The Vampire & Her Witch

While Liam Dunn was starting to imagine opportunities to travel and see the wider world that Lady Ashlynn had been slowly revealing over the course of the evening, soaking in the feast of far-off flavors, the one-armed lord sitting next to him had yet to take so much as a bite of the current course of exotic and flavorful street food.

”Tell me something, young man,” Aspakos said, bringing his beak close enough to Loman’s ear that he was able to speak quietly to the wounded priest. ”Are you avoiding food because you’re still nursing your wounds and languishing in the malaise of defeat?”

”Or has food lost its flavor to you, because your sorcery has begun to claim the joys of life as a price for what you’ve done with it?” Aspakos asked, cocking his birdlike head to one side and looking inquisitively at Loman.

”What?” Loman said, startled out of his thoughts and momentarily taken aback by the sorcerer’s directness. ”Did you just ask if I’m sulking?” Loman asked, coming off more defensively than he’d intended to.

”If ’sulking’ is the word you want to use, then so be it,” Aspakos said with a shrug. ”You have fallen in battle to a woman half your size,” he said, nodding in Heila’s direction as he spoke. ”You have lost an arm, and with it, the ability to use sorcery that you dedicated years to learning.”

”You’ve lost an eye,” Aspakos continued, clinically cataloging Loman’s losses. ”And many would consider your features marred by the scars on your face. Warriors who such fates may spend the rest of their lives haunted by the malaise of defeat, the shame of their inadequacy, and the deep desire for vengeance that they’re too weak and wounded to obtain.”

”So if that’s why you aren’t eating, then I understand,” the sorcerer with the broken beak said directly. ”But if you aren’t eating because everything you put in your mouth tastes the same, and all of it like ashes,” he added. ”If you’ve reached a point where you must force yourself to overcome an impulse to wretch with each bite that you take, because your body both rejects food and demands it, then you have a very different problem, and one that is much harder to solve.”

”So which is it, young man?” Aspakos asked. ”Are you suffering from wounded pride? Or do you possess a cursed and wounded soul that prevents you from enjoying a simple meal?” he asked, picking up another slice of the grilled ’nooftish,’ dipping it in the roasted red pepper sauce, and dropping the whole thing into his wide-open beak.

”I don’t think my wounds are any of your business, pride or otherwise,” Loman said, frowning at the bird-like man who radiated an aura of menace and darkness. ”My personal affairs aren’t any of your concern.”

Privately, Loman hated the way the menacing sorcerer seemed to have seen through the pain that was consuming him and making it all but impossible for the young Lothian lord to enjoy the sumptuous meal.

His face still burned with shame when he recalled the way Ashlynn and her vampire companion had rebuffed him when he pleaded for mercy on his father’s behalf, even after he’d lowered himself to one knee to apologize on behalf of his family for the crime of aggression in starting the endless series of wars that had divided their peoples for generations.

It had been an act of extraordinary effort for him, a man who was both the Disciple of an Exemplar and a man contending to be the heir of Lothian March, to speak the words he had. If his teacher had heard him utter those words, he’d have been lucky if the worst he suffered was a visit to the Inquisition.

But when he asked for the smallest concession in return, for mercy for his ailing father, he was treated as though he’d committed a crime just as great as the one his family had committed when they invaded the Vale of Mists.

The worst part of it was that he’d been chastised by yet another vampire, one whose writings Loman had turned to in order to understand his enemy in this war. The witch, Heila, had mentioned that High Inquisitor Ignatious suffered greatly after his ’death’ during the War of Brothers, but if that was the case, Loman saw no sign of it as the former priest flirted shamelessly with the witch sitting next to Ashlynn.

But it wasn’t just the fact that Ignatious had chastised him that made it difficult for Loman to endure the sumptuous feast before him or the pleasant flow of conversation around him. It was the fact that everyone who had chastised him had been right, in at least one way or another.

When Ignatious called upon him to imitate the Great Prophet and seek the counsel of older and wiser teachers, just as the Great Prophet had turned to the Saint Teacher, Loman felt like he’d been dragged to the edge of a great precipice, only to be left teetering on the edge of an impossible decision.

On one side, there was an infinite darkness and a narrow, rickety bridge leading... somewhere that Loman could neither see nor understand. He felt like Diarmuid had already begun crossing that bridge, and High Inquisitor Ignatious was offering to help him cross it as well.

On the other side, the land was solid, flat, and familiar. It was the world that Loman had known since birth, where he was the young lord of a powerful family and the disciple of an even more powerful pillar of the Church. Only, ever since he’d arrived at this precipice, it felt like it was less and less possible to make his feet move back toward the world he knew, as if he could see it, but never again trod its familiar ground.

For Aspakos to treat him as though he were just suffering from wounded pride felt like a grave insult. Loman had already lost so much, and now, his world was crumbling around him, yet the creature of darkness sitting next to him acted like he was a sulking child, refusing to eat his dinner because he’d been scolded.

”It seems as if your sky is growing too dark for you to find your way,” Aspakos said, shaking his head at the young man. ”But I promise you, the sky only seems dark to you now because it has been so bright before. I’m afraid that if you don’t understand the prices you’re paying even now, you’ll only make matters worse, for yourself and for everyone else.”

”Your Dominion,” Aspakos said politely, turning his head toward the hosts of the evening and speaking loudly enough to be heard over the chatter along the table. ”I know you wanted to hold off on some topics until we’d had a chance to enjoy Georg’s masterful cooking,” the sorcerer praised.

”But I wonder if the time has come for friend Ignatious to tell his tale?” Aspakos asked. ”I think my young companion could benefit greatly from hearing what his senior has to say, and I imagine others would as well...”