The Vampire & Her Witch Chapter 2036: Bed Of Coals

For a long moment after Maela spoke Huchon’s name, the only sound in the Chapel of Enduring Flame was the soft hiss of the lamps.

Her hands were still clenched into fists in her lap, her knuckles white.

She wanted to shout and scream. Part of her wanted to tear the cloth off the altar and hurl the lamp at the wall. She wanted to; she needed to lash out at the source of more than twenty years of pain.

Grand Priest Livius had done this to her. He’d taken from her so many times. And now he was dead, and there was nothing she could do to a man who was already dead. This wasn’t his chapel; it wasn’t his grand temple in Trevarthen... destroying things here wouldn’t hurt him at all, but still...

A knife twisted in her heart, tearing at her faith in a way nothing else ever had. For twenty years, she’d sought solace in the arms of the very same Church that cursed her. Several times, when it felt like her body was tearing itself in two, when the pain of labor came months too soon... It had been the Church that mended her body and preserved her life after she lost her child.

The Church had saved her from death more times than she cared to remember. But it was their fault she’d faced it in the first place. Their fault, and Huchon Trevarthen’s. That fat sack of pustulent slime was still very much alive, but what could she do to him from here? Even if he was standing before her, what could she do...

"Hold on to that anger," Ignatious said quietly. He placed one hand very gently on her back, right between her shoulder blades, and when he spoke, a gentle, reassuring warmth flowed from that hand, melting the tension that gripped her body.

"There will be a time to return to that fury," Ignatious said. "But it isn’t tonight, and it isn’t tomorrow. I know it’s hard to set that down, but there’s something more important to focus on right now, isn’t there, Lady Maela?"

"Jocelynn," Maela reminded herself, pulling back from the overwhelming surge of emotion that came with learning the truth of what had been done to her. To her, to Rhys, and to the children who had never been born.

"Tomorrow belongs to Jocelynn," Maela said, taking a deep breath, forcing her fingers open one at a time.

"It does," Ignatious agreed. "I promised to catch you if you stumbled. I’m also here to guide you. You don’t have to face your struggle alone. For now, we’ll focus on being ready for tomorrow," he said. "When I came in tonight, you were performing the Supplication of Flame."

"Mother Koulma taught it to all of us at the convent," Maela said. "When the Contemplation of Light isn’t enough to quiet your thoughts, you light a lamp, you name what troubles you, and you feed it to the flame."

It wasn’t a prayer that Maela had needed very often, but some nights, when the dreams had come for her and she was haunted by the feeling of the last time she’d hugged Ashlynn... When closing her eyes brought the specter of the daughter she’d lost in the wedding dress she never should have worn... the Supplication of Flame was one of the only things that had brought her peace.

"Tonight, you named Fear as the thing you needed to feed to the fire," Ignatious said.

"I did," Maela admitted. "But it didn’t help very much."

"No, I don’t imagine it did," Ignatious said with a wry smile. "That isn’t Mother Koulma’s fault. It’s the way the prayer has been taught for a very long time in orders like the Sisterhood of Confession. The Sisterhood has little need of Holy Fire so they make do with a lesser understanding of the ritual."

"The Sisters kneel before a flame that’s already burning and hand it their grief and their fear. They feel a little lighter for a while," Ignatious explained. "There’s comfort in that, especially after hearing the confessions of those who have filled their lives with wickedness and suffering. There’s also focus that comes from the prayer. But there’s no power in it, Lady Maela," he said. "That lamp was burning before you came, and it will burn after you leave."

"Then how is the prayer supposed to be used?" Maela asked.

"The Supplication of Flame was never meant to feed a fire that already exists," Ignatious said. "It was meant to light one. You don’t burn the fear itself. Fear is part of you, the same as love. What you burn is everything that fear could make you do."

He held out his own hand, palm up and empty.

"You’ve already taken the first step," Ignatious continued. "You told me you would be there for Jocelynn tomorrow. Those were good words, and I believe you meant them. But words spoken in a warm chapel are easy," he said.

"Tomorrow night, you’ll be watching your daughter face a trial that could take her from you, and every part of you is going to want to look away," the High Inquisitor said. "Fear will rise, and dread will tempt you to step back. To find some reason you can’t be there when the ritual begins"

"So now," Ignatious said, "you burn away the chance that you’ll change your mind. You burn away the moment when fear overtakes you, until nothing is left but the determination to do what you already know is right."

"How?" Maela asked.

"Hold out your hand," Ignatious said. "Like mine."

Maela did. Her fingers trembled, and she willed them still.

With a small flick of his wrist, every lamp in the chapel sank to a faint ember glow, leaving them in near darkness.

"Imagine a ball of Holy Fire resting above your palm," Ignatious said. "Don’t call it. Don’t pray for it. Just see it. Then feed it every way tomorrow could go wrong if you let fear win. Not vaguely," he added. "Name them. Describe them."

Maela closed her eyes.

She could picture it in her mind. Sunset in the forest where the ritual was supposed to take place. Ashlynn and her coven gathered around Jocelynn. Then Jocelynn turned to look for her mother, her pale, seafoam eyes searching the crowd of people who had come to support her... And found only an empty space where Maela should have been standing.

"I’m not there," Maela whispered. "She looks for me, and I’m not there."

"Go on," Ignatious said softly.

"And it goes wrong," Maela said, her voice catching. "The seed is too much for her, and she..." She swallowed hard. "And the last thing she ever knew was that her mother couldn’t bear to watch. I never told her I loved her. I never told her how proud I am of her for being brave and... She dies. She dies, and the last time we spoke, we fought..."

A faint warmth stirred low in her chest as she spoke, connected to the warm feeling that radiated from Ignatious’s palm against her back.

"What else?" Ignatious asked. "What else could happen if you gave in to fear?"

"She lives," Maela said, the words coming faster now. "She lives, and she remembers that I didn’t come for her. That I abandoned her when she needed love and support the most. She’s polite to me. She calls me Lady Maela instead of Mother. She stops writing, and she stops visiting, and I’m only a story she tells about the woman who wasn’t there."

The warmth climbed, gathering around her heart, then rushing down the length of her arm until her palm tingled with it.

"Again," Ignatious said.

Maela didn’t stop. She burned the version of herself who lingered too long at the door, the one who stood at the back where Jocelynn couldn’t see her, the one who arrived just in time to be too late. She fed them all to the fire, until a bead of sweat slid down her temple and her breath came short and shallow.

"Open your eyes, Lady Maela," Ignatious said.

She did.

Above her palm, no larger than a robin’s egg, a small ball of golden flame was burning.

"Holy Flames are about choices," Ignatious said. "Choosing what we can accept and what we cannot. That which we cannot accept, that which cannot be allowed, we burn away."

"Someone has wronged you greatly, Lady Maela," Ignatious said, looking at the ball of Holy Flame reflected in her eyes. "He has likely wronged many others, much the same way Owain Lothian wronged so many. Ashlynn set her feet on the path that put an end to Owain’s cruelty. If you walk this path, you can do the same to Huchon Trevarthen," he said.

"So this is what you meant when you said that I could walk beside them," Maela said as the flame above her palm flickered and vanished.

For a moment, she could see Huchon’s face, wreathed in golden flames. His flesh blackened and blistered until it crumbled into nothing but ash and bone... It was a sickening, terrifying image. The idea that she would cause such a thing, that she not only wanted to cause it to happen but that she could have the power to make it a reality, tied her stomach in a knot.

But then, she thought back to the small grave in the Blackwell family’s cemetery that bore the name Maelon, and a bright ball of golden flame sprang into being above her hand again as she burned away the fears that would stop her from walking this path, even if she had to cross a bed of coals to do it.