++The relationship between vampires and their progeny is one we have some understanding of, largely from the perspective of progeny due to their being far easier to capture and interrogate. The particulars vary, but in most cases they are bound together by practicality more than sentiment. This, itself, is of some advantage. Used properly.++

  Book 2: Chapter 10

  Reggie, in his moment of panic, assumed the worst and expected to find a praetorian digging Ludvich up, or ten praetorians. Fuck it, fifty, why not? And there were probably a score of Circumscribers with them. The Lady of Lorwick, of course, would be directing it all, and have long figured out what Reggie pulled in her city.

  If even a tenth of his paranoid worries came true, Reggie would’ve died about five times a week. Fortunately this time was no different than most, because his fears proved unfounded. When he reached the roaring animal sounds, and the shifting dirt, he was greeted with nothing.

  Nothing except whatever it was that was displacing all the soil, and displacing it from below. Reggie didn’t need to do much thinking to figure out what that was, and hastened to start digging the thing out himself from aboveground. He used his fingers without transforming, worried that, however good his talons were for scraping away large volumes of material, he might well flay Ludvich by mistake if he worked with such dangerous tools.

  Strength alone proved good enough to excavate him however, and Ludvich emerged from underground coughing, spluttering, and utterly smothered in detritus. He was brown with dirt, that’s how much dirt there was, caking him head to toe. Reggie hadn’t left him for more than an hour or two, surely, yet already it seemed the stuff had decided Ludvich’s skin, hair and clothing was its new home. Only his eyes were free of it, a pair of white pits gazing madly out from the dark sea around them.

  Reggie met those eyes and held their gaze, slowly lifting his hands. He remembered when he’d emerged from the ground. What Ludvich needed now was a friendly face.

  “Hi,” he began, gently, “Ludvich, it’s me, you—”

  Ludvich screamed like a tortured cat and pounced on him, moving…really slowly. Slower than normal, even. Reggie sidestepped with about five hours to spare and watched the man drop from his attempted tackle to land. He couldn’t have been falling more than a yard, but Reggie felt he could’ve sprinted fifty paces in the time he took to meet dirt.

  “Sycily, what’s going on!?” This wasn’t right. Vampires were stronger than humans, right? Even than humans with a Class. Why was Ludvich weaker?

  Ludvich has lost his Worker Class, for the time being he has no mana-granted physical abilities at all.

  That was…very not good.

  “Did I fuck him over?!”

  No, he will, in time, regain more strength than he had before, it will simply take him a long time.

  Ludvich had finally started the slow process of getting up. Scrambling up, Reggie supposed, but it felt wrong to use that word when he was moving every limb about as fast as Reggie could’ve moved his own through pure treacle.

  “Ludvich, stop,” Reggie began, but the old man didn’t listen. It took about a minute—at least from Reggie’s perspective—and six or seven more swings before the Witchfinder finally seemed to regain his bearings and calm down. Slightly.

  “Bastard!” Ludvich snarled. “You…you turned me!?”

  Reggie felt a stab of guilt at that. Of course he did. All his time spent crying and moaning, and now he’d gone and done to Ludvich what was done to him.

  “You were dying,” he said at last, “I…didn’t know what else to do. It was either that or feeding you my ichor—”

  Ludvich swung for him again, and this time Reggie let the blow connect. He felt a sickly crack as the Witchfinder’s knuckles broke on his own cheek. Ludvich didn’t seem to even notice, of course. He’d always had a high pain tolerance in life, now that death had numbed his nerves something like broken bones had probably become a mere irritation for him.

  “I’m sorry,” Reggie told him. Ludvich punched him with his other hand, breaking that too.

  “You’re sorry!?” He growled. “You should’ve let me die.”

  Now it was Reggie’s turn to be angry. “Fuck you. You think I’m so much of a monster that death is better than being like me?!”

  “Yes.” The old man said it with such a crushing finality that it sent Reggie back a step. If he’d been a human, he might’ve gasped for the breath needed to speak. Instead he just remained silent and still as Ludvich backed away, growling.

  There were no tears. Ludvich didn’t cry, Reggie had never seen the old man do it before and he wasn’t surprised by the lack now. No blood running down his cheeks like Reggie had felt.

  “You can still die,” Reggie told him flatly. “If you want to. Whenever you want. But why don’t you try and live a while, first, and see what you’d be giving up for the grave? That’s what I did.”

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  “Fuck you,” Ludvich spat. “Fuck you for putting that on me. Suicide isn’t the same as death and you know it.”

  Reggie wasn’t certain what to say to that. Sycily, any ideas?

  I’m sorry Reggie, I— Ludvich flinched, then started throwing punches at the thin air around him.

  “What’s that!?” He snarled. “Shut up! I’ll kill you!”

  Reggie stared at him, beyond words.

  He appears to be hallucinating.

  “Oh so now my hallucinations are talking about hallucinations,” Ludvich snarled. “Very funny.”

  Reggie kept staring as the truth slowly dawned on him.

  “Hang on…” he cut in. “Ludvich can you…hear her?”

  Ludvich looked back at him. “Her?” He scowled.

  Hello Ludvich, my name is Sycily. I was a System Interface for Reggie before gaining sentience. How are you?

  Ludvich started screaming like a stuck pig, and it took a good few minutes to quieten him back down. Reggie was rather pleased to have killed so many of the ants in this nest, for if any appreciable number had still been alive they’d surely have heard the sounds and come running.

  By the time Ludvich calmed down enough to continue speaking, Reggie was wondering how long they had until nightfall.

  “What did you do to my brain?” he asked Reggie.

  Reggie just made an impotent shrugging motion. It was about as articulate as one of the ants, post-draining, but it was also the best way he could really convey the depth of his own knowledge of the matter.

  As usual, it was Sycily speaking up that helped illuminate things.

  Many vampire Lineages have idiosyncrasies that leave them standing apart from the others. Reggie has, due to the purity of his own ichor, become an entirely new order of vampire. It seems that, due to being sired by him, you have inherited his traits as well. You are not just a unique specimen, Reggie, but the beginning of a new Lineage yourself.

  It was a lot to be told so fast, and Reggie suddenly needed to sit down. There were no chairs nearby, but fortunately someone had gone and left a bunch of praetorian ant corpses strewn about the place that served nicely for the time being.

  “I see,” he croaked.

  “I fucking don’t,” Ludvich growled. “Lineages, they’re the categories of vampire that we know of. Varkuun, Velitheans, Varenthor. We…” Ludvich frowned. “I’m remembering all that so easily.”

  Vampirism does not outwardly affect your appearance, but it undoes the damage caused by age. Any damage. Reggie himself noticed a heightened memory as his mnemonic abilities returned to what they were when he was a child, you yourself will be observing a significantly greater difference due to your advanced age upon being turned.

  Ludvich swallowed. “So…my brain, it’s…you mean…It’s like I’m young again?”

  Correct.

  Reggie had never seen anything like the expression Ludvich made after that. A sunrise compared, maybe, except even that didn’t have enough light and warmth to match the old Witchfinder’s eyes. Ludvich didn’t say anything, and Reggie certainly didn’t. There were no words for this.

  “I’m weak,” the Witchfinder snapped after a moment. It hadn’t taken him long to notice the happiness he was feeling and, in typical Ludvich fashion, quickly put it down like a mad dog.

  “You are,” Reggie confirmed. “Uh, sorry about that. What does your sheet say?”

  Ludvich growled. “It says I’m not a Worker anymore, it says I have no mana-borne modifiers to my Attributes, and it says…” He took a while to list all the details. There was a lot of information to balance as a vampire compared to life as a Worker. The old man—the young vampire—recited it quickly enough though.

  Form of The Beast, Blood Magic, Enhanced Senses and Regeneration. Ludvich had all the powers Reggie did when he was first turned. The only difference, in fact, was his Tier.

  “Deity,” Ludvich croaked. “It says I’m a…a Deity Race. Tier 1 but…Deity, Reggie.”

  Deities. Walking legends. Reggie could’ve handed Ludvich excalibur and probably given him less of a shock. “Well, you know they exist now,” Reggie quipped.

  His joke bounced right off Ludvich. “Reggie, do you know what this means? I could…I can become one of the most powerful creatures in the world. In history. The books don’t even acknowledge Deities as real.”

  Reggie frowned at that. “You’re talking like you already knew they were,” he noted. Ludvich waved a distracted hand.

  “Oh I worked that out years ago, not the point. This is…It changes everything.”

  Reggie couldn’t exactly say he was ignorant about how Ludvich felt. If anything the Witchfinder’s whiplash was probably a lot less intense than his own had been. He’d been Classed to start with, after all, and apparently knew the new Tier he had now existed from the start.

  “You’re not gonna kill yourself then?” he asked Ludvich.

  The ex-Witchfinder turned a fiery gaze to Reggie, then sighed.

  “I told you not to give me your ichor again, and you didn’t. You made a judgement call while I was dying. I don’t even know if I’d have asked you not to, had I been conscious.”

  He didn’t thank Reggie, didn’t really apologize, but Reggie got the feeling that things were settled at least. He nodded curtly.

  “Huh. You’re my progeny now,” he noted. “I think that means you have to do everything I say forever.”

  “Fuck off,” Ludvich told him, and started for the nest’s exit.

  Reggie hesitated, then started to follow him.

  “You know that you’re fine going out in the sun, right? For a while at least.”

  “I remember your early nights, yes,” Ludvich growled.

  “Okay, cool. Uh, I probably am not anymore. Actually, Sycily do you know how much the sun will hurt me now?”

  Ludvich jumped as her voice rang out.

  The damage you could have expected in two hours of exposure before will now come in two minutes.

  Reggie stopped dead. “What!?”

  The damage you could have—

  —”I know what you said, I…holy shit, two minutes? That’s insane.” Just like that, he’d denied himself the day. Shit. Reggie wished he’d enjoyed his last sunset more.

  It was still day when they reached the nest’s entrance, too. The sun was shining bright and, judging by the direction and length of all the shadows outside, they still had a good few hours before it was gone.

  Two minutes. After two hours at Tier 2, Reggie’s skin had started to itch and redden. By three it was actually burned, and it took a long while to heal after being scorched by the sun. Two minutes.

  In two minutes, Reggie could cover a lot of ground. He’d not gotten the chance to measure his running speed now, but while transformed, doing some estimates in his head, Reggie figured he could probably manage about…yeah, call it a league a minute. At full speed at least.

  But he was more than two leagues from his castle. Nothing to do, then, except wait.

  “You could go on ahead of me,” Reggie told Ludvich. “Back to the castle I mean. The undead won’t try to eat you now.”

  “They’d have tried to eat me before?” the old man frowned. Reggie sighed. Before either of them could say more, a sound reached them. A deep scuffling from far back in the nest.

  It sounded exactly like a very large volume of ants moving in unison.