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I will agree, in half a heartbeat, that the relationship between myself and Diurhimath is distorted.
Diur has lived so long that his otherwise non-mortal body is trying to break down and he must use special measures to keep it functioning. I haven’t really thought about it, but I suspect others with similar years, like Oberon and Morrígan, must also take such measures. Senhion never reached such an age, so I don’t even know what those measures are.
But while Diur is one thing from my perspective, I am two entirely different things from his. I am first and foremost not just his senior as an Elder, but one of the Descendants, the mothers of the First Generation. Even more, I am one of the twenty four Legion Commanders, the highest ranked Elders who report directly to the Immortals of the Tutelary Council.
Yet, I am also a juvenile, with all the emotional and hormonal immaturity that implies. And I admit, with the restrictions that my current physique and mentality place upon me, it’s no doubt legitimate to think of me as such. So Diur must navigate both versions of me, deferring to the ‘Last Commander’ while mentoring the child.
I could see that conflict playing out in his eyes as my words hung in the air.
Did you think your reason was sufficient justification to rip innocent people out of their old daily lives and transplant them here?
Should he reply as one much senior to me or as a subordinate?
Well, I held his gaze, because I refused to let him off. Commander or juvenile, I had a responsibility to those people as Duchess, and I couldn’t just leave this matter alone.
Finally, he replied, “I absolutely did no such thing, Your Grace.”
“How did they end up your Servants, then?”
“We liberated them,” he answered. “Pasrue broke their possession with her Light magic, and then I took them under my protection.”
“Possession?” Feraen echoed. “Do you mean Demonic Possession?”
All three fairies present wore grave expressions. Fairies all over were suffering a similar problem lately. Feraen was a former victim in passing while her grandmother Mára had suffered actual demonic possession.
“Indeed,” Diur confirmed. “After we learned the method to find and free the demon-blind fairies and the infection carriers, Pasrue and I searched for more victims to cure. But while inspecting the rebel ranks, rather than fairies, we began detecting demon-possessed mortals.”
Noticing a little extra fire in his eyes, I remembered something important.
“Diur, during our first encounters, you were also possessed, right?”
He pursed his lips, then stated, “I was in the grip of a puppeteer, actually, Your Grace. But it certainly gives me a particular reason to loathe the similar experience of possession.”
“A puppeteer?”
“Puppeteering was Trisiagga’s most diabolical skill,” he stated with a grim tone. “If she had either the assistance of a powerful ally to overpower her victim for her, or could somehow ambush her victim as she did with me, she could encase beings far more powerful than herself in a mind-controlling web and use them from then on as her weapons and slaves. At one point, Lord Durash even assisted her in securing a dragon. I understand that you deprived her of that beast when she attempted to divert your kingdom’s hero. And the next time you came, your purification destroyed her hold upon me, for which I cannot thank you enough.”
Bruna spoke up. “I remember that. That ‘web’ was the weird gray skin covering you and all those monsters that attacked us, right?”
When we first encountered him, his skin had been covered with an odd, grayish sheen. It had been faint, just enough to be visible but not so much you couldn’t tell the color underneath. He escaped Trisiagga’s grasp after my [Purification] destroyed it.
He nodded. “Indeed.”
Amana asked, “So Pasrue purified the gidim with her Light magic, and then what? How did you get from there to blood bondage?”
“Because the demons enslaved them for their army, Your Highness. We also had to free them from captivity. Especially the women.”
I could hear all sorts of implications in that last phrase. Were the demons using them as comfort women, like the Regaritan legions were known to do? Or something worse, like breeding hellspawns, or demon chow? I didn’t want to know the details. Any of those options would be bad enough to understand the need to rescue them.
That sounded simple enough, but…
I frowned, and asked, “By your ‘protection’, you mean you used your bond to guard them from repossession?”
He nodded. “Pasrue’s Light magic [Purification] does not have the strength of your Divine spell, Your Grace. A Light mage can only drive the evil spirit out of their victim temporarily. Without other measures, the demon will soon seek their host out and repossess them.”
Lady Serera said it before I could. “That’s a well-known problem, though. You must place them under the protection of the Temple or a Dorian shrine. They hold them there and wait for the gidim to repossess the victim, then use their rites to permanently purify it and ferry it to the afterlife.”
“Even then, the victim is still vulnerable,” he stated. “Even if the original evil spirit is purified, the one who is possessed remains an easy target. Your enemies know this, and know these people’s identities.”
“So, once freed, you brought them here, because otherwise the demons could find them and re-enslave them?” I summarized.
“Indeed.”
“Why here?”
His mouth twisted. “Why not? It’s empty, and it’s a peaceful refuge from the war. They’ve already had their lives destroyed. They can rest here.”
“Don’t you know why it’s empty?” I demanded.
“Of course,” he stated. “Morrígan recommended it for that reason.”
All of us gaped at him now. It was Morrígan who sent the Fairies on this mission!
“She knew you were here and didn’t tell us?” Amana demanded.
He scratched his neck, then shrugged. “She may not realize how quickly Pasrue and I could move. She knew we would begin by placing people in the outlying settlements first, to re-establish the farms, after all. She might not realize we’re moving people into the town already. Of course, it could also be that her playful nature got the better of her and she played a little joke on all of us.”
Serera put her hand to her forehead, then declared, “I need some time to sort this out. Why don’t we put some lunch together and mull things over for now?”
I was still unhappy, but I shrugged and let it stand for now. At least as far as letting everyone stand down, prepare their meal, and relax for a bit. I wasn’t actually present, and could hang around like this for hours, but everyone else had been standing and on their guard for some time, starting from a pretty tense beginning.
Morrígan’s sense of humor aside, I could see why she didn’t consider the formation a threat for the moment. Some two thousand souls were in this town before Astaroth’s magic vaporized the original inhabitants and attempted to steal their soul essence. Only a tenth that number were here now, and perhaps four or five dozen more in the outlying farmsteads. We were surely far under the critical level. And I’m sure Morrígan thought she could resolve the problem and remove the formation long before the population reached such a level again.
As they prepared lunch, I stayed close to Diurhimath, because I had another issue to discuss.
“Diur, about bonding with those townspeople…” I hazarded.
They were cooking a mid-day meal, and he was helping. At the moment, he was chopping radishes. He kept his eyes on his task, but he answered, “I won’t apologize for it, Your Grace.”
“So I gather. I’m just curious about something.”
I mulled over my question, trying to figure out how to ask it.
“Are you perhaps wondering about whether my people have the charms that your society makes blood-bonded individuals wear to safeguard their free will? We use a different method, but we have provided for them. Pasrue is quite an accomplished talisman artisan.”
With a blink, I realized I should have wondered about that as well.
“No, it’s different. It’s just somewhat difficult to ask about.”
Having finished, he looked up at me with a raised eyebrow, then scooped the radishes into a mess kit pot that already held diced potatoes and handed everything over to Bruna, who was in charge of the fry pans together with Arken. Apparently, that was his only task, because he wiped and sheathed his knife, placed the chopping board with other items for cleaning, and stood.
“I can see that from your expression, Your Grace. Let’s move away a bit.”
I agreed, and we stepped away from the tents a little ways. Or rather, he stepped while I floated along. Simulating actual walking with [Blood Presence] is difficult.
“About those townspeople,” I mused. “Well, quite a few of them are men.”
Once I had confidence that no demon presence lurked, Fan Li used the [Blood Sigil] on Bruna’s back to assess the town’s populace. She located a little over two hundred inhabitants, in a fairly even split of men and women.
Diur’s face twitched slightly, but he kept it under control, mostly. He knew exactly where this was going.
“I’ve converted most of my father’s abandoned Servants over to my bond. I’ve had no trouble with the women, but he had a number of men whom I will… well…”
He nodded. “At your age, it’s quite normal for men not to stimulate your fangs, Your Grace.”
I grimaced. “Can you not say it that way?”
“I can’t imagine a more polite way to say it. Especially, for a juvenile Elder who normally would only feel sexual attraction where men were concerned. Vampiric hunger depends upon our donors fitting our beauty standards, and the beauty standards of a nearly all-female race are, quite naturally, feminine. The Elder instincts you received at birth associate human women with both feeding and pleasure, while they associate human men only with procreation.”
“You’re getting worse!” I protested. “There has to be a less crude way to say it, Diur!”
He shrugged. “Hence, with men, you would have no vampiric hunger at all. And you, no doubt in loyalty to your husband, cannot allow yourself to use sexual hunger as a proxy to excite your fangs for a man.”
“Gaaah,” I complained, wincing. Then I frowned at him.
“Can you? Or, I suppose you could swing that way, but, I mean, that shopkeeper we met…”
I’ll be frank. That man would be no prize, no matter what way one swung.
I had the distinct impression that Diur was fighting to keep himself from laughing. His eyes that had been so dark up until now were finally crinkling with humor.
“I think I know which shopkeeper you mean,” he said with a chuckle. “So no, I didn’t use sexual attraction as a proxy for vampiric hunger with him. To be frank, when the donor is not enticing enough to stimulate my fangs, I have a female Servant prepare me. Pasrue, in this case.”
“You use a fluffer?” I retorted. Then I frowned at myself, because I do the same, after all. Dana helped me with the elderly women among Father’s servants, and likely would help me with the men when the time came. I had no right to criticize.
“You hoped I could teach you some other method,” he deduced.
I twisted my mouth, then admitted, “Yes.”
“Sorry, but I don’t have one. And I suspect your lack of memory from the Elder Age on the subject means you had none, either. This ‘fluffer’ you mention is probably just the usual approach we all take.”
He tipped his head. “I’m sure, like most senior Elders, you had both male and female Servants. That’s how you bigshots with thousands of Servants arranged for succeeding generations of them.”
My lips pursed tightly, then I admitted, “I used attraction as a proxy, like you said.”
I never pursued motherhood as Senhion until right at the end, but I did, in fact, take human lovers from time to time, both male and female. I just never dispelled my contraceptive magic. If a male lover wished for a child, I matched him up with a willing female Servant, just as I would find a male Servant for a female lover. In four thousand years, I somehow never thought I had the time for children, so I would never volunteer myself.
“Your Grace,” he finally hazarded. “I do understand why you think I shouldn’t have used the bond to protect those people.”
“Do you really? Do you really understand that you didn’t free them, you simply moved them from one yoke to another?”
He sighed and nodded. “I can’t deny that. But we were using stealth to move among demons and the possessed, taking serious risks to liberate them. We weren’t in a position to do so out of charity, and we needed their immediate obedience, for our safety and theirs. However, I am not offering that by itself as my excuse. I do have a very good reason to use Servanthood as my method.”
“It would have to be an extremely good reason, Diur,” I warned him. Nothing I had heard so far particularly let him off the hook, as far as I was concerned.
He cast a contemplative look out to the horizon, then returned his gaze to me once more.
“Aren’t you curious at all as to why demons are possessing humans in your enemy’s ranks? They already have the leadership’s cooperation. What’s the purpose for possessing the rank and file?”
