AN: Worldbuilding, and expanding backstory chapter on the whole Elemental Siblings and Undercurrent in canon

Side Story: Vampire Mercenary

His life started when he was tracking a boar in the forest. He remembered he carried his spears on his back, armed with a bow and a handful of arrows in his family quiver. But instead of a meal that would last a good month if preserved and rationed well, he found a pale bloody boy in the evening light, standing near a dead boar torn open like some animal had fought it.

Brimir blessed this child, he had thought. Because that boy should be dead and must be seriously wounded beneath all that blood. He at once took the child in and brought him back to his village. The clothes he wore was barely enough, and he had asked the boy what village he had come from and why he was there, alone, in a forest.

The child didn't answer but just stared emptily. He was astounded to learn not a single wound was found beneath all that blood.

The villagers started to buzz at that, suspicious and superstitious.

He ignored the warnings, he and his wife took the boy in. As a boy, he was hardly rumbustious as his daughters and didn't eat much. He must have been sick or something. Despite that, the boy tried to play. Tried, but he would stop and hang his head before sitting down, quickly exhausted beneath the summer sun.

Summer festival came shortly, in the night he was more alive, and he managed to smile but only briefly. But the village elders talked about sending him away to an orphanage, or a town close by where a healer would surely find the reason why he was sick. That had changed everything.

Drunk by the festivity, even the village watchers were caught in the merriment. The night ended with everyone dead asleep.

He woke up to silence, his wife still heavily asleep beside him. As usual, he got up early and into dawn's light to wash his face with a bucket of freshly drawn out water. Daylight unusually bright to his eyes but he paid no heed, only curious of why he didn't see his usual neighbors not up and about, or why he couldn't hear Daniel's annoying whistling or the clatter of Maude's beating her straw rug. Perhaps everyone was still too hangover from last night.

His family was still asleep, and he had taken upon it to set up breakfast for them. Once done his chores, he left the village to hunt.

Hangover persisted throughout the day, a headache that kept pounding and grew worse enough for him to sit down in the tree's shade. Perhaps he should go back early instead, and he did, sighing in relief in seeing his neighbors up and about from the distant. The early morning's silence and eeriness forgotten. Everyone looked haggard though and went about their business slowly.

He called his neighbor and they barely responded, only jerking their head up and nodded before they went back to their work woodenly. He had frowned, the sinking feeling in his stomach worsening. Something was wrong, his instinct screamed.

He hurried home, finding his wife tending the flames and his two daughters politely sitting at their table, twiddling their dining utensil. They were all quiet at his arrival, not greeting like usual. He made a joke there was a funeral happening. His wife said nothing, and only stared at him emptily. He asked what was wrong, her lack of response making his heart beat rapidly. She felt cold when he touched her.

Cold as a corpse. He immediately went to his two daughters, hands on their head, touching their neck. No pulse.

He ran out into the village, grabbing his neighbor and checking them, finding the same for each as he shouted and shook them, begging them to respond.

They were like dolls, dolls being puppet by another. This was like a nightmare, a sick twisted joke made into a nightmare, the whole village dead but pretending to be alive, and he knew the reason why they were like this. He passed out beneath the sun in the moment of this revelation, recalling his last moment being dragged back into a building.

He woke up to a sad little boy saying he was sorry, he thought everything would go back to normal and that he wouldn't notice the difference. All because he didn't want to leave the village. He said he never had a father before and found him nice enough and made him his.

He had laughed, because he knew and realized why now, why he wasn't like his wife and children, why he wasn't turned into mindless ghouls. Here he was, thirsty and sick, and no longer human, all because this boy wanted him as his family.

How could something so innocent be so monstrous? He refused to move from where he laid, hoping sleep would wake him up from this nightmare.

He ended waking up to fire and the roof of his home crashing down on him. The King's Knights were here to cleanse the unholy stain from this land. Or so he thought, it ended up being two triangle fire mages incinerating everything: the house, the animals - its habitants putting up a fight, rushing towards them even in flame. Vampire or not, he still felt the pain of fire and without looking back, he ran.

He ran what seemed forever.

Except he couldn't go doing it forever. The thirst drying his mouth and the headache pounding in his head harder to ignore, a constant ringing in his ears growing louder as his breathing grew heavy. Like a vulture swooping, a different pair of mage caught him, they stuffed liquid into his mouth that made his inside burn and rip apart, then he was thrown into a cage with another.

He didn't know how long he had been imprisoned, all he remembered drowsily how warm the summer sun was and the nights being too cold. Once in a while, someone would grab his head and shoved more liquid into his mouth.

It was night, the crickets chirping and the constant swaying and shaking of the cages stopped. They were put down roughly. A fire was lit and the air alive by the sweeping of wings. A lantern rattled and there was a loud clang, someone stood over his cage.

"This," the man began, his accent strange but familiar, commonly spoken by upper nobles. "Is no monster." He pursed, disappointed.

"But her wings," one of his captor began. "She's one of the winged ones."

"Yes, I know. Fascinating beings, but hardly a beast or a monster," the mage corrected. "Unless she's some kind of hybrid, then our deal is off." He then oddly stopped and muttered, "Vampire hybrid…" A notebook was brought out and he quickly scribbled something down.

Distantly, he was aware another being sat in the same cage as him, who was oddly quiet and said nothing at the exchange.

"Don't look at me like that," the mage said sourly at her. "Didn't your tribe told you not to fly so far away from the nest."

She said nothing.

"Nope, nope. You're not going to fool poor Jacob here," the mage continued adamantly. "You're not going to make me waste my coin."

Still more silence and then a tiny whimper broke.

"Oh for the love of gods," Jacob swore. "Fine! Fine, I will buy her. Get her out of that cage already!"

The banging of metals and the rattling of cages being unlocked, the warm presence that has been accompanying him was lifted up and put down outside.

"Now run along, shoo! Fly. Leave this place," Jacob said somewhere off. "But if I find out you are helping these men conning me, there will be trouble I tell you! Trouble!" He then muttered sourly before returning to his cage. "You better fulfill your promise to me."

"Of course, your excellent. This is the vampire that you wanted."

"This? This is no ten-year-old boy!" The voice reached a higher pitch when he shrieked. "I explicitly told you to catch-"

"Wait, wait… let us show you."

A hand snatched his arm and roughly pulled him against the cage, he banged his face against the metal and he slightly groaned.

"I find it appalling you left potential food for a vampire in the same cage as it," Jacob commented drily.

"We sedated him with the potions you've provided."

Something sharp cut him and slid down across his arm. He hissed when the blade cut deep, his arm trembling in the rough firm grip.

"See, cut heal nice and quickly," the smug voice went on.

"I can see that," Jacob stated with slight annoyance. "Give me the knife."

"Ow!"

"Oh, don't be a wuss. It's just a cut," Jacob snorted. "Before you ask, yes, I cleaned it. Like I would contaminate you with a vampire blood."

Someone grabbed his nose and peeled his mouth open enough to bare his teeth. A cold blade brushed his tongue, a brief taste of sweetness and he swallowed, exhaling.

"And there we go. Look at that, fangs," Jacob said. "Retracting back nicely into the gums, fascinating."

A brief moment of silence fell, someone tapped their foot repeatedly on the ground.

"On one hand, he's not what I asked for. On the other hand…" He pursed loudly.

His throat was parched as paper when he spoke in whisper, "Help me… Please."

"Jacob, step aside." Another voice cut in.

"My lord?"

Footsteps approached the cage, the lantern light bright and glaring when it was brought closer to his face.

"What's your name?" the man asked.

He inhaled deeply, sucking what little moisture in his mouth. "Dead people have no names."

A cold laugh swept out from the man's mouth. "How old are you?"

"Thirty… three."

"I meant how long have you been a vampire."

Since the summer festival. He was sure, that was the last moment of his time as a human. "Solstice," he whispered at the glaring ball of light that stared back through the cage.

"A newly made vampire?" Jacob said, barely containing his excitement. "Do you know what this means!" He hissed.

"Tell me, mister vampire. Would you be interested working for the Crown?"

If he had his mind, he would have surely asked if it was a sick joke or something.

"I'll make you a deal. I'll feed you, I'll make my men teach you how to fight, I'll get Jacob to show you what you're capable of and give what you need to make your job easy. In return, bring me ten of your kind alive."

"Ten!" Jacob hissed either from excitement or from pure incredulity.

"Your Highness, he's a monster – he will only betray you." Another voice cut in.

"We'll see," The man said, amused. "Bring me the dagger."

"What?"

"You heard me, bring me Undercurrent."

Footsteps marched in, there was a sound of a box opening. A chanting of spell in a murmuring voice, something cool and narrow slid into his hand, his fingers immediately wrapped around it and his hand moved it closer to his chest.

"Pay the mages, Jacob. And get him ready."

"At once, my lord."

It was surreal to be one of the King's knights. To don clothes, armor and weapon that would cost more that he and his family ever owned. It was something boys played and pretended as, pointing sticks and saying gibberish words in place of proper spells, running around and yelling for the Glory of the Crown. A commoners' pipe dream. It was something, he realized, the mages looked and laughed under their breath. And yet, he was in their world, but not amongst them. He was not their peer.

He was a hick of a farmer, a pathetic example of a feared monster. Something to laugh, something to sneer, but the curl on lips faltered when he brought his first vampire without any legs attached to them. The second without their eyes. The third almost half-dead. By then, no one said a word to him, the distance between him and them still unattainable.

It was something between his wildest nightmare and a wondrous dream. He was fast, he was strong, he could smell more, hear more, see more. The world that he once knew that was no friend to mankind was alive, whispering and murmuring words that he never heard nor knew yet he could understand.

And he could speak back! He could sing the words for water to jump, childish lullabies he had learned and hummed under his breaths became spells. The wind runs with him, the trees rustle of stories, even fire doesn't hurt him if he asked it to. It was amazing and so easy to kill with - just by asking, and the world would snuff out a life without a blink. Yet on a whim, it would sometime ignore him, sometimes it would do the opposite of what he had asked, sometimes it would do something else.

It was no friend. It listened, but it listened to everyone and for that, it could easily turn around and kill him instead. It was a wondrous, uncaring, cruel world. Was this why the Firstborn were so feared, they could ask the world to do as they please while mages tire as they try to wield the world.

He has yet to pay his debt to the Crown at the time, but three was enough for him to be accepted as one of the King's knight.

"You'll be called Number One from now on," an old knight spoke.

"Why number one?" he asked softly.

"Because I'm number one and every host that I inhabit share the number!" The dagger hummed cheerfully.

"You'll be the fifth number one…" The knight droll.

"What happened to all previous number ones?" he asked.

"Dead," the knight said in a clipped manner.

"Dots and Lines all of them, and I worked so hard to make them reach past Triangle…" The dagger lamented loudly from his side. "But I've never had a newly minted vampire body before. So this is a new experience for me as well! With your willing body and my brain, well… my mind, we'll make for a good pair of vampire hunters," it said, excited at the prospect. "Never have tried myself out with those creatures in a body like theirs."

"Take comfort you have a partner that can make the most common of mages the deadliest," the knight said with a sniff.

He learned much later that if he had failed or run away, the dagger that he had not once thought of letting go would have killed him with his blood and bones harvested for research. Blood and bones…

It wasn't just researching a way for poisons and alchemical weapons that could paralyze men, or be used to destroy a mage's source of power, and devastate the local pest populations. They were also experimenting on common seeds that could withstand drought, pest, and grant more bountiful harvest. Even diseases did not stop these unholy men of science, from the mild to the most lethal that even he, a creature immune to mortal ailments was forbidden to enter some of their rooms.

Agriculture, hybridization, even chimeric experiment.

"A brain of a horse inside a fire dragon's body…" He was perplexed.

"It was eating hays and liked oats a few weeks ago," said Jacob, an elderly researcher who was taking notes of its current habits.

Namely eating meat with a bloody mess.

"What happened?"

"The body of the dragon changed it," Jacob muttered absentmindedly. "Does blood make monster a monster? That's like the entirely opposite of us, why doesn't our blood contain powerful properties while these native monsters do?" he asked.

"It must have been transformed, something had happened to its brain," he muttered, and with motion at the knights watching the creature feasting, multiples spells both water and wind were aimed at its neck.

The head was decapitated cleanly without it so much screeching. He winced.

"Crushed powdered bones of these creatures make for great alchemical ingredients," Jacob noted as assistants came to harvest the body of the dragon. "Bones are magical, organs or at least the oil secreted from its innards contains powerful properties."

The researcher then hummed. "Do these monsters blood contains poison that could transform the mind? Is there a way to cleanse such property? Or even extract it?" he mumbled absentmindedly. "Bones and blood… why the brain, why not transfer the bones into the body, would it affect the body? Yes, yes…" he trailed off listlessly, writing down in his notebook.

Take a human brain out of its own body and put into a monster's, and it would turn into a monster. While a monster would become just as smart as man but remained a monster.

Jacob described this process similar to a foul spirit of a disease but one that didn't kill its host, but change it. A symbiotic parasite. No different to drugs and potions that could influence and transform the mind, and a vampire's body was full of this. This was what separated them from the men and elves, what made them closer to monsters. So far, he has yet to extract this alchemical agent into a pure form.

All the vampiric blood was used up to make failures, instable bloodthirsty hybrids and purely mad beings with their lives cut short. They were more like the rare ghoul than pure vampires, but instead of being dead corpse animated by Water magic much like the ghouls, they were alive. Apparently, making ghoul was not an easy process, the vampires he caught could only make one at a time out of its recent victims.

But his whole village had turned into these ghouls. How was that possible then? Mass necromancy or multiple thralls was not an easy feat to come by, not even with Firstborn magic.

There was another off-putting thought, contrary to popular myths and tales, vampires were born than made. Jacob, though, didn't cross out the legends from the picture entirely. Theoretically, there was an ancient technique of Firstborn Magic out there that could take advantage of the transforming effects of the vampire's essence, and amplify the changes to make full-blooded vampires from another.

It seemed so out of there, but considering the living chimeras and Jacob trying to find a way to make vampire hybrids out of a similar process, what was stopping the long-living race of vampires from doing the same with their own branch of water magic? Even worst, they probably have discovered this process and passed it down the generations. It was a comforting thought to know such knowledge and history was lost in the Great Purge of their kind.

But what about the boy then, his progenitor? Even to this day, he was still at large and uncaught.

Jacob held no interest, he had just begun his experiments of switching the bones of a living human with that of a vampire, artificial implants. Vampires body were after all no different to humans in a structural sense.

"I just need to find the right match!" Jacob had said cheerfully.

More hunting of screaming and spitting vampires that curse after him with criminals living and dying for the pursuit of knowledge. The new variation of the hybrids not faring better, but they were less vampire and more… human. Sunlight didn't bother them, and they had no need for bodily fluid. They were faster and stronger though, but they were still a failure. Jacob wanted magic, and no commoner made a show they could sense the spirits or use magic.

Failure in society, failure in science, and that meant only one thing. Some had tried to escape, taking advantage of their newfound power, but he would be there to cut them down before they could.

The slow realization he indirectly made more demons and his own kind with those failed hybrids had splash what little anger left in him. How was he different to that boy who thought by turning the whole village would make him happy?

This was the price of a cure. If there was a cure. Jacob was honest enough to admit that there were no techniques or alchemical potions that exist to do just that: take the vampire out of a man. But the mad mage wasn't dissuaded as he found reversing the transformation or at least curing the symptoms such as the need for human fluid and weakness to sunlight a challenge worth pursuing. The closest thing a vampire could become a man again.

But he didn't have the patience to wait for that long, by then a decade and more of working in the shadows of Gallia and more memories of dead men and women staring behind those cells, fated to become monsters, failures, or outright dead on the table - he started to think it was better to die than live with this.

"I want to resign, Your Majesty," he finally asked the prince now king who stood watching his knights dragging the troll.

"Has Jacob filled you with ideas that you could live off a brothel?" The king mused.

A crude joke that startled him. He knew he didn't need to live with blood as he had learned when Jacob grilled one of the caught vampires.

"Define bodily fluid, does that include any kind of excretion, like urine?"

He remembered the splutter and the hollering of insults. Jacob assumed yes at that and it was only a matter of taste of why vampire chose blood. Blood… blood was sweeter than any wine, it was ambrosia, it was a taste that haunted one's tongue. It wasn't something he could forget. He also remembered it was his first smile he had made since he turned.

"Or are you getting married?" The king cut his thought again with another crude joke.

"N-no…"

Cold blue eyes gazed at him. "You're tired of taking lives."

I'm tired of living. He didn't want this anymore and he wasn't sure he could stand living and working like this for years to come.

"Perhaps a change in the air is what you need," his employer said. "All the gold I've given you have not been spent one bit."

What did a vampire need from carrying gold? What could he spent on besides his armor and sharpen his blades? The only thing he ever did with the gold was dumped them in random villages or at church. He had yet to spend it in a brothel… something the sentient dagger, Undercurrent had laughed at.

He slightly shuddered at the thought of the blade experiencing through the motion. Knowing how old it was and how many bodies it had possessed, accumulated knowledge and experiences from them, he was sure Undercurrent had seen it all.

"Taking lives is easy, but protecting it is not," the king told him. "I want you to watch my eldest son. Any spies, any assassins, anything that struck out for you, I want you to bring them in and report to me. You have my permission to kill if necessary."

"Well, I'm not going to be stuck with babysitting duty. Find me another host if you're going to give him this job," his mouth cut in without tact. "I will only accept a triangle mage no less."

"I thought you wouldn't be willing to let go of this host, Undercurrent." The king smiled.

"Willing host are rare, but I never like being so reliant on one body anyway," The living dagger scoffed, his hand had unconsciously tightened around its hilt. Skin contact with its metal was something Undercurrent liked, and something his body had made into a habit.

It was oddly disturbing and yet comforting in a way.

"You trust me with the heir of Gallia?" he asked the king.

"Do you hate your life enough that you're willing to ruin the land that which you stand upon?" The king looked at him with a thin smile still on his face.

"No."

"Why do you serve me?"

"Because you are my king."

"And would you serve another that would replace me if he too was king?"

He hesitated at that.

"Shall I tell you a tale of the first Markey vampire?"

When the Markey came, the natives of the land invited them to a feast in celebration of a new future. They were beautiful and enchanting, and unlike the elves, they welcome the tribes with open arms, but they were deceitful with their hearts blacker than the night. For the feast was instead the blood of Markey that they drank like wine. They left but one who they had cursed and given back like a lamb.

Merciful Brimir took her in and wrote life onto her heart in honor of our two ancestors that the gods had hidden from Ragnarok. The gods took his offering and punished the wicked blood-lusting demons and cleanse their kind forevermore, blessing Brimir a land without scourge…

Joseph blinked rapidly but his eyes gradually glazed over the rest of the words. Really unhelpful, he thought as sleep slowly clenched its claw deep into him. The book of folklores slowly dipped down with each breath he took and finally rested on his chest, his fingers loosening from its hard leather cover as his blue eyes drifted shut.

He fell asleep as he laid in his large bed, the reading lamplight lit brightly on his bedside.

A gauntlet made of dark metal reached out from the shadow, but hesitated a hair-breadth away from the prince. It retracted back into the darkness and a pale hand instead reached out in its place. It gently took the book away from the Crown Prince and placed it on the bedside table, then with a click, the light was switched shut.