TIMESKIP.

[vrykolakas]

THE BRUCOLAC COURT Unseelie. TITLE Baron of Srathmarbh, Black Omen. OCCUPATION Baron, drugs manufacturer, political thinker gods help him, Umibōzu captain. ABLE TO FAST-TRAVEL Yes; puca. RESIDENCE IN 2,701 Srathmarbh. RESIDENCE IN 2,702 Srathmarbh. MAJOR EVENTS PUBLICATION OF THE REDDENED HILL Being a Personal Account of the Battle of An Carn Ban... [ ✖ ] ADOPTION DISCUSSION "There is no one I would want to do it more." [ ✖ ] COMPLETION OF THE SRATHMARBH SPIRE Description [ ✖ ] PUBLICATION OF THE GOVERNOR A brief meditation on what and what not to do while holding public office. [ ✖ ] BIRTH OF SHAMASH Description [ ✖ ] BIRTH OF ISHTAR Description [ ✖ ] RESCUE OF CHILDREN Description [ ✖ ]

PLANS By the time the timeskip ends, the Brucolac will be in a more stable position, his spire complete and the surrounding lands a buzzing centre of construction and commerce. He will have two children in the care of Alyosha Hazan. SUMMARY OF KNOWN DETAILS Beebins; daring rescue of beebins; becoming reluctantly published; stuff stuff stuff; seeing a scifi film and being the biggest nerd; building a wee town & preparing for ports & shipyards; maybe hunting cloudwhales; tsk'ing unhappily at the cult of the fox TIMELINE OF EVENTS SPRING IN 2,701 (Mar, Apr, May) MARCH - Publication of the Brucolac's The Reddened Hill: The Unseelie Triumph of An Càrn Bàn. Anonymous, though rumour suggests it was one of the Barons. MARCH - A long talk with Alyosha about adoption. APRIL 5TH - The Srathmarbh Spire is completed and the name 'Srathmarbh' finally begins to catch on. Construction workers are encouraged to stay and continue building on the town proper. Whispers abound of future, grander plans (the Brucolac himself ensures these whispers circulate). Various grants and start-up loans are offered to would-be business-owners. APRIL - Hunting cloudwhales for their precious floaty bones. MAY - Publication of The Governor. Anonymous/under penname. MAY - A run-down rural farmhouse west of Mair is chosen for the location at which to base the Brucolac & Dasha's growing drugs business. MAY - Aileas an Seabhac requests that the Brucolac act as her diplomat to help smoothe over tensions between the vampires and the elves. MAY - Those fucking swans. The Brucolac will scoop up a few and be seen to pour what wealth is gained from them straight back into Srathmarbh. SUMMER IN 2,701 (Jun, Jul, Aug) JUNE - Two vampire entrepreneurs take advantage of the Brucolac's offered start-up loans and begin to create a printing press in Srathmarbh. JUNE - The Brucolac participates in the Treun summer tourney, in the Melee category! Yseult comes to watch; the rumours which have long abounded about the Brucolac's kept woman in Mair become noisier. The event ends terribly for them when, during the daytime, Yseult is attacked by copycats of the fox cult for her association with shardbearers. JULY - Perhaps it's the rich heat of the summer sun which the slakemoths respond to? Or the blood in the air. They wrap themselves up in cocoons and emerge terrible, but are manageable. Don't ask how. JULY - An attempt is made to feed one Mr Bones to the slakemoths. AUGUST - The Festival of Shadow. FALL IN 2,701 (Sept, Oct, Nov) EARLY SEPTEMBER - The Brucolac is affected by the scrambling of the translation enchantment; he speaks some stilted Drabbish, and a whole heap of languages from his world, which are all totally useless to him. Expect terrible handwriting and a lot of gestures. Also expect one great big universally-understandable I TOLD YOU SO. SEPTEMBER - The Srathmarbh press is complete and ready for business! Grants for teachers and educators, or literate people wishing to become teachers and educators, are refined and more widely publicised. SEPTEMBER 29TH - Birth of Shamash, son of Verla. OCTOBER 3RD - Birth of Ishtar, daughter of Yseult. OCTOBER 5TH? - By the grace of the Unseelie monarchs, the children are returned, delivered safely to the arms of Alyosha Hazan. OCTOBER 25TH - 30TH - Samhain! An excuse to be naked with loved ones. NOVEMBER - Some of the escaped criminals are former employees of Mr Bones, out for vengeance or perhaps out for gainful employment now that Mr Bones is no longer quite the force he was. The Brucolac puts out feelers to ascertain various situations and deal with them appropriately. WINTER IN 2,701/2,702 (Dec, Jan, Feb) DECEMBER - The Brucolac stays far away from the White Hart. No thanks. Srathmarbh will hold a fervent Yule celebration, which promises to become a tradition. JANUARY - Fuck, what do you mean the slakemoths bred? Oh fuck. FEBRUARY - Yseult causes controversy at the Ostara Festival by anonymously submitting a work named Blindeye, a great abstract mural of wild colours meant to be touched and stroked and stared at with unease. It is torched by a traditionalist. The Brucolac tries to use this to distract from possible re-emergence of elf/vampir tensions caused by the assassinations of elven artists. SPRING IN 2,702 (Mar, Apr) DATE - Description DATE - Description DATE - Description

( codes by whambam )

Comments

OCTOBER 2701

[vrykolakas]

october 5th. rescue. likely warnings for violence, possibly against children.

[vrykolakas]

The night after the girl's birth, the Brucolac stayed with Yseult. Both of them shocked and quiet as war-orphans, they locked themselves into Yseult's bright, beautiful rooms in Mair and passed an insensible night and day together. Yseult got drunk and wept into the Brucolac's hair. They argued, of course, more for the sake of snarling at each other than because they were angry; they argued pointlessly about the fact that the child was a girl and how had the Brucolac been wrong and whether it mattered; neighbours knocked urgently on walls to tell them to shut up when their voices rose to hysterical heights, and were ignored. After, having wrung themselves clean dry of emotion, they both slept through the day.

He took his leave after waking. Accalon got no joy from needling, the Brucolac being too exhausted to bite back, so they rode in silence save for the screaming winds and the ululation of nightmares as the puca galloped across dreaming terrors. At his spire he moved quick to avoid the attentions of his staff, was craven enough to walk in the shadows to avoid the petitions of over-eager clerks keen to tell him of all the work he had to do. Only let out a breath when he came to his private office.

And promptly sucked it sharpily in again when he opened the door to his sitting room.

"Oh fuck," he said, almost a whimper.

The imp which was sprawled on his floor in a literal puddle of red wine, guzzling happily at a half-empty bottle it had stolen from his drinks cabinet, swallowed and grinned up at him. "Was bored," it said, smacking its lips. "Don't stand on me, Lord Shardbearer your baronship. 've got a letter for you. I'll clean this up..." It staggered to its feet, and produced a note from its pocket. Held it out with slightly sticky fingers. The Brucolac snatched up the paper.

"Get out," he said, and looked down; the imp had already vanished, wine and all, with the puddle entirely gone. Blinking, dry-mouthed with horror and amazement, he returned his gaze to what else lay on the floor, in tumbled-apart black pieces. Reeking of magic and old, old blood.

"Fuck," he said again, staring at the High King's armour.

***

He had wondered what he had sold himself for.

The armour was heavy, massive, bleeding magic down into his bones; it prickled with spikes, yet made no sound as the metal plates (were they metal?) slithered against each other. He hadn't yet put on the helmet. It was about as intuitive as sticking his head into the maw of a mafadet, of a great bonefish, of an overgrown shark.

Steeling himself, he did it anyway.

[fairyfoes]

It wasn't metal. Inspection proved it was more like shell, grown up around a living thing, with a blackly pearlescent sheen on the inside of the plates. And as soon as he began to put them on, they became his skin.

New senses flowered in him slowly. He could feel the weight of dustmotes whirling in a corner. The tread of feet through some knobby Dorchadan forest leagues away like a prickle at his shoulder. Sleeting rain falling on the healing ruin of Caer Scima like the twinge of some scabbed-over wound deep in his chest. And like a spider at the center of some unknowable web, he felt in faint twitches, uncanny knowing that curled through his mind like mist, the doings of Unseelie shardbearers. Breaths taken in sleep. Eyes aching pouring over books. The sweat and heat of copulation, the strain of panic, and if he focused just enough he could feel himself in their skin.

Until all that remained was the helm, seemingly lifeless, staring him down. Daring him, almost, to become an arbiter of the wrath of Dorchadas.

[vrykolakas]

For a few moments he closed his eyes and felt himself everywhere. A sensory voyeur living hundreds of different moments simultaneously. He ran with the panicked woman stealing through Seelie territory, feeling the cold sweat that prickled between her neck and her gorget; occupied the aching space behind the eyes of someone half-asleep in a private library. Felt Caer Scima's scars like his own.

Then he locked eyes with the helm's eyeless slit, and considered anger. He had stopped his wrath so far. Directed it inwards or simply caged it, afraid of what he might do if he were to start taking revenge. It wasn't like he had any right to turn this chance down. To muzzle his fury now when it might finally be useful would be pathetically wasteful.

And fuck if he didn't want to make the rivers run red around whatever place they'd taken those children.

He drew on the helm.

[fairyfoes]

The helmet hushed into place over the mass of his hair, the lines of his profile, infinitely cold, and became him. His sense of all things exploded outward still further; he could see magic like new colours, feel ley-lines of power that lead to other worlds, feel life and death and all the strange places in-between, a familiar-unfamiliar urgency, the want to live, vicious and darkly primal and defiant against that ris—

Something black and cold clawed into his mind, trained it by force and pain to focus on the room and the remaining sense of his body. It spoke to him, in no voice he recognised, piercing, white-hot.


Beyond light and knowledge go you now to your enemy, through fire and abyss.

Not to Mair, but to some eldritch, ancient place well beneath it. The knowing lapped over him coldly. Mair was a new thing, built on the bones of a place of great lamentation and suffering. Casinos and brothels were just a shallow growth, a coat of paint, covering a place where in the ages before time men had given up their dreams, their hearts, their lives, in pursuit of gilt-edged fantasy. Where like betrayed like, and where in the far beginning the first seeds of greed and deceit had been made to grow and take form... which for ever sprout anew, and bears dark fruit even unto the last days.

It was not a mortal thing, that dealt in dreams and children.

[vrykolakas]

Perhaps he cried out at the sudden outward flowering of his senses. It was lost to him, carried on Northern winds and drowned out by the wanting souls of the dead and the living. And then something hauled on the reins of his mind, brought in skidding back to his body, where he found himself stooped, hands at his head. Gauntlets at his helm. How cold it was.

I knew it, he thought, distantly surprised to find a part of himself which sounded like himself inside his skull—and distantly not surprised at all. With a jolt, he realised the double-feedback he was getting where the armour or whatever it was met his shard. He spied on himself spying on himself and there was the awful potential to telescope too far out.

He hauled himself straight. (O'Treoraí. They won't lose their way. Neither will you.) I knew it, he said, his voice not moving through the black magic carapace.

Slowly, he took an experimental step. Reached for that old place, aimed to take leagues in his stride.

[fairyfoes]

He left lightning-clad and to a sound like thunder, like the earth cracking. In his wake, workers fled scaffolding and soldiers scrambled in fear of an attack which never came.

Shadows parted for him, revealing the spaces between.

And he was welcomed there, beyond substance and form, felt more at home in what writhed and tested the boundaries of reality than when given hard flesh—

Was spat out again under a sky that was no sky, but a collection of light-filled eyes burned redly beneath the bedrock of the world. His children were not alone here; set on a great sacrificial altar made of the compressed and mortared remains of other children. They squirmed and cried and screamed with dozens of others, who had been taken in a short stretch of time— all left to die. Some of them were close to dying, not even enough energy to shiver in their swaddling, round faces sallow.

Around the high altar crashed a black sea of deathless spirits, clawing and biting and battling each other, both more and less than shadows. Victors would slither, long-limbed and sharp-taloned, atop the bones, pour themselves into the weakest bodies, those just on the cusp of death.... and be gone.

Armor-clad, the Brucolac crashed into place among them like a meteor, scattering shades and spirits in cold fire that flared and died. They ignored him in their frenzy, clambered over him like animals, shrieking banshee wails, wanting to be real. It was flesh they needed, not to consume, but to crawl inside like parasites.

By right and ritual, and by all laws, he'd sworn, to give up his own. The fell power in his hands now, to break those laws, to undo some horror, some magic so ancient that the span of his life was no more than a mote of dust against it. He could break them.

But only twice. And there was a horde to cross.

[vrykolakas]

By right and ritual, and by all laws. That tired old despairing thought, oh gods show mercy for what I've done, was too well-rehearsed to shake him as it should have. He curled gauntleted fingers in towards his armoured palm. Wide awake to the terror, but unafraid.

He had done his petitioning; this was the mercy he had been shown. He was coldly grateful for it.

A shade-thing, momentarily beetle-bodied before it diffused and stretched into something greater and stranger, scuttled past and over him, and with a sudden, armour-silenced hiss of defiance he opened his palm, reached into the darkness and pulled, and all the shadows—the real true shadows, cast by the weird, blood-thick light from above—opened their mouths. And sought (with great, rolling black tongues, the darkness suddenly the consistency of sucking tar) to swallow down the shades which crowded nearest them, opening a path for the Brucolac.

[fairyfoes]

Shadows fed on the numbers of fears and horrors, gnashing shifting-shaped teeth through spindle-thin limbs. There was a space, for a short while— before they massed, buzzing toward him like angry ants at an interrupted feast. Tried to pry into the joints of his armour.

(He could see it, how these grown so strong; threads of old magic blue-purple on his vision, these terrors, made themselves more than flickering shapes feeding on the first fears of the very children they fought to corrupt, keep, consume, inhabit. He could feed on it too, if he wanted, draw the coldness into himself like blood—)

october 5th. end of the night.

[vrykolakas]

He had sent a single message to Alyosha: Have food ready, wetnurse, something. With a twist of a dial, he had let the compass turn his words to text so she couldn't hear how exhaustion thinned out his voice. Then he had put it away and focused his attention on the children, without the energy to concentrate on anything more.

Shamash and Ishtar were swaddled now in fresh linens, fed with dabs of sugar water (administered with utmost caution, near terror, on the advice of a medic in Redgate) in the absence of milk, both sniffling intermittently with hunger still. He replaced the cold, slit-visored helm. Staggered under the weight of the world. Dorchadas crackled around him, all purple and blue, a thousand different colours of darkness.

He held the children tight, and took the single step which would bring him crashing before Alyosha's door in a burst of flame cold and bright enough to singe the earth around them. Knees nearly buckling even in the black-shell casing of his borrowed armour.

The weight of all this knowing was exhausting. He might as well have stuck his head into a hornet's nest for the painful whine which invaded his ears. If there was space between his brow and the helm's visor—and he wasn't sure there was—it was slicked with blood.

[fairyfoes]

She'd been sealing papers, carefully pressing seals into wax: letters of credit and payment and reporting and inquiring— the neat mountain of papers slowly grew into ordered stacks of folded, signed, sealed letters for delivery. The thick candle light of the office gleamed off her glassy scars, the imperfect glass of her spectacles, the silver of her hand. She rarely had cause to use the lockets— had fallen out of the habbit of such communicators ancient time ago— and leaned over when the thing became faintly radiant atop a far corner of the large desk.

She flipped it open, nudging her spectacles up her nose, brow furrowing as she read. She could almost taste the urgency of the words.

Cast the spectacles off and slammed open one of the desk drawers, reaching inside. "Cara!" She called out, and was out of her seat fast enough to scrape its feet on the floor. "Cara, is your boy in!?"

The manse was thinly staffed, employed only the members of a trusted family, housed and kept them handsomely for their loyalty. After a swift-spoken conference, Breen was sent in wild-eyed haste down to the village proper, pockets weighed heavily with gold, kneeing one horse into a gallop and leading two others that protested the poor-cobbled roads.

Alyosha wrung her hands, fretting while she waited, pacing like a caged lioness. The village was close, her name known; she'd barely had time to explain her haste, uncertainty, usher in two new-made mothers in before, still hesitating in the doorway, the form of the High King crackled into place in the courtyard, wreathed in cold fire that burned nothing, heavy enough in power to crack the fine tiles.

She recoiled from him, dark eyes ringed in white— just a moment before her teeth flashed whitely, hand whipping for a sword that wasn't even on her belt, "I remember—" she began to say, and then faltered short, at last seeing what her lord carried and understanding.

Her words became a sound, half greeting, half grieving, and she darted forward when he staggered, arms outstretched to support him and his burden both. "My king," gasping for breath around some private pain, hauling him up with an arm about his waist, one arm seeking to take the smallest child from him, "My king, I don't... How... let me, I have you now, I have you, I'll guard you still—"

[vrykolakas]

He passed Shamash onto her, cradling Ishtar still. Senses expanded by the armour and its magic, her touch seemed to burn through the plate with a heat which wasn't. With his free arm he reached up, yanked the helm off. Blood streaked his face, crusted in his brows. He was panting like a living thing, shaking his head, fighting to stay upright. His hair came tumbling over his shoulders like the weed he had summoned in the caverns below.

For a moment after removing the helmet, it was like being deaf and blind. His ears rung, blocking out her voice, his own overloud in his ears; "—me, it's me, Alyosha—take them, take them please take them," words spilling from his lips. But his feet were firm on the ground, his burden lightened now the helmet was off, the first shocks of reduced sensation dissipating until the relative numbness was infinitely comforting.

[fairyfoes]

She froze when she caught sight of his mouth as he peeled the helm away, staring up at him, almost uncomprehending, as if some great truth of her world had been upset, up-ended. She processed the sight of him as he was until the infant in the crook of her arm moved helplessly, face squirming against her chest.

"Tell me they're mine," she breathed, half-command, half-plea, voice stretched tight around some unidentifiable emotion. With the skill of long and well-remembered practice, she pulled the second child from him, settled neatly against her shoulder.

[vrykolakas]

"They're yours," he said, voice rougher than ever, steadying himself well enough to give her a wild smile. To catch her eyes. "They're all yours. Shamash and Ishtar—the boy and the girl. And—Aly—we were wrong about—Yseult was carrying a girl, carrying Ishtar, Shamash is the child of Verla," he said all this in a rasping gabble, breathless about this one fact as if it were something wonderful. But then that faded; he winced like he'd been stabbed in the gut, hastened to say, "He needs food, both need food, but he's—older, by a few days I think, I don't know."

Unwilling to explain further, trusting that she wouldn't wait to wring the story out of him before she acted.

[fairyfoes]

She let out a sound that couldn't determine if it wanted to be a laugh or a sob, relief so sharp it cut like pain mingled with some wild elation well beyond simple gladness. She tried to remember how to breathe, how to think, shut him up at Verla by leaning up for a hard kiss that tasted of her gratefulness. A needy clutch of teeth and tongue that lasted only long enough for them both to be startled by the tang of salt. Hadn't realised she'd started crying.

"And warmth, both, Brucolac—" no, no, don't voice your worst fears, he's too thin, tremoring, you can make him live you can do this thing don't you dare—, "Hurry with me, I've gotten what's needed, but you must open the doors."

She had no hands free.

[vrykolakas]

His gauntlets were cold where he cupped her face. When he realised she was crying he started as if spooked, leant back, felt his own throat close and swiftly turned all in one to charge ahead of her. Not quite trusting his voice, frowning and gritting his teeth, baffled and frustrated with himself.

He threw open doors before her, not needing her directions when—even with the helm tucked under his arm—he could feel every vibration of movement in the villa, every hushed word and creaking floorboard.

[fairyfoes]

Alyosha followed fast as a concerned lieutenant at his heels; but her attention was no longer on him. It was on the infants in her arms, breathing soft-voiced murmurs into the soft down of their hair. The nonsense one gave up to comfort despite their own panic, entirely witting that they had no way of comprehending. Ishtar's hand touched at her jaw, it made her stammer, heart-clenched while her thoughts crashed around her sudden, desperate possessiveness.

My son, my daughter, my son, my daughter, I won't fail you you, I swear it on my bones; Shamash, Shamash, you're safe now, you're safe, I'll keep you always safe—

It was half a minute and they burst into the sitting room with the waiting women chatting in soft, curious voices together before a lit hearth; one cried out in fear to be so interrupted, made to stand, wide-eyed at the sight of the Brucolac so fearsomely attired.

Alyosha rushed to hush them, stepping out from behind him, "No fear now! He'll do you no harm, is their father.. Please, please, these are my children, and I—" She was speaking too fast, gathered herself, swallowed around the knot in her throat, "My son, my son, he's far too frail, will need whatever you can give. More than I've paid you for; kept at the shoulder night and day, warmed, and—"

The quieter of the women, older, clearly no stranger to children, moved to hush Alyosha feelingly, reached gather Shamash tenderly from her, saying, "Dear bairn, white as a sheet... Hush, hush, milady, we'll do all what we can and then more, don't you fret. Won't be my first was sickly so, as you know."

"Shamash," Aly said, the one word strangely insistent; and at first she almost didn't let him go. Slowly, her arm relaxed. "His name's Shamash. And hers Ishtar."

october 5th. redgate, between rescue & alyosha's.

[vrykolakas]

People get out of the way as the Brucolac strides through the fortress. He hasn't the energy to care about the scene he's making; still clad in Reul's highly recogniseable black plate save for the helmet, with two swaddled, squalling infants tucked against his shoulder, bizarrely incongruous amidst the spikes and weird, too-organic planes of the armour. His hair was darkened and matted by blood.

He was heading for Saralegui's quarters, fully expecting to be intercepted. The Lord of Redgate was too well-organised not to have some system in place which would lead to him being alerted when an Unseelie baron in demonic armour crashed into the fortress with the beginnings of a small clan of wailing bastards in tow.

[enthraller]

He was indeed intercepted, by a brave pair of guards who decided to together stand in the path of this bloody armored mess of a shardbearer. It was only making that stand that marked them as "brave", however -- both looked highly uncertain, and one might have been trembling just slightly.

"Y-your business here, shardbearer?" The first manages after a moment, making an effort to sound far more in control and authoritative than he clearly felt, and his partner grimaced at his brief stammer.

[vrykolakas]

Rip their heads off and carry on walking, a slightly hysterical part of his mind advised. It was quickly shut down.

"Get me his lordship," he said, his voice sounding far away in his own ears, but not without authority. Mechanical, calm. The children were far too light in his arms. He could feel Shamash trembling. "In fact, you," nodding to the guard who had stammered his inquiry, "take me to him, now. And you," indicating the other, "fetch a doctor. I trust nothing about this situation looks like anything that can wait."

[enthraller]

The pair share a glance, silently debating for a moment whether they should obey or not, but one more glance at the spiked armor and scrawny children makes the decision for them. The latter of the two shoots his friend an apologetic look and scampers off, presumably to find a doctor, and the other stares after him. with an air of defeat.

After a moment, wherein he seems to be wistfully pretending he wasn't suddenly responsible for this mess, the poor guard looks back to the Brucolac and gestures meekly for him to follow him down the corridor.

They reach a door flanked by soldiers after a few tense minutes of walking, and an awkward silent moment ensues with the new pair staring at the vampire with obvious confusion and discomfort while the Brucolac's guide struggles for some explanation.

[vrykolakas]

"The Brucolac," he snaps to them, "Baron of Srathmarbh, your lord knows me and I will see him." His tongue lashes, antagonised and prickling with nerves. Against his shoulder, Ishtar starts to whine, and he tucks her closer with a pained grimace. "Consider it an exceptional circumstance."

He doesn't even know why he's seeking out Saralegui; what he needs most urgently is the doctor he sent the other guard to find, but someone he knows—he needs to see someone, anyone he knows, to reassure himself he's back in the world above ground, that this isn't some hellish feverdream concocted by the underworld spirits who had been trying to suck the life from his children.

[enthraller]

The Brucolac's guide shoots the other guards an apologetic look, and after an uncomfortable moment one of them turns to knock on the door.

A long, tense few moments in which no answer comes, and the guard who'd knocked exhales a sighing breath and opens the door slightly, stepping neatly inside and closing the door after him.

It's another uncomfortable few minutes with the remaining two soldiers silently trading looks and shuffling their feet before the door opens again. The guard who'd entered steps back out looking rather sheepish, and Saralegui himself takes his place in the doorway. Bleary-eyed and dressed in his nightclothes, it's clear he'd been sleeping, and that he's the type who's slow to wake up.

"Brucolac...?" The sorta-greeting is half mumbled, and the young lord steadies himself against the doorframe, looking like he could theoretically fall right back asleep standing there. For once, his glasses are nowhere to be found, and his golden eyes blink repeatedly as if trying to force them to stay open. His brow furrows, and it takes another moment before he seems to properly register the scene before him. "...What on earth are you wearing?"

[vrykolakas]

The Brucolac growls at the inconvenience of waiting, hushes Ishtar, tries to stop Shamash trembling.

When he sees Saralegui, it's with a rush of relief so strong his knees almost buckle. Almost. He disguises it with a brisk step forward, walking straight by the young lord and into the room beyond, and barking, "Reul's armour. It's a long godsdamn story. I need you to take Sha—the boy. Shamash. Here." He leans close enough that the baby can be plucked from the crook of his arm. "Saralegui, please. I haven't the bodyheat to warm him up, shitssake."

[enthraller]

Saralegui starts a little at the brusque intrusion, and the guards hovering outside look for a moment like they aren't sure if they should intervene. Luckily, their lord at least has the sense to wave them off distractedly and shut the door in their (admittedly relieved) faces.

Turning back to face the Brucolac and slightly more awake, he starts in with a "What are you--" before suddenly the vampire is leaning towards him with an offered baby.

That certainly wakes him the rest of the way.

"What?" he repeats, bewildered, and by the way his hands hover in front of him almost defensively, you'd think the Brucolac was trying to hand him a bomb.