Blood Shaper

Book 4: Chapter 32

Azred, [Threat From the Air], eldest of his generation among his family, esteemed warrior, and, most importantly, husband to the most amazing wife in all of existence, was a kind, magnanimous, generous, and overall good person according to anyone you could ask! Any and all would speak at length about his virtues, especially his patience. And it was good that it was so because he was heavily relying on his esteemed patience to keep him from killing his wife’s nominal superior. All he would have to do was reach out, less than a foot, and drive his claws right through the little asshole’s neck.

He flinched as his wife jammed her fingers under his ribcage. Stop being a brat, she mentally sent him through their connection, using it to sense the direction of his thoughts, even if he hadn’t been broadcasting them to her.

Azred folded his arms and leaned back against the wall, glaring at the back of the duke’s head. His wife was the daughter of a count in the Isermani Concord, and Duke Velonius was her father’s liege lord. Technically, as an independent woman of noble descent who wasn’t expected to inherit her father’s title, there wasn’t any reason for her to obey the duke’s command to join in on this fiasco. In reality, Vivien was seen not only as a member of her house but also as one of its leaders, thanks to how close she was to her siblings and her own power. Ignoring the duke when he had called her up would have been a black mark on her family, and refusing to participate in his scheme would have been worse. So here they were.

His wife’s mental barrage of “stop being so grumpy” feelings had him begrudgingly amending his thoughts. The duke wasn’t truly scheming anything; deciding to participate in a small-scale campaign to deal with a threat from vampyr had some inherent virtue to it, as ruinous as those nasty creatures could be, and history showed that having a vampyr running a country, whether it was out in the open or by puppeteering from the shadows, was very, very bad in the long run. So he could commend the duke for risking himself politically and personally to deal with such a menace. Azred was still annoyed at the man because he was sure that the duke cared more about the glory it would bring him to be part of the campaign than the actual problem they would be dealing with. And for dragging Vivien into this, and thus Azred by proxy.

Bringing a dragon rider to counterbalance against the small size of your army was useless without the dragon rider’s dragon.

You’re smoking, Vivien admonished him. Stop being so aggravated about us having to be here and pay attention.

The two Classes needed for a pair to be a true dragon and rider, Dragon Rider and Dragon Mount, came with paired Skills that created a mental and emotional bond between the two members of the pair, allowing them to each feel the other’s emotions and to speak mentally. The bond was incredibly useful in combat, allowing them to function as two halves of a whole while they fought. It also made it incredibly easy to form a close personal relationship with your partner and just as hard for the relationship to truly fall apart. That was why most dragons and riders either ended up being functional siblings or in permanent romantic partnerships. Normally, Azred loved the bond he had with Vivien, but having his wife always know what he was thinking and always be able to nag him about it was annoying at times.

We’re attacking a country that isn’t even a real country yet. He complained back at her, although he did concentrate on keeping more smoke from leaking out his nostrils. They have one city, one port town that got stolen from pirates, and a few villages. If they have a professional military larger than company size, I’ll be surprised. This briefing isn’t worth being at, let alone listening to.

Strong individuals are just as much of a threat as a military force, especially to us since we’ll be physically separate from most of the army. We can’t underestimate the kind of force that might be brought against us, and the people organizing this have more information than we do about what we might face.

Fine, he sighed, when the ass-kissing and exaggerated thanking of people for being glory hounds are done and the actual important bits start, I’ll pay attention.

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Azred saw Vivien’s eyes narrow in his direction from the corner of his eye. We want to get along with the people we’ll be fighting alongside. Part of that includes knowing their names, which you can learn by paying attention during the introductions.

His growl of annoyance, which was quiet enough so that only Vivien could hear it, only got him another jab in the ribs, so he gave in and started paying attention. This meeting wasn’t with everyone who would be participating, but every high-level participant from the Concord was there, as well as a few people from the Bannerthrust Empire. These were all the movers and shakers involved with the campaign. Of course, the regular soldiers and the lower-ranked officers were out working on combining the disparate groups into one fighting force for the duration. This meeting was all the nobles who’d contributed their personal troops and the limited number of official military officers who’d been given permission to participate.

“I believe that everyone is here, and we’ve all been introduced, so we’ll begin.” The elven woman sitting at the head of the table stood as the tent full of people quieted down. “To repeat my introduction from earlier, I am High Crusader Hearthbreaker, and I am leading the Crusade’s recruiting and organizational efforts in the Concord for this undertaking. My counterpart High Crusader Vexler is doing the same in the Empire, and overall command is with Crusader General Eahn, with myself and my fellow High Crusader working as his seconds once we are underway.”

She glanced around, checking people’s expressions. Seeing nothing worth addressing, she continued. “The purpose of this campaign is to march our forces to the east to a new nation that is called Avalon. Avalon is a new polity, less than a decade old, which was founded by a new Class Line Progenitor known as ‘Kay’. This ‘Kay’ was already being watched by the Crusade and others due to their Class Line being that of Blood Manipulation. Multiple investigations showed that the Class Line Progenitor was not working with any vampyr, and the matter was left for passive observation. Sadly, things have changed. Kay has been attacked and turned by a vampyr that the Shatterplate Order was tracking. Sadly, he has not been killed by his personal companions or the citizens of Avalon, but instead is publicly insisting he is not a vampyr and is some other form of being called 'a vampire’, claiming that he was able to clear the inherent instability and evil of the vampyr using his Skills. The likelihood of that being true is so infinitesimal that calling it impossible is only a small exaggeration, but whether it is due to hope, manipulation, or just pure stupidity, the people of Avalon seem to believe it. Thus, the Shatterplate Order and the Itarian Crusade have collectively gathered forces and volunteers to aid us in marching on Avalon and destroying the vampyr there along with the threat their existence implies.” She paused to look around the room again. “Any questions so far?”

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One of the Isermani military officers accompanying one of the two generals that had been given permission to join glanced at his commanding officer, then stood when he received a nod. The massive bugbear was at least a foot taller than the smaller elven woman but somehow still looked cowed by her. “What of the reports that this Kay figure is making publicly witnessed oaths that have been backed by the System that he isn’t a vampyr?”

Hearthbreaker nodded. “I can see why that would be questioned. The problem is that we have no reliable first-hand witnesses to interview regarding the exact nature of the oath our target gave. The System doesn’t alert others when the person giving the oath is using cleverly manipulated wording that is technically true to lead people down the wrong path. The original vampyr that turned our target was well known by both the Order and the Crusade, which we discovered after forces from Avalon and the Shatterplate Order met him in battle. Based on past encounters with that vampyr, we find it very unlikely that he was slain, as Avalon claims. That being the case, the most likely scenario is that a very old and very cunning vampyr is manipulating a newer and less experienced pawn into saying exactly what is needed to fool witnesses without actually lying.”

Azred and Vivien had a moment of shared skepticism. That might be reaching. He sent to her.

The logic of that is supported by the assumptions that this Kay person wasn’t able to keep themselves from becoming a vampyr and that they didn’t kill the vampyr that attacked him. There’s no actual evidence that it didn’t happen.

Do you think he managed to pull it off?

Oh, definitely not. She’s right in saying the odds of that happening are too tiny to measure. Vampyr have been a scourge for millennia, and no one’s been able to keep anyone from turning over that period, even with all of the powerful Classes and Skills that exist. Kay’s claims are almost impossible, and the verifiable facts look bad for him, too. I’ve already read all the reports about this I could get my hands on before the meeting, and all of the accounts about Kay’s oaths that he isn’t a vampyr also include that he’s been physically transformed to look very similar to a vampyr. Claiming that he was transformed into something new is really the only thing he could claim with any level of believability, but it does not look good.

So, our current conclusion is that we’re probably going to be fighting a vampyr but holding off on truly believing it.

Correct. If it turns out this entire campaign is pointless, and they still try and push on, well, no one here will be able to keep us from leaving.

Hearthbreaker took a few more questions about the basic premise before moving on to specifics. “Our target’s known powerful allies are limited in number due to how recently they began building up. We can confirm they have one tier-four leader for whatever military forces they’ve been able to build up, a member of the Mapsight family who emigrated there before the vampyr attack. He also has one unknown tier-five combatant leading Avalon’s national adventurer force, a force of personal troops that use his Class Line led by an unknown figure, and the allegiance of one Eleniah the [Indomitable Fist], formerly of the Seramist Isles. Finally, there have been reports of an unknown gold dragon in the area. While there is no confirmation the dragon is with Avalon, it would be best to assume they are until we learn otherwise. We are unaware of any other powerful allies our target may have, so it is likely this will be a relatively easy campaign. However-“

The rushing of blood through Azred’s ears drowned out the rest of what she was saying, and Vivien’s shock and alarm met and merged with his own. The color of a dragon’s scales was basically the same as a human’s hair, based off of their family, and the rarer the color, the less likely you were to see it outside of a specific family line. There weren’t any dragon families that had golden scales on the three continents that most of the locals thought made up the whole world. The only family that Azred knew about that could have a child with golden scales within thousands of miles was his own, and there was only one member of his family with scales of that color that was out in the world and not accounted for back home. His cousin Murunel.

The same cousin that had been abducted at some point after she’d run away from home, been missing for many years due to that, then had just shown up one day talking about how she’d been broken out by her new friends. She’d refused to stay home and had punched him surprisingly hard when he’d tried to stop her from leaving. She’d gone back to her new friends. One of them was a male human whose name had started with a ‘K’. A male human who she’d mentioned would probably be a leader of some kind in the future, but who she was unwilling to give details about.

Vivien squeezed his hand tight. We’ll find out more. She promised him. If she’s still there because of some kind of mental manipulation or the like, we’ll kill whoever’s responsible and get her out.

And if it’s regular deception, we’ll drag her out of the way before this army kills what’s left of her friend. She won’t like it when they destroy the monster in his body.

His wife gave him a stern look. Murunel is stronger than you seem to think. What if she fights on behalf of the friends and connections she’s made?

He loved his wife and his cousin, and he loved how close the two of them had become after meeting each other, but he’d known his baby cousin for a lot longer than she had. Murunel hates fighting and everything that goes with it; there’s now way she’d participate in a war.

Vivien sighed and shook her head.

Azred let his lovely life think what she wanted to; it wasn’t like the bond between them made them agree with each other all the time; it just helped them end arguments and fights in healthy ways. He focused all his attention back on the briefing, looking for every single bit of data that would help after they arrived. He still didn’t really care about a miniature war to remove a vampyr from a position of power, even if it was a good cause. But finding his baby cousin and getting her back home where she belonged? That was something he could put himself behind fully.