The Vampire & Her Witch

As an Inquisitor, Diarmuid had witnessed countless horrors over the course of his life. He had seen the depths of depravity men and even women could descend to when they were driven by both real and perceived injustice. More than once, he’d been summoned to investigate scenes of unspeakable cruelty attributed to ’demons’ only to find a bitter, jealous, or greedy person hiding behind a carefully maintained mask of civility, even as their hands dripped with blood.

Recently, he’d also fought real demons. He came to understand their cunning, their ruthlessness, and the lengths to which they would go in their fight against his people and his faith. Diarmuid might have railed against his superiors in the Holy City when they declared that they would do nothing to Owain Lothian for the crime of magnicide so long as they were able to use him to slay demons in the upcoming Holy War, but after seeing the demons up close, he could at least understand why his superiors valued a man like Owain so highly.

He had seen cruelty, savagery, and a relentless drive to achieve victory at all costs, but never before had he seen anything like the abattoir that greeted his eyes when he finally managed to cut the impaled acolyte free of the icy forest that trapped him and pull his broken body out onto the town walls.

”Merciful Lord of Light, how...” one of the acolytes behind Diarmuid said as he stared at the carnage of shattered stone and torn bodies that littered the wall. Everywhere he looked, the snow was dyed red as if buckets of paint had been flung about with wild abandon. Worse than that, however, were the piles of dead and dying men who lay at the end of each trail of red.

Two-thirds of the Hanrahan soldiers had been ordered to the walls to form the first line of defense, which meant that there were more than two hundred soldiers who had either taken up bows and arrows or stood ready with spears to defend the archers atop the walls. Now, it seemed like at least half of those men were dead or soon would be, and dozens more clutched at wounds that ranged from minor cuts to shattered bones.

”Focus,” Diarmuid said as he tried to drown out the sound of pained cries, whispered prayers, and behind it all, the echoing, endless drumming that came from the demons in the wilderness. ”First, we save a life, so join your faith with mine,” he said as he knelt next to the bleeding acolyte and began to pray.

”We offer our prayers and devotion to You, Lord of Light.

In this moment of suffering, we call upon Your infinite compassion.

Where hope seems dim and lost, we beg for Your Holy might.

Transform our small and shallow faith into Your healing power.”

”My life is a candle flame in the night,” the acolytes responded when Diarmuid finished his prayer. ”Together, our flames become one light.”

No sooner had they spoken than a feeling of bone-deep fatigue washed over their bodies, bringing with it the aches and pains of an entire day’s worth of hard labor and the ravenous hunger of a week of pious fasting as the Holy Lord of Light took their offering and used it to bathe the wounded acolyte in sacred golden flames.

In the light of those golden flames, the faint lines at the edges of Diarmuid’s eyes and the corners of his lips looked deeper and the weight of the world seemed to way heavily on his shoulders, but all of that weight and strain fell away when he washed torn, frostburned flesh knitting itself back together and the faint flush of health returning to the flresh of the young acolyte’s face.

”N-now what, your Worship?” one of the acolytes asked weakly as he slumped against the cold stones of the gatehouse. ”There are too many injured people to heal like that,” he said as one of his legs began to shake uncontrollably and his hands clenched involuntarily in the aftermath of making an offering to the Holy Lord of Light to pray for healing.

Suddenly, before Diarmuid could think of a response, the stars in the sky seemed to grow brighter as a shining light atop Hanrahan Keep twinkled in the darkness. A few heartbeats later, dozens of sacred, luminous arrows poured down from the sky as if the Heavens themselves had come to their aid.

”Loman,” Diarmuid breathed in relief as he crawled to the inner edge of the wall, carefully keeping himself low to avoid detection by the demon giants outside the walls as he peered out on the west gate plaza.

”No... Merciful Light, no...” Diarmuid whispered as his eyes finally beheld what had transpired while he was trapped by the forest of ice in the gatehouse.

Sir Tommin’s figure was unmistakable with the pristine white tabard and gleaming armor of one of the Church’s most celebrated Templars. Only that armor was anything but pristine, as it looked crumpled and torn, nearly as broken as the man it was supposed to protect. But in place of the pious, quiet, and capable knight that Tommin had once been, only the sobbing, broken wreckage of a man remained as he clutched his head and wept.

Tommin’s state was shocking enough, but as Diarmuid’s eyes flicked about the battlefield, the scope of the tragedy only grew greater. Three of the four templars lay dead or dying, and the fourth was using all his might just to keep the Crimson Knight at bay for even a moment longer. Already, the Templar’s tabard was stained red from his wounds, and blood flowed freely from the arm that was weighed down by the shattered remains of a shield.

Fully half of the Temple Guard lay dead or dying in the snow with only a scattering of demons around them suffering a similar fate, but it was the cause of many of their deaths that brought a strangled cry to the Inquisitor’s lips.

Loman’s rain of radiant arrows was merciless and relentless as they fell from the Heavens, and they claimed the lives of men and demons alike as they fell. At first glance, it seemed like there were more demons than men who were struck down by the holy arrows, but even as he watched, that changed dramatically.

”Iţkuíla. Ükşa. Ilţala-nnö!”

Diarmuid had never seen a demon like the white-furred, horned figure wielding a glowing sword of ice, but when it shouted and held its sword aloft, a soft, crystalline tinkling sound filled the air above them before a glittering dome began to form above the center of the plaza.

The dome wasn’t a perfect hemisphere, Diarmuid realized in shock as he watched it shimmer into existence. Rather, it resembled one of the gilded rotundas that covered fountains in plazas throughout the Holy City, supported by a dozen icy pillars that stretched up from the cobblestones of the west gate plaza to support the crystalline dome.

In any other context, Diarmuid would have stopped to stare in admiration at something so beautiful. The crystalline rotunda transcended simple architecture, resembling a piece of art that caught the light of the stars above, the golden glow of the Temple in the distance, and even the shimmering blue-green ribbons of demonic light in the sky to create a dazzling display of rainbow hues that rippled across its multifaceted surface.

It should have been a thing of pure beauty that any servant of the light could admire, but it had been conjured by a demon, and its purpose was heresy of the highest order.

The luminous arrows pierced through the armor of friend and foe alike, dispassionately slaying anyone who the Holy Lord of Light deemed worthy of death, and even the shields of demons or temple guards were useless to block the radiant arrows, but the crystalline dome was different. When a glowing arrow struck the dome, it bent, twisted, and dissipated before it could pass all the way through the ice!

It was a sight that shook Diarmuid’s faith to the core. The rain of arrows Loman had summoned with his Bow of Stars, if they were the same ones that Exemplar Domas was famous for calling down from the Heavens, were a declaration of the fate the Holy Lord of Light wrote in the stars for everyone on the battlefield. If a man’s death tonight was written in the stars, then nothing could thwart the Holy Lord of Light’s will.

And yet, this demon could, and dozens of demons were retreating back under the shelter of his glittering dome, which meant that the only people the rain of arrows was falling on... were the members of the Temple Guard and the Lothian soldiers with them.

But even the appearance of the glittering dome of ice that bent and twisted Loman’s arrows into nothingness couldn’t have prepared Diarmuid for the words he heard next when the diminutive figure of a horned demon wearing the wide-brimmed hat of a witch turned to stare directly at the place where he crouched behind the wall.

”Inquisitor!” Heila shouted over the din of battle. ”Help me save your people! They will not listen to anyone else, but they may listen to you. Tell them. Lay down their weapons and we can save their lives!”