Chapter 1930: Domain Authority

Quinlan Elysiar stood at the war-lodge fire with the entire Beastman Confederation on its knees around him, ring upon ring out to the palisade, and read the rest of the window.

[Reward unlocked!]

[Sovereign claim recognized: the continent of Iskaris.]

[Domain authority granted.]

He felt it before he finished reading it.

The packed earth under his boots stopped being mere earth.

It was his now. He could tell it on an instinctual level.

The compound, the pass road behind him, the rebuilt villages of the old war with their square dwarven granaries, the fortress on the border plain, the labyrinth gates standing open in every city he owned, all of it arrived at once, pressing up through the soles of his feet like the floor of his own house.

Roads ran through him like veins. Cities sat in him like warmth. He could feel where his land ended at the coasts and the far passes.

And threaded through every mile of it, under the roads, the fields, and this very compound, ran his daughter.

Ever since her birth, Rosie had been busy expanding under all her cutesy behavior. Just like her father, she, too, was a conqueror.

Her roots lay under the whole continent now, a living lattice from coast to coast, and where they ran thickest the land felt awake in a way the rest of it did not. ℴ

’Someone has been quite the diligent little lady,’ the Primordial Villain grinned inwardly.

The window was not finished with him.

[A prior claim exists over this land.]

[The prior claim has been contested and defeated.]

[Domain Protection: 24:00:00]

The last two digits rolled over to 59 while he watched.

[Once Domain Protection ends, more information will be relayed and the Suppression will end.]

’Okay,’ Quinlan thought. ’Things just got serious.’

He knew as much about the prior claim as anyone alive did, which was close to nothing.

Archduke Vasilen had called it the Suppression as well. He had watched it cripple almost everyone above the seventy-fourth level on the day it first came down.

Chizuru’s clan had spent numerous generations trying to bring it down, and the old woman was still afraid of whatever waited on its far side.

Every soul on Iskaris knew it as the Heavenly Restriction, the ceiling nobody had ever climbed past, and nobody in living memory had known who laid it or why.

The window had just called it a claim. Somebody’s claim.

The worries came in order, because that was how his mind worked.

Would the far side feel it go, be notified by the system itself, or would the barrier come down quietly? If it went loud, whoever laid it would know within the hour that a land on their map had stopped answering.

He remembered the look the Archduke had given him, the one reserved for mud tracked into a clean parlor. That had been an outsider’s honest opinion of Iskaris’s strongest.

If whoever laid that barrier sent an army through the hole tomorrow, level two hundreds if such a thing existed on the far side of it, then the fortress, the Program, the mountain, the roads, all of it got left behind.

He would gate his family out of a burning continent with whatever they could carry, and their hard work would be destroyed.

Twenty-three hours and fifty-nine minutes.

The four great lords were watching him.

Skarn had come up off his knee first, because of course he had. The wolfkin lord stood with his hackles half-risen, staring at the Villain’s face while the Villain stared at empty air.

"Something changed-" the wolf lord began, but was interrupted because, from one moment to the next, the sky lit up.

Heat rolled over the palisade on a wind that had blown from the north all day and now came from the west. The fire circle leaned away from it as one body.

Beneath his skin the whole continent pulled toward one point like a tide going out, every road and every field of it dragging the same way, and he knew the point before he turned.

The target was his stronghold, his home.

It was exclusively her.

Far to the west, past the border plain and every mile of empire between, a pillar of white-green light stood up off the horizon and climbed.

The tree in his garden had woken the moment the land became his, and this was what that looked like from a thousand miles away.

It rose straight, clean, and impossibly wide, taller than the mountains between them. The underside of every cloud from the north to the south, east to west of the continent, turned the color of new leaves.

Every pair of eyes the continent owned turned to look at it.

"What is that?!"

Skarn’s roar cracked across the compound, and for once there was nothing in it but the thing he had spent his life refusing to admit to. The unknown was standing on his horizon.

Rajah was on his feet with his claws out.

Gorruk had risen to his full height without a word and stood with one palm spread flat against the nearest palisade post, as if the timber might tell him what his eyes could not.

Along the palisade soldiers had their weapons half-drawn against a light no blade could reach.

Only Vargis Ironfang stayed on one knee, and the dogkin lord was looking at the Villain’s face instead of the sky.

"My daughter is showing off," Quinlan grinned.

Through the land under his boots he felt every branch of Rosie’s crown lift at once, as if the tree had drawn a breath, and they were still lifting, bending upward past the angle wood could bend, feeling along the empty sky like a hundred thousand green tentacles on the hunt.

They touched it.

There was nothing up there.

There had never been anything up there that any eye could see, only the ceiling every child on Iskaris learned about before it learned to count, the invisible wall that forbade them from ever leaving the continent.

Rosie’s branches found it.

Where each tip pressed upward, the air dimpled like water taking a fingertip, and held.

Ten thousand dimples.

A hundred thousand.