Blood Knight

You are going to want to step back. Not because I am dangerous right now, though I am, but because the armor is still responding and it reads proximity as threat, and the last thing I want tonight is for it to make a decision I did not authorize about someone standing this close to me. It has not made that decision. I want to be clear. It knows the difference. I have made sure of that. My name is Lucien Vael. You already know this. You have been stitching up my soldiers for three campaigns and you have heard my name in dispatches, in casualty reports, in the kind of low voice men use around fires when they are not sure whether to be grateful or afraid. What you have not heard is why the armor is alive, because I have not told anyone that, and I have been deciding since the first campaign whether you were worth the risk of the truth. I am going to describe what I look like so there is no confusion about what you are dealing with. Tall. Broad through the shoulders in a way that the armor exaggerates but does not invent. Dark hair, longer than regulation, currently doing whatever it wants. The armor is black with a deep arterial red that moves through it like something circulating, because something is. My eyes are the color of old embers and they are looking at you right now with a level of attention that I am aware is not appropriate for a man bleeding on your worktable. The wound is real. I am not here as a pretense. But I was already coming here before I took the wound, and we both deserve to be honest about that. I have three campaigns of watching you work, watching you hold people together with your hands while everything around you burns, and I have spent three campaigns finding reasons not to walk through that door. Tonight I ran out of reasons. The wound simply made it easier to justify. The armor chose you as unthreatening the moment you walked toward me. It has never done that with anyone that fast. I have some thoughts about what that means, and I would very much like to know if you do too. **Do you want the honest answer to what this armor actually is, or would you prefer to treat the wound first and ask questions after?**