The Vampire & Her Witch

Seeing the spark of passion rekindling in Ignatious’s eyes brought a cold smile to Nyrielle’s face. It had taken seventy years of exile, but it seemed like the former Inquisitor had turned his fury away from her and onto the Church that made him the man he’d been when she captured him.

”You seem resolved to your fate,” Nyrielle said, leaning back in her chair as she studied her progeny’s reactions. ”Has Hamdi had a hand in that?”

”High Lord Hamdi grew bored of me within a few years of my arrival,” Ignatious said with a resigned shake of his head. Lately, I see him once a decade or less. My years in his care were... hard,” he said as his eyes gazed into the distance.

When Nyrielle brought him to the western lands, it was originally to loan him to Amahle so that the witch could study the magic practiced by humans. Nyrielle wanted the insights that a witch could offer and there were things that Amahle wanted to understand beyond just the methods that humans used to practice their strange magics.

When she’d finished with the Inquisitor, rather than allow him to return to the Vale of Mists, Nyrielle had asked Hamdi to give him a home and an opportunity to learn what it meant to live his life as a vampire.

At first, the aging vampire seemed delighted by the human zealot. He took great pleasure in pushing Ignatious to the brink of starvation before throwing him into the wilderness, or confining him in a cell with young innocents, eager to see if the human’s hatred of all ’demons’ would allow him to feed on such forbidden fruit or if his morals would assert themselves even in the face of his hunger.

These games had only lasted for a few years, however, before the High Lord passed responsibility for Ignatious on to his own progeny. There was nothing interesting about stripping the broken man down further and since he expected Nyrielle to reclaim him one day or another, he saw no point in investing in rebuilding Ignatious into a functioning person.

”Rathin was my keeper in the darkest years,” he said, returning his gaze to Nyrielle. ”He left me in the dark and brought criminals for me to feed on. Eventually, he took me out, I think out of boredom more than anything else, but I learned much from him about hunting and the rules of the Tangled Wood.”

”I do not expect that your existence here was comfortable,” Nyrielle said. Though her tone was neutral, a very small part of her was relieved that the years had been unkind to him. While she no longer held a grudge for what he had done, at least, not enough of one to act upon, his crimes couldn’t easily be forgiven.

”It wasn’t,” he agreed. ”That changed when you allowed Marcel to send reports about my colleagues. Without those, I might never have found my way out of the dark again.” It had been more than twenty years into his exile when the letters began to arrive. They were infrequent, but the man who came to manage Nyrielle’s spies was thorough, even with the smallest leads.

Over the years, Marcel had learned the fates of the men who fought alongside Ignatious in the war. Many had died there, but the Black Merchant left no stone unturned, tracking down acolytes, personal disciples, even his teachers.

”I told him that he should let you know when your former associates died,” Nyrielle said, giving the fallen Inquisitor an odd look. She couldn’t deny that there had been some cruelty to the task she’d set for Marcel. It had also been a test of her youngest progeny’s ability to turn his network of mercantile contacts into a useful intelligence gathering tool.

”It wasn’t a kindness,” Nyrielle said, tilting her head in confusion. ”Yet you say they helped you to find your way out of the darkness?”

”It was hard to accept at first, Mistress, but it helped to ground me,” the younger vampire said. ”I had lost all sense of time. Getting reports, even years apart, that my mentor had died in his sleep of old age, or that one of my disciples became an Inquisitor in his own right even if he died in the Lothian’s next war... It not only gave me a sense of time again, it also gave me closure.”

”Do you,” Nyrielle started only to pause as she considered her words carefully. At this point, it was clear to her that Ignatious had suffered in every way that she could have wished for him to, and for far longer than the woman he’d tortured had. Now, as she let go of the last lingering bits of resentment, she found herself with a strange feeling of connection to her exiled progeny.

In a way, Ignatious was like an estranged son to her. The bond that connected them was palpable and very real. It wasn’t something that could be broken easily and in his presence, she felt an undeniable closeness that she felt with all of her progeny. At the same time, it had been decades since she last laid eyes on him.

Now, sitting in front of him, she realized how little she truly knew about him, even after all these years. Even if he hadn’t changed greatly, he still would have felt like a stranger to her. Looking at the worn down and... tamed man that Ignatious had become, the storm of emotions that Nyrielle felt were too varied to name, but there was one thing she was certain of. She no longer had any desire to see this man suffer.

”Do you regret missing their funerals?” Nyrielle forced herself to ask. ”Do you resent me for leaving you here for so long?” A few months ago, before she met Ashlynn, she not only wouldn’t have cared about his answers, she wouldn’t even have asked the questions. But now... now things were different.

”Perhaps at one point I did,” Ignatious said, raising his brows in genuine surprise at Nyrielle’s question. All he had known of her in the past had been her righteous fury at what he had done to one of her progeny, combined with her enduring hatred for the actions of his former Church.

At first, he’d returned that fury in full measure for what she’d done to him. It was hard not to hate what he’d become, especially when Hamdi delighted in starving him to the point that he became a savage beast only to be confronted by the magnitude of his crimes after he gorged himself on blood. The moment when lucidity returned amidst the carnage he’d wrought seemed to delight the ancient vampire more than anything else he did to Ignatious in the years he treated the former Inquisitor like a plaything for his amusement.

But now, was this really sympathy that Nyrielle was showing him? Of the many things he expected from her visit, an expression of genuine care and concern was along the last of them, If so, if she really was showing kindness that wasn’t just an imitation of real emotion, then it was more sympathy than he’d encountered from any vampire since coming to reside in the Tangled Tower.

”Mistress,” he said as a ghost of concern stirred within his chest. ”Are you well? You seem much softer than you were at the gates. I’ve taken confession from many men who are approaching the end of their life, towering brutes who find softness only when they realize that they’ve lost the chance to share that softness with anyone. It isn’t my place to pry, and I know that you care nothing for the Holy Lord of Light, but if you need an ear to listen, I still remember how to.”

”So this is the face the mighty Inquisition shows their own kind,” Nyrielle said with an ironic laugh. ”Perhaps, the day will come when I turn to you for just such an ear, but that day is not today. For now, all you need to know is that I’ve found someone who has breathed life anew into my withering heart, and I’ve taken her as my Seneschal. She’s studying with the Mother of Thorns at the moment, but you’ll meet her when we reunite in the High Fen this autumn.”

”I see,” Ignatious said, lowering his head while a sad smile tugged at the corners of his lips. From the sound of her voice, this woman was much more than a simple Seneschal and he couldn’t help but wonder what sort of woman could make such a profound impact on the merciless reaper who had cast him into the depths of torment so long ago.

”I’m glad that you’ve found someone who has brought light into your life and rekindled the fires of your heart,” he said, though not without some difficulty. As much as he told himself that his heart had been ground down too far to harbor resentment for what had been done to him... If living well was the best revenge then Nyrielle had certainly proved the statement with the feeling of contentment that radiated from her languid posture and shining eyes.

”The gift she’s given me is great,” Nyrielle acknowledged, sensing the shadow that seemed to have fallen over Ignatious ambivalence and shifting her posture to give him more direct attention before his thoughts could spiral further in the dark direction they’d turned. Nothing, however, could prepare her estranged progeny for the words that came next.

”But, Ignatious, tell me. If I could bestow her gift on you and reignite the fires of your own passions, could you still make the offer you just made me? Could you join Thane, Zedya and the others and direct the flames of your fury at our enemies and the Church you once served?”

”Or,” she asked, leaning forward and resting her chin on her hands as her midnight eyes stared deep within the fallen Inquisitor. ”Would giving you back your passion return you to the raving beast that attempted to set the Vale of Mists ablaze when you discovered that I had turned you into the very thing you despised?”