Novel Full Chapter 1640 Bloomguard
Quinlan stepped out of the [Warp Gate] and into his own garden.
The cold dwarven air went out of [Synchra]’s pauldrons in a breath, replaced by the warm hum of his estate’s grove. Sunlight came down at the angle his property was known for, gold and unhurried.
[Synchra] receded the moment his boots cleared the seam.
The crimson veins woke at his throat first, then chased outward across the breastplate, the pauldrons, the gauntlets, the greaves, every plate of black armor flushing red along its seams in a single instant. The metal flowed up and off him like water finding its level. Where it had ridden, the [Mimetic Shell] settled in its place: a loose dark shirt with soft trousers, comfortable and lived-in.
Home.
He let the garden’s air settle on his face, and then the system, which had given him a polite half-step of breath after the cavern, decided he was ready.
[Class Acquired: Bloodfather.]
[Ritual Available: Rite of the Bloodfather.]
[The Bloodfather may designate his chosen. The chosen’s bond with the Bloodfather will be tested and evaluated. Only the worthy may pass.]
[Bind only those you are willing to bleed for.]
A new line followed.
[The Bloodfather’s remaining capabilities are locked until ten bonds have formed.]
Quinlan’s grin pulled wider.
‘A ritual.’
The distinction between ritual and spell was a meaningful one.
The world ran on spells. Spells were the bread and butter of every fighter from a village hedge witch to a continent-warping primordial: cast on the fly, fueled by mana, obedient to their channels, repeatable on cooldown. The line between a strong fighter and a weak one was usually how cleanly her spells fed off her stats and how creatively she could chain them together once the fight got messy.
Rituals were a different animal entirely.
A ritual cost something the caster could not get back. It demanded preparation and often included sacrifice, and what it left behind was permanent: a new shape of thing, written into the world and left there for the rest of a lifetime.
Two examples instantly came to his mind.
The first was the Hexwitch’s [Ebon Vow], the ritual Vex had laid on Quinlan in the early days of their bond. It was the same vow Ragnar’s warhammer had crashed into on the day a backstab should have folded Quinlan’s skull, and instead had split the wound between two bodies and let neither of them die. The same vow had been quietly funneling Vex’s mana into Quinlan’s channels for months whenever his own pool ran shallow on a long campaign. One ritual, performed once, doing work for a lifetime.
The second was the Ritual of Immortality. A would-be lich offered themselves to it, and ninety-nine out of every hundred came out of the offering as a corpse, a half-thing held together by failed will, or worse. The one in a hundred who survived emerged as a true lich, with deeper mana, sharper control, and access to an entire shelf of class architecture the world reserved for entities that had made the trade.
That was what a ritual was.
A spell asked the caster to spend mana.
A ritual asked the caster to spend self.
And the system ion Quinlan’s chest had just put one on him.
His grin sharpened.
‘Another one for the shelf.’
…
Rosie’s tree rose at the end of the path.
It had grown again, abnormally so. Just a couple months ago, the trunk had crested the second-story balcony of the main house. Now it easily towered over the same building many times over, overlooking her father’s domain from a high vantage point.
But it was still the same tree, just much, much bigger. The wide iridescent spread of its crown formed a canopy over the stronghold, creating a beautiful atmosphere and shade, under which the girls loved to spend their free hours just lounging. Golden veins pulsed beneath the bark in slow rivers, catching the afternoon sun along their travel, and the crystalline leaves at the highest reach shimmered green and gold in the rhythm that meant his daughter was wide awake and very entertained.
She was, very obviously, being entertained.
Four of the five elven caretakers were up in her branches.
They worked the canopy with the careful, barefoot reverence the elves reserved for state ceremonies and consecrated ground. Each maiden had her sleeves pinned back at the elbow, her ears tipped up under the dappled light. Slim, graceful figures balanced on branches Quinlan could have driven a carriage across, every step measured against the wood like a footfall onto an altar.
The platinum-haired one, whose post was the long eastern branch, knelt and ran a soft cloth down a section of the bark, the strokes slow and reverent, every pass an act of devotion. To his eye, the wood she was polishing carried no smudge whatsoever.
Two branches over, the brunette of the five had cupped both palms around one golden vein in the wood. She breathed onto it. The vein brightened. Her shoulders eased.
A third was perched higher than that, almost lost among the upper crystalline leaves, plucking a petal that had drifted loose from its cluster and tucking it back into the spread it had come from, every motion delicate enough to fool the petal into thinking it had never moved.
The fourth was on the trunk itself. She had a small silver brush in her hand and was working a section of the lower bark near a knot, brow drawn tight, refusing to leave any imperfection where her gaze had decided one might exist.
Quinlan knew his daughter’s tree very well. A scratch on her bark would not have caused any issues, much less troubled her.
A nick from a dropped pruning knife, a thumbnail dug accidentally into a vein, an entire branch sheared off by a fool too dim to know whose daughter they were attacking, none of it was going to bruise her. Rosie’s bark had been ‘attacked’ during one of Ayame’s and Iris’s daily kitten fights, and Rosie had giggled through it all, watching with her legs dangling from a low branch.
The five caretakers did not act on that knowledge.
They knew it on paper. They had seen it with their own two eyes, their archives noting a few specific incidents in which their princess’s bark had taken attacks which she brushed off. None of it changed how they tended her. They would tend the tree of the only living daughter of the only living son of the First Elf with a precision bordering on devotion. They would sooner drive a dagger through their own hearts than allow any careless touch on her trunk.
These five had been Kaelira’s archers once.
Elvardian foot recruits, posted to the same disposable border unit. They had survived alongside her because Kaelira was Kaelira, and they had walked off the battlefield behind her into Quinlan’s household when the dust settled. The bows came down within their first month. Once they laid eyes on the Geim child the household was building itself around, all five of them had asked, quietly and in formation, for a different post.
Their bows lived on a rack inside the gardener’s lodge now, strung and oiled and untouched, with one standing exception. The day their princess needed an arrow loosed in her defense, the rack would be empty inside a heartbeat. Until that day, none of them had any other use for one.
Their order had a name now.
The Bloomguard.
They had drawn the charter up themselves, formal scroll and inked seal and everything. They had carried it first to Rosie’s mothers and second to Quinlan, walking out with the blessings duly inked beside their own. Their princess had clapped her hands and squealed when they showed her the finished seal. The squeal had been ratified into the founding documents.
Technically, the Bloomguard did not answer to Quinlan.
Their charter listed exactly one master: their princess. By the contract their own pens had drafted, the man currently on the grounds above her roots held no formal authority over them whatsoever.
In practice, they answered to him immediately and without complaint.
Rosie was not a bad girl. There was no instruction her father might give that the Bloomguard could refuse without their princess appearing in the gardener’s lodge later that afternoon, big amber eyes upset, asking why anyone would do such a thing to her, so they took Quinlan’s word as their princess’s standing wish.
Then a small ecstatic squeal interrupted his appreciation of his caretakers’ work.