CHAPTER 1123: MYTHS AND LIES (PART ONE)

"Sir Ollie, you... You’re a witch?"

Hearing the stunned words from the Inquisitor, a small smile formed at the corners of Ollie’s lips as he carefully withdrew his power and stopped his carving.

He hadn’t meant to put on a show for Diarmuid, he’d only been looking for a way to pass the time while he waited for the latest ’guest’ of the ancient fortress to prepare himself for the evening’s meal. But, from the way the older man was staring at him, looking like a fish pulled out of the water, it was clear that a few explanations were in order.

"The tunic suits you," Ollie said, smiling more openly and gesturing with the curved knife in his hand toward the chair opposite him. "Lady Ashlynn thought you might prefer something less," he started to say only to trail off when he realized he didn’t know how to express the intention without sounding insulting.

Something ’less formal’ wasn’t it, the outfit Diarmuid wore was suitable for a knight, scholar or young lord to wear to all but the most elaborate and formal of occasions. Something ’less likely to draw the hatred of the Eldritch people’ was more truthful. After all, Ignatious managed to retain his robes in large part because he was one of Nyrielle’s progeny, but Diarmuid had no such protection. Still, pointing it out so directly felt... crude.

"We have a little time," Ollie said instead, moving on from the awkward topic while glancing out the window at the setting sun. "So I should probably explain a few things before you meet with everyone else."

"Whatever the Church taught you about witches, it’s probably wrong," Ollie said bluntly as Diarmuid carefully lowered himself into the seat facing the young man. "Some of it might be close enough to give you an idea, but the rest is... just wrong," he said carefully.

As much as he wanted to refer to the Church’s beliefs about witches as ’blatant lies,’ it wouldn’t help matters and Diarmuid was clearly still struggling with his experiences in the Vale of Mists so far. Not that Ollie blamed him for struggling. Ollie had struggled himself when he first met Harrod, Georg, and the other Eldritch folk who lived in the Vale of Mists. But unlike Ollie, Diarmuid had been steeped in a lifetime of the Church’s teachings about the Eldritch, which had to make things even harder for the older man.

"Lady Heila has already begun correcting some of my... misunderstandings," Diarmuid said, choosing his words with equal care. The Willow Witch had been very direct with him on the carriage ride that he needed to remove the word ’demon’ from his vocabulary quickly before he squandered the good will that his actions had bought him, and that he would need to face a number of strange, new experiences once they arrived in the Vale of Mists.

She’d given him some other tips as well, but those had mostly been efforts to dispel the myths that humans had believed about the Eldritch. Diarmuid had read some of the Sealed Histories and he knew full well that the Eldritch weren’t all cave dwelling savages the way the Church taught common people, but even he had been unprepared for the level of sophistication among the Eldritch people that Lady Heila spoke of.

"Did she tell you about Lady Ashlynn and the coven then?" Ollie asked, surprised that Heila would have gone so far for Diarmuid. But then again, Heila was probably trying to be kind to the Inquisitor on Ignatious’s account.

"No, we didn’t speak about Lady Ashlynn at all," Diarmuid said. "I still thought that she had died on her wedding night right up until she greeted Lord Loman as her brother-in-law."

There were other questions lurking in Diarmuid’s dark eyes. Most notably, if the body he’d exhumed in the forest hadn’t belonged to Lady Ashlynn then who had it been? But then, he’d already seen Lord Owain prepare one imposter to pose as Lady Ashlynn, and it was hardly the first time he’d found a substitute body in a grave...

He just hadn’t expected the refined noblewoman from Blackwell County to be so thorough in concealing her escape from the grave. How he and everyone else investigating Lady Ashlynn’s ’murder’ had been led astray was less important, however, than understanding one of the words that Sir Ollie had just used, because the last time Diarmuid had seen it had been writings about the Evil Queen who nearly prevented the Church from establishing the Kingdom of Gaal.

"Did you say ’coven’?" Diarmuid asked, doing his best to keep his breathing even as his heart began to race. The coven of the Evil Queen had been small, composed of only two other witches according to the records Diarmuid had seen. But those two witches had each slaughtered dozens of Templars and Inquisitors before the Exemplars were able to band together to put an end to their reign of terror.

"Isn’t it too soon for Lady Ashlynn to raise a coven?" Diarmuid said, licking his lips as he found that his mouth had suddenly gone dry. "Doesn’t it take years to turn someone into a witch?"

It wasn’t just the years that it was supposed to take for a Great Witch to make other witches. The ritual described in the ancient records sounded both gruesome and cruel, requiring a witch to carve open the chest of an ordinary person, replacing their heart with a ’seed of evil’ that had to be nurtured with the sacrifice of dozens, if not hundreds of lives. Moreover, it was written that the ritual often failed, requiring several attempts before a new witch could be birthed from the horrifying process.

Diarmuid could understand, intellectually at least, how a woman as kind as Ashlynn was known to have been could choose to engage in such a gruesome ritual in order to obtain power and a chance for revenge against the people who had betrayed her. He could even construct a scenario in his mind where she would have attempted the ritual on the common folk among the Eldritch, hoping that one of them might survive in order to join her cause...

But the Ashlynn he’d seen in the courtyard didn’t seem like the kind of monster, driven only by a thirst for power and revenge, who could do such a thing. Rather, Diarmuid had assumed that Lady Heila was the same as the hedge witches that appeared among the people of Gaal from time to time. Someone who had learned how to make use of divine power using the rituals and traditions of the Eldritch people.

But if she was part of the coven of a great witch... and if Sir Ollie was the same, then Lady Ashlynn already had enough power to rival the greatest threat to humanity that the Kingdom of Gaal had ever faced, and it hadn’t even been a year since she’d started gathering power...