The Vampire & Her Witch

”Will ye surrender? Or die?”

Sybyll addressed herself to the Temple Guard, who shrank back from the writhing, sobbing figure of Sir Tommin, as if they were afraid that they would be infected by the darkness that tormented him and caused his Holy Light Blade to turn against him. But when she spoke, her voice was loud enough to resound off the town walls and carry across Hanrahan town, all the way to the keep where she suspected Ian Hanrahan was still cowering behind his fortress walls.

Around the plaza and even on the town walls, the fighting stopped as the Eldritch forces withdrew at least a few paces from their opponents, stopping mid-assault to give the humans a chance to accept Dame Sybyll’s terms.

In the Eldritch way, the greatest warriors of either side had just fought a duel for supremacy, and the victor couldn’t be clearer. Everyone in the Second Army was clear on the fact that the greatest combatant the humans had to offer was the Templar with the Holy Light Blade. Now that he had been defeated, there was no one left who could stop Dame Sybyll from slaughtering every last soldier in town.

Since no one could stop her, it was the height of foolishness to throw lives away for nothing, and the Eldritch people learned this in nursery rhymes about the First Warrior. After all, the tradition of duels and challenges fought between the strongest for control of a nation, as well as the responsibility of the victor to care for the defeated, was a tradition that had preserved the lives of Eldritch Clans who would have otherwise slaughtered each other for thousands of years.

But humans were notoriously stubborn, and Lord Jalal refused to relax, even though their defeat should have been obvious to everyone present. The Church, especially, wasn’t one to accept defeat easily, and with so many of their Templars and Temple Guard present, he feared they would do something... drastic.

While everyone hesitated, Hauke quietly completed his sorcery, transforming sheets of flowing, melted snow into solid walls of thick, crystal-clear ice, complete with narrow slits for archers to fire through in the same style as the walls favored by the human defenders.

The greatest difference between the walls of ice shaped by Hauke’s sorcery and the ones designed by humans was the inclusions of slopes, curves, and angles, each designed to deflect force away from a defender or funnel a surge of avalanche-like force harmlessly around the wall instead of resisting it directly.

The walls weren’t something of Hauke’s own design, but a sophisticated work of engineering created by the Frost Architect Eraric and embedded in the Runic Blade of Eternal Ice. On any other occasion, the young Frost Walker lord would have immediately begun to study the frozen structure, learning everything he could from the mentor who had left behind the sword as a final, complicated legacy. Now, however, he sighed in relief that there was a layer of protection between the soldiers of Sybyll’s army and the ranks of human soldiers arrayed against them.

The sound of crystalline ice forming and the sudden emergence of a pair of fortified walls defending the invading army seemed to startle the defenders out of their stupor as the various leaders among the Hanrahan forces realized that the fighting could resume at any minute if they didn’t respond to Sybyll’s surrender demand.

”Don’t listen to the words of this demon!” Templar Aldric shouted as he raised his faintly glowing sword up high. He’d already lost one brother to the Cat Lord, and even though Sir Tommin wasn’t dead, from his anguished sobs, the blinded Templar likely wished that he was. To any other man, it would have been obvious that surrender was the only possible answer if he wished to preserve his life.

But Templars weren’t ordinary men, and their oaths and devotion to the ideals of the Holy Lord of Light were more important than their meager lives. If they died fighting to the last man, then their swords would have carved open their path to the Heavenly Shores, but if they forsook their ways and made peace with demons, then their souls were sure to be damned to a life of suffering when they were reborn.

To Alric, his fellow Templars, and the men of the Temple Guard, it wasn’t a choice between surrender and death, it was a choice between a glorious afterlife and several lifetimes of suffering until they could atone for the sin of surrender.

”If you listen to her,” Aldric continued in a voice that grew stronger and more confident the longer he spoke. ”If you listen to her, then you’re little better than a heretic! The Church will remember you for your cowardice, and it will hunt you down for your betrayal,” he threatened.

”But, but we can’t fight them!” Sir Niall cried, pointing with a finger that shook and trembled. He felt less knightly than he had since the day he’d watched his father burn on the pyre, but he didn’t care. Like a foolish schoolboy, he’d sworn to uphold the virtue of Truth, and he spoke the truth as he saw it now.

”We aren’t real soldiers,” Sir Niall protested as he looked at the men who had come from his village, wearing armor and carrying weapons that they had never used against anything more threatening than a band of horse thieves. ”My men have farms to go home to. And wives and children, some of them,” he added as he thought of the charming young woman he’d spent the evening with in the hopes that she might come home to his village with him when this was all over.

”If we, if we surrender,” the young knight asked in a wavering voice. ”Can we just go home? We won’t take sides between you and Baron Hanrahan,” he added, hanging his mace on a loop at his waist and holding up his hands. ”We’ll just go home to our village until this is all over.”

”You think she’ll stop here?” Sir Thorryn shouted from the opposite side of the plaza. ”We all stand together! Villager and Templar, Hanrahan and Lothian, and we have a chance to stop this evil from destroying our homes. They already attacked the caravans, what makes you think they won’t come for you in your village next?” the veteran knight asked.

Before either the youthful Sir Niall or Dame Sybyll could respond to Thorryn’s call for solidarity among the defenders in repelling the demons, one of Hanrahan Town’s defenders made their decision for everyone, because it had always been their decision to make.

Lord Jalal felt his fur stand on end, and every instinct within his body screamed that he needed to be somewhere else, anywhere but the spot where he currently stood. Feline reflexes twisted his body as he searched for the source of the deeply ominous feeling an instant before a blinding white light consumed his world, followed by burning, tearing pain.

From high atop Hanrahan Keep, an arrow formed of pure, radiant starlight streaked through the night. There was no whistling of wind or any other sound to mark its passage, and most of the people gathered in the plaza never even saw it coming. Among the defenders, only the Templars had a brief inkling of the arrival of a power so sacred that it cleansed their hearts of doubts and reminded them of the tremendous power of the Holy Lord of Light above to aid them in their fight against demons.

Among Dame Sybyll’s forces, Heila was the most sensitive to the flow of mystic energy in the air but the arrow of light moved too swiftly for her to respond to it, and even Sybyll herself was still too weakened by her confrontation with Sir Tommin and his Holy light blade to do more than watch in horror as the arrow of light tore into her closest friend from Airgead mountain, enveloping him in a flash of light as Loman Lothian finally made his move...