“It has been said once, by degenerates, that the vampire plague upon us is a curse of our own doing. Do we say the same of rats or the that drugged cesspit of the Imperium of Demeter? No, of course. Reality reflects the truth at all times and the lies of demons and their sympathizers deserve nothing but a noose or the pyre. The answer to this is in our own mythology, Good Kinsmen.

The vampires are Arthurian bastards all, the worst of that cursed bloodline. They willfully joined the defilement of All Mother Melentale by Arthur Eld and this curse of blood is wholly their unforgivable sins made manifest. Blame is but projection in this case, and since the collapse of the Old World till our escape to this one, we have suffered these projections for more than a millennium in wars from the heart of the Fatherland to the warped reality of the Northlands.

Know that vampires are not but a misbegotten resignation of our species. They are seared by Melentale’s metal and the mightier they become- the worse the effect. Their blood lust steals away their sensation of the world unless sated. Even their supposed immortality is not but a long death. Look at these failings and consider for this moment if this is anything else but a wretched punishment for their crimes against our All Mother.

Remember the vampire is the demiurge of our world of blood. They are the demonicka and undead in one form. Trust not their visage, for they are an abomination of Noble Humanity’s legacy and stain it with every moment of their existence. They burn all, they kill all. They will gladly lead the open-minded astray from the light of Melentale as well. They are the taint in our soil and the despoilers of our pure-blooded legacy.

By the end of this century, we could see them all exterminated. It requires only diligence and a willingness to carry this challenge through the arduous moment that has, so often, dissuaded our weaker kinsmen from achieving victory. The Long War will end soon. Take these words to heart, for this is the Nation’s will.“

Excerpt from A Thesis on Abominations: The Vampiric Problem

2932 A.H.

Sonne von Liden, Historian of the Lightborne Königreich

I have removed and rewrote mentions of 'dwarven' or 'dwarf' when referring to our under-mountain neighbors of the Imperium.

She was, misguided perhaps, an avowed opponent of all non-Lightborne. It is a shame we don’t have her alongside us today.

-May Melentale preserve the Fatherland and smote all of our oppressors-

Note by Jan von Liden, Historian of the Lightborne Königreich

The Oath Betwixt

******

Jericho Warshien, Count of the Valkanweald

Jericho wiped his mouth on a cloth handkerchief and tossed the crusader's head into the snow. The blood he imbibed settled in his core, and slowly, the concept of sensation returned to him. He once more felt the tundra air roiling into his lungs. Taste returned, and copper's foul taste on his tongue signaled that he could enjoy tea and spices again. Then, the cold came to him with a wind gust, followed by the rising suns’ warmth on his face.

He closed his eyes and took a moment to relax, then opened them to see the full brilliance of nature’s colors return to him. After decades, he could consume enough blood to feel the world again. He wiped his eyes; his fingers were wet from tears.

He felt a presence beside him. It was the corpse he’d puppeteer with his necromantic hexes. It offered him his pistol with a kneeling stance, though it followed a preset command more than executing its own will. He took it.

With that, the corpse rotted into sludge, rusted armor, and slippery bone. It would be nothing more than a curiosity if he kept it past this moment. Better to let it waste.

Jericho sheathed his weapons. The silvered sword hissed as it went into a protective scabbard. Now he could smell the steam the holy metal emitted near him, the smell of sulfur. He would have to get used to that again. He regarded the butchered crusader’s corpse long enough to sign a prayer toward it.

“Your form was amateur, lord.” A distant and deep voice sounded above him.

Jericho turned to it, to Talbert, one of his bannermen and the one he preferred to keep him company out here while they waited for the twin suns to rise. He still stood on the hill- arms crossed. His armor had not even accumulated a speck of snow in that stance. The fight ended so quickly.

“It was an amateur I fought,” Jericho said. “I did not want to give him a good death.”

“A waste of energy. We could have killed it in the snow before. Then, we would have been able to enjoy this without that... embarrassment.”

Jericho approached, “You should imbibe blood, kinsman. You seem to lack joy today.”

“I wanted a fight,” he said.

“I offered this one to you-”

“A fight, not a pig to slaughter.”

“What’s the difference with these Lightborne?”

“If no difference shows ahead, I’m falling on my sword,” Talbert said. “Fuck this, I didn’t come from the Northlands for maypole games and circuses. I’m trying to die out here.”

“Aren’t we all?” Jericho said as he moved up the hill. He joined Talbert there, both of them pausing to admire the suns slowly cresting above the foggy south. The skies were a soft blue with serpents of fluffy clouds looped across them. It was nothing like the madness of the Northlands and the creeping chaos that came naturally there.

Jericho broke the silence. “Has the seers spoken to your mind, Talbert?” There was still much to be done.

“Yes, Lord. The Count of Caucher and the Count of Lysander circled and ruined two separate armies of eight thousand and sixteen thousand each. Those should be the last stragglers. Even if some survived- they’re pushing them eastward instead of south.”

Jericho nodded at the report. “The Lightborne will know within weeks what happened here. There’ll be opposition before we hit our goal.”

“Good,” Talbert grumbled.

“We’ll need to throw that defense off center.”

“We could just smash through them.”

Jericho shook his head. “That’s how we snatch defeat from this. Talbert, tell the seers we took casualties and will hold for reinforcements. We give the others our blessings.”

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

Talbert turned his head to Jericho, his face obscured in darkness, which stank of rotten flesh. “We deceive our kin with that- To what aim?”

“The Lightborne have built their colonies to contribute based on region. The swamplands past this plateau are their port of choice for supplies from their… “Fatherland”. The Kaiser needs those free for reinforcements, and these lands are the manpower reserve for a future war with those Elves to the east.”

“We’re here to burn their capital, not hunt yokels and play at conquest,” Talbert voiced his position.

“Exactly, we make them think it’s the second. Any attack there provokes an overreaction. It’s their soft underbelly. The Lightborne will surge regiments to defend the port cities while we burn some colonies. Then we march east and join the rest for a flank on the colonial capital.”

“You’re breaking with your lord’s plan by doing this,” Talbert spoke with an edge to his voice. Saying too much might draw His eye here. Discipline, if it were deserved, would strike both of them.

“He’d expect it. Why do you think I have no leash? The other counts will try at this game, too- and will be keener than I to backstab their rivals. Northlander brotherhood and all that. Let them pretend at glory while we win our own.” Jericho ended this conversation by looking at Talbert. He would not tolerate an open mind anymore on this issue.

“As you wish, lord,” he said.

Jericho left Talbert on the hill, starting toward his encampment.

“My lord, a question,” Talbert called back to him. “About a feeling we might share here.”

Jericho turned, “I gift you one answer.”

“Does disappointment greet you here, too?” he asked.

Jericho now had memories of a daughter, Anton’s daughter, being sold off to meat breeders in some Elven city. The news came to him at his retirement farm, delivered by a friend of a friend who was now dead in some field by Elven gunfire. He was then at some random Volksturmtruppen post, stewing in loathing for everyone beside him. Then, he was swearing oaths to join Melentale’s holy crusade. He couldn’t repurchase her, couldn’t find her; he was terrified even to know what she became ten years after her enslavement. He could only hope he died in the Long War before he found out.

Jericho boxed those memories away from his own. That was a scared failure of a man called Anton. Nothing he needed or wanted to experience was thrust into his brain. Such was the curse of bloodthirst—to be welcomed by unwanted humanity naked from the mask of stoicism or glory.

“It greeted someone here or there, then or now- I know that,” Jericho answered.

*******

The corpse broke its rigor mortis in a hundred sick cracks and violent spasms. Its grey, frozen eyes filled with an ethereal light. Old emotions roiled inside a dead brain, failing to draw connections between topographies of memories, regrets, and rage. To be as this is to drown while blind, deaf, and stupefied. The corpse beheld everything and nothing. Around it were shapes it despised but also held no feelings toward. Some shapes lay in piles, which were brothers but also just flesh. It sought to kill that bastard vampire but also wanted to find a home.

It lived in fog, a consuming grey. It found itself sinking into a hell unlike any other—snatching at memories and faces, each slipping away. There was nothing for it to gain. It had just ideas to lose that it didn’t understand but suffered the loss of: the mother of its children, a father smiling down and helping it stand as a child, and brothers standing side by side, shields raised.

Melentale saved me.

Word ripped through the fog, so powerful they united its consciousness. For a moment, Amsel became whole again after hearing these words. “Bourbon, one one-half-ounce, one sugar cube- muddled until dissolved in two dashes of bitters, garnish with an orange slice,” it said. “Do this, and thou shall be saved.”

Amsel felt himself slipping back when it began to question the command. There was only one answer: It obeyed wholly.

The shapes of importance took note. A glass cup kept in a wreath of snow in a bucket- decorated in frost and chilled by the air. There was a table beside this, and before him was the familiar shape and style of an officer's military tent. This tent was garnished with trophies and civilities well enough, though nothing like the Imperial lords of the Fatherland. There was a bottle of bitters labeled as such in Eisensprache on the table. The same goes for the bourbon. The orange sitting in a box with associated fruit, and the sugar cube is in an iron container with others.

The thought came through. This was not a Lightborne military tent.

The fog surged toward it, and for a moment, its name was stolen. It obeyed. A sugar cube mixed with muddled bitters joined with bourbon and garnished after a stir. It took this mixture and followed a new voice that begged its presence. The shape it despised most extended a hand for it.

In humility, it knelt and offered the glass. The fog vanished, and for the briefest moment, it realized what had happened.

Jericho took the glass as the risen crusader fell apart beside him, outside his tent, far enough from the entrance not to risk stains. He took a brief sip, enjoying the first bits of plunder they ripped from these Lightborne. He moved to a temporary table made from an overturned wagon. His ornate pistol was on it, disassembled on a white cloth with oils and brushes and laid off to the side.

A vampiric woman sat across from him, her black hair loose in the wind and her grey eyes tracing from the right to the left on an old tome bound in the sigil of some, now dead, crusader order. She took to furs and heavy clothes for her dress, though she had not imbibed blood in some time. He could’ve known that regardless since the burn scar across her narrow, pale neck was just as visible now as it had been when she was just a tiny girl- an old scar by silver. The stump of her missing ring finger tapped some phrase in that time she read.

“It’s distasteful,” she said to him.

“Anneline, this is the best cocktail mankind developed before their extinction; it’s quite tasteful,” he replied. “Or is it my use of this?” he asked, casting a hand at the corpse carts loaded by fully armored vampires bearing the Valkyrie motifs of the Valkanweald on their armor.

She looked over at the sight and shrugged. Her eyes were the same, upturned hooded shape as Jericho’s- which no other vampires possessed. “It’s wasteful and disrespectful.”

“They would do worse to us. Worse to you than me,” he spoke and took a sip, pondering some of the things he knew. “If you want to murder someone, you should start by being a better killer than them. It’s the lesson the Lightborne seem stubborn to adopt.”

“Then just kill them. Playing a puppeteer,” she said as she returned to her tome. “Such an act disappoints me.”

Jericho downed the rest of his cocktail instead of responding. He started to clean his pistol, wiping off the gunk and residue as the Lightborne captive had told him to. He thought for a moment that these were his enemies' supposed new tools and how few were among the crusaders. They were like miniaturized cannons. There could be formations with these things- with silver bullets. Terrifying.

“I see nothing of this Hadroan in any of these tomes they brought,” Anneline said. “They talk of other colonies during this… Elf War years ago.”

Jericho started to reassemble his pistol. “I doubt there would be. Even in the memories I imbibed, it’s nothing of note… at first glance. A trip-wire colony to warn the port of Averlann if Elves or we ever attacked from the north. It should be the perfect target.” He polished the assembled firearm. “What do they say of Elves in there?”

She looked up to him. “Same as what they say about us. Looking for allies in this campaign?”

“They are the Lightborne writ small,” he answered as he holstered his pistol. “There is nothing to ally with there.”

“What drives you to that belief?” Annline asked. “I read nothing but a wronged people here with plenty of cause to take to the Lightborne.”

“You should imbibe some blood,” he answered. He felt a tear upon his back, like a rippled lash cracking skin. It was but a memory. Not his own.

“Why would I do that?”

Jericho turned to her and gently shut the tome in her hands. “I need you to look more like a Lightborne. I want you to infiltrate Hadroan ahead of us, " he continued.

Annline narrowed her eyes, grey pupils focusing on him. “Jericho, you’re sending me to the frog-eaters to play harmonicas and line-dance- it’s a waste of our time. Just surround and shatter them.”

“I’m concerned about their militia, Anneline.”

She stared at him.

“It’s their commander,” he clarified. “I learned from the blood of that crusader. Rumors of an interesting reputation.”

“Just one man.”

“One man who is a warrior of the Ordo Malleus, so those memories suppose, in a defensible spot, with an army that defies its nature- an army more loyal to him than the state,” Jericho added. “The Lightborne have done more with less before.”

“Ordo Malleus?” Anneline smiled for the first time, showing her broken fangs. “And you fucking entertain that? Ordo Malleus sitting around leading a militia? They’d be under a headsman’s axe before they even thought of leaving their ordo.”

“This one is,” Jericho whispered back. “He owns a black reputation too.”

“All right,” Anneline read his feelings and set the tome on their table. “What do I get out of this if I go?”

“You’ll find out if this commander is Tarus von Reiner,” He offered.

Anneline stared back, her eyes glossing over when the name reached her. She rubbed her neck briefly, then shook off whatever cloaked her. “Only if we both kill him together.”

Jericho offered one of his hands, which she took as a mark of their pact. “I would not deny you that. We’ll face him together when that time comes, sister.”