Blood Shaper

Stonegnawer Eahn, the dwarven Crusader General of the Itarian Crusade, was still looking a bit weak from the poisoned weapon that he’d been stabbed with during the assassination attempt that’d started the recent battle, but he was much recovered compared to how he’d been on the day. He was still a bit pale and was moving gingerly, like his joints ached with each movement, but he was far from death. He sat back in the chair that’d been provided, leaning against the backrest to keep as much weight off of his own body as he could while still keeping a proper posture.

To be fair, Kay wasn’t looking much better. His already pale skin was waxy looking and he was slightly too thinner than was healthy. During the coma he’d been in, it’d been hard to get any nutrients into him, especially with the seizures. He hadn’t been conscious for any of them, but according to his healers he’d had a concernedly regular number of seizures that thankfully hadn’t caused any permanent damage. The healers theorized that they had been a result of his brain trying to process his memories of being in that other universe and failing. The seizures had faded over time, as had his memories of that place that wasn’t a place. It was all a blur of confusing sensations that meant nothing to him now. Trying to actively think about that brief stint of time had him instinctively flinching away, so he continued with his original plan right after being recovered, he wasn’t going to think about it at all.

The two leaders looked at each other quietly while the Crusader General’s entourage took their seats and some refreshments were set in front of everyone. Kay wasn’t entirely sure if Commander Ravenhome should count as part of someone else’s entourage, since he was the ultimate leader of his own organization, but everyone’s body language marked Stonegnawer as the definite leader of this group. The elven woman who was a Crusade officer was also there, Kay recognized her from when he’d marched into their command tent and she’d physically put herself between him and the Crusader General. The orcish man he’d sent Eleniah to beat on wasn’t there, in fact Kay hadn’t seen him since he’d shouted for everyone to kill Kay and then gotten blasted off out of sight.

Does one person with two escorts even count as an entourage? Kay wondered as he thanked the servant who set down a drink in front of him. Is Alice with them or with me right now? The way she’s sitting doesn’t really tell me anything.

Kay was on one side of the medium sized conference table, the three representatives of the surrendered army were sitting across from him, and Alice Ravenhome of the Shatterplate Order, who was both Commander Ravenhome’s daughter and Kay’s vampiric “child” was sat in her own chair pulled up to the side of the table, right between Kay and her father. With Ahthia sitting to Kay’s left and the Blood Guard standing in the corner the room was moderately crowded, and that wasn’t even considering that Isla was hiding somewhere while invisible.

Stonegnawer took a sip of his drink and set it down before looking up at Kay. “Good day to you, your majesty.”

Kay raised one eyebrow. “Good day to you as well, although that isn’t the correct address. I’m still a mere lord.”

“Oh? I assumed you received a quest to upgrade your title when an invading army appeared on your doorstep, that tends to be an event that jumps most cities and towns into suddenly gaining nation status, even if they’re still small. I believe its something to do with being recognized as an entity worth invading.”

Kay decided it wasn’t worth hiding at this point. “I did get a quest like that, but it hasn’t completed yet. The success condition was to defeat or drive off the invading army, and I guess that since I haven’t officially accepted your surrender that its still counting you as an enemy army camped outside my gates.”

“Hmm, interesting. I would assume the System would count de facto surrender or defeat as well, but I’m not a System scholar.” He took another sip of his drink. “Well if your quest wants official surrender, lets discuss terms and allow you to become a king. That is what we’re here for after all.”

“Indeed.” Kay nodded at Ahthia and she passed out copies of the starting terms they’d decided on to the three of them.

The elven woman skimmed over it but didn’t seem to be paying much attention to the document, she kept glancing over at the Crusader General and checking his condition. The two men dug deep into each of the terms, and it took them several minutes to read through the multi-page document.

“Do I get a copy?” Alice asked.

Kay squinted at her. “Do you need one?”

“Not really, but I’m interested if what you’ve put in there intersects with why I’m here.”

“Why are you here?”

She waved him off, “We’ll get to that.”

Stonegnawer set the papers down with a thoughtful expression on his face. “These terms are… more generous than I expected. Although some of them are… interesting and I’m not sure if they’ll work.”

“I’ll be honest with you,” Kay told him, “We’re being generous because I think without Nelam’s intervention in events things would have gone quite differently. If we’d been able to successfully parley and you’d accepted the truth, we’d have bled your coffers a little to pay for the evacuations we had to do, but that would have been it. On the other hand, if you’d just attacked immediately we’d be smashing you into the ground with reparations and punishments for it. Since things didn’t go as badly as they could have, and since you seemed to be operating on something relatively similar to good faith, I decided to lean on the kinder side of things. And while we’re open to negotiation on some terms, others are not open to negotiation.”

Commander Ravenhome flipped back through several pages and began rereading a section with a baffled look.

“Would you please explain which terms are non-negotiable?” Stonegnawer looked at the document uneasily. “I don’t know if some of these are possible to accomplish as you have them. I’m not certain if I have th authority to agree to a number of these, let alone actually assuring that they’ll be carried out.”

Kay shared a look with Ahthia. “Personally, I very much want to insist on those irregular conditions, but I’ve been convinced to be more flexible for those for the reasons you just mentioned. Let’s say I’m personally invested in those happening but we aren’t going to pitch a fit if we have to tweak them to fit reality. The terms we’re firm on are the payments to offset the evacuations we undertook, reparations to replace lost income and production, funds to enact repairs, and the weregild for the death of my people.”

Stonegnawer let out a short relieved breath. “Oh good. Those are actually the easy ones to address. I’m not skilled in anything economic or related to trade, but these look like standard figures pulled from historical treaties I’ve read, which adds the weight of precedent to this. Unless there’s anything egregious mixed in there that I missed I can guarantee those will be paid.”

“They have been.” Ahthia told him, “We pulled them from the relatively standardized set of treaties that stemmed from the last time the Bannerthrust Empire expanded it’s borders. As far as we could find many of the recent treaties since then pulled most of the generalities from there.”

“Yes, that’s where I thought you’d sourced from.” Stonegnawer nodded decisively. “I can easily accept those terms without any question or negotiations.”

“Good.”

“As for the rest…” He frowned at the papers while he moved to the section they were talking about. “These individual sets of terms for each organization and noble that contributed or led troops here. Most of them seem standard, forced trade agreements , reductions of tariffs when traveling their lands, generally accepted punishments for invading someone and losing. Those who continue to acknowledge my authority have already agreed that I will accept the final terms we agree on for all of them, as long as nothing too insane is added. The rest of them…”

“Any of them that are acting reasonably and like they have a brain in their head will also receive terms we believe are still merciful, if not exactly the same as the one’s we’re presenting here.” Ahthia’s eyes went cold. “Those acting unreasonably will be receiving much less merciful terms.”

“Ah.” He tilted his head back a bit asked asked, “Are the Clans still being-?”

“Complete fucking assholes?” She snarled, “Yes. We are not going to shut our borders to immigrants from the Clans and force them to go back. Nor will we, what was the bullshit they were spouting? Right, we won’t be ‘limiting the spread of our untraditional ways and ideas so that they don’t pollute the sacrosanct lands and peoples of the Clans.’ Fucking idiots acting like they won and can dictate what we do! I’m going to find out which of the Elders gave them their orders and I’m going to-”

“Ahthia.”

She cut off mid rant and looked away while coughing to hide her embarrassment. “My apologies. As I meant to say, we understand that anyone who has decided they no longer need to listen to you will feel they aren’t bound by the terms we agree to. We will be dealing with them separately.”

“Thank you for your understanding. The terms I don’t know if I have the authority to agree to are the one’s specific to the Crusade and the Shatterplate Order. Those are=”

Commander Ravenhome dropped his copy of the terms on the table as he stared at Kay. “You want us to move our headquarters here. And agree to oversight from your government. And give you control over some of our training. And hand over all of the individuals we have in our care that have been infected by vampyr over to you.”

Alice perked up with a sparkle in her eye. “Oh really?”

Ravenhome ignored his daughter as he continued speaking. “The first three are one thing, but the last is ridiculous! We promised our protection to those people and the hope of some day finding a cure! We can’t just release them to-“

“To someone who has a cure?” Kay replied archly. “Anyone who isn’t too far gone can be saved form becoming a vampyr by becoming a vampire. It will still be a change, but they won’t have to become and insane monster with an eldritch corruption puppeting their bodies.”

Ravenhome’s eyes which had been bright with annoyance and righteous indignation shifted into deep shock as Kay spoke. “Oh shit. Oh fuck.” He whispered. “That means… That means…”

Alice leaned toward him, “That’s what I’ve been telling you dad.” He gestured at her own body, “I’m not the same as I was, but its so much better than it might have been.”

“I didn’t… I couldn’t- I was so caught up in you being okay I didn’t get the implications.” He breathed out, his eyes full of wonder. “We can save so many people.”

“The other three sets of terms, moving your headquarters, being open to supervision or at least some level of monitoring, and letting my people have some amount of say in your training, is to avoid anything like this fiasco that we’re dealing with the aftermath of. While the intentions that started this nonsense might have been pure, or at least close enough, the fanaticism of many of your people led to the deaths of my people. Innocent people who didn’t deserve to die fighting you over something you were wrong about. Vampires are going to continue to be a thing, even if its only infected people that we save. We have no idea if we can procreate in normal ways or if that’s the only way to become a vampire. But either way I don’t want overzealous vampyr hunter killing innocent vampires.”

“You’re assuming any vampires will be innocents,” The elven woman countered, speaking for the first time.

“I mean innocent of bing vampyr not innocent of anything at all. Of course they could still be or become criminals or murderers or what have you.”

“Uh, Kay.” Alice leaned in like she was confiding with him, “Anybody with the right parts can have kids with people with the other set of matching parts. It’s been like that forever.”

Kay rolled his eyes, “I know that. I’m talking about being vampires. The System is calling us a race, but we’re technically people of different species that have been changed by a disease or a mutagen or whatever it actually is. Will we spread that to any children we have? Can we even have children that way? In a lot of the legends my original world has about vampires, they’re undead beings and if they aren’t they’re generally infertile. I know we aren’t undead, but are we fertile? Has the System made it so we’re a full fledged species of people and will breed true? We don’t know yet.”

“Oh, I hadn’t thought about any of that.”

“I’ve talked to Zeia about it and I guess she didn’t bring it up with you. That’s not relevant to the topic right now though, we can talk about it later.”

“This is a good opportunity for me to jump in with my thing.” She turned to look at her dad. “Dad, I was going to push for us to move a lot of the Order here anyway. The opportunity to learn from the people here about Blood Manipulation to counter the Blood Magic Skills a lot of vampyr have is a great opportunity, and so is learning about the eldritch stuff we didn’t know about! Kay made me an actual new Bane in the middle of a fight against a vampyr that got all mutated on us.” She pulled out the red dagger Kay had created for her. “If we agree to Kay’s terms and move everything here, we can probably negotiate for the training he wants to control to include the new thigns we want to learn!”

“I’m sitting right here.”

“Yes, but you’ve already agreed to teach me and my team things, this would just be including a few extra lessons in with the training you already want to happen.”

He shrugged one shoulder in acknowledgment. “True.”

“While that sounds like a very good opportunity for the Order, and likely the Crusade as well if I think about it,” Stonegnawer said as he stared at the dagger Alice held with a bit of wonder mixed with a tinge of avarice, “I still don’t believe I have the authority to unilaterally agree to those terms on behalf of the entire Crusade.”

“I might command the Order,” Ravenhome added, “But that would still be uprooting a lot of lives. I’d have to talk to my people about it.”

“Well then, while we’re here, let’s discuss what could be done to make these terms more palatable for the rest of your organizations to make them more likely to be accepted, and what concessions could be made instead if they never go through.”