Novel Full Chapter 1721: Queen’s Decree
Chapter 1721: Queen’s Decree
"Members of the elven race."
"Hear me."
The words hit the silence like a bell, and Serelis felt them in her teeth.
"The Council conspired against their sworn sovereign. They plotted my downfall, imprisoned me in chains, and attempted to install a puppet queen on the throne you and your ancestors elected me to hold."
Her voice carried a certainty all elves knew their wise queen for, every syllable decided before she opened her mouth.
The accusation swept across the battlefield, and Serelis watched the soldiers around her go still as it landed.
"By my right as Queen of all elves, I declare every member of the sitting council an enemy of the elven race."
"Every member?!" Serelis heard her own soldiers gasp. Her accusing the elven councillors of crimes could be understood, but the Alliance of Elvardia wasn’t just about the elves.
The council itself was made up of dwarves and elves in equal measure. Thus, when she accused ’every member...’
"King Ragnar of the dwarves aided this conspiracy. A dwarven king placed his hands on the succession of the elven throne, in direct violation of the Founding Charter of Elvardia."
Serelis’s blood went hot.
She had spent years standing beside dwarves on joint patrols, biting down on every remark about their stench and their greed and their squat, smelly, hairy bodies because the alliance demanded it, because Elvardia was supposed to be bigger than the contempt that every elf carried in her marrow for the stocky creatures the First Elf had never intended them to share a nation with.
And a dwarf had dared touch their queen’s throne.
The fury that tore through Serelis’s chest made her forget that her very own lady was being accused, such was the animosity between the two races.
The violent anger that ran through every elf’s chest had nothing to do with politics but hatred that a lifetime of forced coexistence had only buried, never killed.
"LIES!" A dwarven captain broke from the coalition line with his axe already behind his ear. "Feet sniffing cunts have no right to speak of our glorious king like that!"
He threw the axe with all his might, the masterfully crafted metal screaming through the air at blinding speed.
Wind snapped from the villain’s hand and caught the axe mid-flight, crushing its rotation and flinging it into the smoke so hard it vanished trailing sparks.
He didn’t even look at the dwarf.
Myrasyn hadn’t flinched either, appearing to the soldiers below as if she fully trusted the man standing so close to her with her life.
"The fate of the dwarven king and his councillors is not my authority to proclaim."
Myrasyn looked down at the hundreds of thousands of elves below.
"But the elven councillors who betrayed our very race are mine to judge."
Her voice dropped, and the magic carrying it sank lower and closer, leaving the sovereign’s broadcast behind, as if the queen were whispering directly into every elven ear.
"For the crime of high treason against the elven crown. For conspiracy to dethrone a sitting monarch. For aiding the dwarves in the violation of our founding charter. The sentence..."
She turned, reached behind her, and closed her hand around Aelindra’s throat.
"Sister, please..." she begged, voice broken. "For Mom... She would weep-"
The queen held her there long enough for every soldier on the ground to see what a traitor looked like in her hand, then she threw her.
Aelindra sailed forward through the open air in a tumbling arc, robes catching the wind, legs dangling and hands roped behind her body, and across the battlefield hundreds of thousands of eyes followed the body in stunned silence as it reached the peak of its flight and began to fall.
Myrasyn raised her staff, and a blade of pure light materialized along the crystal edge in a crescent so bright it bleached the color from the smoke.
The blade came down in a single stroke, and Aelindra’s head left her shoulders mid-air.
"...is death."
The light passed through her neck as cleanly as morning passes through mist, and the head fell in a slow turning arc toward the battlefield below, trailing a ribbon of blood that caught the glow of the blade that had made it.
"She killed her!" A loyalist shrieked from the ground. "The queen killed her own sister!"
"My Lady!" An elven officer screamed from the coalition line.
Shouts erupted across the battlefield from every direction, elves screaming over each other in shock.
Myrasyn watched it fall, and a single tear rushed down her right cheek before her hand reached after it.
Her fingers stretched toward the head tumbling away from her through the open air, and her body listed forward as if something in her chest had followed it off the edge, and for one terrible second the elves on the ground watched their queen begin to fall apart in the sky.
Then the man’s hand closed over her shoulder.
He didn’t pull her back or speak or make a show of it.
He just held her where she stood, one hand on the shoulder of the woman who had just killed her own sister, and the grip was steady enough that Myrasyn’s balance came back before her composure did.
She wiped both cheeks with the heel of her palm, drew one breath, and when she straightened the grief was gone and the queen had returned.
"With every council seat vacated, I invoke the Sovereign’s Mandate."
Every elf who had attended school knew those words.
The Sovereign’s Mandate was the oldest failsafe in elven law, rumored to have been written into the founding charter by the then current elf queen’s own quill strokes, a law for a day nobody believed would come: the day the entire council fell.
When every seat stood empty, the crown spoke alone with the full authority of the court behind her until new members were appointed to fill the chairs.
It had never been invoked.
"The dwarven crown violated the founding pillars of the union between our peoples."
Myrasyn’s voice held no anger, only the clean finality of a verdict reached with full clarity. "As such, I declare the alliance known as Elvardia null and void."
The scream that tore from the eastern ridge nearly split the sky.
Isveth’s army, traitors here to back up the Primordial Villain, had crested the treeline behind the head maiden’s silver-bark banner, and the war cry that erupted from their ranks spread from the shrine maidens to the matriarchs and everyone in between, because every one of them knew the dwarven alliance was a leash of necessity around their people’s neck, tolerated only because the whole race’s survival depended on this forsaken union, and Myrasyn had just cut it while standing next to the Holy Son himself.
To the elven ’rebels,’ this was the symbol of a new age, their golden age, officially starting.
"When the council seats are filled, the new court may review and veto my decree." Myrasyn let the words settle across the roar. "Until then, the crown has spoken."
"And now... the most important decree of my life." She paused, and the correction came quiet. "No. This will be the most important decree of elven history."