Blood Shaper

Book 4: Chapter 21

Amanda, Prime Minister of Avalon, watched, outwardly dispassionate, as her lord lectured the assembled throng of wretched wastes of space that called themselves “nobles” and “successful merchants” and other such crock. If they actually were nobles or truly successful at anything, they wouldn’t be here getting torn a new one by Kay.

She hid a grin as she mentally used the expression Cindy had taught her. She quite enjoyed imagining Kay ripping new assholes into the fools.

As the idiots started to process that they weren’t here for some sort of reward or celebration and the arrogant ones started to get pissed at how Kay was treating them, their expressions started to shift from a collective look of stunned shock into a mixture of disbelief, anger, and dismay. All of which annoyed Amanda just as much as their initial beliefs about why they’d been brought here.

Seriously, do none of them know what hard work looks like? She fumed, Or even the tiniest bit of effort?

Some of them had looked around as they’d entered and begun to gather before Kay had begun to speak the prepared lines she had practiced with him. They’d been searching for rivals and competitors, hoping to see who had been invited to what they were sure had to be a reward ceremony, to figure out who had earned an invitation and who hadn’t. They’d enjoyed smug little looks between each other when they noticed that certain individuals and groups weren’t there. Those individuals were some of those most disliked by this particular crowd, and they weren’t there because they actually contributed something to Avalon and didn’t sit around on their asses expecting everything to be handed to them through their connections or supposed status!

These idiots about to be punished had come here expecting to be pampered and raised up because of their family names or their backroom deals in other nations, all because they didn’t have some privilege or power they wanted back home. The third sons of nobles, the minor branch families that had to take the crumbs of privilege and power from the tables of those higher than them, the spoiled merchants who didn’t like having to compete in the market, they had all turned their eyes on Avalon once news of it’s rise began to spread. They had thought to themselves, “Oh, we can go to this new city that’s popped up and be more important there. Our tiny houses will be great ones there. My small mercantile consortium will be the only one to control trade there.” And they’d sauntered off to Avalon, congratulating them all the way.

And that wasn’t guesswork or putting words in people’s mouths to assign those motives to these fools. She’d read copies of their correspondence that Isla had acquired.

There were few things in the world that actually deserved true hatred, and these idiots weren’t one of them. Amanda only disliked them to an incredible degree.

You could make comparisons between Amanda and any one of the fools. There were generalized ones that had inexact levels of truth to them, such as Amanda knowing what a hard day’s work looked like and not being an idiot. A still broad but much more exact comparison was that Amanda had had a much more difficult life than any of them. Born to a pair of adventurers who had not been expecting to get pregnant at that time in their lives, she’d ended up in the care of their close friend after their tragic and untimely deaths when she was barely a year old. That friend was Meten, the man she called “father”. Or “Da” when they were in private.

Growing up in a village that was predominately one species and not being part of that species was hard at times, but it was easier for her than it might have been otherwise. No one in the village actually had any true hatred for other races, not that had actually come up, and mostly, it was the ignorant bullying of children looking for their place in the world that she had been the victim of. Even then, it wasn’t too bad because her dad was either the first or second scariest person in the village, and he was quite the overprotective parent. More than one kid had been brought before her, shamefaced and cowed to apologize, with her da staring down at them sternly.

Growing up, she had wanted to be just like her da. Powerful, unbeatable even, and a generous, helpful person who could hold off the monsters and occasional bandit that troubled the village. Then she’d gotten old enough to get access to the System, and found that she had no Combat Class slots. Not one. She would never be able to be the powerful warrior to fight at her father’s side.

That had been quite the disappointment, but in the end, her main goal had not been to be a fighter; it had been to be a generous, helpful person who could contribute to her home and be useful to her loved ones. When her slightly older cousin had come back home from the nearby town to visit from one of his breaks while learning to be an Earth Mage, she’d listened closely to his stories, searching for something that she could do. The village hadn’t had any Classes they needed someone to pick up, so she’d started searching for something new and useful she could do. And in her cousin’s stories, she’d found one. A few people in the village were literate, and they did their best to keep things organized, but they didn’t have anyone truly dedicated to that task.

They didn’t hold to that idiotic “affinity for Classes” nonsense that was common in the countries far to the west, so when Amanda had told her da she wanted to go to the town and learn to be a scribe, he’d agreed. After some talks with the rest of the village about whether or not the village would help pay for her apprenticeship to one of the town’s two scribes, they did, and a stern talk with her father about under what circumstances it was and wasn’t appropriate to come and destroy the entire town with a burning wave of ash, which was very few, she left for the town, some clothing, some money, and a magical communication device to call her father with if one of those specific circumstances did happen. A few weeks later, she’d gained the Novice Scribe Class, and her journey of learning began.

Now, in general, that nearby town had followed the behavior of its Mayor, who was pretty much neutral to everyone. Being relatively close to the borders of Nelam, there was a faint taint of pro-human prejudice there, but it was limited, as the Mayor didn’t really like that sort of thing. As a human, she never had that happen to her, but her faint memories of children who were mean because she didn’t have horns helped her empathize. She made a few friends of different species and commiserated with the ones who had stories of annoying shopkeeps or belligerent guards. Slightly more than a year into her training, the Mayor died, and his son took over. Like his father, the new Mayor was neutral to everyone for the most part, and things continued as they had.

Then, the new Mayor died in a tragic accident. The new Mayor’s brother, the first Mayor’s second son, came back from his schooling in Nelam to be Mayor. Years later, Amanda had confirmed through Avalon’s information networks that the whole thing had been a fairly standard Nelamian plot. Start putting pressure on the leader or leaders of nearby independent towns, then “suggest” they send one of their children to attend schooling in Nelam to “widen their education and expand their viewpoint”. Then, they would make sure the children attended specific schools and made specific friends. If the indoctrination didn’t work, well, they had a hostage. If it did… In the case of Amanda’s story, Nelamian assassins kill the father and the older brother, and then the younger pro-Nelam son gets put in charge with “friendly Nelamian advisers,” and they start pushing to fold the independent town into Nelam.

Things got rapidly worse for any non-humans, with special emphasis on beastkin, because the king of Nelam had only focused on enslaving beastkin early into his rise, and that prejudice and hatred had had years more to sink into people’s minds. It started with the people who were already discriminating in small ways doing it in bigger ways, then openly instead of with snide remarks and higher prices. After that, the new Mayor started making it a law that people had to discriminate, and non-humans were pushed out of certain jobs and told they couldn’t shop at certain stores.

Then the slavers came.

Amanda had disliked slavery; she thought it was abhorrent and illogical, but she hadn’t hated it. How could she truly have? It had never actually affected her in any way.

She learned how to hate it when the slavers, helped by the town’s guards, swept through and gathered up every beastkin and most other non-humans to be taken deep into Nelam and sold, including her best friend, a cheerful cat beastkin a year older than her.

A slaver caravan confident in their guards and their safe route back to Nelamian territory was no match for her tier-five father, whom she had called with her enchanted communicator and begged for help. When she saw her friend again and saw what had been done to her in only a few days, she learned to truly hate slavery and anyone who supported or enabled it.

The abolitionist groups didn’t find her; she found them. Amanda quickly worked her way up as one of the town’s most promising scribes and organizers, compliments of being one of the only human apprentices that had been left after they’d purged anyone else, and she used that position to help more than one group of escaped or rescued slaves get smuggled farther and farther away from Nelam. She was a hard worker, diligent, competent, and generally well-liked by the town's administrator. She had believed that in the next few years, she’d be in a position to kill the Mayor and destabilize Nelam’s operation in the town.

Her plans were ruined when several tragedies struck at once. A virulent plague strong enough to kill even people at tier three had spread throughout the region, hitting both her home village and the town. The Mayor annoyed at the limited number of slaves he had both for the town and to sell, had used the plague as an excuse to start wiping out the small handful of nearby predominantly non-human villages, including her own, saying that the plague must have been spread because of “the undesirables in our midst”.

Already weakened thanks to a multitude of deaths, her village wasn’t prepared to deal with sudden incursions by the town’s guards and hired adventurers and slavers. They’d retreated farther away, but then they were stuck. They had limited food and little ability to grow more, with many of their farmers dead. They were also vulnerable to monster attacks, with only Meten and Darten left with Combat Classes higher than tier two. Meten could probably destroy everyone who came for them, but as incensed as the Mayor of the town had become, especially after Amanda’s botched assassination attempt on him after hearing about what he’d ordered, he’d only send more and more enemies until he’d won. Meten was also unwilling to kill every innocent in the town just to remove the cancer that had grown in it.

So Meten had hidden what was left of the village in a defensible spot, hidden it with runes as best he could, and set out with Darten to find a new place to live, as far away from that town and Nelam as they could travel safely. Amanda and the rest of the village had held out for a few months as the enemy drew closer and closer until her da and her cousin made it back with good news. A place to live, with a Class Line Progenitor that came with it.

Traveling to the spot that became Avalon and even for a good time after meeting Kay, Amanda’s goal was to do whatever it took to protect her people. Even to this day, that hasn’t changed. What had changed was her definition of “her people”. She was Prime Minister of Avalon, and she would do her utmost for every citizen of her new city and eventually for everyone who was part of the nation it would become someday.

Amanda had never fundamentally changed as a person; she still wanted to be helpful and useful to her home and the people who lived there. With her position, she could do that at an even grander scale, and that was a happy thought that helped her get through every day.

The fact that it gave her more power and resources to continue dismantling the Nelamian slave trade was the icing on the cake.

She continued to watch Kay explain to the idiots exactly what they had done to bring his annoyance down at them and successfully hid a savage smile with her Poker Face Skill. The tacit approval of a tier-five Class Line Progenitor to spend his prodigious and growing resources to further that goal made it much sweeter, and the the unspoken knowledge that once they were safe from outside influences harming Avalon, its full might would be bent to wiping out the evil of Nelam and it’s golden king made the entire thing almost disgustingly saccharine.

Wasn’t it wonderful that she secretly had quite the sweet tooth, then?

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