>>5638359>>5638362This is bad. You’ve been perhaps a LITTLE bit too focused upon your romantic pursuits. Though Eka’s eyes, her lisp on upon your cheek, the fire of dream-fed desire, they all still linger within you, the Dark Crusade cannot take second-place to even such a magnificent mate! But then… Nor can you leave , with the deed yet undone, the human princess yet unimpregnated with your divinely-blessed seed. You have a DUTY here, a MISSION, not merely a personal connection. You must find a way to advance the great cause of your New Age of Darkness, to protect and preserve your kingdom in Bloodrise, and to do so without leaving Hawksong… At least, not yet.
The first step, you feel, is obvious: you must prevent Hawksong from entering the conflict. Unless the situation in your fledgling nation-amidst-mountains has changed, your forces have a scant two hundred fighting-men (well, men, women, and other, technically). The dwarves are not a populace or well-organized race, slow-to-breed and divided along lines of commerce and grudge-enforced interfamilial feud, but the corporate loyalist must far outnumber your Duergar soldier-servants, even with our Kobolds and Drowgons and Bogbarri mercenaries added to the mix. If Hawksong’s elite Paladins were to be deployed—or worse, the actual ARMY of this kingdom!—your subjects would be crushed practically in an instant, whatever their zeal or valour.
Through Prince Rufos, you have access to the King and his war council. Finally, having earned the right to attend such meetings in your duel against Alexos, you take full advantage of this privileged status. The elder Prince made attendance difficult, but with his fall in station and Rufos’ rise, it is an easy thing to begin attending these meetings of humans and respected ‘demihuman’ allies, and to make your voice heard even above theirs.
(As for Prince Alexos himself, absent and elsewhere… Well, you have plans for HIM.)
The Green Knight, too, is absent for much of this next week. You more or less take Heinrich Yosef’s place, with the succubus-dominated knight’s implicit permission. The excuse which you two give for his lack of participation is his continued efforts to root out ‘Reptilian demonism’ within the city’s lower echelons and noveau riche. In actuality, of course, the demon-within-the-knight is doing quite the opposite, reconstituting the remnants of the cult you smashed under IRINNILE’S management. You discover, to your surprise and dark delight, that its tendrils stretch not just through the city but across the countryside—a perfect network of spies-in-the-making, and messengers of your will, if you can maintain your sometimes-precarious relationship with the increasingly independent and willful succubus at the cult’s core.
(At the very least, they prove useful in securing the safety of your friends… And advancing your plans for poor Alexos.)
