Chapter Sixty-Six: Bound to the Stake

Because she was worried the new king would discover her, Hera did not bring Eirei back to her private residence. Instead, she took him to the tavern they had visited before, sealed away the last of his strength with magic, and only then began to undress the prince.

“Hera, calm down!”

“Calm down? You’ve been telling me to calm down for two hundred years!”

“We’re both so old now!”

“Precisely because we’re old, I can’t keep waiting.”

“But you can’t take advantage of me like this!”

“I just love this sort of thing.”

“…”

Hera’s words gradually stripped Eirei of any reason to resist. He grew disheartened—when suddenly, the door burst open with a bang.

“Who’s there!” Hera halted, glancing back. A white leopard stood in the doorway.

“So it’s you.” Hera recognized the druid. “Why are you back? Weren’t you following the other two? I’m rather busy now. Can’t we talk later?”

“This isn’t the time to play around. The young master’s in trouble.” The leopard strode inside. “He and Eve have been locked in the Cage of the Twin Moons. We need to rescue him.”

Hera was startled. The Cage of the Twin Moons—it was something even gods found hard to break. But how could Linley and the others have been imprisoned?

“Bard has appeared?”

“Yes.” The leopard quickly recounted what had happened. Hera hesitated, but Eirei struggled up from the bed.

“Hera, we have more pressing matters,” he said gravely. “We need to save the young prince.”

Hera looked at him in surprise. “You want to save him?”

Of course she intended to rescue Linley, but she had hoped to resolve her own affairs first—this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Linley was only imprisoned, so there shouldn’t be any immediate danger.

“He spared my life. I owe him.” Eirei replied, signaling the leopard to help undo his shackles.

On the way, Hera’s expression shifted several times, but in the end she didn’t stop the leopard.

Eirei donned his armor once more, feeling his fighting spirit slowly return. He turned to Hera. “…I understand your resolve now, Hera. When this is over, the two of us can finally talk.”

Hera’s eyes gleamed with joy. “Then let’s hurry and save him.” She picked up her staff. “Why would Bard bring him to the palace? Would that help him in his fight against the queen?”

“Of course. It helps enormously,” Eirei sighed. “The queen is the princess of the wood elves who was thought to have died.”

The leopard was startled. “Wasn’t she dead?”

“She did die, but somehow survived for reasons unknown.” Eirei stepped out of the room. “It’s complicated. We’ll talk as we go—I just hope we’re not too late.”

The three of them hurried toward the palace, Eirei summoning his own retainers—he had decided to betray the new king.

On the way, Eirei told Hera and the leopard the hidden truths of the past. Forty years ago, the little princess of the wood elves was killed by an archmage—yet, strangely, she later appeared in the palace of the night elves.

At the time, the new king had just ascended the throne. He was Eirei’s elder brother and had orchestrated the entire affair. He never told Eirei the whole truth, only that the little princess’s soul possessed unique powers, and that she carried night elf blood in her veins—she wasn’t entirely a wood elf.

“My brother hated the wood elves fiercely, yet for some reason was fond of that girl. He wiped her memories and raised her as his own daughter.”

He raised her for decades, until the girl, having grown strong, regained her memories and killed Eirei’s brother.

“Four years ago, she seized my brother’s throne. I cannot forgive her for that,” Eirei said coldly, sitting in the carriage. “No matter what, my brother raised her. How could she kill him?”

The leopard hadn’t expected such secrets. What was going on with these wood elves? That eldest prince was clearly a woman too—so there were two princesses? And both were immensely powerful; the leopard couldn’t see through their strength at all, feeling that even the ancient primal elf might not be a match for them—there was something deeply unusual about these two princesses.

“Wait…” The leopard suddenly realized something. “If your queen is the wood elf princess, wouldn’t her family just welcome her back? Why then did she start a war?”

Eirei only knew fragments of the truth.

“No mortal can return from the dead,” he explained. He didn’t know how the queen had been resurrected—her flesh seemed ordinary, yet there must be something wrong, perhaps involving demons or gods.

Four years ago, the queen returned in joy to the wood elf palace, but her family did not accept her.

“A princess dead for forty years suddenly returns—no one could accept her, save one.”

“The young master?” The leopard guessed who it was.

“No wonder she started a war. It must be love turned to hate—I can understand her!” Hera interjected from the side, causing Eirei to tense.

Hera went on wistfully, “The queen was rather adorable in the past. I was her nanny for a time—I still remember how, when she slept as a child, she’d hug me in her dreams and call me ‘dearest elder sister’… That voice was so sweet. If I weren’t so devoted, I might have been tempted myself.”

“Dearest elder sister…” The leopard thought, judging by night elf age, she should really be calling you ‘aunt.’

But now she understood: in short, the night elves and wood elves had far too much drama.

The leopard had learned to think as Linley did, and couldn’t help but sigh inwardly that her homeland was still the best—no princes or princesses, the queen was immortal and loved nothing but bananas, so there were no royal intrigues to worry about.

She didn’t want to dwell on this any further when the carriage suddenly stopped.

“What’s going on?”

“Prince Eirei, the road to the palace is blocked.”

Eirei was the first to step out, and was immediately stunned.

Dawn had not yet broken, and the avenue was already packed with people clad in black.

“The boss has been captured by the new king!”

“That old lecher, he’s even gone after our boss!”

“We have to rescue the boss!”

The black-clad crowd surged toward the palace, clogging several main streets.

Eirei was astonished, and so were Hera and the leopard when they disembarked—but soon they sensed something was wrong. The crowd nearest the palace was not as orderly as this one; instead, chaos reigned, with angry voices rising above the din.

“He’s a wood elf—he’s really a wood elf!”

“Burn him! Burn him!”

The cries of rage grew louder. The three exchanged uneasy glances, a sense of dread welling up within them.

Bard had not entered the palace. Instead, outside its gates, he had tied his prey to the stake for execution by fire.