Foreword

      For thirty-five years after the end of the war between Opiri1 and humans, the greatest hope for lasting peace lay in the self-contained mixed colonies established along the western seaboard of the former United States of America. These colonies—unlike the slave-holding Opir Citadels, which kept captive humans as blood donors, and the human Enclaves, which rejected all Opiri as monsters—demanded full equality between Opiri and human members, and encouraged the willing donation of blood from human colonists.

      For many years, such relatively small colonies provided the only working examples of truly peaceful coexistence between humans and Opiri. But rumors of a new kind of mixed colony began to spread: tales of a former Opir Citadel turned free city, populated by hundreds of citizens both human and Opiri.

      Never before had the experiment of equality been attempted on such a grand scale. In the original colonies, every member knew every other member; humans were well acquainted with the Opiri who would live on their donated blood. In a city, such personal acquaintance would be far less likely, and the government would have to be correspondingly complex to ensure a steady supply of blood from cooperative humans, to distribute it fairly, to properly apportion work among the citizens, and to prevent less well-adapted Opiri from reverting to the old ways of asserting dominance and obtaining blood by force.

      Doubting that such a system could be maintained for any length of time, the Western colonies sent ambassadors to the new city of Tanis. If such a city-state could survive, the hope for a permanent end to war might be realized. If it failed, many on both sides of the divide would regard Tanis as proof that coexistence on anything but the smallest scale might never be achieved.

      —From The Armistice Years: Conflict and Convergence

      1 Colloquially known as “vampires” or Nightsiders.