The Vampire & Her Witch

Outside the window of his bed chamber, the mists of the Vale glowed with a faint, reddish-golden hue as the sun sank toward the tops of the mountains to the west.

Soon, Sir Ollie would return to escort him to a dinner where he would reunite with Lord Loman and the young lords from Hanrahan and Dunn. More importantly, he would meet the legendary High Inquisitor, Ignatious, and the other leaders of the Vale of Mists.

His mind should have been focused on Lady Ashlynn and the mysterious Eldritch Lady of the Vale known as the Harbinger of Death, but all Diarmuid could think about was coming face-to-face with the Inquisitor who had defined for generations what it meant to carry the flames of the Holy Lord of Light in his heart and into battle against the ’demons.’

Diarmuid had been thinking about what to say to Ignatious ever since he learned the man was still alive, if a vampire could be considered alive, and that he resided in the Vale of Mists. When he faced him, whether he was wearing the robes of the Inquisition or the simpler, antiquated outfit that he’d been provided, he wanted to be able to explain himself to the Inquisitor in a way that made it clear that he hadn’t forsaken his faith.

For a moment, Diarmuind turned away from the bed where his clothing lay, his hands twitching towards the few books that he’d brought with him when he left Lothian City, as if there might be answers in the sacred texts.

The sensation that he was falling hadn’t left him, and the words of the Exemplars and High Inquisitors contained in those books looked like a rope he could grab onto... but the illusion that they offered any kind of salvation shattered before it had fully formed in his mind.

These were the books he’d chosen when he thought he would be hunting for ’demon’ in the wilderness. They were practical texts about the frontier, accounts of Eldritch activity in Lothian March, analyses of Eldritch capabilities written by Church officials who’d fought alongside Lothian Lords in every war since the Second Crusade.

The newest book dated from just fifteen years ago, after the last High Inquisitor who fought in the War of Inches returned to the Holy City. The oldest had been written during the reign of Caun Lauthian, when the westward expansion of the Second Crusade was finally broken and humans first learned the word ’vampire.’

These books were useful for understanding the Church’s experiences with the Eldritch over the past two centuries, but they didn’t hold the answers that Diarmuid was seeking in order to settle his heart. They contained nothing about the Great Prophet’s original teachings, and they were written exclusively by men who had been born after the First Crusade, when the Church had already united against the ’demon threat.’

What Diarmuid needed, what he yearned for with an almost physical ache, were the dusty, ancient scrolls preserved in the Sealed Archives of the Holy City. Texts so old they’d been copied and recopied across generations, their parchment brittle with age, their ink faded to brown. Records brought over from the old countries when the seven kingdoms were founded, carefully transported across the seas, and guarded by the Church ever since.

What he wanted to read more than anything was the writings of the Great Prophet Berosus himself. The accounts of his disciples. The earliest interpretations of his teachings, written before the Church had consolidated its power, before kings claimed descent from the Prophet’s followers, before the word ”demon” became synonymous with the Eldritch people.

Diarmuid sighed heavily, resting a hand on the familiar crimson and gold robes that he’d worn on countless trips to the Sealed Archives in the Holy City, as if the fabric itself could help him recall the words he so desperately wanted to hear.

”Chaos, strife, and the sacrifice of tens of thousands,” he recited softly, closing his eyes and letting the familiar words flow from memory. ”These are the fruits harvested by those who would see the power of the divine spread among the masses.”

The Great Prophet Berosus had witnessed the chaos and bloodshed that followed the collapse of the Empire of Eternal Waves firsthand. Diarmuid had read the accounts of the battles fought in that era of madness, not written by Berosus himself, but by Eaghan Owle, the Ascended Scribe, who documented the horrors that the Great Prophet had been sent to rescue mankind from.

The Ascended Scribe wrote of tribes of demons burning their own people by the hundreds. Women and children, the sick and the infirm, piled up like kindling and set ablaze in rituals meant to grant their leaders the power to command the forces of nature as a weapon against their enemies.

”They burned up a thousand of their own,” Diarmuid whispered, remembering the precise words that had haunted him since he’d first read them as an acolyte. ”Women and children, the sick and the infirm, piling up the bodies of their neighbors like kindling. And it gave them the power to command the wind and rain, summoning lightning from the sky until the bodies of their enemies covered the fields like wheat that had been cut for the harvest, and the streams ran red with blood.”

That was the chaos the Great Prophet had ended. He gathered a holy army and led them across the lands, purging the great demons from the length and breadth of what had once been the Empire of Eternal Waves and putting a stop to the constant, senseless slaughter committed by the wicked in an attempt to reclaim the throne of a fallen empire.

When he was done, when he and his disciples had finally purged the last demon lord from the world he lived in, he divided the lands into seven kingdoms, declaring that no one would ever again sit on the Cerulean Throne. It was the end of an era and the dawn of a new one...