The Vampire & Her Witch

”Too much blood has already been spilled over these things, and I, for one, have always wanted to know why...”

Dirar’s question was one shared by many in the great hall. For the first time, the knights and lords of the frontier were hearing a version of their own history that established common ground with the people they’d considered mortal enemies for their entire lives. It wasn’t easy to stomach, especially for those who had lost family and loved ones in one of the many wars fought against the Eldritch.

But even the most stubborn among them found themselves asking the same question that High Lord Dirar had asked. Why? Why fight these wars at all?

”Like the Mother of Forests and the Sovereign of Stars who rescued the Eldritch, the Great Prophet and the Saint Teacher established a new order to rescue the world,” Ignatious said, continuing his story. ”But the threat they faced was different from the one the Eldritch faced, and the tools they had were different too.”

”Their greatest goal was to lock away the power of sorcery and put an end to the Age of Chaos,” Ignatious said. ”The Church of the Holy Lord of Light became the only ones allowed to practice sorcery, and they called their sorcery ’miracles,’” Ignatious explained. ”It helped the people to respect the power of sorcery and the people who used it, and at the same time, within a few generations, created a world where people forgot that they could also create ’miracles’ so long as someone taught them how.”

”Some among the Eldritch are very long-lived,” Ignatious said, bowing his head toward Nyrielle. ”They are able to think and plan across hundreds of years because they will live to see their plans come to fruition, and they will be able to react to things that threaten their intentions. Oracles live longer than most, but unlike vampires, they are not timeless. Instead, they have the gift of prophecy, the ability to see events unfolding long after their own deaths, and to observe how the actions they take today will shape tomorrow.”

”In order to protect humanity long after his death, the Great Prophet sought out seven men of great destiny,” Ignatious said. ”Men who were wise, strong, cunning, just, and capable of ruling over smaller kingdoms than the fallen Empire of Endless Waves. The great prophet feared the scale of struggles that would erupt if there was once again a single throne to rule over all of humanity, but seven smaller kingdoms, even if one warred on another, could not doom the world.”

”The Great Prophet entrusted the land and the people to those rulers and their descendants, starting lineages that endure to this day,” Ignatious said. ”Unlike the Eldritch, wars were never forbidden among the human nations, but forbidding the use of sorcery made the wars that were fought far less deadly, at least for a time,” he said, glancing briefly at Isabell.

”The wars fought in the old countries are still terrible things,” Isabell said. ”The Church can call down fire with their ’miracles’, but we’ve invented ways to rain down fire on a city or an army without the need of sorcery. Wars between nations have become more deadly than they were hundreds of years ago, and I imagine they’ll become more deadly still, even without the power of sorcery.”

”You can see it here,” Isabell continued. ”The armor of knights is better now than it was before. The fortresses we build are stronger. The Kingdom of Gaal has been trying to find ways to counter warriors like Commander Bassinger, Milo, and Harrod,” she said, gesturing to some of the most prominent warriors from different clans within the Vale of Mists.

”Human engineering can’t yet rival the power of the Church’s sorcery,” Isabell concluded. ”But, given time, the day may come when it does.”

”Thankfully, that day is still a ways off,” Ignatious said, though he looked disturbed by Isabell’s confidence that such a day was coming.

”But this lesson is less about the way we wage war than it is about the order that the Great Prophet and the Saint Teacher created,” Ignatious said, returning the lesson to the more important topic for what would come next. ”When the Great Prophet selected rulers he felt were capable he charged them with training their descendants in their ways, preserving the order he’d brought and passing it down from one generation to the next in a line that has been unbroken for close to a thousand years,” Ignatious said.

”And during that time, the Church has acted as both a guide for the descendants of the men the Great Prophet chose and as a check on the spread of sorcery,” Ignatious said. ”In the old countries, it worked for hundreds of years, in part, because the Church found a way to do something... something that reshaped the nature of power in this world.”

”No one can say when or where or even why a True Vampire, a Great Witch or an Oracle will be born,” Ignatious said. ”All we can say is that, when we study those who came before, we find they were born into worlds that needed their power, and they made the world a better place for the people who needed their help.”

”The Great Prophet and the Saint Teacher changed that,” Ignatious said with a pained expression on his face. ”Much as kings pass down their crowns to their sons from one generation to the next, the power of the Sovereign of the Sun and the power of the Sovereign of the Stars have been passed down from one Saint to the next, creating an unbroken line of Oracles using their power to shepherd mankind...”

”It isn’t supposed to be that way,” Ignatious told the gathering. ”And over time, the Church has come to resemble the kingdoms of the old countries more than the collection of sacred guides and guardians the Great Prophet and Saint Teacher created it to be. In the old countries, that mattered less. The Church used the power of prophecy and miracles to wield power and influence, but orders like the Inquisition were small and only rarely confronted sorcery in the wild.”

”That changed when the Church arrived on Eldritch shores,” Ignatious said. ”Here, the Church found an ’enemy’ who used sorcery as freely as it had been used in the Empire of Endless Waves. So it declared them to be ’demons,’ and it sent the entire world to war in order to destroy a people who had struggled so hard to escape extinction...”