ARC 7: CHAPTER 27: VERA

The sound of humming lured me from my sleep.

It was a woman’s voice, low and pleasant, improvising an off-key tune. The canopy of a forest whispered around me, and not just in a poetic sense. There were voices in those rustling branches, constant and just at the edge of understanding. They didn’t sound sinister. It was just the Wend talking to itself.

But that humming, that wasn’t any spirit or spiritual echo. I cracked a sore eye open and found Delphine nearby. She looked to be mixing something in a little bowl, and very much seemed the witch in that moment.

“You didn’t kill me,” I mumbled during a lull in her song.

She spoke without turning around or stopping her work. “How do you know? I could be a necromancer on top of everything else.”

I hm’d in response, closing my eye again. “Where’s Vicar?”

“Getting a sense of our surroundings. Maybe he ran off to find the wizard without us, but he’s stayed this long. I imagine he’ll be back. You’ve been out for a day, or so Renuart tells me. I can’t tell time in this place. You were… possessed, I guess is the best word for it. We performed an exorcism. A shoddy one, but I worked with the tools I had. Whatever that demon put in you, it’s out now, but it’ll have left a scar on your aura. I’m afraid there’s not much I can do for that.”

“…Shit.” It was all I could say in response. A whole day. Lias would have been warned by his familiar. We’d lost our chance.

I couldn’t bring myself to feel angry over it. Instead I took stock of myself. I wore nothing save for my trousers, which had been cleaned. The rest of my clothes and my armor lay nearby, also scrubbed. Delphine had used my Briar cloak as a blanket to keep it all on. I was covered in bandages, some of them stained, and everything felt numb. Probably more of whatever drug the doctor had given me before I’d blacked out. The worst wound seemed to be on my chest, which was wrapped in many layers of bloodied linen and felt hot, infected. Where had Delphine kept all of this?

“Your cape bit me,” the doctor said.

“Sorry.”

She shrugged, then turned and offered me the bowl. Some of her fingers were wrapped in new bandages. “Drink this.”

She helped me sit up against the side of the tree, then watched as I sipped at her potion. I grimaced at the taste, but took all of it and handed her back the bowl.

“Renuart found us drinkable water,” Delphine told me after she’d packed her supplies away. “It tastes strange. Like honey and moonlight… and I know moonlight isn’t a taste, it’s just what came to me at the time.”

I nodded, resting my head back against the tree. “That’s how this place is.” I paused and added, “Why do you call him that?”

“What do you mean?”

I opened my eyes to look at her. “Renuart Kross is just a mask, a deception. He’s not a knight, certainly not human. He steals souls. He damns people. You treat him almost like a friend.”

Delphine finished packing her things, rolled them into a bundle of cloth, then rested that bundle on her thighs. She held it a moment, almost as though for comfort, and took some time thinking over her words. “Vicar isn’t his name, either. It’s just a title, and not one I think really applies anymore. He’s outcast, just like us.” 𝘙äŊỐ฿Ęʂ

“Like us?” I chuckled hoarsely, though it hurt to do so. “I’m not so sure.”

Delphine furrowed her brow. “What do you mean?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. A lot of this doesn’t add up, but maybe I’m just a very paranoid man who doesn’t trust anyone. Besides, I’m not much of an outcast these days. I put myself right back in the thick of it, fool that I am.”

She had no response to that. Neither did she dismiss me or walk away as she usually did. I sensed something different about the scholar’s demeanor. A hesitance, like she was on the precipice of a decision. A day ago, this would have been where I’d find a reason to deflect, but I was just too damn tired.

She had me trapped, and I had her trapped in this eldritch place, and we couldn’t hide from each other anymore.

“I think…” Delphine curled her legs up. “I think you and I, and Vicar even, are each more alike than any of us really want to think. You’re a great warrior famous across the realms, I’ve got my name in books that cardinals and kings read, and Vicar has seen kingdoms rise and die since long before either of us were born. And yet, none of us really have anything we want, do we? The three of us are teetering on an edge all the time, and one push in either direction will send us tumbling.”

Tumbling into what? I wanted to ask, but part of me wanted to hear where she was going, so instead I asked, “What is it you want, Delphine?”

“I want to be a great scholar,” she said. “I want my name to be spoken in universities a hundred years from now, a thousand. I have so much to say, so much to learn, and so much about this world we live in is a wonderful mystery. I love the unknown, and thinking about it, and I want other people to think about the world they live in. It’s far too common for people to just believe a certain thing, or accept a certain way of things, and never question or wonder. It’s in the wondering that I find myself, in not knowing what to think and then dedicating my mind to finding those answers. And when I’m wrong, oh! Alken, I love being wrong, to know that not everything I believed terrible is absolute.”

I opened my mouth to speak, coughed, and waited until Delphine handed me a skin of water before speaking again. It did taste like honey, and like moonlight.

“But what if you find out something awful?” I rasped. “What if you seek answers in this life and what’s beyond it, and what’s past that shroud is terrible? A nightmare.”

Delphine shrugged. “Maybe our world is just a little pocket of dreams inside a vast and predatory sea. But that’s why we have knights.”

I snorted. “Don’t you hate soldiers?”

“I do. But the idea of knights, the stories we tell about them… there’s truth there.”

“And what do you think Vicar wants?” I asked. “If he’s so like us.”

Delphine shrugged and smiled. Was that the first smile I’d seen from her? “I don’t know, and that’s why I’ve been so fascinated by him. I think he believes in something, and it isn’t all fire and brimstone.”

I knew the next question. What do you want?

Delphine stared at me with her knowing brown eyes. I sighed. How did I answer that? It took me a while to find something.

“I want… I want my homeland to not be constantly teetering on the brink of eating itself.”

I stared out at the Wend, at the light that wasn’t light tumbling through its trees like fog. Though the branches rustled and the woods whispered, there was no breeze on my face. It wasn’t hot or cold. The air didn’t smell like anything, or so I thought, but then I’d breathe in scents I felt I should know but couldn’t name. It was all memory, all dreams and times converged together and lost between the cracks. My eyes drifted down to my scarred hand. Even unarmored, it glowed with a faint yellow light.

“I don’t mind fighting. I’m good at fighting. I want to fight for someone with a good heart who’s trying to make a difference. I want to know that every drop of blood I shed matters, that I made the world a better place, a safer one, not just filled it with more anger. I know that’s foolish. I know that when you fight, someone else is always hurt, but there are wolves and lions out there and if someone doesn’t fight them then they’ll eat their fill.”

“…That’s true enough,” Delphine whispered.

My eyes closed again. I almost stopped there, almost. It was hard to say what made me keep going. Something about this place, the way it felt so unreal and yet so true? Perhaps because I was talking to a woman who’d once been a priestess. The same kind as her.

“I don’t want to be alone,” I confessed in a small voice. “I’m afraid that being alone makes an animal of me. When I’m alone, all that’s left is them.”

“Them?” Delphine asked.

“The dead. The ones I killed. The ones I failed. The ones I couldn’t save. They never leave me alone. Even here, I can feel them not far off. Soon as I stop looking, they’ll crawl in and start whispering hate at me again.”

I looked at Delphine, at Sister Vera, and met her eyes. I knew she could see the fear in mine, and that a knight is never supposed to show fear, but I didn’t care just then. “I want my friends to not be monsters. I don’t want to fail my queen again. I made promises to her, new ones and old ones, and if I fuck it all up again, I’m not sure there will be much left of me after. I want to face Lias and hit him until he tells me why he’s been such a right bastard, and I…”

I don’t want to kill him. I couldn’t bring myself to say that much. There didn’t seem a point.

“I regret so much. I want to stop regretting.”

Delphine hesitated, then said, “I think that last is the truest thing you’ve said so far.”

I narrowed my eyes and glanced away from her face. “And we’re back to this again.”

“I’m serious. Do you regret it? What you did?”

I took in a deep breath, fighting to keep the rare calm this situation had placed over me. “Do I regret slaying a demon who meant to devour my soul? Do I regret stopping a being who conspired with a madman to destroy countless lives?”

I expected anger, a dismissive scoff, some biting remark. I hoped for it, because it was easier than actually having this conversation. But perhaps Delphine had been thinking about this the past day while I’d been unconscious, because she didn’t rise to my bait. Her gaze remained steady on the side of my face, lingering on the scars running across its left side.

“It’s easy to think about it that way, isn’t it?” She said. “To convince yourself you did the right thing, the necessary thing, the sane thing.”

“I did,” I said harshly.

“I don’t believe you actually think so!” She leaned forward, and some of her own anger did reveal itself. “In fact, I am fairly certain you do not actually believe you did the right thing.”

“And how do you know? You don’t know anything about me, Sister Vera.”

“That is not my name. And you won’t avoid this by trying to anger me.”

“Avoid what?” I sat up against the tree, grimacing at the pain and turning to face her best I could. “What is it you’re so fixated on convincing me of? That she wasn’t evil? That she didn’t mean me or anyone else harm? In what world can I believe that!? This isn’t some storybook, some repressed scribe’s fantasy where the pretty hell nymph who opens her legs for the mortal idiot actually gives a shit for him.”

Delphine’s face hardened. Her reaction to my vulgarity satisfied my anger, and I gave her my cruelest smile. “Face it, Sister Vera. You and I were both dupes. We were seduced by a monster from the darkest, most vile corner of the afterlives. We were meals to that thing, meals and toys, nothing more.”

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“If you believe that,” Delphine spat, “then why were you crying?”

“I…” I blinked at her, confused. “What?”

Delphine had tears in her eyes, mostly from anger, and her voice dropped into a hush. “When you killed her shadow. You were crying.”

I shook my head slowly. “No, I—”

“You were! I saw it. You looked like your heart was breaking apart when you swung that axe. There was no triumph in your face, no satisfaction. You were grieving.”

“That’s… ridiculous.”

Had I been weeping? I’d been so angry, so exhausted. I just wanted the nightmare to be over. I’d acted with barely a thought. Delphine had seemed possessed, and the scadudemon was spitting venom at me, and I’d just… acted. Then everything else happened after, and I hadn’t really given myself time to think about it.

Delphine watched me, not bothering to wipe away her own tears. My jaw clenched. “If you’re Vicar or one of those mirror demons in disguise…”

“I’m just myself. Human. Alder Knights can tell lies, right? Look into my eyes and tell me I’m not human.”

I did. She didn’t so much as blink, and I looked away again.

Damn it.

“There’s no point to this,” I said. “It doesn’t matter if the way I feel is… confused. There’s not even a way to tell how much of that is me and how much of it was what that thing put in me. They get into your head, Delphine, they make you think and feel things that aren’t right. Hell is full of the dupes of the Abgrüdai.”

“You’re not wrong.”

Her agreement irritated me more. “Then why keep bringing it up? Why blame me? I’ve tried to let it go, God knows I’ve tried, and maybe I’ve done a shit job of it. But you?” I looked at her again. “You tried to kill me for it. You left the Church and started studying demonology. It’s obvious you haven’t let it go, which means she was really in your head, or you think you know something I don’t.”

“I don’t!” She set her bundle of medicines down on the grass and leaned forward, placing a hand to the hollow of her throat. “I don’t know anything, alright? I was so young back then, so foolish. I thought I was smarter than everyone else, and when I discovered what was happening to me, I was so excited! I thought it made me special to have been picked.”

“Picked?” I asked.

“Picked. Chosen. Whatever you want to call it. By her. The one you took from me.”

She let those words linger a while. “I saved your life today. Your life and your soul. I believe that holds some significance among knights, unless I’m misinformed?”

I sighed. “It’s a life debt, yes. So what, you want me to spend the rest of my days protecting you? Slay some great monster? Go fetch a holy relic?”

“No. This is what I want from you, Alken Hewer. I want you to know me. To hear my story. We'll begin there.”

She took a deep, shuddering breath, but didn’t bother wiping the tears that’d started in her eyes. Delphine, who had been Sister Vera, spoke in a calm voice as she told me her story.

“The abbess took me under her wing when I was still a young girl. She was traveling abroad and found me in the west. I was born in the Bannerlands, out of wedlock between a nobleman and his mistress. He had a wife, my father, so I was… inconvenient. Still, I grew up around books. The abbess took me away from my home when she saw I could be of some use as a scribe. I think it was also because I was born sinfully. That’s how she was. Always collecting little monsters and trying to turn them to God’s purpose… her purpose, anyway, though she’d say it was God’s.”

I remembered the abbess of the Cenocastia monastery in Elfhome. She’d been a severe, formidable woman who didn’t seem to approve of my hanging around. Fidei had told me once that she actually enjoyed it, because it gave her the excuse to reprimand any of the nuns I “distracted.”

“I felt honored for a while,” Delphine continued. “It was a grand adventure for a young girl. Picked by a great woman, traveling across the realms with the most famous one of all at the end of the road. I was told that I would be trained to be a cleric and aide to heroes. That’s the purpose of the Cenocastia, you know. We study the word of God and all Her saints, and we act as advisors and confidants to the knightly orders.”

“I know.”

“Our cloister in Seydis was founded to support the Alder Table. All the paladins were human, as were many of the city’s inhabitants, so they needed human priests and human confessors. The Seydii elves might have been our allies, but faeries are fickle and strange, or so old wisdom has it. I was training to become a holy scribe, to serve the greatest men and women in the world. It was like a dream, for a while. But dreams end.”

Delphine had scooted over to sit against one of the roots of the same enormous tree I lay beside. She twirled her fingers idly as she gathered her thoughts.

“I got older. I started to… change. One of the other novices, a nobly born lady from Mirrebel… well, they say things about that country, don’t they?” Delphine chuckled dryly. “That was when I first started to think about that sort of thing. The Abbess saw it. Hard to hide anything in a cloister. It infuriated her. I stopped being her favorite after that.”

I frowned. “Because you liked other girls?”

“You don’t understand. You’ve had power all your life, and such things must seem like eccentricities to you. For me?” She shrugged. “I was a sinner twice over, by birth and nature. The Abbess had her plans for us and my proclivities were an inconvenience.”

“Plans?”

Delphine became quiet a while. “Yes. She was ambitious, and our order had great influence across the lands. We trained young women, many of them nobly born, to go out and teach, hear confessions, record, study, advise. We had a cadre of adepts, which I was supposed to be part of. The abbess demanded perfection. She wanted us loyal, scholarly, virtuous, and pure.”

I realized in a flash what she was implying. “She was trying to make paladins out of you. Another order of True Knights.”

“True Clerics, maybe, but the theory remains the same. We would have been the second arc of the halo of Seydis, alongside the Alder Table, not just its shadow. Trick of it is, the abbess had very set ideas on how it needed to happen. The Alder Knights were too… elfish. Too fey. They were known to take part in some of the more outlandish tastes of elvendom, and the abbess didn’t want us following suit. She tried to mold us in the image of the classical priesthoods, with vows of chastity, silence, poverty, and the like. She could be very controlling, and in the end I don’t believe there was much genuine faith in those halls.”

Delphine sat up straighter and placed her fingertips to her chest. “So now you know something of me. Now I will tell you how I met the demon.”

I tried to control my reaction. I felt dread, and… excitement. I realized I wanted to hear this, to know something more of Fidei, or the one who’d called herself that at least. Something that wasn’t from a scary little book full of dark lore.

“She came to me in my dreams,” Delphine told me. “I didn’t know what was happening to me at first. I thought it was just repressed feelings, anxieties, fantasies. I was dealing with a lot of stress and doubt at the time. I started having vivid dreams, day and night, some of them while I was awake.”

She smiled, as though the memory pleased her, but the smile faded into a more pensive cast as she continued. “But I was a novice sister of the Cenocaste, and I wasn’t helpless. I studied. I put together the facts. I knew soon enough that I was being haunted by a succubus.”

I turned my face to look at her. “Then… you knew even at the start what she was?”

“That’s right. She didn’t spring it on me like she did to you, at least. I connected the dots.” Delphine made a strange motion with her fingers, like she was pointing out stars in a constellation. “I combed through old texts, some of them forbidden, but being the abbess’s shadow for so many years had its benefits even after I fell out of favor. I set up a trap.” She smiled wistfully. “It didn’t work. I ended up catching one of her scadudemons, and spent weeks convinced I’d banished her for good. But then the dreams started again, so I tried a different tactic.”

“It went on this way for some time. We played cat and mouse, me and the demon. It became a game between us, and I obsessed over it. I lost sleep. I started taking drugs and practicing different techniques to reinforce my mind. I even created a Mind Palace, just like the Magi are said to do.”

My eyes widened. That was impressive. “Is that so? But you’re not a wizard, far as I can tell.”

“My aura is weak. Always has been. I know there are ways to reinforce it, but I never much cared about that kind of power. I’d rather spend my time honing my mind than my soul. But I digress.”

Delphine crossed her legs at the ankle and adjusted her skirts, clearing her throat before continuing her tale. “Keep in mind, I was… oh, nineteen? Twenty? Very young, comparatively, and still very foolish. I thought of myself as very clever. I believed I had the demon on the run, that I’d gotten the upper hand and she was hiding from me. I wanted to capture her, and perhaps…”

Here she hesitated, long enough I asked what the matter was. Delphine met my eyes and shook her head.

“I planned to capture the demon and show it to the cloister, to the abbess. I thought it would put me back into a position of grace, that I could prove to them all I was very much capable of serving God and fighting evil, regardless of whether my father was married to my mother, or whether I preferred tits to cock.”

I raised an eyebrow at her uncharacteristic vulgarity, but Delphine waved me off. “I was full of pride and ambition, but something unexpected happened. You can guess what it is, can’t you?”

I could. “You fell in love with her.”

“Ridiculous, I know. It’s exactly what you’re not supposed to do, the very sort of trap the Adversary is known for, but… it happened.” Delphine wrapped her arms around her legs, looking very vulnerable and — though it felt strange to think — girlish just then, rather than a worldly woman in her mid thirties.

“It was more like infatuation at first, obsession. I grew jealous of our odd rivalry. I didn’t want anyone else to know about the demon, and soon enough I abandoned the idea of capturing her and showing the abbess. I felt special. She made me feel seen. I did manage to capture her, eventually. I lured her — the real her, not one of her shadows — into my Mind Palace and locked her in a cage I’d prepared.”

Delphine laughed quietly. “I know now she let me do it. Waited until she was certain I’d been seduced and wouldn’t turn her over to the cloister.”

“You let her go?” I asked.

“After a time. I fancied the idea of having my own personal demon locked away inside my mind, there to be called on when I needed her. But…” The doctor shrugged. “I guess it made me feel dirty, like I was doing the same thing to her that the abbess did to me.”

“You weren’t a predator trolling a monastery of young women for souls to eat,” I noted.

Delphine shot me a withering look. “I felt that way at the time, at least. Anyway, I never really captured her. Shy had a physical body the whole time. She was disguised as one of the sisters, and I had no idea.”

“Shy?” Delphine had used that name before, back at the castle.

“Short for her real name, though even that’s just part of her true name. Even that part can call, and she often told me it was uncomfortable. So I came up with a nickname.”

Shy, rather than Shyora. Just like I’d called her Dei. The revelation made me feel inordinately jealous, and angry at my own jealousy. It also made me uncomfortable, because it humanized what I’d spent so long convincing myself was utterly inhuman.

“Our courtship was sporadic and strange,” Delphine continued. “But it made my time at the monastery more tolerable. I realized quickly I’d always been outmatched by her, but didn’t mind much. I learned, in bits and pieces over the few years she was there, that there were other demons. Some kind of dark plan.”

My jaw tightened. “And you didn’t go to the knights? To the king?”

“Shy told me that many of the knights were part of the plot. She had to tell me in dreams, with allegory and in other roundabout ways. It became part of our games. She was bound by her master, you see, and couldn’t directly tell me much.”

“Her master… she told you about Reynard?”

“Not directly, as I said. And that brings me to the close of my tale.”

I felt a new sense of trepidation, one that felt different and less easy to name than what I’d felt before.

“Shy couldn’t tell me much, or do much, because she was placed under a powerful geas by the man who’d summoned her out of the Abyss and bound her to his service. But she wanted to be free, and I knew she’d been muzzled, so I started to study.” Delphine smiled sadly. “I know now that’s why she picked me… the fact I was an outcast in my own heart gave her an in, but what she really needed was an ally to help her. I didn’t think about it at the time. I just wanted to help. So I broke the geas over her speech. I couldn’t break the binding itself, but I was able to give her mastery over her own voice.”

Delphine lifted her eyes and stared at me with a hollow expression. “And she used it to tell you everything, right before you killed her.”

I closed my eyes and looked away, unable to meet that empty gaze. “You don’t understand.”

“Then help me! You said you owe me a life debt.” Delphine scooted closer, refusing to let me escape. “So this is how you’ll repay it, Ser Knight. I want you to tell me how it happened. Tell me about that last day.”

I opened my mouth to speak, but before I could a shadow fell over us.

“Yes, Ser Knight, tell us how you slew the succubus. Regal the blessed sister with your memory of the event, so she can wallow in the nightmare a bit longer…”

Delphine turned to the speaker and spoke in a resentful tone. “Vicar.”

“Oh, so it’s not Renuart anymore?” The infernal wolf jumped down off the root he’d been standing on, landing heavily in the clearing. “Shame. How are his wounds healing?”

“He needs rest. Much longer than a day. How long were you listening?”

Vicar ignored her and looked at me. “We need to move. There is something on the path ahead that you need to see.”

I sat up straight, despite the doctor’s protest. “Sign of Lias?”

“Perhaps. Easier to show you than explain. Get your gear.”

“He’s not healed!” Delphine insisted.

I stood up, groaning and rolling my shoulders. “I’ll be fine. This air is saturated with od, speeds things up.”

I was already getting my gear on before she could muster an argument. With a huff of anger and resignation, she started packing her things as well. When she’d gone out of earshot, Vicar approached me and whispered.

“You need to let this shadow fall off your mind once and for all, Alken. It is a weight upon your neck.”

“What do you suggest? The scadudemon is gone. Shyora is in Hell. Everything else is just memory.”

“That woman is confusing you.” Vicar glanced toward Delphine, who’d gone further off to sulk. “I know you think she might still have some value to us, but perhaps that has run its course?”

I stared at him hard. “What are you suggesting? That we leave her behind?”

He just looked at me with his burning coal eyes. I cursed and walked past him, anger simmering in me at the idea of this treachery. She had just told me about her sympathies for Vicar, and he was...

“Whatever else, she conspired with evil during the days before Seydis burned.” Vicar’s voice, though a mere murmur, chased me as I tightened my belt and threw on my cloak. “Some have done less to earn the Headsman’s Doom.”

“Maybe, but you’re no angel, and my axe is broken. There won’t be any dooms today.”

“And what of Lias Hexer?” Vicar hissed.

“First, we need to find him. Let’s see what’s at the end of this path.”

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