Chapter 1931: The Eternal Tree’s Declaration

The empty sky over the estate puckered in a vast slow field of ripples, one for every branch, and the branches pushed through.

At the beastkin fire, a thousand miles east, the clouds over the compound rippled in the same rhythm.

"The sky," a cub’s voice said somewhere behind the woodpile. "Instructor, the sky is moving."

His daughter began to drink.

The pillar on the horizon went from white-green to white. Heat rolled over the palisade a second time, hard enough to flatten the war-lodge fire sideways and send sparks streaming east across the compound.

Under Quinlan’s boots the ground began to hum, a note too low to hear that came up through his heels and sat in his teeth.

Blue script bloomed beside the counter.

[The Eternal Tree is draining the local reserve.]

Whatever held that counter up was drawn from the same well she had her mouth on, and every swallow she took came out of his day.

The counter was moving.

[Domain Protection: 21:40:12]

’...’ Quinlan had a wry smile on his face as he watched.

He trusted his daughter greatly. But that counter was the only thing standing between his continent and whatever had laid the ceiling. Watching her drink it out from under him turned his stomach over.

For perhaps thirty heartbeats he had held the counter in the corner of his eye, and it had lost two hours. While he watched, the minutes began to fall faster than minutes should, the tens digit ticking down like seconds.

[19:02:55]

’Fine... If you’re so hungry, Daughter...’

[16:31:07]

’Then take it all. Consume to your heart’s content.’

On the horizon, the light climbed.

It had been a pillar. Now it had a shape at the top, a spreading darkness inside the glare that widened as he watched, and he understood that he was looking at a crown of branches from all these miles away.

The tide he had felt at the first flare never turned back.

It became a current he could follow with his eyes, mana coming off the whole sky in long bright ribbons, bending down out of empty air toward one point on the horizon and going into it the way water goes down a drain with no bottom.

Where a ribbon passed low enough to catch the ground, the grass under it silvered and stood up.

The top of his daughter’s tree cleared the mountains between them. It kept going. He watched the crown put on a mile the way an ordinary tree puts on a season, and then another mile, branches unrolling out of the glare faster than his eye could hold them, until the shadow of it walked east across the border plain.

By the time the counter read ten hours, the tree stood higher than the mountain the dwarves lived inside. By the time it read six, its shadow lay across three provinces, and the sun had gone green over half his empire.

[04:15:40]

[02:07:03]

Gorruk’s voice crossed the fire like a rockfall. "Villain. What is your daughter doing to the sky?"

"That’s a very good question," Quinlan said.

"...Hah?"

[00:48:19]

Under his boots the humming stopped. For one held breath the compound stood still, the fire straight again, the wind dead, a hundred thousand beastkin holding their claws and their tongues under a green sun.

Then every root under the continent flexed at once.

The drill field behind the western wall heaved like a blanket being shaken out, and the cubs’ class went down in a heap of wooden claws.

The palisade timber, a thousand years dead and sun-bleached gray, put out leaves along its whole length in the space of a heartbeat, and the soldiers standing on it grabbed for a rail that was suddenly in bud.

Spring hit the compound hard enough to make eyes water: wet earth, green sap, and blossom together, a season arriving in one breath.

West, the root road down the pass valley flowered from end to end.

Her voice came up out of the ground.

It came out of the ground under the beastkin fire and out of the ground under Aldoria’s market square. It came out of the mountain’s forge floor, the capital’s cobbles, and the dead fields of the old border that had learned to be soil again.

Every road on Iskaris spoke in the same clear child’s voice, solemn as a proclamation, and every soul heard it in the same moment.

"The Eternal Tree claims the Continent of Iskaris, and the Eternal Tree bows to the Primordial Villain."

The cubs on the drill field lifted their heads out of the heap.

"The Eternal Tree thus solemnly vows her eternal loyalty to Quinlan Elysiar."

The tree’s light on the western horizon flared once, so bright that every claw on the palisade threw its shadow the length of the compound, and held.

Then, her girlish tone returning, "That’s all!!"

[Domain Protection: 00:00:00]

[The prior claim over Iskaris has dissolved.]

[Ding!]

[The Eternal Tree has blessed your domain.]

[Blessing of the Eternal Tree: the Suppression stands until the sovereign wills it broken. He may shatter it at will within the next 24 hours. Once he does, or the time runs out, the Eternal Tree will raise a barrier of her own in its place, ensuring that the prior claimant perceives its claim intact.]

He read it to the end.

Then he read the last line again, and the smile that spread across the Primordial Villain’s face was the one his enemies had learned to dread and his women had learned to adore.

The wall would come down when he said so, and the world would not know.

"Daughter... you’re far too amazing," he spoke under his breath, and from beneath his feet, soft giggling sounded.

"Hehe! Come home, Papa. Everyone’s waiting!"

Quinlan settled things with the beastkin lords in short order and stepped through his portal.

...

Grass came up under his boots, and Quinlan Elysiar walked out of the gate into the shadow of a mountain.