Blood Shaper

“You made an artifact and it got you up to a new tier five Class?” Eleniah watched Kay playing with the blood map artifact while she pouted a bit. “That’s so unfair. The rest of us have to work our butts off to get to high levels, and you’re already sitting at what, six tier five Classes?”

Kay looked up. “I’m only at four, thank you.”

Eleniah threw up her hands. “That’s still insane! I knew that being a Class Line Progenitor was a massive cheat but…” She shook her head despondently. “I’m hundreds of years older than you and I have two tier five Classes.”

“I thought we weren’t going to bring up the age difference because it makes you uncomfortable sometimes?” Kay responded calmly. He already knew that most of the dramatics were fake. “And didn’t you take a big break from one of your Classes while also not working on getting a new one? That’s not my fault.”

“I’ll bring up the age difference when it suits me! I’m getting over it!” She whirled to face him and stomped over. “And I’m your girlfriend, that means that it is your-“ She cut off her tirade with a giggle. “Nope! Can’t keep that going, it’s too ridiculous.”

Kay pulled the artifact back to him and let it collapse back into an orb. He gathered Eleniah in his arms and just held her.

“I’m proud of you. A little annoyed, because you were supposed to be taking a break and you started working on your Classes instead, but you’ve been doing amazing. Overall and in this one case of getting a totally overpowered Class.”

“Thank you.” He squeezed her tighter. “Are you my girlfriend?”

“What?” Eleniah pushed against his chest so she could look at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Is that the right word? We’re in a romantic relationship for sure, but are we girlfriend and boyfriend? That feels a little… I don’t know, childish?”

The annoyed expression on Eleniah’s face faded into a confused one as Kay talked. “What do you- Oh, wait, how is that word translating for you when say ‘girlfriend’?”

“I hear ‘girlfriend’, what do you mean? No, wait, you’re right the translation is probably grabbing the closest word again. ‘Girlfriend’ is a word for someone you’re dating, like, you’re in a romantic relationship but you’re not necessarily moving toward marriage. That’s specifically the term for a woman that you’re dating, the other side of it is ‘boyfriend’.” He let out a breath. “The culture where I’m come from has been shifting since I was a kid, but there’s still a lot of focus on marriage and being in a permanent relationship. Being girlfriend and boyfriend and using those labels, being in the ‘just dating’ stage of things, implies that you might not be together for the whole run. Again, that’s changing and there are people that don’t like marriage as an institution or have other reasons not to get married, so they’re together permanently and still call each other that as opposed to picking other terms, but in my head it’s still kind of what two teenagers or people in their twenties that don’t know what they’re doing would call each other.”

“Both of those are coming to me as the same word, which is ‘girlfriend’.”

Kay mostly heard ‘girlfriend’ but ‘boyfriend’ was layered in there too, with both of them in Eleniah’s voice. It was an odd experience and it made it harder to hear what she was actually saying under the translation effect. He tried a few more time with her help to hear it and then repeat it back to her. “Does that sound right?”

“Yeah, you’ve got it.” She smiled happily at him, “It makes me happy that you’re trying to learn to speak my language even if you have the translation effect.”

“Outside of making you happy it should also help cut down on errors like this one.”

“True. I can kind of see what you mean with the word we’re using. If you break it down it’s something like ‘dating-partners’? It does come with an implication of… Impermanence? If we were going to be together permanently or at least as long as we can last together then we’d use ‘life-partners’ if we didn’t marry, if we were courting and planned to wed that’d be another thing, and then there’s marriage.” She leaned back against his chest. “What does marriage mean to you? Because it sounded like that was the crux of what you were getting to.”

“Yeah, I’d say it is. It’s important to me, probably because of how I was raised and what I saw growing up, but being married is a…” He struggled to find the right words to convey what he was getting at. “It’s a formalization of a promise. Back on Earth, especially back in the States, things were all starting to blend together culturally and people were changing how they thought about things or what they chose to do, but I guess I’m still a little old fashioned when it comes to this. Getting married is supposed to be willingly tying yourself to someone else. It’s a promise to each other that you’re together and will work together to stay that way and also a declaration to the rest of the world that you’ve done so.”

Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

“Hmmm. That sounds nice.”

“What does it mean to you?” Kay asked her. “It’s probably a lot different here in all kinds of ways, but what does it mean to you?”

Eleniah’s chuckles vibrated against his chest. “There are a lot of differences thanks to different cultures and there being so many more species of people here compared to your Earth, but there are institutions and ceremonies and such that are similar in a lot of places. In the Isles it’s pretty similar, although there’s less of a focus on monogamy than some cultures here on the continents or like you talked about.”

Kay let out a sigh. “That’s fine for some people and I get why a lot of people are going to push me to take multiple spouses, but that isn’t going to work for me. Besides just being generally not attracted to the idea, it sounds like a lot of work. Dealing with you is hard enough, imagining having to divide my attention between others?” He shuddered. “That sounds like a nightmare.”

Eleniah looked up at him with narrowed eyes. A moment later pinching fingers by his ribs had him jumping away from her.

“I didn’t mean it as a dig at you!” Kay insisted, backing slowly away from her raised fingers. “I meant that while I love you and want you to be with me, we’re not the same person and sometime compromise is difficult!”

Eleniah stopped in place and gasped dramatically, “You… you love me?”

“Will you stop? That isn’t the first time I’ve said that to you.”

She grinned and walked back over to him and wrapped him in a hug again. “So, marriage isn’t as formal in the Isles. A lot of people just decide that they’re together like that and then they are, no ceremony or legal anything to it. Some people do small parties or something, but it’s only when you get into forming alliances and tying powerful interest together that you get the formalities mixed in. Growing up I didn’t really expect anything big or fancy, just to fall in love with someone and decide that we belonged together. Then Alahna decided to conquer the archipelago and become queen.” Eleniah rolled her eyes. “That changed things a little, although I never felt like my choices got limited or I’d end up marrying someone for political gain, thank goodness. It just meant I’d have to be fancy about it when I did meet my person. I’m not really interested in polygamy either, I’m a one person at a time woman.”

They stood there quietly for a time before Eleniah eventually looked up at him. “Do you want to get married? To me, specifically, not just in general.”

“… Yeah, I do. We’ve only been romantic for a few months, but we’ve been basically joined at the hip for years now and I think you’re the person for me.”

“I feel the same way.”

“So in the Isles we’d be married now?”

“Basically, yeah.”

“I like that.”

A few hours later, after sending the guards out of the room and spending some quality time together affirming their choices, Kay and Eleniah stared at the artifact again as it slowly drew out the shape of the entire city of Avalon once again.

“What are you going to name it?” Eleniah asked.

“I’m not sure. All the names I can think of are… kind of lame, honestly. ‘Blood Map’ is ridiculously simple and also not really true, calling it ‘something of Avalon’ or ‘Avalon’s something’ seems worthless when I don’t know what the ‘something’ would be and ‘Kay’s whatever’ or the ‘thing of Kay’ are too self aggrandizing and sound kind of dumb.”

Eleniah kicked the blankets off of her and rolled over to press her side against Kay’s. “You can’t leave it as ‘Unnamed Enchanted Artifact’ though, that will kill your prestige.”

“I know, I know. Should I just ram some syllables together and make it sound like a name? The Carnestophul!” He proclaimed grandly, holding the orb up before them.

“No.”

“Yeah, I didn’t think so. I wish I knew more languages besides English right now,” He grumbled. “A bunch of cool names for things come from Latin or ancient Greek or other languages I don’t know. They all take bits and pieces from each other that mean something related to what the thing being named is and then it’s a word. Even the names of famous things from legends or history are usually just descriptors that sound cool because they’re in a language you don’t know. You remember the King Arthur myths I told you about that my sister loved? The ones that I named Avalon after and why my nickname is Kay?”

Eleniah placed a gentle kiss on his shoulder. “I remember. I would have loved to meet your family.”

Kay smiled. “Thanks. We’ll have to time it better next time we go to the Isles so we can meet your parents. Or we can have them come here. Either way, King Arthur had a dagger named Carnwennan, which sounds really cool, right? My friend who’s getting a…” He trailed off. “Well, Noah was getting a degree in folklore and mythology and I hope he still is. But he wouldn’t let me just enjoy the stories and the names and had to ruin it by telling me that Carnwennan literally means ‘little white hilt’, because the dagger had a white hilt.” He tossed the expanding map up, using Blood Manipulation to have it hover in the air for a moment and then let it float back to his palm. “I don’t know any Welsh though, so that doesn’t help.”

“You could just go with random sounds mashed together then.”

“I thought you said no to that?”

“No, I said no to calling it The Carnestophul, that sounds ridiculous.”

“Too bad that there’s no easy description of what it does, then we could just call it that.” With a though Kay collapsed the artifact back into the small sphere that it was whenever it wasn’t being a map and set it on a small table next to the bed. “Oh well. I have time to think of a name. As long as no one knows about it there won’t be enough people thinking of it by a name for it to get automatically named. I can hold on to it until after we deal with all the vampyr and name it then. Maybe something will come to me at that point.”

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!