A scout leaned toward his squad leader and said three words too many, and the officer beside him seized his collar and yanked him forward with a hiss that carried farther than the original comment.

Up and down the Consortium line, veterans who had spent years learning which names to fear clamped down on their own because, by now, every sensible veteran on the Consortium roster knew that the Primordial Villain’s reputation was not built on rumors.

Maelstrom stood at the head of his detachment with his arms crossed and his expression set in the particular displeasure of coerced cooperation, heavy and unconcealed.

The Mediator had been clear. Cooperate. Lead our best. Do not provoke Devil. The army general’s gaze tracked Quinlan across the open ground, and what it carried was not fear but suspicion, decades of field command sizing up a man a truly insulting fraction of his age.

Alastair Greenvale stood opposite him, and the Duke’s composure held because it had to.

His jade cloak hung from broad shoulders and centuries of command held his spine straight, but the eyes that tracked Quinlan burned with a fury he could not voice in front of his men.

He had brought his elites to stand beside Consortium filth on the orders of the man who held his leash, and the reason he could not say that out loud was the same reason he was standing here at all.

Quinlan looked at him once, and the Duke’s fury dimmed.

Quinlan’s right hand rose, and [Warp Gate] tore the air open a second time.

The seam split wide across the clearing, dark light bleeding into the dawn, and through it came the smell of foreign soil and distant war.

"The world that comes after this war has no room for your old grudges," Quinlan said, and his voice carried without effort, flat and final. "You will either learn to behave, or you will be destroyed."

He spread his fingers wider and the gate responded, stretching until five men could have passed through abreast, its edges humming with the effort of holding a passage large enough for the forces assembled.

Maelstrom moved first.

The general turned to his detachment, and the suspicion on his face was replaced by the boastful projection that was his natural habitat.

"Listen well. The Vesper Consortium has been given what generations before us fought and bled and died in the shadows for. Legitimacy."

He let the word land. "To earn it, we fight a just war beside the ancient powers of this continent. This is the first day in the history of the Consortium that we march under the same sky as a kingdom’s soldiers, not as criminals, but as allies." His fist struck his chest. "Do not waste it."

The Consortium fighters received it in silence, because every one of them had been called scum since the day they signed on, and this was the first time anyone had offered them a door.

Alastair’s turn came without a pause.

The Duke stepped forward and his voice was measured and pitched to command.

"By decree of King Alexios, the conflict between the Greenvale Dukedom and the Vesper Consortium is suspended. The human race faces a threat that supersedes all grudges. The pitifully weak and incompetent Ravenshade family’s borders are collapsing. The Elvardian Alliance bleeds our fellow humans dry while we fight each other over scraps."

His chin rose. "Through Quinlan Elysiar’s dimensional magic, the Greenvale Dukedom will spearhead an invasion into the heartlands of Elvardia itself. We strike first, we strike hard, and we remind those knife-eared bastards and their dwarven dogs what happens when humans stop killing each other long enough to point outward."

The Greenvale side received their lord’s flimsy speech with significantly less enthusiasm than the Consortium did. The men and women in jade cloaks had been fighting and dying for months against the very criminals standing twenty paces to their right, and a royal decree did not erase the faces of the friends they had buried.

Alastair read the silence, sighed through his nose, and added the line that every commander in history has eventually been forced to say when things weren’t going as planned.

"The Dukedom permits looting and pillaging of enemy holdings."

A stir ran through the Greenvale ranks. Heads straightened. Eyes sharpened.

Maelstrom’s laugh broke across the field, loud and incredulous. "Looting and pillaging? That’s a given for us!" The general’s grin was wide and vicious. "The Consortium grants its members a one-off seventy percent share of all spoils this campaign!"

Alastair’s eye twitched. "Eighty."

"Ninety!"

"The Dukedom relinquishes all claims on bounty!" Alastair bellowed, and the vein in his neck said he meant it.

Maelstrom’s grin vanished. "You’ll bankrupt your entire duchy, you imbecile!"

"What did you just call me?!"

A beat of mutual hatred passed between them, raw and old, and then Maelstrom’s gaze swept his own soldiers, saw the way their eyes had locked on the Greenvale offer like dogs on a bone, and made the only decision a competitive man could make.

"...The Consortium also relinquishes all claims on bounty!" he roared. "Every coin, every gem, every artifact you pry from Elvardian fingers is yours!"

Two hundred pairs of eyes caught fire at the same time.

Everyone on this continent knew what lay in the vaults of Elvardia.

The elves had been hoarding ancient artifacts for millennia, and they themselves were a coveted bounty. Bringing home a hot elven slave who would serve their family’s every need for thousands of years was the kind of perk most male soldiers would risk their necks for.

The dwarven reserves were no less legendary, and every soldier present had heard at least one story about dwarven stout aged in deep-mountain casks for three hundred years that could make a grown man weep with joy.

Greed shoved the animosity aside so fast it left skid marks.

Soldiers who had been glaring at each other moments ago were now eyeing the open portal with the exact same expression, calculating how quickly they could reach Elvardian soil and start filling their packs.

A Consortium scout broke formation first, and two Greenvale soldiers followed before their sergeants could bark, and within ten seconds the march through the portal had begun in earnest.

The two leaders watched their soldiers funnel through the gate, momentarily united by the dawning realization that they had both just promised away every copper they could have claimed.

As the Greenvale detachment filed past Quinlan’s group, one woman among them did not look at the portal.

Sareth Greenvale walked with her halberd resting across her shoulders, her stride unhurried and her emerald eyes passing over Quinlan, over Vex and her crimson tattoos, over Kitsara’s five tails, Blossom’s blonde ears, Feng’s dark hair, over every girl who had fought her in the deep prison beneath Greenvale’s walls.

Her gaze held each of them for exactly the time it took to confirm they were alive and present, and her face gave nothing.

She walked through the portal without breaking stride, and the space she left behind was quieter than the space around it.

...

Quinlan watched the last of them disappear, and the seam closed behind Sareth’s back in a whisper of collapsing light.

None of his girls had asked the obvious question, because most of them already knew the answer. He was sending humans and beastkin into elven lands, and the mother who raised him was the First Elf, his harem sported members of the race, and he had just opened the door for two armies to march into their lands.

The truth was that the elves who mattered had already chosen him.

The magistrates who knelt when he told them the truth of their ancestry, the matriarchs who pledged their swords, the settlements that defected when the evidence reached them, they were behind his lines, fighting on his side with blazing conviction.

They had chosen the son of the First Elf over the comfort of a ten-thousand-year lie, and Quinlan did not need the rest.

The heartland elves had heard the same truth and decided the status quo was worth more than the bloodline of their progenitor.

He had enough elven allies. He did not need all of them.

He would ensure that his elven allies did not cross paths with the new forces, and also that these forces stayed far away from Seraphiel’s ancestral lands.

As for the dwarves, enough would survive.

The logistics were clean. The Consortium had been dropped at the edge of the heartlands, past every settlement that pledged to him, with nothing but hostile territory between the gate and the first Elvardian vault worth cracking open. The criminals promised a continent’s worth of treasure would find their targets without passing a single allied village on the way.

The beastkin were simpler. Their army was marching through land Quinlan had already cleared with the allied elves, and the message he sent ahead was plain: evacuate, the Confederation is coming through, they will not slow down.

By the time the columns reached contested soil, every allied settlement would stand empty, and the army would cross ghost country until it struck the heartland from the opposite flank from the humans.

Three armies from three angles, all aimed at the same throat.

Quinlan’s right hand rose, and [Warp Gate] tore the air open once again.

The war for Iskaris had been fought in pieces for a long time. Border skirmishes, proxy conflicts, throne games that never quite became the thing they were always building toward.

Every faction on the continent had spent lifetimes bleeding each other in careful measures, trading territory and grudges in a cycle old enough to feel permanent.

That cycle was about to shatter. 𝕗𝗿𝕖𝐞𝐰𝗲𝕓𝐧𝕠𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝐨𝚖

The Bloodfather had his family at his back, carrying a power this world had never produced, and the final act of this continent’s long and bloody story would not be fought in careful measures.

The saga of Iskaris was reaching its end.

Then a voice found his mind, clear and carrying more reverence than the word had ever held.

<Master...>