Blood Shaper

The view from high up above Avalon city was both beautiful and added a sense of scale to Kay’s thoughts. He was multiple stories above the ground, looking down at the city in an office he’d had made at the outer edge of the cliff face his palace and domicile were built into. The large glass window he looked through was enchanted in several ways to prevent attacks or forced entry but still allowed a clear view of the small figures of people going about their business in the streets below. It was like sitting in a plane and looking down at the tiny ants of cars driving around, but he wasn’t as high and those were individuals, not vehicles moving around. The comparison and contrast between his memories and this moment highlighted many of the differences between Torotia and Earth, and many of the concepts he was struggling with.

Thanks to planes, travel on Earth was much easier, with people being able to move across the globe in hours. Torotia was much larger and flying was much less accessible or reliable, making journeys a matter of weeks and months. Skyscrapers as tall as the cliff he was standing inside were common in cities all over Earth, but to have an office like his was a rarity reserved for the most powerful people in the largest of cities here on Torotia. Not that Torotia was the loser in all of the comparisons he had. His version of Earth had no magic, as far as he knew, which he now considered a massive drawback. Without his Classes, Skills, and the magic they granted Kay would never have been able to defend his city and his people like he had a few weeks ago.

That was the topic that was really occupying his mind and was the source of the comparisons he kept making. Just under three weeks ago the army they’d been expecting had shown up and a battle had taken place, thanks to the manipulations of the king of Nelam. When Crusader General Stonegnawer Eahn, the leader of the army, had asked for parlay he’d been attacked by an assassin, which was immediately blamed on Kay and started the fight. Even after the battle had ended in Avalon’s victory, they’d found no proof of who the attacker actually worked for, but everyone assumed it was Nelam. The battle was now being called “The Shatterplate War” according to the few people Kay had talked to once he’d managed to stay awake for more than an hour at a time, which he personally found a bit distasteful. There had only been one battle and it had lasted only a few hours, which he felt disqualified it from being called a war, but he also remembered an obscure history fact his friend Chase had told him about a war that had only lasted forty-five minutes back on Earth, so he’d kept his peace.

Blaming it all on the Shatterplate Order felt like it was more wrong than calling one battle a war though. His friends and advisers had said that it was being called that because there wouldn’t have been an army without the Shatterplate Order gathering one up, but that felt disingenuous. Until he would have been able to prove the difference between vampires and vampyr to the world, someone would have tried to kill him. Just because the Shatterplate Order had been the ones to make the biggest and most noteworthy attempt during which he’d been able to show that he wasn’t a vampyr didn’t make them the villains of the piece, they’d been driven by misunderstandings, a debatably healthy sense of paranoia, and an understandable fear of what kind of problem a vampyr ruling over Avalon would have been. Being wrong didn’t make them evil.

But maybe that was his compassion speaking. He tried not to let it show, but he felt guilty for some of the lives he’d ended during the battle. Not all of them, the Nelamian troops who’d come to pillage and possibly enslave his citizens deserved everything they’d gotten, but many of the soldiers he’d killed had been there truly believing they were contributing to stopping a monster from coming into power. Kay’s emotions on the subject were a mess. Part of him felt bad for the people he’d killed, part of him was annoyed he felt bad, they’d been the enemy. Another portion of him was worried that he didn’t give a shit about killing some people and was worried he was becoming a monster. He had time to work through those thoughts and emotions though, and there was work to be done.

While Avalon would have won the battle without the sudden interference of a giant eldritch monstrosity breaking through the sky and causing havoc, it’d still changed the direction of how things went. Instead of a totally defeated army running away in a rout he had a rough grouping of organizations and collections of soldiers all arguing about what happened next camped outside his walls. The end of the battle had come at the same time that the most influential leaders of the army had finally realized that Kay had been telling the truth the whole time when he’d said he wasn’t a vampyr. With the driving force behind the army taken away, many of the leaders of soldiers who’d agreed to ally and become part of the campaign to kill Kay refused the authority of the Crusader General and demanded to negotiate their own terms with Kay. Some of them tried to foist the blame of their actions on to others, a few claimed that Kay had no right to dictate terms to them at all, and some even claimed that they deserved to be rewarded for aiding in the fight against the eldritch leg-proboscis thing. None of that was helped by the fact that Kay had only woken to full consciousness yesterday after multiple days of side effects from being pulled into an antithetical reality at the end of the fight.

A knock at the door jolted him loose from his thoughts and he stepped back over to his seat. “Enter.”

The short form of Ahthia, one of the Ministers he’d appointed for his government, specifically the Minister in charge of information, research, history, documentation, and those sorts of tasks, came through the door and shut it behind her. “Good day, my lord.”

“Hello Minister,” he replied with a short sigh, “Do we have to have the formalities every time we see each other?”

“Yes, we do.” The dwarven woman walked over to the chair on the other side of Kay’s desk and pushed herself up into it. She placed a small sheaf of papers in front of her before taking a moment to look out the window. “I admit, it really was a good idea to have this extra office made for you. The other official offices lower down are nice, but there’s something special about being able to look out and see the sky.”

“They’re nicely furnished and decorated,” Kay agreed, “But being cooped up underground all the time isn’t for me.”

“We dwarves can go for longer periods than most without seeing the sun or the stars, but we still need to be outdoors too. Speaking of, now that the war is over hopefully we’ll be able to pull more builders and Earth Mages off of expanding the walls and can finally get that public balconies project you thought up going.”

“That would be nice. Sadly we’ll need to get rid of the unwelcome guests camping on the lawn, so tell me what you’ve found.”

“Right!” She shuffled through her papers, reading them and getting her thoughts in order before she began. “There are quite a lot of precedents on what terms were exchanged between victories and defeated armies in the past, including ones that had an exchange of war reparations. Sadly, the fact that most of the actual governments that contributed troops to the enemy army did so through cats paws or nobles who ‘acted on their own’ makes things complicated. Unless we can get anyone in power in those nations to admit that this attack was purposefully ordered to happen we aren’t going to get anything out of them. We’ll have to enact any punishments and reparations on the actual participants we have on hand.”

Kay tapped his fingers on the desk in annoyance. “That’s not optimum for us right now. Beating back the attack on us is great for our public image, but we need to keep that up. The big countries, specifically the Bannerthrust Empire and the Isermani Concord just poked us with a stick. If all we do is break the stick, they’ll just look for another one. We need to smack their hand so the pain teaches them not to do it again.”

“We don’t have that option in this case. If we insist on taking our demands to the Empire or the Concord themselves instead of the nobles and generals that actually led the attack they’ll just say they weren’t involved and paint us as over-dramatic whiners. Anyone with a brain will know the truth, but part of the way the game is played is that there’s the ‘truth’ and the truth, and too many people fall for the first one.” She pulled out the bottom sheet of paper and passed it over to him. “However, while we can’t hit them in the hand, but we can kick them in the shins a little later.”

Kay read through the list of weaponizable political gaps, economic attacks they could make, and favors that could be called in. “I see. We aim within whats feasible for the reparations and surrender terms, then come at the puppet masters from another direction. We still show the skulkers among the big countries that they shouldn’t mess with us without giving them an opening to turn it around on us. Well done.” He handed her back the list, “Work on narrowing that down to our best options. I’m sure you’ve already thought of this, but aim for moves that make it clear why we’re biting back at them so anyone who’s paying attention gets the message too.”

“Not a problem.” She set that page aside and broke the rest of the papers into stacks. “Now, this pile represents what I believe are the best options for the Shatterplate Order, the Itarian Crusade, and the groups that are still accepting orders from the Crusader General. These are the options for those who won’t follow the original structure of the campaign while remaining relatively reasonable, and the last stack is our problem cases and my recommendation for those.”

“Let’s start with your first pile. If the healers allow it, I’ll be having a meeting with the Crusader General and his people this evening, so it’s best if I at least have an overview of what I’m going to be offering him.”