The Vampire & Her Witch

”You aren’t wrong, Diarmuid,” Nyrielle said lightly as she gave Ashlynn a gentle squeeze. ”My darling, Ashlynn, will shake the foundations of your faithful, just by being who she is,” she said with a smile that revealed a hint of her fangs.

Once, Nyrielle had feared direct confrontation with the Church. It had been one of the Church’s Exemplars who led the charge against her grandsire, Torbin, and it was the Church’s sorcery that had weakened Torbin’s progeny so much that they’d been unable to resist the swords of the Lothian knights and the Church’s Templars.

At the time, she’d still been ’young’ for a True Vampire, and she’d never fought in anything like the war the Church and the Lothians brought to her homeland. She was supposed to be the mighty Harbinger of Death, yet she’d been powerless to protect the three people who mattered more to her than anything else in the world.

For a hundred years, she’d walked the edge of a knife between protecting her people and provoking the Church’s wrathful retribution. She accepted losses she didn’t have to in order to present the illusion that she wasn’t a threat that needed to be exterminated by the Church’s most powerful miracle workers.

But Ashlynn had changed that. Bit by bit, she’d restored not only Nyrielle’s tenderness and her ability to love, but the passions that demanded that she protect all those she held dear, and that she fight for the people who put their faith in her to keep them safe from the threats both inside and outside of their nation.

After a hundred years of passively defending her home, hiding away the truth of her own growing power, she was ready to unfurl her wings and stand up to the Church once again. And this time, things would be different. This time, she had Ashlynn at her side, and together, they would destroy anything that threatened them or their loved ones.

”The Church brought this on themselves,” Ignatious said, shaking his head sadly. ”They’ve turned messages into mythology and humble teachings into great truths. Now that it’s gone on for so long, they’ve created a world where people can no longer ask new questions and discover new answers.”

”Lady Ashlynn doesn’t fit into the answers they already have,” Ignatious said, pursing his lips together as he gently squeezed Heila’s hand in his. ”So they lash out to destroy her, because doing anything else will destroy them.”

When he spoke, his tone carried both a great sadness and deep regret. He knew what it meant to be one of the Church’s agents of destruction. Decades ago, he’d come to Lothian March to destroy Nyrielle and her progeny because the Church was terrified of the ’undying demons’ she’d unleashed upon them to retake the Vale of Mists from Cellach Lothian.

In those days, Ignatious had used the Holy Flames of his order, not just to destroy Nyrielle’s progeny, but to torture them. The books that Diarmuid had mentioned reading were filled with the scraps of information he’d extracted in one anguished confession after another, neatly jotted down as if they were divine revelations, stripped of the horrific cruelty that had been used to obtain the information.

Nyrielle had forgiven Ignatious for what he had done all those years ago. She’d turned him into a vampire so that he could suffer the same pains he’d inflicted on her progeny, and for eighty years, he’d suffered in darkness under the cruel claws of High Lord Hamdi in the Tangled Tower.

Those years had all but destroyed his faith in the Church, yet at the same time, it had been the words of the Great Prophet and the promises of the Holy Lord of Light that allowed him to endure all those years in darkness. When he finally emerged from it, he’d rebuilt his shattered faith, even if there was no longer a place for a person like him within the walls of the Church’s temples.

In a way, Ignatious was proof that even the most zealous fanatics among the Church could change, finding a different path to the Holy Lord of Light and the Heavenly Shores beyond this life. Yet at the same time, the magnitude of what Ignatious had to endure before he could transform his faith spoke to the difficulty of the task, and the vampire feared that too many of the faithful would rather die than transform in the way he had.

”It’s not a war I want to fight,” Ashlynn said as she and Nyrielle moved to take their seats at the head of the table. ”But it’s one that the Church started. I’d prefer to see more men like you, Diarmuid, visiting from the Church with the willingness to learn than to fight another war.”

”But if the Church comes,” she promised. ”We won’t allow our people to be trampled on again,” she said with a glance at Nyrielle that contained so many complex, interwoven emotions that it briefly felt like the two women were in a world of their own, sharing thoughts directly when words wouldn’t suffice.

”I don’t know if it’s possible to stop the Church from coming,” Diarmuid said, pursing his lips together as he struggled to think of a way to prevent the Church from doing what it had promised to do for so many centuries.

Already, men were preparing to set sail from the old countries, bringing with them dreams of conquest and heroism in the Holy War the church had declared against the Eldritch living near Lothian March.

War was coming. Not because negotiations between the two sides had failed, but because one side never bothered to negotiate in the first place. So who could a man like Diarmuid go to, once he learned the truths he’d come here to discover? Who could he convince that the war was a mistake and that there was no need to fight?

There was no one, short of the Saint himself, who could stop this... and somehow, Diarmuid didn’t think the man had any interest in doing so.

”We can talk about all of these things later tonight,” Ashlynn promised in an attempt to shake off the heavy atmosphere that had settled over this end of the table. ”I invited Commander Aspakos and Artificer Erkembalt here because I value their contributions to that conversation when the time comes,” she said, nodding at the gentlemen who had been advising Hauke and Loman.

”But more than that, I invited everyone here to enjoy a moment of connection before anything can pull us even further apart,” Ashlynn said as she picked up a bell on the table and rang it softly. ”Master Georg has prepared quite the feast for us this evening, so, for at least the first course or two, please set aside the ’big questions’ and the burdensome worries.”

”Tonight, everyone here is either family or a close friend,” she said, looking affectionately at the members of her coven and Nyrielle’s progeny before her gaze drifted all the way down to the far end of the table, where Loman sat with Liam Dunn. ”So please, enjoy the meal tonight, and enjoy each other’s company. It may be some time before we’ll have an opportunity like this again...”