The Vampire & Her Witch

”Your Dominion, I’ve come to answer your call...”

Rhys barely moved after he spoke the ancient, formal words. He knelt on the rough-hewn stone floor of the lighthouse chamber with the wind stinging his bearded cheeks and cold water on the floor seeping into the knee of his breeches, but he made absolutely no movements once he’d assumed his submissive, respectful posture. He didn’t dare.

He’d never met a witch before, and neither had his father, but he knew his history well, both the history that was known to the common people and the secrets kept locked away in the Blackwell family’s sealed records. There were many things that the common folk didn’t know about witches, but if there was one thing on which the public record and his family’s private histories both agreed on, it was that no ordinary man could face the power of witches... and that the witches of the sea weren’t to be trifled with.

”I not Dominion, not the Mother of Tides. You call me wrongly, Lord of Black Sails” the cloaked figure said in a voice that was deeper and more resonant than that of most women. She spoke the king’s common tongue with a strange, rolling accent that elongated words, and her intonation was odd, as if she were unaccustomed to even the most common words.

”If you aren’t the Mother of Tides,” Rhys said, looking up at the cloaked figure even as he remained kneeling. ”Then which of her witches are you?” Rhys asked before realizing what he’d said and quickly lowered his head again. ”Forgive me, I don’t mean to be impudent,” he added quickly.

The woman standing before him could likely sink every ship in Blackwell Harbor and smash their broken hulls against the docks, crushing the beating heart of his County with little more than the wave of her hand. No matter how he felt about this summons, it wouldn’t be wise to agitate her or show any disrespect.

”My name is... in your tongue, hard to say. Esselk’ti, I am called,” she said, pronouncing her name with a strange -click- sound that Rhys wasn’t certain he could replicate. When she turned away from the window to face him, the blue light of the strange flames revealed a face that was smooth and rounded, covered with mottled grey and white fur. Her eyes were large and dark, and her mouth and nose formed a short, whiskered muzzle.

”Rhys, you are. From Phylip’s line. You are the Eldritch lord of this harbor, of the Harbor of Black Sails, yes?” Esselk’ti asked, twitching her whiskers at the kneeling lord as she spoke. ”Stand, Lord Rhys. You kneel not for me. I am Witch of Deep Currents only, not the Mother of Tides. You come when I call, yes?”

”So you may call... ’Auntie,’ in your words, Auntie Esselk’ti, if this pleases you,” she said with a smile that revealed her sharply pointed teeth, followed by a deep, rich chuckle. ”To young, am I, to meet Big Brother Phylip. But old enough, your Auntie to be.”

”I don’t know that I dare to call you ’Auntie’, Lady Esselkti,” Rhys said as he stood, carefully keeping his distance from the powerful witch. She frowned slightly when he spoke her name, though whether it was his refusal to call her ’Auntie’ or his inability to pronounce the -click- in her name, he wasn’t certain.

”I thought that the coven of the Mother of Tides had forgotten us long ago,” he said carefully as he wrestled with memories of the last time he’d stood here, just over twenty years ago.

He’d been wrestling with those memories ever since Mor told him about the blue flame burning on the Isle of the Drowned, and despite promising himself several times that he wouldn’t bring it up, the wounds in his heart wouldn’t let him bite his tongue. Not after what had happened to Ashlynn and the rest of his family as a result...

”I lit the beacon when my eldest daughter was born,” Rhys said, staring defiantly into the witch’s dark eyes. ”I hauled fresh oil myself, and I lit the beacon every day for seven days, but the flames never turned blue. I kept lighting them, once a week for a month, and once a month for a year.... But the flames never turned blue, and no one ever came,” he said, blinking back tears of frustration as he remembered those desperate, terrifying days.

Maela didn’t understand why her husband abandoned her every night after Ashlynn was born, and he couldn’t tell her. The secrets he carried were meant for his firstborn son alone, and no one else, not even his wife.

His father made sure he understood that before he ever spoke a word of their family’s hidden history, and Rhys didn’t need to hear his father explain the reasons twice before he agreed to become the next link in the chain that stretched all the way back to the Blackwell founding ancestor.

Once Rhys fell in love with Maela, and especially as she drew closer and closer to the Church while she struggled to conceive, he agreed with his father’s wisdom even more. After all, how could he explain to his devout wife that the family she’d married into owed its early successes to witchcraft?

”Pearl of Echoes. Missing,” Esselk’ti said, cocking her head to one side as her dark eyes tracked Rhys’s every movement, as if she were somehow judging him. ”I arrive, it is gone already. I fashion, I make, new one. Long to make. Searched four days for giant pearl. Still not great pearl. Will last only five tens of years,” she said apologetically, as though it was some great tragedy that something she’d made would only last for half a century.

”I thought your kin, your line, abandon the Mother of Tides first,” the witch continued as her gaze sharpened. ”Thought you break promise with her. But now... Maybe wrong. Maybe you not the betrayer. Maybe some other take the pearl as treasure,” she speculated.

”Why did you light beacon when daughter born, Lord Rhys?” Esselk’ti asked, changing the topic back to what Rhys had told her. ”What reason makes you call for witch for her?”

”My daughter, Ashlynn,” Rhys said, clenching his hand into a fist to prevent himself from clutching the brass hilt of his sword. ”She was born with the mark of the witch, just like Claire du’Gaal was more than two hundred years ago,” he said, carefully watching the witch’s face for a reaction before he realized he had no way of understanding what the twitches of her whiskers or the tilt of her head meant.

”There isn’t anyone here who could teach her or keep her safe,” he said, plunging ahead even though he couldn’t be certain how the witch felt about his explanation. ”The Mother of Tides hasn’t returned to take a Blackwell as her Witch of Ebbing Tides since Phylip died,” Rhys said, frowning slightly at the witch as he spoke.

”I know, I know,” he added quickly, holding up a hand before the witch could respond to his statement. ”We have our own end of the bargain to keep, but the day when the Eldritch can return to our isles may never come. I wish it would,” he added bitterly, slamming the base of his fist into the wet, stone wall with enough force to send droplets of salty water splashing against his face.

If the Eldritch could return to Blackwell, then there would never have been a reason to send Ashlynn away... But just because he wished the world were different, wouldn’t make it so.

The Kingdom of Gaal was a fragile thing when the bargain was struck. Many Eldritch nations had fallen to the Church’s Crusade, but there were other forces rallying to oppose them. Phylip had already retreated from public life by then, and his grandson Oisin had taken the throne of Blackwell.

At the time, Rhys imagined that things felt very different from how they did now. The Blackwells would hold the harbor and the surrounding islands in trust for the Eldritch until they could return, and Phylip would use the last of his powers to ensure that their Eldritch neighbors were able to escape the fleets sent by the Church from across the sea.

Then, when the kingdom broke under the internal strife that was sure to follow the forceful unification that Charles du’Gaal and the Church subjected them to, the Mother of Tides would return to Blackwell Harbor and select one of Phylip’s descendants to take Phylip’s place at her side as the next Witch of Ebbing Tides.

Only, things hadn’t worked out that way, not even when another human witch attempted to do what Phylip had grown too weak to even contemplate...