Chapter 778: [The Rewritten Lost Past] [18]

Vanadias. Capital of the Teraquin Kingdom.

Seven years.

The Blood Moon War had been bleeding Sancta Vedelia for seven years, and neither side had given so much as an inch. The Vampire Witch’s forces held their ground. And the Resistance cobbled together from the surviving noble houses, bound by both desperation and unity refused to break, driven forward by young leaders.

At the center of it all stood Ernest Olphean.

He was Prince of the Olphean House in name, though the title of King had already settled over him, earned not by birthright but by the simple fact that no one else had held this together as long as he had. He stood alone in his war room, hands flat against a wide table, eyes moving slowly across the map spread beneath them. It was a detailed rendering of Sancta Vedelia in its entirety, coastlines, cities, forests, the great arteries of road that connected it all. Red bled across most of it, marking territory that had fallen to the Witch. Green carved out what had been reclaimed. And blue, scattered, irregular, contested marked the places where both sides were still fighting over every street and hill and bridge.

There was more red than there had been last month. There was always more red than there had been last month.

A knock at the door broke his concentration.

"Enter."

The door swung open. A silver-haired figure stepped through without waiting.

It was Amael.

"Hey! You can’t just walk in here!" One of the posted soldiers moved immediately, hand closing around Amael’s arm.

"Leave him." Ernest didn’t look up from the map. "Leave us."

The soldier hesitated, then gave a short nod and withdrew, pulling the door closed behind him.

Ernest straightened slowly. "Lord Falkrona. It’s been a while—"

"Sirius." Amael cut straight through the greeting, moving toward the table. "I want to speak to Anox."

Ernest’s gaze sharpened. "Is something wrong?"

"What about you, Ernest?" Amael replied, his voice calm but edged. "Is something wrong with your head? Any rational person would have driven out a foreign evil consciousness occupying their mind rather than simply making peace with it. And yet here you are. Cohabiting."

"And yet you’re friends with that foreign evil consciousness," Ernest replied, a faint smile pulling at his mouth.

"I’m beginning to wonder about that."

He moved without warning. One moment he was across the room, the next he was beside Ernest, fingers wound into the front of his shirt, driving him back against the stone wall with a controlled force.

"Get out, Anox."

For a moment, Ernest’s expression stayed, wide-eyed, tense, the look of a man caught off guard by the speed of it. Then, slowly, something underneath shifted. The tension drained out of his features and was replaced by something older, more composed. A different light moved behind his eyes. A different smile settled onto his mouth.

"It’s been years," Sirius said.

"Unfortunately," Amael replied, grip hardening now. "I should have come every few months. I didn’t think I still needed to watch over you."

"You don’t," Sirius said.

"Don’t you?" Amael’s eyes narrowed. "Then explain this war to me. Look me in the eye through that face and swear to me you had nothing to do with it."

"Would you believe me if I said no?"

"No," Amael said, without a moment’s hesitation.

A quiet chuckle moved through Ernest’s chest. "The war was the Vampire Witch’s doing. She started it."

"And you had nothing to do with it," Amael snorted. "And Regent King Rucain? What about him?"

Sirius’s expression shifted a bit. "You’ve done your research. I was beginning to think you didn’t spare Sancta Vedelia a single thought, Mael."

"Shut up."

"Why did you come?" Sirius asked.

Amael released his grip and stepped back. "The Blood Moon Spell," he said. "Seven years it’s been spreading, and you let it happen."

"Seven years, and you’re bringing it up now?" He chuckled. "Better late than never, I suppose."

Amael said nothing to that.

Because there was nothing to say.

He hadn’t wanted anything to do with Sancta Vedelia. He had made that decision and with both eyes open. The continent had a long and miserable history of tearing itself apart, centuries of conflict, political rot, houses rising and crumbling and rising again in cycles that exhausted observation. And then the Great War, not so long ago, when the Holy Tree of Eden had nearly slipped beyond all control and a Goddess had been captured and sacrificed on that soil like something ordinary. Amael had looked at all of that and made a choice: not his problem, not his war, not his island.

He had underestimated the Spell. He could admit that now, if only to himself.

It had been in its early stages when he first heard of it from Michael.

Only Sancta Vedelia. As though that word, only, could be laid across something of that scale and make it smaller than it was. He had let the reassurance sit and had not looked closer, and now seven years of unbroken war had fed the Spell in ways he hadn’t calculated. Blood Arts of that nature didn’t stagnate. It grew. Every life lost on Sancta Vedelia’s soil was fuel added to a fire that had no intention of burning itself out, it was feeding the Spell, strengthening its weave, and through it, feeding the Vampire Witch who had cast it. The longer the war ran, the more powerful both became. And the longer it ran, the less it resembled the contained, derivative thing Michael had described at first.

The real Spell, Merithra’s original working was something Amael had no desire to imagine in full. But even this pale shadow of it was beginning to show him exactly why it had been forbidden.

He had miscalculated it badly.

And Sancta Vedelia was paying for it in red.

"What I don’t understand is why you came to me." Sirius continued crossed toward a small cabinet in the corner, produced a decanter of deep red wine, and poured himself a glass. "I have a role to maintain. My mother needs to believe I am working toward her ends. And the current Vessel of the Vampire Witch, she isn’t ordinary. This war would have happened regardless of anything I did. I simply... accelerated the process."

"You helped her," Amael glared at him.

"I helped a woman who had been suffering for centuries," Sirius replied, turning the glass slowly in his fingers. "Did you ever consider doing the same? You came to me so many times, patient as anything, trying to reason with me and yet you never once went to the Vampire Witch."

"I didn’t know who she was," Amael replied.

"No," Sirius agreed. "But you never asked me. I’ve had lifetimes to learn every face she’s worn. You could have asked at any point." He raised the glass to his lips. "You never did."

Amael said nothing to that.

"You kept your distance from Sancta Vedelia purposefully," Sirius continued with a smile. "I think I understand why. Your predecessor, that First Apostle, the Guardian who turned on every other race, he was something else entirely. Among all the Vessels of Samael Eveningstar, he may be the most dangerous I’ve ever had the misfortune of knowing." He glanced at Amael. "Staying away from Samael’s remnants, from anything connected to what he left behind, I imagine that felt like wisdom."

Amael’s expression didn’t change, but his eyes hardened slightly.

"And yet," Sirius said, almost gently, "you are the one who told me not to run from what I am. To stop hiding from myself and simply live." He let that sit for a moment. "Are you doing that? Or are you still keeping Samael at arm’s length and calling it caution?"

"That was before," Amael said. "I’ve accepted it. I’m still accepting it. But acceptance doesn’t mean walking willingly into the jaw of something that will kill me."

"Is that what you think Sancta Vedelia is right now?" Sirius asked, raising a brow. "Is that truly why you came all this way?"

"I came to see if you hadn’t crawled back into being a scoundrel," Amael said, closing the distance between them with sharp steps. His eyes didn’t leave Sirius’s face. "So tell me. Your living for yourself, this new path you’re walking, is it going to bring harm to me or anyone I care about?"

The question was quiet on the surface but full of meaning.

He was asking him if all that was happening right now here was a plan of A-Nox.

Sirius’s mouth curved slightly. He raised his glass.

Amael’s hand shot out and knocked it aside. It shattered against the floor, wine bleeding across the pale porcelain in a dark spreading stain.

"Don’t," Amael said.

"Don’t what?" Sirius asked, looking down at the broken glass without much reaction.

"Don’t smile and deflect and say nothing." Amael’s voice was dangerously low. "I will kill you, Sirius. If the path you’re walking leads where I think it might, I will do it, and I won’t enjoy it, but I will do it."

"You don’t even know what path I’m walking," Sirius replied.

"It doesn’t matter," Amael said. "Stop this war. If A-Nox has you that frightened, then step away from her. Come to our side."

"Eden’s side." The warmth left Sirius’s voice entirely. "You mean Eden’s side." He looked at Amael with a directness that hadn’t been there before, something old and tired and entirely serious in his eyes. "Lucifer, Eden, Samael, they are all the same to me. Three faces on the same hunger. I want no part of any of them. I have lived long enough to see the horrors each one has authored. I won’t trade one Ymir King’s leash for another’s."

Amael looked at him for a long moment.

"After everything," he said quietly, and the disappointment in it was worse than anger, "I thought you’d give me some trust. Even a little."

"I trust you," Sirius said, and meant it. "I don’t trust what you carry. What you might become. What the future holds for anyone bound to Samael Eveningstar’s legacy." He held Amael’s gaze calmly. "You can only keep moving and hope that one day, eventually, the future decides to be kind to you."

Amael furrowed his brow hearing that before speaking.

"What happened?"

Sirius didn’t answer. The face of Ernest Olphean gave nothing away.

"You should go," he said instead, turning toward the map. "And you’re right to think this place has become dangerous. As for the war, it shouldn’t—"

"Stop it," Amael said. "Whatever you’re doing, stop the war."

When Sirius turned back around, the room was empty.

He stood there for a moment, looking at the space where Amael had been. Then he looked at the map, all that red, all that blue, all that green that was slowly losing ground and he said nothing. He walked out of the war room, through the corridors of the castle, through the doors, out into the cool open air of the castle grounds. He kept walking. Past the guards, past the garden walls, past the formal grounds until the stone paths gave way to quieter earth and the noise of the city behind him softened to nothing.

He stopped at a particular place. He always found it eventually, no matter how long he went between visits.

A gravestone, well-kept, surrounded by leveled ground and fresh flowers that someone had left recently, someone who still came, still remembered.

The stone was beautifully carved, the letters worn just slightly at the edges by seasons of rain and wind.

Sirius stood before it, still and silent, and read what was written there.

In the loving memory of Viessa Teraquin.