The Terms of Surrendering
Most sentient beings, even including some who have not yet fallen too far into Monstrousness, will abide by ending a conflict with Surrender.
In exchange for their life and for no further harm to come to them, the Surrenderers must negotiate offering up one or more of the following to their Conquerors:
- Some form of loot or payment from what the Surrenderers have on hand is paid to the Conqueror.
- A ransom. The Surrenderers are bound & cared for as collateral, and taken to be traded to whatever friends or allies will pay for their release.
- The Surrenderers must perform one discrete labor for the Conquerors (e.g. "plow my fields", "deliver this letter", etc).
- An oath must be sworn by the Surrenderers in a public and legally binding way. If this oath is broken, the Surrenderers will be marked as either being untrustworthy or Outlaws depending on the severity of things.
- The Surrenderers must report to a local community in order to face whatever form of justice or legal system is used there.
- An indignity must be suffered. Usually this is reserved for highly public figures, whom are stripped of a title or forced into some other social humiliation. If the Surrenderers has little else to offer though, some bullies are satisfied with watching people squirm. Or y'know, torture.
- The Conqueror may wish to inflict some form of specific injury or binding upon the Surrenderer, to ensure they will not be a threat.
The Enforcement of Surrendering
Monitors
Censusism has been slowly growing ever since the 5th Splash. A large part of this is thanks to the goodwill they've earned via their Monitors- individuals who offer the following free services in many towns and cities:
- They track whomever is arriving, where they came from, and when.
- They track whomever is leaving, where they are off to, and when.
- Optionally: you may also log a record of any or all goods you have with them as well.
- While the public may not directly access a Monitor's records, anyone may ask a Monitor to consult their records for them or to act as a witness for such matters.
- A Monitor's records are also regularly committed to the same grand vault that all of Censusism stores their records on every person who ever lived.
Most societies, enforcers of law, caravaners, itinerants, and general travellers utilise the Monitor's useful record-keeping services extensively. After all: if you go missing or get into trouble, it's one of the first methods anyone would have to find you. Smugglers and other sorts wishing to travel in secret either falsify their identities or omit part of their manifest, or simply hedge their bets and don't opt in in the first place.
Monsters
People can become Monstrous for many reasons, but there are many cautionary tales of Monsters born with the sole focus of revenging themselves upon those who would betray an honest Surrender. The most famous of these fables is of Adala & Alethea.
Adala and her sister Alethea were both Gizhelber, living on the fringes of the cold and desolate Red Empty. As such, they had to travel quite a ways to find the nearest spawning pool frequented by their species.
Along the road, they were accosted by robbers. Alethea cried "Please, we Surrender! We don't have much, but-" before being cut down, the layers of her papery body peeling away. Before Alethea's watery thin blood could even freeze to the permafrost, Adala had already begun to change.
Her skin began to peel away- layers separating into hundreds of loose flowing sheets. Then, it shred itself into the countless thin strands of a brush. Dragging a single mop-like finger across the ground, she dredged up the straw-coloured blood of her sister before flicking it at her assailants. "Perfidious!" "Meaningless!"
The robbers slashed at Adala, but their swings did little more than part her strands aside. Instead they fled, as Adala clawed at them and smeared them with her blood-yellow grasp. They ran and ran for hours, until they finally came back to their den near town.
There the robbers attempted to scrub themselves clean using gravel and rime. However, no matter how they scrubbed, Alethea's blood wouldn't fade away. One man among them, so frightened by the stain, attempted to cut his flesh loose- only to find Alethea's blood flowing through his own veins. The leader of the robbers saw this and shouted to his men, "Calm, calm, CALM DOWN MY ROBBERS! I shall go into town! I will find us a cure!"
And so he went into town, but what did he see? Adala was already there, raving to the townsfolk, spreading the word of the robbers and their foul misdeeds! "Damn" he thought, "I must go elsewhere." And so he went to the next town over- but then there too was Adala! Already shouting! Already screaming! And in the next town, and the next town, and the next town.
They say that to this day, the leader of the robbers is still trying to outrace Adala and his own deeds- and that you can still hear his men near the Red Empty howling for him to return with a cure.
Nooseknot Tablets
Nooseknots are born as tiny little insects, smaller than a grain of sand. In nature they get blown around on the breeze, and breathed in or swallowed by other creatures. For any creature bigger than your thumb, all this usually results in is a mild case of diarrhoea.
If the host dies though, the Nooseknot will instantly mature and grow a tail many times the length of their body. This tan tail with sepia colored patches makes them resemble very thin string-like worms, which burst out of the fresh corpse and immediately drill down into the ground faster than the blink of an eye. By the time you realize what's happened, there's little more than some pinpricks in the dirt.
The Nooseknots frantically burrow back to the place they were originally born with near-perfect accuracy, in order to breed and continue the cycle. They do this by weaving themselves into a sheet of humping worms, beneath which big clumps of new Nooseknots will be born.
What's really peculiar about all this is, all of the body spots on the adult Nooseknots line up to form a perfect picture on the final sheet that they form: an image depicting the last thing their host saw before they died.
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The predecessor to the Monitors were the Nooseknot Breeders. They are much less popular by comparison today, given the cost and the false alarm diarrhoea and all, but for a small fee you can still purchase a tablet made from dormant infant Nooseknots. If you ever were in mortal peril: you can simply pop it, and if you should die than that Breeder will usually get a near-perfect picture of what killed you that they will share with the authorities, kin, etc.
Designated Survivors
Many groups who are distrustful of outsiders or would like the extra insurance simply keep the fastest individual among them as a designated survivor. At the first sign of trouble, they are supposed to immediately flee and report the situations to others.
Social Pressure
To forgo the traditions of surrender is to invite Monstrousness and ruination, and so most decent folk you meet will treat it very seriously.
If you are accused and even mildly suspected of having violated a Surrender, as either conqueror or surrenderer, most cultures enforce publicly shunning you until you've cleared your name. Even friends and family are expected to ignore you, though they may render you aid in secret.
If you do nothing to clear your name, you are unpopular enough, or there is clear undeniable proof you have violated Surrender: you are considered an Outlaw, and handled accordingly.
Typically, depending on the circumstances and the local customs, there are often a few legal arguments and methods to clear your name:
- Some cultures hold some form of public trial.
- If you have clear proof of your innocence, the accusation may be dismissed.
- If an accuser claims you reneged on the terms of your surrender, you may often just pay those terms in public to resolve things.
- If an accuser claims you attacked or abused them after they surrendered, you may just choose to face some form of punishment or penalty.
- If you win the goodwill of the public, you may often be absolved if the accusation is minor and the evidence is thin.
- If the accuser withdraws their accusation, you're also set. (Whether through bribery, threats, winning them over, etc)
- When all else fails: a public duel is the most traditional resolution for any accusation. The loser of this duel is the one who is forced to surrender of course, this time with a public audience and immediate enforcement of terms.
The Implications of Surrender
Technically speaking: banditry is completely legal on The Mound. If you are stronger than someone, you can beat them up and force them to give you stuff.
- However be sure you sized them up properly! If they get the jump on you, then you'll be the one surrendering your things.
- Similarly: you better hope they don't have any powerful friends. Otherwise there's nothing stopping them from getting their friends and coming back for you.
- Most city-states and other settlements have their own militias, which are more than happy to crush robbers or raid their dens and re-appropriate the bounty of their surrender for whatever local lordlings desire.
Some societies also have unspoken working arrangements with their banditry, letting them operate as a form of proxy military forces. As long as the bandits raid the enemy and keep on good behaviour locally, they are allowed to operate unimpeded.
The tradition of Surrender also makes a lot of odd jobs for mercenaries.
- Obviously if you need deal with bandits and such, doesn't hurt to hire some muscle for protection or to raid the bastards and get your stuff back.
- Some mercenaries also specialise in enforcing more complicated Surrender terms, such as guarding a surrenderer while they fulfil an oath or labour, for a regular fee.
- Bounty hunters exist, that will track a criminal and beat them into Surrendering and facing justice.
- Some people make an entire living by hurling reasonable sounding false accusations at wealthier people, and just hoping they or the people who serve them pay out a small sum rather than deal with the headache of all this or challenging them to a duel.
- You may defend yourself in a duel if you are accused of course. OR you can hire a duelist to fight in your stead. The very best duelists of course, are the Duelists of Zampuro.
- Body doubles are very popular to protect prominent people from ransoming. A bandit might get halfway through negotiating for a fortune before realising the person they strong-armed is a lookalike and doesn't have a penny to their name.
- A Conqueror may request anything of a Surrenderer short of their life, or things they don't have to give. As such, some cruel and indecent conquerors may force impossibly steep terms on a Surrenderer- most often in the form of a long and arduous task that essentially results in slavery.
This is, in spirit, a violation of the tradition of Surrender. But since one must rely on the local community to resolve it, sometimes the abuse may sadly stand without some kind of external pushback.
This post © 2026 by Ro Pham is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
