But no… that was ours. I distinctly remember this spot. It was just that the thorny brambles looked as though they’d been growing for years, rather than a single month.

They had crept upwards over the column, covering it with a riot of black thorns, green leaves, and tiny red buds. At the very top, the most new and spindly tendrils were reaching for the Tower of Winter.

I bit my lip, suppressing a grin as I knelt before it and touched a glossy leaf. The Mother had blessed us. Or the ancestors, or hell, even the Lady of Light.

I sat there and looked at it, my grin slowly fading to a frown.

Mother Blood or the Lady of Light. A heretic scholar had claimed they were the same goddess, shaped by different cultures through the eons.

The High Tongue runes were so similar to formal Veladari. Comparable enough that a theory had been postulated that they came from the same root language, so many thousands of years ago that any record of it was long forgotten.

But there were other commonalities to consider, parallels that had kept me up all night.

The fiends’ process of creation was also similar to that of the wargs, the need for violence, for pain, for conviction. Their strength, their speed. The hunting prowess of a creature of the night. The need to consume blood.

I forced myself to breathe evenly, thinking it through. It was undeniable, the links between warg and fiend, a rite confirmed from two different sources.

With trembling hands, I slid the ritual book from my bag and opened it.

Who said that they did not share the same root? If languages and goddesses shared roots… why not the monsters that walked among us?

I read the runes I had translated.

In a circle of thorns,

With blood freely given…

I knew ‘tears’ in the next line, the rest still undeciphered.

But it was close enough. It was a root, a common cause. The only problem was that I still couldn’t think of how the hell it applied to Wargyr. His ritual was clearly defined by a frenzy of savagery, offerings of flesh and blood spilled by force, not thorns nor willingly-offered blood.

I closed my eyes, clamping down on frustration. The vampires had always hated the wargs… so why write their god’s name in the very first chapter of a sacred vampiric ritual book?

Because Miro was right. It was the ritual of Wargyr… for vampires.

They are the same, I wrote, defacing my own lexicon. They encoded this in their traditions because they knew they were the same. They knew fiends and wargs come from the same dark place, with the spilling of blood and tears. They retained the knowledge that to become a fiend was a dark and twisted thing, the same as the wargs. Both wargs and fiends must kill to become what they are. 

I stared at the words, tapping my pen on the page.

Very well. I could, on some surface level, accept the similarities. But the fact remained that I had asked Miro for that information, and I didn’t trust him as far as I could throw him.

I knew Bane had killed before. I’d been there when he sentenced Derog to death and carried out that sentence himself.

But I struggled to imagine him performing the ritual he’d described… forcing torment upon an innocent person.

Why? I asked myself. Because he leaves you poems and roses? You truly can’t imagine him acting the monster? 

No… it was that I didn’t want to imagine him acting the monster. I was so used to seeing him in a certain way that the idea of extreme, rabid violence, not a tidy execution, seemed anathema to me.

I couldn’t envision Bane doing the things the wargs had done in Tristone. But if Miro was right… he had. He’d done absolutely forsaken things.

For a good reason, I reminded myself. The wargs were powerful, fast, far more so than the average vampire. If Bane had chosen to perform such a rite… it had to be for the sake of being able to stand against them.

I looked back at the deciphered ritual, struggling to place it with this unwelcome knowledge, considering similarities.

Languages, goddesses, monsters… maybe they all shared a root, sprung from the same fertile soil, watered with blood and pain. Maybe the page I’d been deciphering was the ritual to convert a vampire to a fiend.

Or I was just being ridiculous and leaping to conclusions. My translations had hardly even begun, and I was already trying to link Wargyr and the vampires, making them out to be the same thing.

The answer was simple: more research. I tore the page with my accusing revelation out of the journal, fully intending to throw it in a fire the first chance I got.

But my feet didn’t turn towards the library. I was tired, worn out from endless hours of research and translation, and from a sleepless night contemplating the unthinkable.

I took a deep breath. I trusted Bane with my life, did I not? I trusted him.

So I needed to ask him if he’d done it. If he’d once been like a warg himself, or if Miro had lied. If the ritual to become a fiend was gentle, with freely given blood… or a nightmarish bloodbath full of horror and despair.

I looked at the page I still held, torn from the precious journal—I didn’t want to deface my journal by comparing the fiend I adored to the wargs. I folded it and shoved it deep in my pocket.

It would hurt him terribly… but the similarities were undeniable. He would tell me the truth of how he’d been created.

All I had to do was work up the courage to ask the fiend himself.

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Chapter 36 Bane

The map spread before me, showing all of Veladar, the Rift a long valley to the east. And in the Rift I saw every weak point, every village and keep left open to the whims of the wargs.

The news had spread like wildfire. The minor nobility had opened their houses to the people, and I could finally breathe a little easier knowing they were safe in the walls of fortified keeps.

For now. The fields, the mines, the livestock… none of it could be left unattended for long. Eventually the Rift-kin would have to leave the safety of the fortresses and return to their own lives.

And then they would, like the people of Tristone, be left out as bait. I clenched my fists, examining the map with gritted teeth, pushing the little red stones we used to denote the legions.

In a time of peace, they would’ve been more than enough. In a time with Hakkon producing seven newborn wargs in a single night… not nearly enough.

Too many gaps in the legions, too many crumbled walls, too many stretches of endless, empty wood for the wargs to slip through.

I could not be everywhere at once.

I nudged a stone into place and closed my eyes, planning my route through the Rift. Someone had to watch the border on foot. I would have to leave Cirri alone, but I trusted her not to be angry. She wouldn’t put emotions over the safety of the Rift-kin.

My level-headed lady. Already I could see her giving me that look, the one that said, what are you waiting for? Telling me to get on with it, to do what must be done.

Truly, I was the luckiest fiend in the world.

But as I raised my eyes from the map, my gaze landed on the two portraits across from me.

I had brought my map into the tower, in the room full of paintings. It was the best place in the castle to get anything done, to think, free of prying eyes and questions.

The paintings of carnage reminded me of why I was here, why I had chosen this. The only problem was the portraits, though I couldn’t bring myself to move them.

Sitting side by side, I was reminded of the fairy tale again. The perfect couple. The prince and princess, a scene from a story.