The Vampire & Her Witch

While Ashlynn focused on the conversation that had sprung up between Rastlan, Jocelynn, and Heila, Nyrielle’s attention was focused on the only person in the room who held real power and hadn’t already committed to their plans.

”Outside, you said that the only path you could see to save your people was to fight beside us,” Nyrielle said bluntly, cutting to the heart of the matter. ”Is that your prophecy, or one of your predecessors?”

”It isn’t a prophecy at all,” Dirar said, flicking his tail as if he were shooing away a nuisance. ”My predecessor, Bujir, called himself the Keeper of Heaven’s Will,” the High Lord said with a snort. ”When the Verdant Hills fell, followed by the death of High Lord Torbin, he became convinced that our doom had been written in the Heavens for all to see and that it was only a matter of time before the Southern Steppe burned the way the Vale had.”

”I remember,” Nyrielle said, clenching a fist as she confronted an unpleasant memory. ”He wanted my promise to defend half a million of your people fleeing through Lothian lands and the High Pass in exchange for the support of your soldiers and sorcerers. It would have been a disastrous war to the death against the humans’ Church, and he was willing to concede every inch of ground east of the mountains if it would buy him a window to escape through.”

”There’s nowhere for half a million people to go west of the mountains,” Dirar said. ”He looked. He spent years neglecting his home while he searched for some kind of promised land in the west. Everywhere we could have gone, we’d have been forced to fight the people who were already there.”

”With half a million of your strongest,” Thane said, joining the conversation from his seat beside Nyrielle. ”You could have claimed a sizeable territory. You might not have been able to displace another High Lord like Hamdi, but you could have settled around Crystal Lake as neighbors to the Ancient Clan, or along the coast between the White River and the Great Marsh.”

”Only if we had a leader who was both strong enough and ruthless enough to build his next throne out of the bones of his enemies,” Dirar said. ”Bujir wasn’t that kind of man. He burned himself out searching for a path that didn’t exist, and he was half mad in his final years, unable to tell the difference between his visions and the world we all live in.”

”I killed Bujir to free us from his madness,” Dirar said. ”If I hadn’t, he might have opened the gates of our cities to welcome Caleb Lothian and his Templars instead of rallying the herds to fight back against him. But I made the mistake of reading his writings,” he said, shuddering visibly as he recalled the ’gift’ bestowed on him by his predecessor.

”Bujir wrote that whoever claimed his throne would be the last High Lord of the Southern Steppe,” Dirar explained. ”Much of what followed sounded like lunacy. The sun and the stars sharing the sky in a world of fire and blood, white beaches made entirely of bones, a single birth demanding two deaths...”

”This is why I never bothered trying to understand the prophecies of the Church,” Nyrielle said with a snort. ”They all read much the same. Cryptic, disturbing, and easily transformed into a whip to drive a mob of ignorant faithful. I hope you burned what you found,” Nyrielle said.

”I would have,” Dirar said, nodding in agreement. ”And perhaps I should have,” he said, turning his gaze to the human lord sitting next to him. ”But a raven brought me a river of wine, guarded by the bones of the free, and just as the writings warned, I find myself drunk on the taste of peace,” he said with a helpless shrug. ”Lunacy or not, I cannot deny the role your messenger played in changing my mind.”

”Wait,” Erling Fayle blurted, blinking several times in surprise as he found himself the apparent subject of an Eldritch lord’s deranged prophecy. ”Are you saying that the peace between us is all because of what this High Lord Bujir wrote before he died?”

”Prophecies are rarely self-fulfilling,” Dirar said, shaking his head. ”I’d all but forgotten this one when Wolstan approached me, asking if I would accept a truce with a human who was little more than a boy perched atop his father’s throne. I thought it unlikely to last, but even if we gained a year or two of respite along the northern border, it was worth taking the risk that you’d use the time to build up your forces.”

”I doubt my ’forces’ would have done anything more than inconvenience you, Highest One,” Erling said, smoothly adopting the form of address he’d heard Rastlan use when speaking to a high lord. ”A few of my knights and our men would have been no match against people who could call down thunder and lightning.”

”You forget, Lord Erling,” Thane said. ”If you’d been willing to become a puppet of the Church, you’d have had ’miracle workers’ of your own, calling down pillars of fire or arrows of light to strike down your enemies. Caleb Lothian and his Templars carved a bloody swath through the Southern Steppe during the War of Four Templars. You could have done the same, and you’d have been praised for it.”

”I don’t want that kind of praise,” Erling said flatly. ”I just want to take care of my people.”

”I’m much the same,” Dirar said, clapping the young lord on the shoulder. ”But I dislike walking the path laid out for me by others. I befriended Wolstan and his Freeholders because I admired their desire to live free of the human kingdom, even if they refused to embrace the freedom of the endless waves of grass,” Dirar said.

”But when I found my hooves upon the path that Bujir wrote of, I returned to his writings and the writings of those who went before him,” Dirar said. ”I found two things that I’ve only recently come to understand.”

”The first one came in the oldest writings of the Southern Steppe,” Dirar explained. ”Some of which had been deemed too dangerous to be read by any other than the lords of the steppe. It said that the Heavens had been seized and that the sun and stars would chart the way to our doom at the behest of thieves.”

”The human saints,” Nyrielle said, nodding in understanding without explaining to Erling or anyone else at the table who didn’t already know the secrets that the Mother of Thorns had revealed to Ashlynn.

”I think so too,” Dirar said. ”I found something else of interest among those writings,” he added, glancing briefly in Ashlynn’s direction. ”Something I didn’t understand until I talked to Wolstan.”

”I’ve read that the Will of the Heavens can be shattered when the Millstone of Time is soaked in the blood of a Great Witch,” Dirar said, watching both Nyrielle and Ashlynn closely for their reaction. ”So tell me, Lady Nyrielle... Was my ancient predecessor right? Or am I doomed to watch my home burn as yours once did while my people die for believing that I could trample the fate Bujir saw for them?”