Chapter 293: Estranged Son
Seeing the spark of passion rekindling in Ignatious’s eyes brought a cold smile to Nyrielle’s face. It had taken seventy years of exile, but it seemed like the former Inquisitor had turned his fury away from her and onto the Church that made him the man he’d been when she captured him.
"You seem resolved to your fate," Nyrielle said, leaning back in her chair as she studied her progeny’s reactions. "Has Hamdi had a hand in that?"
"High Lord Hamdi grew bored of me within a few years of my arrival," Ignatious said with a resigned shake of his head. Lately, I see him once a decade or less. My years in his care were... hard," he said as his eyes gazed into the distance.
When Nyrielle brought him to the western lands, it was originally to loan him to Amahle so that the witch could study the magic practiced by humans. Nyrielle wanted the insights that a witch could offer and there were things that Amahle wanted to understand beyond just the methods that humans used to practice their strange magics.
When she’d finished with the Inquisitor, rather than allow him to return to the Vale of Mists, Nyrielle had asked Hamdi to give him a home and an opportunity to learn what it meant to live his life as a vampire.
At first, the aging vampire seemed delighted by the human zealot. He took great pleasure in pushing Ignatious to the brink of starvation before throwing him into the wilderness, or confining him in a cell with young innocents, eager to see if the human’s hatred of all ’demons’ would allow him to feed on such forbidden fruit or if his morals would assert themselves even in the face of his hunger.
These games had only lasted for a few years, however, before the High Lord passed responsibility for Ignatious on to his own progeny. There was nothing interesting about stripping the broken man down further and since he expected Nyrielle to reclaim him one day or another, he saw no point in investing in rebuilding Ignatious into a functioning person.
"Rathin was my keeper in the darkest years," he said, returning his gaze to Nyrielle. "He left me in the dark and brought criminals for me to feed on. Eventually, he took me out, I think out of boredom more than anything else, but I learned much from him about hunting and the rules of the Tangled Wood."
"I do not expect that your existence here was comfortable," Nyrielle said. Though her tone was neutral, a very small part of her was relieved that the years had been unkind to him. While she no longer held a grudge for what he had done, at least, not enough of one to act upon, his crimes couldn’t easily be forgiven.