The Heartlands opened before the column in silver and green.

Trees wider than houses rose in columns of pale bark threaded with veins of faint bioluminescence, their canopy dense enough to turn the afternoon into green twilight.

Marshlands pooled between the root systems where clear water lay over white stone, and the air moving through the old growth carried cedar, wildflower, and the mineral sweetness of water that had been filtering through ancient roots since before the barrier went up.

Quinlan walked because he had to. [Warp Gate] needed a destination he’d visited or one he could see through a subject’s eyes, and the Heartlands were virgin ground on both counts.

None of his slaves had set foot in the inner territories, which meant [Overlord’s Eyes] had nothing to show him. Every meter forward was earned on foot.

The elven rangers had taken the vanguard before Isveth could assign one.

Shrine maidens moved through the old growth with the ease of women in their own homes, long ears twitching at every birdsong and canopy rustle, faces flushed with the pride of guiding the Holy Son through their ancestral lands for the first time.

The ranger at point kept glancing back over her shoulder at the armored man she was leading as if confirming the honor was still real.

Seraphiel had gone quiet. The elf walked with her lips parted and her blue eyes tracing the bioluminescent veins through the bark above, the cheekiness that usually lived on her face nowhere to be found.

Beside her, Sylvaris had one hand pressed to her chest, fingers curling against the fabric.

Sera’s hand found her mother’s and held tight. "Mom... it’s so beautiful."

Sylvaris nodded once, her lips pressed together, and said nothing because she couldn’t.

"Okay, you two made me curious." Serika fell into step beside the two elves, holding each of their shoulders. "Why do you look like this? Aren’t you elven nobles?"

Sera’s voice came out softer than anyone in the column was used to hearing. "Our lands are on the far northern edge of Elvardia... The soil is thin, the trees are ordinary, and the magic in the ground barely grows a decent garden."

Her gaze climbed the nearest silver-bark trunk. "The Heartlands are legendary among our people. They say these forests are the closest thing to the Eternal Forest, where Luminara’s magic soaked so deep into the earth that the trees themselves became half alive."

Her voice thinned.

"But as low and insignificant nobles... we were never given the privilege of visiting."

Among the elven host, ears lowered. Matriarchs who had been marching with their chins high went still, and the shrine priestesses near them exchanged glances that carried the same quiet shame.

The Holy Son’s woman and her mother, the most honorable of elves who stood at his side and fought beside the son of the First Elf longer than anyone else, had been barred from the Heartlands because their house wasn’t important enough.

Behind the vanguard, Void had not left Scar’s back.

The mage’s chin rested on the assassin’s shoulder with her eyes shut and her hat listing sideways, and the only sign she was alive was an occasional contented hum against Scar’s collar.

Then her nose pressed into the crook of Scar’s neck and inhaled.

"Void." The word left Scar through her teeth. "If you ever dare lick me again, I’ll kill you."

It didn’t sound like banter.

The silence lasted exactly as long as it took for curiosity to win.

"As a scientist, I’ve always been rather curious..." Aurora’s voice was measured, but the gleam in her amber eyes was pure alchemist. "And now, I have questions. Lots of them."

"I didn’t care until now," Lucille added with a sly grin, her eyes drifting to the spot on Scar’s neck where Void’s tongue had been, "but night frost and lavender, huh..."

"Miss Scar always smells great!!" Blossom’s tail was a golden blur behind her. "Blossom wanted to ask for her perfume, but it’s natural body odor!"

Scar’s stride faltered. Being discussed like a scented candle by these shameless women was not part of any training she had ever received.

"You have great taste... and your name is cute too... ...Unlike mine... Your mom has good taste too..." Void murmured from Scar’s back, lazy and content, and based on the increase in tail movement, the mage had already earned a lot of good points as far as the blonde dogkin was concerned.

Kitsara lifted her nose and sniffed, her foxkin senses pulling from the air around Void. Her red eyes widened a fraction, and the grin that followed was devastating.

"You’re right, kinkiest female mage of the human race."

"...Hey... Bad fox..."

It came out so flat and unbothered it barely qualified as a complaint. Then the second word registered.

"...Female...?"

Kitsara shrugged. "Quin exists, of course~"

Among the elven vanguard, every long ear within range twitched toward the conversation at once. The ranger at point went scarlet.

Three shrine maidens behind her developed a sudden interest in the marshland to their left, and not one of them succeeded in hiding the color climbing their faces.

The Holy Son was a man, after all... And a young one at that, if the rumors were to be true... It made sense that he had the urges of a man, they realized.

"Oh..." Void murmured, then nodded into Scar’s neck. "...Having a hot and submissive ghost girl call you ’Master’ with starry eyes is indeed..."

"VOID!!"

Scar’s hiss scattered birds from the canopy.

"Ladies, please behave. Stop harassing Scar. We’re in enemy territory," came the words from Quinlan, which somehow didn’t help the Elite Soul regain her ice-cold composure.

...

The column wound deeper into the Heartlands, crossing two marshes where the rangers laid stepping stones of shaped root for the non-elven members of the party all the while masterfully dispatching sentinels there to ambush them.

Then Isveth appeared at Quinlan’s side.

"Holy Son." The Head Shrine Maiden inclined her head toward Quinlan. "Ahead lies Thalindris, the ancestral seat of House Vaelreth. The Councillor’s garrison holds the eastern approach to the inner Heartlands."

Her composure wavered for the first time since the march began.

"We ask that you allow your faithful to handle this. The First Elf’s son should not shed the blood of her descendants. Allow us to bring the wayward back, or deal with those who refuse."

Behind her, three matriarchs stood with hands on their hilts, and the certainty on their faces left no room for the outcome where Thalindris refused.

Quinlan looked at the army behind Isveth, at the shrine maidens and matriarchs armed to the teeth and asking for the privilege of purging their own people, and felt nothing burdensome about the prospect at all.

He would have killed every elf in Thalindris without losing a second of sleep, should they be hostile to him.

But it cost him nothing to let them sort their own house, and he had dwarven forts to crack anyhow.

"I appreciate it, Head Maiden."

Isveth bowed low toward Quinlan, and the elven host peeled away from the column in formations so clean the transition looked choreographed.

Within minutes, tens of thousands of armed women were marching east through the silver-bark trees toward Thalindris, and the sound of them faded into the canopy until the forest swallowed it whole.

Quinlan watched them disappear, then turned.

His necromantic power pulsed outward, and scout-type Elite Souls materialized.

Eighty Rank 5 specialists stood in a loose ring around him, human, beastkin, and elven forms in light gear moving with the rehearsed silence that came from Scar drilling them personally in the soul space between deployments.

"Cast a wide net ahead," Quinlan said. "Every approach from the capital, every notable noble estate between here and the southern coast. Become our watchful eyes."

Quinlan believed that his scout-type souls were wasted inside dwarven forts.

Tunnel warfare against the most heavily armored race on Iskaris was a job for brute force and elemental destruction, not stealth and reconnaissance, and eighty specialists who couldn’t crack blacksteel plate were eighty specialists better spent watching the roads ahead of him.

The elven capital sat to the west, the Heartland nobles could field reinforcements from half a dozen directions, and getting caught with an army at his back while buried underground was the kind of mistake he did not intend to make.

"Understood, Master," they spoke in unison.

Scar’s voice came through the bond, crisp and professional, and the thread of necromantic awareness branched outward from her as she began relaying patrol routes, terrain markers, and rally points to every scout through the link.

She hadn’t moved from the column; Void was still draped across her back, but the precision of the orders flowing through the bond was the work of a commander at a war table.

The scouts scattered. Eighty shapes dissolved into the trees, and within seconds the canopy had swallowed them as thoroughly as it had swallowed the elven army.

Quinlan turned south, where the old growth thinned and the terrain rose toward the first rocky ridges of dwarven territory.

"Fort’s that way. Let’s move."

...

The silver-bark canopy thinned within the hour, replaced by stone pine and granite ridges that rose in jagged steps toward the mountain face, and the first dwarven fortress sat at the top of a slope that would have taken a conventional army half a day to climb under fire.

This one was not like the others Quinlan had cracked on the march south.

The barrier was already up, a dome of pale-gold runes humming with the dense layered shimmer of a forge that had been given weeks instead of minutes, and the ramparts bristled with twice the cannon emplacements any previous fort had mounted, every barrel aimed downhill with the readiness of a garrison that had watched the others fall and learned.

They had known he was coming. They had prepared.