The Vampire & Her Witch

”What do you mean about the path that’s been charted for Loman?” Diarmuid asked, all nervousness forgotten as he looked at the ominous, feathered sorcerer.

There were people within the Church who could read the chart of the heavens to understand the shape of things to come, but most of them could only glimpse a portion of the Holy Lord of Light’s grand design. They could see portents of great changes, the coming of war or which years would contain a great storm on the coast, but the more detailed the answers they sought, the less they could see.

The Seers of the Church could tell you that a great storm was coming, but they couldn’t tell you which month it would arrive in, nor could they tell you which baronies it would ravage. Only that this year would contain a great storm, or that next year wouldn’t.

Only the Exemplars, and the Saint across the sea, could read a man’s destiny in the stars well enough to say where his path led, and even then, they could only do so for men who were fated to shape the world in some way. A king’s destiny could be foretold, but a farmer’s could not.

Even then, a man was still free to blaze his own trail. The Holy Lord of Light didn’t force a man to walk a singular path toward a predetermined end. Instead, he laid down several paths for every man and gave him the sun and the stars to navigate by so he could choose the path he wished to walk.

From the way he spoke, however, Aspakos could tell which path Loman was walking, and that already suggested a level of ability that was rare within the Church, assuming the feathered sorcerer really possessed such an ability.

”I mean that he cannot avoid the greater price of his sorcery forever,” Aspakos said bluntly. ”Sacrificing the lives of the inconsequential will shield him for a time, but eventually, if he continues to use power that is only meant to be wielded by a Sovereign and their Celestial Court, he will have to pay the same price that I have paid, snuffing out the stars in his own sky until the only ones that remain lead him to a tragic end.”

”I paid the price willingly,” Aspakos added. ”And with full understanding of what using the founder’s arts would cost me. But if Lady Heila speaks the truth, then your companion has been deceived about the price he pays when he conjures his Bow of Stars, and that is already a great tragedy.”

”Oracles aren’t Witches, Inquisitor Diarmuid,” Aspakos said as he looked directly into the Inquisitor’s eyes. ”They cannot meddle as freely in the lives of others. You would do well to understand this if you wish to free yourself of the shackles that came with the power you were taught to wield. Your situation is much less dire than your companion’s, but even you have made sacrifices that you do not understand in order to gain power beyond your own strength.”

”I don’t understand,” Diarmuid said with a frown. ”Oracles? And what do you mean about power beyond my own strength?”

”Ignatious can explain it to you,” Aspakos said. ”He is proof that it isn’t impossible to walk out of the darkness, and perhaps he’s even proof that there is still hope for people like us. Stay close to the witches, Inquisitor,” he added cryptically as he turned to take his seat at the table beside Erkembalt. ”They might be agents of chaos, but chaos has a way of creating new paths where none existed before.”

For several moments, Diarmuid stood rooted to the spot where Aspakos had left him as his mind grappled with the strange man’s advice.

It was difficult when the content of the man’s words was so shocking, but Diarmuid closed his eyes and forced himself to break down what the other man had said, examining each component of the warning the mysterious individual had delivered in order to understand not only the message, but the intentions behind it.

Tone was the easiest to understand, assuming that Aspakos wasn’t a skilled actor who manipulated his voice in order to manipulate others. When Diarmuid thought about how the other man spoke, he heard deep concern, along with a sort of melancholic acceptance that he’d often heard from men approaching the end of their lives.

The Eldritch were too strange to Diarmuid’s eyes to interpret the hidden language of their movements. He didn’t know what it meant when Aspakos’s feathers twitched, or when Erkembalt’s tail swished from side to side as he spoke.

If he were speaking to humans, he could read the direction of a person’s gaze or the tightening of their jaw to help judge the truth of their words, but when it came to the Eldritch, their strange features made it difficult to assess their words in the same way he normally would.

It was certainly possible that Aspakos was lying to him, but from his tone alone, Diarmuid didn’t think it was likely. When he closed his eyes and imagined Aspakos as an elder of the Church, dispensing wisdom from his deathbed, the words and tone lined up too well with a man who had made difficult choices.

There was acceptance in Aspakos’s tone, but at the same time, there was a yearning for those who followed after him to walk a different path. One that would lead to a happier ending.

In the end, Diarmuid could only conclude that Aspakos’s warning was genuine, and motivated, at least in part, by some deep, personal tragedy that the other man had suffered. But what his warning actually meant, and whether or not he had any ulterior motives beyond helping the younger generation to avoid his mistakes was impossible for Diarmuid to say.

Part of him wanted to take a seat at the table, joining Aspakos next to the animated conversation taking place between Master Isabell and Artificer Erkembalt, but when he turned to do so, he felt like his feet were rooted to the floor. Aspakos had said all that he intended to say, and he left the rest of the explanation to Ignatious...

Was it because he’d already revealed all that he could? Or was there an even more dire warning yet to come, one that Aspakos felt would be better received if it came from someone who had walked the same path that Diarmuid had?

The Inquisitor didn’t know, but as he heard the sounds of boots ringing off the stone floor in the hallway outside the formal dining room, he said a silent prayer to the Holy Lord of Light, asking for the strength to confront the answers to the questions that brought him here, along with the answers to the questions he’d never thought to ask.