Acronas is the elder of the two cities of the draconians and lies in the eastern mountains on the southern side of the Land of Shael. There is no road to the city and only by flight can anyone reach the city causing them to be isolationists. The matriarchal council that rules the city cares little for the events outside of their mountains. In a continuing failure to control the population their council actively removes males who are more aggressive and powerful. This has over centuries weakened their population overall reducing their size and failed to create more docile males.

Tomas

The first day that I follow the strange elf who brought me back from the dead was uneventful, he did not answer any of my questions and we have yet to run into anybody else on the road. I have taken the time to do some examination of my body.

I’ve lost some weight in whatever he did and I no longer need glasses to see though I can wear them and after a moment my vision will become clear again. My hands are however the only thing that give away that I’m no longer human. In the center of each palm is a slit that opens up when I press my palm against something. Within that slit are some fangs or maybe stingers that I have no idea what they do. There is also an ever so slowly growing discomfort within me even though I have felt no hunger as we walk.

The strange elf Damû walks up to the small wooden gate that surrounds a village on the side of the road. I don’t remember seeing it on the map Adrian found in one of those books and it is maybe a dozen small houses. Little more than a few small shops and an inn.

“Enjoy yourself” he says while tossing a bag of coins to me.

“What?”

“Willing subjects are easier to study. So long as you’re a good experiment I’ll give you some things you want and desire” he says before literally falling into a shadow.

I look around but none of the few people on the street have so much as batted an eyelash at his vanishing act. Was that magic? I think that was magic. He also said if I was a good experiment I’d get rewards. Dying sucked but maybe this is not so bad. . .

Still I walk into the inn to see three tables in the common room, one of which is currently occupied by an old man who smells like he sweats what he drinks. The bartender does not say anything but a young woman in a tunic that is cut a little low around her chest says, “take yer pick of table. I’ll get ta ye soon darling.”

I sit at the one nearest the stairs which have some odd symbols carved on their railing. Since I don’t know what they mean I ignore them.

“Just a meal or spending the night?” the waitress asks after trying to get the other man to pay for his drinks.

“Spending the night” I day while pulling out the pouch of coins Damû gave me. Glancing inside I can see at least a dozen gold coins.

“Looking for any extra services?” she asks while leaning lower than she needs to.

“What kinds?” I ask not sure what she is hinting at.

“The kinds you can’t let your mother know about” she whispers in my ear and I find myself nodding.

“I'll bring you a selection after dusk then. The soup will take a moment.”

I smile, I never would have gotten away with bringing a whore back to our quarters in that Althaen city. Abagail would probably run her off and I think Bryan might shame me.

Still I hope whoever it is is clean. Who knows what sort of funky diseases could show up in a magical world like this. Actually, magic could probably make sure that sort of stuff is cured before it can spread.

The soup somehow feels wrong to me. I can smell that it is lightly seasoned but the taste is bland. I can see the cheese sticking to the sides of the pieces of potato but I cannot taste it. I don’t feel full or satisfied with it as I drink the broth but I have to eat.

I stick to water for the short hour before dusk. I want to be able to remember this in the morning and somehow the water seemed more appetizing than the soup did. I must have been dehydrated.

Dusk falls and the waitress approaches me while I grin. “Your room has been prepared, follow me.”

And follow I do, I wonder if she is the company I’ll be paying for or if she pimps for some other girls. We go up the stairs and she opens the second door on the right before handing me the key.

I enter the room to see that there are three girls, each scantily dressed in a way that covers only their breasts and hips.

“Pick the girl you want. They’re all clean, fresh from the market.”

I don’t immediately catch the latter sentence, excited to enjoy myself and I point to the girl with the largest chest. The other two follow the waitress out while the girl I picked looks at me scared for some reason.

“Are you alright?” I ask.

“Y yes” she answers but I’m not sure the answer is truthful.

“You don’t have to. . .” I start before she interrupts.

“Yes, I do.”

She then begins to undress from what little clothing she is wearing as I begin to stare. The cloth that covered her breasts fall to the ground, giving me my first real look at that part of female anatomy outside of pictures from the web.

I reach out and touch them, the smooth softness under my fingertips as more and more of my hand is filled by the softness of the female flesh. I give a light squeeze, enjoying the soft firmness. That very instance the girl screams and a warm wetness fills my palm and the warmth travels up my arm.

I try to pull back in a panic, this isn’t how it is supposed to be, but my hand does not move from her chest. The girl’s skin goes pale and takes on a deathly pallor as some sort of warmth travels up my arm from her. Her screaming gets louder before she goes limp in my grasp and the strange feeling shooting up my arm ends. Only then does my hand separate from the girl and she falls to the ground.

I hear a knocking at the door and I quickly look between the door and the girl who is no longer breathing. No, no, no this can’t be happening. How can it be like this?

Damû Rámeri

I grin in my shadowed form as my newest experiment on creating immortal weapons stumbles upon the most significant change to his anatomy. The screams of the dying girl however seem to have alerted the other mortals and judging by the hyper ventilating and panicked look of my experiment he is not adjusting fast enough to his new race.

It seems that I will have to intervene if I want to get a significant amount of data from this experiment. I walk through the wall and into the hall before shifting my body back into the physical world. With a flick of my wrist and a burst of mana I corrupt the latent mana flowing through the blood of the waitress and the hidden bouncer that protects the slaves; taking control of the blood in their bodies and freezing them in place just as the waitress opens the door.

I manipulate the two as if they were puppets and have them follow behind me as I enter the room. My experiment appears to be trying to maintain the flow of blood in his accidental victim, not that it will do any good. Such crude methods cannot repair what has been done.

The two being puppeteered by their blood look forwards with eyes full of fear, their minds runing unhindered, while I have full control over their bodies. They begin to pull my experiment away from his meal so that I can examine the effectiveness of the feeding process.

The lack of clothing makes the initial examination easy, still I frown at how much lifeforce is still dissipating from the corpse as my eyes shift to look at the flow of positive and negative energy. The drain did not kill the girl but a mix between the toxins involved and physical trauma from creating the bridge to draw out her lifeforce.

Now that my examination is complete I turn to my experiment and bother to hear the words which he speaks.

“. . .ve her. I didn’t mean to. . .” and immediately regret doing so.

Perhaps I made a mistake in which of the Called I killed to raise and use as an experiment. There is too much morality in him but it is too early to be certain of that judgement. With another small burst of mana, I add my experiment to the list of people under my Blood Puppets spell, silencing him.

“The girl is dead and I will not change that. This is what you are now, a monster that must take life from others in order to sustain yourself. Surely you have been feeling the ache in your veins, a growing discomfort ever since I rose you from the grave. A pain that lessened as you took that girls life. Unfortunately, the process is still too crude and wasteful though the girl may have simply had too weak of a body.

You will try again on these other two” I say before releasing him from my spell.

“I don’t want to kill people” he answers as I loosen my hold over him.

“Then learn control, living creatures can heal and recover from you just as they could from a vampire’s bite. And don’t think of starving yourself, the hunger will drive you mad before it kills you. If you don’t eat your instincts will take over and you will gorge yourself on everything nearby.”

“I don’t . . .”

“You’re not human anymore, holding onto your humanity too much will only hold you back. You must balance who you are with what you now are.”

“What ca. . .”

“. . .can I know of becoming a monster? Because I am one. A monster who walked a path far worse than the one I am putting you through. I scratched and crawled my way back into the world of the living after being tortured and then eaten by demons. I burned in the flames of Ignaris, got extinguished in the depths of Aquarvas, torn asunder by the winds of Caelaris and crushed under the weight of the mountains of Terraniar. All this before I was destroyed again by paladins and holy men, only to rise from the fragments because they failed to purify all of my remains. Then I suffered for decades, subjecting myself to the lights of the higher planes that it could not happen again.

All you have to go through is drain the life of others, there are those that must eat their own kin to live. Those who live in soul wetching agony every second of their existence but still maintain their sense of self. I would prefer you to stay sane so I can just release you when I’m done but I won’t let you die until I’m done” I say with venom and a surge of mana through the blood in his brain. A crude substitute for the enchantments that have never made sense to me.

I then grab his hand and place it in the bouncer, if the failure of the feeding process was due to the weakness of the girl there should not be any issue with him and there are plenty of ways to strengthen the victim. . .

The man screams as I apply just the right pressure on my experiment's hand to start the process. I grin as I watch the flow of his life force turn into a flow towards the subject of my study. His body withering as he begins to rapidly age but he still dies of the trauma before all of him can be taken.

Refinement is needed, perhaps a less extensive bond? Or a feedback, returning some of the life in healing to reduce the trauma as the feeding progresses?