The Vampire & Her Witch

For several moments, Isabell stared at Heila in shock as she tried to process the idea that Ashlynn would, at some point in the future, offer her a place in her coven of witches. It sounded preposterous, but then, just a day ago, the notion of entering the Vale of Mists and being received as an honored guest was also preposterous. Yet here she lay, with a horned witch tending to her wounds, using exotic and rare ingredients that could very well be considered priceless on this side of the mountains...

It was too much, even for her. Accepting that Ashlynn was a witch and holding back all of her preconceived notions of what witches were until she learned first hand was already a stretch for her. She could accept that Ashlynn wasn’t wicked, even if she was going to war with the rulers of Lothian March. She could accept that the Eldritch people were just people who looked different and had unique customs of their own.

She could accept all of those things and more, but the notion of joining them, of becoming a witch like Ashlynn and Heila. It just felt like a step too far.

”If she makes the offer some day,” Isabell said politely. ”Then I promise to consider it. But I’m not a warrior. I wasn’t a warrior even when I fought in wars and I’m much less of one now. I doubt you need an old woman who can’t fight to join your coven now.”

”You aren’t that old,” Heila said with a gentle shake of her head. ”You might be twice my age, but you’re not that many years older than Virve or Sir Lennart, and they both began new lives as something greater than they were before. Virve became the Oak Witch and Sir Lennart married Madame Zedya and became a vampire so they could share their love forever.”

”People can always change to become something different,” Heila added, pausing just long enough to receive Isabell’s permission to remove her tunic so she could begin to treat the older woman’s wounds.

”Ignatious, he, he’s more than twice your age, and he’s still changing,” Heila said with a faint blossom of pink across her cheeks. ”Especially since we found each other. Every time I hold his hand and every time he wraps his arms around me, he’s a little bit softer and a little bit warmer, all on his own, because people never stop changing.”

”You said he was from the Inquisition?” Isabell said, eager to pivot the conversation away from the notion of her joining Ashlynn’s coven.

She knew that Heila was trying to be helpful but Isabell felt like she understood who she was fairly well after all these years. The idea of reinventing herself at her age, especially in such an extreme way, felt like more than a simple renovation, it felt like tearing out her own foundations in a way that could cause her whole world to crumble. There was something else about the example that Isabell wondered about so she leaped at the opportunity to shift the conversation in a different direction.

”Didn’t you say earlier that Ignatious was also one of Lady Nyrielle’s progeny?” Isabell asked, wondering how much becoming a vampire had changed the man and whether it had been the act of transforming him into a vampire that was responsible for that transformation or something else. ”It must be hard for him to reconcile his faith with his... transformation.”

Isabell didn’t know what else to call it. She’d shared a meal with Marcel and never realized that he was a vampire but, after seeing Ashlynn reveal all of her power, she wondered if Vampires were the same way. Did Marcel have a different form that he only revealed when he was using his powers? Was this Ignatious the same?

”It took Ignatious a long time to find a way to hold onto his faith after becoming a ’demon’ like the rest of us,” Heila said softly as her hands pulsed with silvery-green energy. Slowly, she traced intricate patterns on Isabell’s skin, promoting the body’s own healing and erasing the bruises one by one.

It wasn’t the fastest form of healing she could use but after hearing Ollie speak about the fanaticism of the hunter named Eamon, she wanted to be careful about how close she came to ’working miracles.’ Eamon hadn’t needed to see much in order to decide that Ashlynn was a Saintess, worthy of worship according to his faith.

While Heila didn’t think that Isabell would experience the same kind of religious devotion that Eamon had, she still wanted to keep her use of witchcraft as close to healing that the older woman might be familiar with as possible. That was why she started with a familiar looking salve and slowly progressed to gentle healing magic that only healed one bruise at a time instead of drawing on the vast power of the forest outside the fortress to heal Isabell’s wounds in minutes.

”Ignatious shouldn’t have joined the inquisition to begin with,” Heila said, pulling her thoughts back to Isabell’s question. ”He’s a kind and gentle man. The Church saw that he was talented and they twisted him into something he wasn’t meant to be. Now, he’s finding his way back to the person he always was. He still believes in your Holy Lord of Light, the Heavenly Shores and such, but he’s been discarding several other teachings that he feels are misguided. Like the things the Church has to say about the Eldritch.”

Isabell sat quietly as she tried to imagine what that must have been like for Ignatious. She didn’t know the man, but it wasn’t an easy thing to become an Inquisitor. She’d met more than a few Inquisitors herself over the years and they were among the most fanatical and hardened men she’d ever met.

Their faith and the zeal with which they sought out the enemies of their Church were so overwhelming that, sometimes, it was hard to see them as complete people. They seemed to have sacrificed parts of themselves, like the ability to laugh or cry, in order to become vessels for the Holy Lord of Light’s power.

So, to put all of that aside after transforming into a vampire, something his former self would have hunted and destroyed without question, was a feat that Isabell didn’t know if she should admire or fear. After all, he’d done it because of what Lady Nyrielle made him.

Or was it something simpler that made him undergo such a radical reevaluation of his faith?