The Vampire & Her Witch

The impromptu celebration thrown in honor of Ollie’s transformation into the Cypress Witch lasted until the small hours of the morning when the earliest rays of dawn began to paint the mists of the vale in soft golden hues, and the frost that had collected on long grasses faded away as though it were a dream to delicate to survive the light of day.

While the villagers themselves seemed content to continue the festivities, Ashlynn insisted on bringing Ollie back to the ancient fortress, pointing out that even though he appeared to have been asleep for several days, the trial had actually been very exhausting for Ollie and what he needed most now was rest.

"How is the castle town so different already?" Ollie said, staring out the windows of the carriage as it rolled through the large gate in the wall that stood as the town’s final line of defense against Lothian aggression.

The current wall protecting the city hardly seemed like a wall for the tiny castle town, standing thousands of paces away from the nearest building, but the new wall had been built atop the remains of the original city wall, at a time when Vale City had been a much larger settlement.

Now, however, the space between the town and the wall seemed to have been packed full of wagons, carts, and hundreds upon hundreds of tents. That alone shouldn’t have been surprising given the size of the army that Nyrielle had brought back from across the mountains. What was surprising, however, at least to Ollie, was the amount of construction that was occurring, even in the chill and damp autumn of the Vale of Mists.

"This is Lady Ashlynn’s doing," Heila said proudly, beaming from her seat beside the Mother of Trees. "She’s trying to encourage people to settle here, and she hired more than a hundred architects and builders in High Fen City to spend a year here to expand the city."

"But, it’s only been ten days since you returned to the city. This is a bit much, isn’t it?" The young knight said, pointing out the window at several long, wide trenches that were marked off by long lengths of twine. "Are these supposed to be streets? Why are they digging such deep trenches?"

"For water and waste," Ashlynn said with a faint smile. It wasn’t until she spent time among the Eldritch that she realized how cramped and foul human settlements like Lothian City or even her beloved Blackwell City had become with too many people creating too much waste in too small an area. "This is the system they use in High Fen City to keep trash and waste from piling up in the streets between market days."

"But the size of this all," Ollie said, still shocked at how many of these strange, trench-lined roads had been cleared in between the hundreds of tents. After helping to build a village for the refugees, he had a much better frame of reference for the transformation that was taking place before his eyes, but he still struggled to imagine needing as many new streets as Ashlynn seemed to be laying out in the castle town.

"Ollie," Ashlynn said, her mood turning slightly more serious. "We’re about to fight the greatest war the Vale of Mists has seen since the days of the Second Crusade. It’s no exaggeration to say that if we lose, it will be the end of the Vale of Mists as we know it, and anyone lucky enough to survive will be forced to flee across the mountains again, and this time, they may never return."