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It was a day like any other in the small, self contained, city-state of Blushing. There wasn't a cloud in the sky, it was a balmy 310º Kelvin outside, while within the city, as always, it was 297.6º and the exactly 10,000 inhabitants were going about their routines, unaware of the changes about to sweep over their city and world.

Suddenly there was a shout over the speakers from the Southern gate! Over the salt flats which were all that remained of the "Sea of Calabasas" a group of people was approaching! Everyone rushed to the nearest Viewing Hall to see!

The men, (or women, it was impossible to tell which for now,) numbered ten, borne along on the backs of strange beasts, tall, gangly things larger than anything living the people of Blushing had ever seen. They were oddly dressed too: one of them even courted death by wearing Black! However, foolish or not, they were the answer to the people of Blushing's prayers!

For twenty five years no caravans, no lost outcasts, not even raiders that could be captured and pardoned, had come to Blushing. There had been no weddings for two years. No one COULD wed, all the men and women in the city who were unmatched were too closely related to one another. The Star Gods would smite the city with skyfire if they sanctioned such unions! Even before that things has grown dire. The number of children who had not been born with the blood taint in the past fifty years was too small to replace those who would die in the next fifty years... Many whispered that the "Years of Slow Death" had begun for Blushing, as it had for so many other cities before them.

But now: NOW perhaps they had hope!

A year ago, as the mysteries instructed, they had sent out four pairs of scouts, a brother and sister each, to try to reach another city and bring back newbloods. Perhaps Renault and Clara, who had gone South, had succeeded?! The people of Blushing would know soon!

At once preparation began for the welcoming ceremonies: The orgies and feasting would last a week when the strangers arrived. They would attempt to convince as many of them to stay as they could: but of course also to convince at least two of them to head back to their own home city with a caravan of "Blood Exchanges" and trade goods for the setting up of a trade route.

Blushing had never had a southern trade partner, and this was great news that they might soon! Everyone but the oldest dotards knew that though they had northern, eastern, and western trade partners once, they no longer did. If no one had come in twenty years and more, they were not coming at all. Trade Partners were more than just places to sell your cities' surplus and buy those things you lacked, they also were vital sources of news and information, but above all, of Newbloods: marriage partners for your young people when the bloodlines of your city grew thick with intermarriage. Human blood needed to be thinned periodically, or the Star Gods grew angry.

Everyone knew the story of how when the Son of the Sun and Daughter of the Moon, who were cousins, had married the Star Gods had grown angry. That was when they had burned the land and boiled away the seas. In those days there had been cities all over the world, but now only a few thousand survived, and century by century there were fewer and fewer.

However the people of Blushing mostly didn't know how grim the global situation was: nor that one of their trade partners had fallen to raiders out of the dessert who had left it dried out ruins, another had been locked up by plague, and now was a festering tomb, and the third... When the third caravan they sent didn't return, and they had no word from Blushing as to their status, Carleton, (their northern trade partner,) had enacted the Rite of Separation. They cut ties to Blushing, thinking it had fallen to raiders or plague like Blushing's other two partners. Unlike Blushing they had a full six trade partners, and were not especially concerned with losing a minor city like Blushing. In another fifty years time they would have sent a military strike force to investigate the ruins for possible reclamation, but that would have been far too late for the people of Blushing.

Now though was one of those moments when all history turns on the actions of a small group of people, and it is to them we turn next...

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