He stepped out of his [Warp Gate] and into a war.
A war of paper.
The central reading hall of the Vraven royal archive had been conquered wall to wall: ledger towers rising like siegeworks, squads of crown clerks moving in supply lines, estate maps of the Ravenshade duchy pinned across three joined tables with knives through their corners, and runners ing and going with document crates stacked to their chins.
A clerk saw the gate bloom, yelped, and baptized the floor with a full tray of files.
"Stop arriving like that," Alexios said from behind a desk that had annexed two smaller desks, sleeves rolled to the elbow, not looking up from what he was signing.
"Why?"
"Because it’s disruptive."
"Oh." Quinlan nodded, not intending one bit to change his methods of arrival.
Alexios’s vein bulged for a second before, through visible effort, he restrained himself from speaking back to this arrogant creature. "Not today..." he whispered under his beard.
Morgana sat at the correspondence table with her family’s letters sorted into merciless piles, Ravenshade ink getting read by the one Ravenshade nobody had thought to lie to.
A table over, Lilith leaned over a ledger with her arms crossed, grinding through it column by column.
And in the middle of all of it stood Iris.
She had her red eyes on a map of the duchy’s border holdings, and she was questioning a sweating archivist about missing years in the toll records with the exact courtesy of an interrogation.
The clerks orbited her at maximum possible radius. She looked like five days of no sleep held together by spite.
Quinlan drifted along the tables without announcing himself.
Nobody here needed him. He’d e with half a mind to offer gates, muscle, and a legion’s worth of dead clerks, and one look at the room settled it.
The machine he’d handed her in a workshop full of blood and cauldron-steam was running at full draft, and it answered to the short woman with a generational vendetta. Hers, top to bottom. Exactly as promised.
Then he saw the folio.
It lay open on the central table under a clean sheet of glass, crown-sealed, positioned where every runner in the hall would pass it a hundred times a day.
An old page. Four sentences of tired bureaucratic script that had once dissolved a barony. And above the faded paragraph, in fresh dark ink, a single line had been entered at the head of the record.
Damian Ravenclaw.
The document that had erased a family and never once thought to mention a child now opened with his name, entered first, exactly as a king had promised in a freezing cellar.
Quinlan read it upside down across the table and allowed himself a long pause and a big smile.
"Good," he said to no one in particular. "That’s the least of what you deserve, brave little warrior."
"..." Iris went very still and made a point of not looking at him, for her eyes moistened as soon as the words left his lips.
Brave little warrior, spoken the way one speaks to the honored dead, as if her brother were standing at the table to hear his due.
Her whole life, the world’s paper had agreed that her brother had never existed, and she had built a knife of herself on top of that silence. Now his name led the crown’s own record, and the most feared creature on the continent had just called him what no one else was left to call him.
Something that had sat clenched behind her ribs came loose, one knuckle at a time.
Quinlan crossed the hall and took up station behind her, and for a while the two of them just shared the silence. The hunt lay pinned under her hands, the name sat in fresh ink under glass, and everything worth saying about either had already been said to no one in particular.
Then his hands settled onto her shoulders, and his thumbs dug in.
"Ngh." It escaped her before she could kill it.
Long hours of hunched ledgers and swallowed fury had collected under his palms, and his fingers went after the knots one at a time, firm and patient and far better at this than a feared conqueror had any business being.
Iris blinked her eyes clear.
"...Where did you learn this?" she muttered at the map.
"Learn?" The man sounded far too entertained. "I’m just rubbing your shoulders, it’s nothing special. I used to do this for my mom from time to time."
"Which one?"
Quinlan chuckled and actually gave it thought. "e to think of it, I’ve rubbed every one of my mothers’ shoulders by now."
To the dozens of human ears in range it was nothing, family small talk from a man with a plicated family. Iris did the calculations in silence, though: Mearie and Lumi had both e later.
The first shoulders he’d ever rubbed belonged to a mother a whole world away. He just didn’t feel like turning himself into an open book in front of the room.
"You’re right, by the way," she then scoffed, chin dipping forward to surrender more of her neck to his thumbs. "It’s really nothing special."
"Mm."
"Mediocre. At best." Her shoulders had e down two full centimeters and were still descending.
"Noted," he said, and kept kneading. "How’s the hunt?"
"Slow." She didn’t look up. "I can’t torture and demand answers from papers. You require something?"
"Just visiting my favorite secret agent."
"Then you’ve seen me. There’s the gate."
He stayed exactly where he was, thoroughly pleased with himself. For a while the hall worked around them: runners, ledger-stacks, Morgana’s pen scratching steadily through her own bloodline’s correspondence.
Then Iris rolled one shoulder, irritated. The roll became a full-body twitch, and her scowl climbed off the map to land on him.
"Actually. Since you’re not being of any use right now." She reached over her shoulder and jabbed a thumb at the top of her spine.
"Deal with your screeching midget. She’s been getting on my nerves."
">
"My screeching midget," Quinlan repeated.
He studied her instead of leaving. The shadows under her eyes, the maps of the duchy that had butchered her family spread out under her hands, and the fresh ink on old paper twenty steps away.
She was neck-deep in the reckoning of her own past, and from the middle of it she was shoving him at Ayame’s, because nobody alive knew better than Iris what unfinished business did to a person. The crude mouth had never once managed to hide the good girl behind it.
"> "Alright. I’ll handle it." Then, with malice aforethought, warmly:
Her eyes widened into outraged saucers.
The word came out strangled, an octave above her fighting voice. The hiss turned fully feline on the last word. "> The word came out strangled, an octave above her fighting voice. The hiss turned fully feline on the last word.
Quinlan was already stepping backward into his blooming gate, grinning like he’d gotten everything he came for and then some. "Eat something before sundown," he called as the light folded around him. "Ayame is a good girl too. She would hate to know you’re starving."
The inkwell chased him through the gate thanks to a heaving woman’s mighty throw.
A heartbeat later it drifted back out and set itself down on her map, empty. Its contents followed, her own ink hanging in the air in tidy script, rearranging itself into two words before the gate winked shut.
’Good luck.’
For a long moment, no one in the hall moved.
"He just..." Somewhere by the stacks, a runner put it into words, very quietly. "The Primordial Villain. He strolled into the royal palace. Uninvited. Massaged the scary woman. And left."
Nobody had a correction to offer. The continent’s terror had conquered nothing but a set of shoulders, and fucked off.
Alexios signed another page. ’How nice it is to be ignored by that creature for once...’ he mused inwardly.
...
Back home beneath Rosie’s tree, Ayame Fujimori was losing a war against a travel case.
She had packed it twice and re-tied its straps three times, and the second-in-mand of the most dangerous family on the continent was currently frowning at a buckle as if it had insulted her technique.
The [Warp Gate] bloomed at the garden’s edge and delivered her lover.
"There you are." The strap got one final, unnecessary tug, and the brat arrived on schedule, chin first. "Mister Primordial, keeping his second-in-mand waiting on departure day. Staying with the elves must’ve been enjoyable..."
"Yeah, it was great." Quinlan nodded, taking Ayame out of her groove. "They’re very hospitable people."
"..." Ayame’s eyes narrowed. "What about..."
"Elves, done. Dwarves, humans, and beastkin remain," he wasted no time, knowing exactly what she wanted to know.
"Beastkin, huh?" Ayame murmured, pondering.
Beastkin were a collective of people, consisting of various beastkin races. Unlike humans, elves, or dwarves, they were not a single race.
"I’m thinking it has to do with them being united under one beastkin banner," Quinlan said.
"Conquer the Beastman Confederation, and you conquer the beastkin people..." Ayame tried the logic on her tongue, then admitted. "It makes sense, I suppose. The beastkin species created a nation of their own, which in turn means they’ve chosen to bee a collective of the beastkin people."
Quinlan merely nodded again, smiling. Theorizing with his beloved samurai was always a treat.
"But what about the treaty? It still has ’a few’ years left on it."
"We’ll deal with it."
"Of course we will. It was a rhetorical question," Ayame smirked. "I already have a few ideas."
"Me too. But shall we leave that for tomorrow and focus on today? I’ve long awaited this day..."
Ayame averted her gaze quickly, knowing full well he meant more than just visiting her hometown.
Her hands went back to the case, checked a buckle that was already closed, then checked it again.
Quinlan watched her do it and kept every observation to himself.
"Ready?"
"Obviously." It arrived a breath too fast, and both of them heard it, and neither of them touched it.
Black Fang was waiting against the tree.
"Was the sisterly bonding session fun?" Quinlan asked her.
Black Fang looked at him and said nothing, which from her was a plete sentence.
"We bathed," Ayame supplied across the lawn, not looking up from her case.
"Oh?"
"In poison."
Quinlan’s eyebrows rose.
"She made me a ’rookie’ blend." Ayame gave the buckle another entirely unnecessary tug, far too casual for the content she was delivering. "My skin has never felt this good, and I slept the whole night through for the first time in a long time." A pause. "She also washed my hair."
Quinlan looked at Black Fang.
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