Chapter 605: Interlude - Skye - Bend the Knee
[Princess] - no matter how much the Eventide Eclipse joked about making her a [Queen] - Skye had a raging headache.
Three heavily annotated proposals lay in front of her, and no matter how much she’d delayed, waited, and stalled, there was no fourth proposal forthcoming. No matter how much she talked to the walls or sent out messages, there were no fanged smiles surprising her in the night, no better offer made.
If there was a secret society of vampires surviving the Immortal War, they hadn’t seen fit to contact Orthus. The decision was Skye’s and Skye’s alone, but she was not without support. Varuna was here in her hour of need, and she stroked his jaw as she debated with herself.
The first proposal was from the New Remus Empire. It would make Orthus Town an official tributary, required to pay modest taxes. However, they didn’t get anything for those taxes. There was barely a promise of protection against the demons and other powers, but that was it. There would be no [Engineers] moving through to build a network of roads, connecting them to other tributaries. There would be no new libraries erected, no civil servants arriving to smooth the livelihoods of all the members. Just taxes demanded, to be poured into the elves’ hungry maw.
The term was relatively short. Only 64 years before it could be ‘renegotiated’, and Skye knew that meant an increase in taxes - assuming the New Remus Empire won the war against the demons.
What had her sweating - a near impossibility for a yuki-onna - was the penalty for failure to pay. They’d personally execute her, which would be a shame, and let Skye feel the sharp edge of the knife against her throat. More grimly, they’d octanate the population. One in eight members of Orthus Town - and, they were clear, the surrounding villages - would be chosen for execution. The remaining members of the family would be forced to beat them to death with their own hands.
Bad enough, but Skye hadn’t been trained just to look at offers as they were. There was a deeper level to it. Who determined how much was owed? How did they collect? It was easy to construct a system where failure wasn’t just possible, it was the only outcome. Easy to point to failure to pay taxes as an excuse, execute her, and install their own puppet leader.
It was only the elven curse which gave her a small modicum of relief. Who would want to rule this place, far away from all the other elves? Their plans were clear - repeat the process in every place in the world, for effective world domination - and it seemed unlikely that they’d want to off a good percentage of their population and leaders just to rule a questionable location.
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