The Vampire’s Son

The Vigorous Confederacy was a vast human nation. It was ruled by the son of a vampire. This is the story of how that came to be.

The Vigorous Confederacy was ruled by a white-maned man clad in octopus and manta ray leather. He traveled with shark leather clad guards who carried iron whips. This ruler was Suril, Law-Giver of the Vigorous Confederacy.

The vast human nation did not call their ruler “King”, but “Law-Giver”. Human laws are strange to dwarves, but the humans take them very seriously. For example, dwarves abhor slavery, but when the humans defeated the Unwelcome Monsters — the demon-ruled nation of goblins that once threatened the northern continent — their laws allowed them to take slaves as prizes from among the conquered people.

The humans also have strange laws regarding succession. Ten years ago, a dwarf was made Law-Giver of the Vigorous Confederacy. This dwarf earned the title by being the best-qualified administrator in the whole of the nation. That he was a dwarf was not an issue. Many dwarves and goblins lived in the Confederacy. In most cases, these were former denizens of the Unwelcome Monsters — either by heritage or because they or some forebear had been kidnapped. Confederacy law does not discriminate by race, and so a dwarf ruled the nation for two years.

That reign ended when the dwarf disappeared from the capitol. During the search for a replacement, an unknown wanderer submitted his candidacy. This wanderer was so skilled at word craft, and had so such an impressive breadth of worldly knowledge that he was chosen as the next Law-Giver.

In truth, this wanderer was secretly a vampire, and had personally driven his predecessor into hiding. This vampire had been traveling from town to town for decades, feeding on humans until suspicion was aroused by his agelessness or the many deaths. Then he would flee, and assume a new identity. The maneuver to replace the Law-Giver was only the most recent of the seasoned deceiver’s schemes.

Under the harsh light of his new position, the vampire managed to keep the con going for almost a year. When his nature was discovered, he was hacked to pieces. Investigators compiled a list of 372 humans this cursed man had slain. Of those, thirteen men and eleven women had fallen to this vampire after his arrival in the capital city.

What happened next highlights the strangeness of human succession law. Adult descendants of the previous king are first to be considered as replacement. The investigation uncovered that the vampire had been cursed nearly eighty years prior, when he profaned the temple of the human god of chaos and nature. A few years before that, his son had been born.

This son, who was 81 years old when the investigators found him, was named Suril. He had been working as a beekeeper and poet, and had published a number of well-known poems. The investigators found him worthy, and the very same people who hacked Suril’s father to pieces laid the Law-Giver crown upon his head.

As for the dwarf who had lost the crown to the vampire, the next time he appeared in government records was a decade later. Law-Giver Suril, disgusted by the elves’ practice of devouring the bodies of sapient beings, ordered his military to attack the distant forests. The attacks went well for the Confederacy, but many Confederacy warriors died at the hands of the ageless elves, some of which had honed their martial skills for centuries. One of those listed in the rolls of the the dead was the dwarven once-ruler.

Law-Giver Suril, vampire’s son, rules the Vigorous Confederacy to this day.