The Vampire & Her Witch

Perhaps to some, it would have been the most natural thing in the world. For a True Vampire to marry their Seneschal, a person whose life was bound to theirs until the end of their lives, made the kind of sense that any child who had ever read a fairy tale could understand. But fairy tales were the only places anyone could think of where vampires found love at all.

The Four Deaths were legends, some might even call them boogeymen, creatures that were all but spectres of death itself. A Seneschal was supposed to act like Death’s servant in the world of the living, but in most fairy tales that included such a figure, they were little different than loyal hounds, side characters in the story who appeared as heralds for their mighty masters.

In the history of the Vale of Mists, since Nyrielle’s birth, only one True Vampire had ever brought a Seneschal to visit, and that had been nearly two hundred years ago, not long after Nyrielle’s birth, when Bardas, the Jaws of Death, last paid a visit. Few records of that visit had survived the fall of the Vale, and what records remained made little mention of the man from the Black Striped Clan who followed at Bardas’s side beyond his name and his clan.

But as the crowd looked at the Mother of Trees, kneeling before the Harbinger of Death with tears in her eyes, they were shocked to find those tears answered by faintly pinkish tears running down Lady Nyrielle’s alabaster cheek, though the powerful vampire didn’t seem to be aware of them at all.

"I thought my heart died more than a hundred years ago," Nyrielle said as she lowered herself to one knee, refusing to stand while her lover knelt. "I thought it burned to ash when the Lothians tore our home apart and set fire to everyone and everything I had ever held dear. I thought that I would never know love again."

"But with you, my darling," she said, clutching tightly to Ashlynn’s hands, "I feel so much more than just love. When you are in danger, I am afraid. When you are insulted, I am enraged. And when you are victorious, my heart is filled with warmth and pride."

For months, Nyrielle had tried to answer a question that had plagued her entire life. Had she always been capable of this kind of love, or was it only because she fed on Ashlynn that she could feel so deeply?

Her teacher, Shubnalu, had once said that True Vampires were born without real emotions. He believed that they only learned to imitate the feelings of others during their early years as children and that the sooner they cast off the thin, ’false feelings’ of their childhood, the sooner they could take their proper place in the world.

At the time, Nyrielle disagreed vehemently with her mentor. She knew that she loved both her parents and her grandsire, even if Torbin was Eldritch while her parents had been human, and she found small joys and little sorrows in countless things. The fall of the Vale and the death of her parents had been so painful that she still believed that her feelings had to be real, but in the long years since then, those feelings faded more and more each year.