The Vampire & Her Witch

When Ashlynn and Nyrielle entered the room, there wasn’t a single person who didn’t turn to look at them, though each person’s gaze contained very different feelings.

Isabell smiled warmly at the couple as she witnessed the radiant love shining between them. It took Isabell a moment to realize that the warmth she felt in her chest wasn’t just her own happiness, but an echo of the joy that Ashlynn felt, reverberating through the connection they shared like wind fluttering through the leaves of a tree.

Isabell felt happy seeing her friend so deeply in love, in part, because Ashlynn herself was happy, and that same feeling rippled through Heila, Ollie, and Virve as well. But while the entire coven noticed the feelings of warmth, lov,e and affection flowing from Ashlynn, only Heila realized how deliberate it was.

Amahle called it ’A Mother’s Shelter’, and claimed that it was something that all great witches were capable of. For the Mother of Thorns, the expression of power manifested as a feeling of great safety, as if anything that threatened the people she protected could never draw close without being torn to pieces by the thorns that protected them.

When Ashlynn created a place of shelter, she projected the feeling of a vast tree, protecting everyone beneath its branches from blistering sun, driving snow, wind, and rain alike. So long as people drew close to her, they would be safe from a hostile world.

Ashlynn clearly knew there were tensions in the room. Some, like Loman’s wounded defensiveness, she could predict. But others, like Diarmuid’s religious sentiments, were like traps buried beneath the soil. Saying the wrong thing, or stepping in the wrong plac,e could trigger a response that felt wildly disproportionate to the person who had committed the offense, while drawing righteous fury from the offended party.

Other times, she might have been willing to accept the risks that a gathering like this would be explosive, but tonight, she had no desire to see a repeat of her own first dinner in this dining room. She’d misread Nyrielle’s intentions then, lashed out at her from a place of fear and pain, and she’d nearly ruined everything from the start if not for Nyrielle’s exceptional patience and grace.

Now, as she met Diarmuid’s gaze on her way to the head of the table, Ashlynn almost visibly sighed in relief. She didn’t see hostility or anger in his eyes, but deep curiosity instead, and a glimmer of genuine, almost childlike wonder as he experienced her witchcraft yet again.

”Now I understand why the Church is so terrified of witches,” Diarmuid said as Ashlynn and Nyrielle drew closer. ”It would be very difficult to stand before our congregations and claim that the only Saints to walk the face of the world were the ones who followed the sun and the stars.”

”I’ve been called ’Saintess’ before,” Ashlynn said, pausing behind Hugo and Ignatious as she looked across the table at the Inquisitor who had abandoned his priestly vestments in favor of the simple tunic and breeches preferred by the Vale’s knights.

”From one perspective, it isn’t wrong,” she said with a light sigh. ”Great Witches, True Vampires, and High Oracles, we all have some things in common. If the Church just revered High Oracles as Saints, I might be able to accept being compared to one,” she said as her tone unintentionally hardened.

”As it stands,” she said carefully, not wanting to break the peaceful atmosphere she was working hard to cultivate. ”I find the comparison a little... uncomfortable,” she said charitably.

What she wanted to say was that, in her mind, the words ’Saint’ and ’Charlatan’ were interchangeable. The people who had stolen the power of Oracles, binding it to the Church for generations upon generations while receiving the veneration of the masses, deserved to be called far worse, but ’charlatan’ felt appropriate after so many years of deception.

”I didn’t mean to offend, your Dominion,” Diarmuid said apologetically. ”I’m here because I’m looking for the truths that can’t be found within the Church’s walls. I saw what you did in the courtyard, and I can feel your presence now. It’s very different from His Eminence in the Holy City, but no less impressive.”

”I think, if the faithful were to see you and what you’re capable of, without being told that you’re a witch, they’d arrive at the conclusion that you must be a Saintess,” Diarmuid said. ”And I think that terrifies the Church.”

Of course, there were other things that would terrify the Church about Lady Ashlynn. Her relationship with the ’Demon Lady of the Vale’ would be seen as heretical even if Lady Nyrielle weren’t a vampire, and the fact that Lady Ashlynn was still supposed to be married to Lord Owain would only make matters worse.

Diarmuid himself had ceased caring about such minor heresies long ago. He’d seen too many women battered by their husbands, or worse, to feel that Lady Ashlynn owed Lord Owain any kind of faithfulness after what he’d done to her, no matter what Church doctrine said about a husband’s duty to become the sun and stars of their family.

He’d also met far too many women who found safety and comfort in each other’s arms when the Church would have sent them back into the arms of the very same monsters they were fleeing from.

In his eyes, such unions were proof that the Holy Lord of Light opened many paths to love, and he could only be grateful that women like Lady Ashlynn found someone they could open their hearts to after suffering as greatly as they had.

Of course, the Church would say that its doors were never closed to women who needed to escape the monsters they were married to. Orders like the Confessors had filled whole convents with women who needed to seek shelter from the dangers within their own homes.

But Diarmuid had seen those convents firsthand, and he knew very well that fear of the world outside the convent’s walls wasn’t the same as faith in the mission of the Church. Given the choice, he’d rather see women like Ashlynn finding new love and starting new lives of their own, no matter who the stars in the heavens guided them to... even if the love they found was as heretical as the one that Lady Ashlynn seemed to have discovered here in the Vale of Mists.