A Hall of very scared nobles.

There was silence for a moment, with a scattered attempt by a few nobles who were starting to understand their lives were changing to properly cheer the knights' entrance, but mostly the gathered nobles stayed quiet for an uncomfortably long time. Then with the attempts of their peers to guide them, the gathered nobles managed an obviously half-hearted, but loud, cheer for the Knights of Dorzhan. Underneath his faceless helmet, Kriios gave a predatory grin of satisfaction, then he smoothed it out. Better to save the intimidating smiles for when people could actually see his face.

The procession of knights marched down the center of the Great Hall, and where they walked the gathered nobility shied away, cringing and flinching from the harsh sounds and hyper-militaristic display. Few knights had been seen in the Great Hall gathered in groups, and none in full armor, in the living memory of any of those elves—Vexosia Calabrant had certainly never allowed it, and neither had her own mother and predecessor.

None of the elven nobles could have matched the intimidation of those knights even armed and armored, and there simply weren't any non-elf nobles. Dark elves were disproportionately represented of course, but then they'd been the more talented conquerors over two thousand years before when the country had been founded. The forest elves and sun elves made up just over a third of the gathered nobles, and the rest were dark elves. While physically there were major differences between the three groups, culturally they had been united for so long that there were few functional differences. Dark elves were still a little more drawn to fighting, and treated men as little more than breeding tools and domestic servants; forest elves usually chose not to handle metals, and preferred a free-love lifestyle; and sun elves organized as sisters (both literally and metaphorically) to choose a mate who would service all of them.

It was no mistake that all three varieties of elf had different mating practices. Forest and sun elves particularly were closely related, with: white and peach skin tones, hair that could be as light as golden blonde or as dark as red mahogany, and a variety of blue and green eye colors. Dark elves by contrast had either hair so light it was white or silver, or as dark as midnight in shades of blues, purples, and blacks, but not in-between; their skin was dark as well, more often a polished brown, but rarely a dusky blue, purple, or black—lighter versions of their possible hair colors. But it wasn't really their physical differences that inspired their mating habits, it was their low populations of males. The most fertile elves, forest elves had male children a quarter of the time, but both sun elves and dark elves only had a one-in-ten chance of bearing male children—and their sexual mores and strategies reflected that. And inspired by nature, the elves were matriarchal: their country Dorzhan ruled by a queen, and its nobles houses by family Matriarchs.

Kriios was overturning that "natural" order.

At the head of the Hall, where a throne had once stood, was a platform that had elevated the Queen over the mere mortals who petitioned her and held court. Now it was empty except for a metal pole in its front-right corner, driven visibly through the wood of the platform and anchored into the stone floor below. Even as the knights approached the platform and arrayed themselves in front of it the nobles conspicuously avoided looking in the direction of that right corner, and the upending of the order they knew it represented.

There on the platform, garnished in thick chains that attached her to the metal pole, was Queen Vexosia, clothed only in her chains and a loincloth that covered her genitals, but did nothing to hide her round ass. She had flipped her long white hair over her shoulders so that it draped her chest and gave her some modesty, hiding her perky breasts completely from the front except for a hint of their modest bulge under her locks. She was scowling, and hate flashed in her eyes when Kriios mounted the platform and with heavy steps that shook it, turned to face his audience.

With practiced ease Kriios undid the pins and latches that held his gorget in place, and he removed it and his helmet, baring his neck among the one audience most likely to want to tear it out, revealing his hard face. A squire ran up to him, and he handed the equipment to the youth. Square-jawed, cords of muscle visible in his neck as he stretched it, there was no mistaking Kriios's mixed heritage. His skin wasn't green or grey, but a dusky blue, and he didn't have fangs so much as large canines, and his ears were pointed instead of round, but it was also obvious despite those differences that Kriios's father was an orc—if his size wouldn't have given it away on its own. Actually, for a mixed-race orc he looked unusually elven, for many half-orcs appeared almost entirely like one themselves. His eyebrows were sharp, and his eyes weren't red but instead a soft lilac purple. He didn't have facial hair, and his hair wasn't muddy brown like most orcs, but platinum, with hints of purple that shimmered in the right light.

Like it did there on the Great Hall's platform, descending on him from the ornate candelabra that used simple magic to highlight the ruler of Dorzhan. Where Kriios would reveal the new order that would resurrect Dorzhan.