The Vampire & Her Witch

When Nyrielle opened the heavy, iron-bound door to her bed chambers, she carried Ashlynn across the threshold as though she was carrying a newlywed bride, refusing to set her down until they’d reached the center of the opulent space.

On the far wall, a fire crackled merrily in the hearth, filling the air with the faint scent of cedar woodsmoke that accompanied a warmth that was rare this far beneath the ground. Previously, on the occasions that Ashlynn visited Nyrielle’s bed chambers, the flames in the hearth had only burned long enough to take some of the chill from the air. A few hours of a burning fire could only do so much to push back the chill that seeped from the stones themselves after all.

Now, however, the entire chamber felt warm and inviting, as if the fire had been kept burning for several days until the stone walls of the chamber themselves were no longer cold to the touch.

The changes in the room went far beyond the simple hearth however. While Nyrielle’s large, four poster bed still dominated the center of the room with its dark curtains and spills of delicate lace that trimmed the soft, satin bedspread, a new feature in the room immediately commanded Ashlynn’s full attention.

”Nryi, you,” Ashlynn whispered softly, unable to take her eyes from the sight of the wall that faced the foot of the bed.

”I painted it for you,” Nyrielle said as she set Ashlynn down gently on her feet. ”I did my best to capture every detail you showed me in your dream,” she said. ”I, I hope that you don’t mind,” she said quietly as she felt the echo of Ashlynn’s heartbeat within her chest begin to race.

”Mind?” Ashlynn said numbly as she took two hesitant steps toward the painting before she even realized she’d moved. ”How could I mind something like... something like this?”

After Nyrielle’s conversation with Zedya about what she could do to make her bed chambers more welcoming for her lover, Nyrielle had gone far beyond looking for ways to add hints of life and growing things to her cold, dark chambers.

Her room already held one of her largest paintings of the ancient fortress and the city around it in the days of her youth, before the Lothians had put it to the torch. It also held one of Zedya’s best tapestries depicting the Vale of Mists as her progeny saw it, a place of vast trees shrouded in layers of silvery fog that promised safety and refuge for everyone who had been burned by the greed and ambitions of human rulers.

Both pieces brought a trace of life and vibrancy to the dark chambers but neither of them would speak to Ashlynn in a way that would truly welcome her lover and make her feel at home. So, rather than adding another painting of the Vale or even one of the Briar where Ashlynn had spent so much time mastering her powers as a witch, Nyrielle had taken up her paintbrush to transform an entire wall of her bedchamber into a vision of a place that she had only visited in Ashlynn’s dreams.

Gently swaying seagrass framed the bottom of the mural, faithfully recreating the look Nyrielle remembered from the edge of the cliff where she and Ashlynn had enjoyed a moonlit picnic beneath the stars. The sky she’d painted was light, with the faintest hint of peach coloring the bottoms of wispy clouds in the moments before the sun would rise above the waves in Blackwell Harbor.

As Ashlynn examined the mural in greater and greater detail, she realized that everything in the harbor had been recreated so perfectly that she could read the names of several familiar ships, captured in moments of stillness as they raised their sails to ride the morning tide.

The view of Blackwell City was just as detailed, with streets laid out exactly as they were in Ashlynn’s memories, as if Nyrielle had possessed a perfect map to reference when bringing the city in Ashlynn’s dream to life on the bed chamber wall. There were even tiny people moving about, opening shops after the previous night’s celebration or collecting near the docs to begin the day’s work.

”You even, even added this,” Ashlynn whispered, falling to her knees before the mural as her fingers traced the well worn footpath that she and Jocelynn had taken when they snuck out of Blackwell Manor at night to watch the sun come up and the ships setting sail. And at the opposite end of the mural, seen in the distance as it reached the far wall, Blackwell Manor itself, perched in its stately position atop a ridge, overlooking the harbor below.

”I thought about adding our picnic blanket and the basket you filled with delicacies from the festival,” Nyrielle said softly as she knelt next to her lover. ”After all, this is the memory of your home that you chose to share with me,” she said, wrapping her arms around Ashlynn in a tender embrace. ”But I wanted to give this to you the way it always was, not just the way it was that one time...”

”It’s perfect,” Ashlynn said, leaning her head on Nyrielle’s shoulder as her eyes continued to scan the mural, picking out one familiar feature after another. ”But why? This must have taken you days... Did you start the day we returned?” Ashlynn asked, turning slightly to gaze into Nyrielle’s shining, midnight blue eyes.

”Not quite,” Nyrielle admitted. ”It was after Zedya and Lennart’s wedding when I realized that I was jealous of the two of them,” she said slowly, choosing her words with care as she tried to find a way to express the emotions that felt so twisted together and tangled within her heart.

”I, I haven’t allowed you to share a bed with me when the sun rises,” Nryielle explained, struggling to meet Ashlynn’s limpid emerald eyes as she confessed what felt like a deep, personal failing. ”You have been present when I seal myself away in a daybed while we’re traveling, but you’ve never seen what truly happens to me, to any vampire, when the sun rises.”

”But, talking to Zedya about how she falls asleep in Lennart’s embrace, I realized that maybe, maybe it was wrong of me to send you away before the sun rose each day,” Nyrielle said faintly. ”So, I wanted to make this a place for both of us... one that you didn’t have to flee before the break of dawn.”