The Vampire & Her Witch

”Wait here,” Diarmuid said, standing and returning to his bed chambers, rifling through his possessions until he found the oldest book that he’d brought with him and bringing it back into the sitting room as he quickly leafed through the aged and yellowed pages.

”Here,” he said as he found the passage he was looking for in a book that, less than an hour ago, he’d thought would be useless. ”Is this the Hymn you heard the Inquisitors in your vision singing? Did their sacred rite look like the one described in the book?” Diarmuid asked as he held the book out toward Ollie with trembling hands.

”I don’t know,” Ollie said, giving the Inquisitor a sad smile. ”I’m sorry,” he clarified quickly. ”But I only just started learning how to read. If it was a recipe you had, or a list of supplies, I might manage to sound it out, but sacred rites,” he said with a shrug, allowing his voice to trail off at the end.

”Ah, right,” Diarmuid said, embarrassed to realize that he’d completely forgotten the young knight’s humble beginnings because of how impressive of a knight Ollie was proving to be. ”This was written by one of the Inquisitors who helped defeat the, um, the Eldritch Lord who defeated Caun Lothian.”

”It talks about a sacred rite that required thirteen Inquisitors to lead, accompanied by a full choir of acolytes,” Diarmuid explained as he confirmed the details written in the book. ”The records say that the Eldritch Lord of the Vale of Mists was a powerful Vampire from the Clan of the Great Claw, and he was protected by several lesser vampires.”

”His name was Torbin,” Ollie supplied in a carefully neutral tone. ”He was Lady Nyrielle’s grandsire,” he said, emphasizing the relationship between Nyrielle and her fallen predecessor so that Diarmuid understood the sensitivity of a topic that might otherwise seem academic and lost to history more than a hundred years ago.

”Two of the ’lesser vampires’ protecting him were Lady Nyrielle’s parents,” Ollie added with extra emphasis. He didn’t tell the Inquisitor to stop, but if the man was going to talk about rituals used to defeat Lady Nyrielle’s closest family, he needed to understand just how sensitive the topic was.

”Ah,” Diarmuid said, pausing as he wrestled with the idea of abandoning this line of questioning altogether. But... he couldn’t. He needed to know if the thing that Ollie had seen in his vision really matched the sacred rite that had been used by the Church against vampires more than a hundred years ago.

”I understand,” Diarmuid said, as he carefully closed the old book. There were details written there. Details about how the false sun the Inquisition conjured suppressed the vampires of the Vale, rendering them sluggish and unable to use their powers effectively against the Templars who came to face them.

According to the records, the vampires had been weakened to such a great extent that even Cellach Lothian, despite lacking any of the blessed weapons of the Church, had been able to capture two human heretics who had become vampires, burning them both at the stake before his army as proof of his strength, and as an act of revenge against the vampires who had killed his father Caun during the Second Crusade.

”I’m just, I’m trying to understand if the vision showed you something real,” Diarmuid said as he tried a different approach to his question. ”I want to know if you were shown something you couldn’t possibly have seen during your lifetime because it’s one of the most powerful secrets of the Inquisition. Or, if it just showed you an imitation of that thing... Something your mind might have conjured after hearing stories about that battle.”

”It was probably something real, Diarmuid,” Ollie said after a moment of thought. ”I faced my trial here in the Vale of Mists, surrounded by cedar and hemlock trees that have stood here for longer than the Lothians have waged war against the Vale of Mists,” he explained.

”The trees remember things, Inquisitor,” Ollie said pointedly. ”If this is a real ritual that the Church has, then it wouldn’t be strange for the trees that survived being burned by it to pass along a warning about it, even if I’m not their witch.”

”The trees remember our rituals,” Diarmuid breathed, his eyes going wide as the implications struck him. They remembered the rituals of the Inquisition long after the people who fought in that battle were dead. Then, a century later, they showed that ritual to a witch...

Not only that. According to Sir Ollie, he faced that vision again and again and again, improving himself each time as he learned how to fight against the combined forces of the Lothians and the Church.

When Ollie explained the lessons he learned, he emphasized the need to understand humility, and that there were limits to what one man could achieve. He spoke of making the hard decisions about going to war with friends at his side in order to save the friends who must stay behind, and facing the loss of one or the other no matter what he did.

But as Diarmuid listened to him telling the tale, he couldn’t shake an entirely different feeling. That the trees who lent their power to Lady Ashlynn’s witches were using the opportunity of Sir Ollie’s trial in order to teach him how to fight against the Church. After all, the vision could have presented any enemy it wished to and the lessons would have been much the same.

Yet the trees had shown Sir Ollie a vision of one of the Church’s most powerful, and most dangerous sacred rites, and they’d given the young witch as many chances as he desired to learn how to defeat the Church’s ritual.

Diarmuid believed in many things, and he had a healthy respect for coincidence. Just because two things happened close together didn’t mean that one happened because of the other. But when it came to something like this, he found it hard to imagine that what Ollie had experienced had been a simple coincidence or a random example.

And if that was the case... Then what did it mean for the Church if nature itself had chosen to side against them?