The New Dark Lord: Book 3- Chapter 21 (Patreon)

Ensharia wasn’t sure whether the vampire had merely been strangely quick in getting over Silenos’...Change. Perhaps she herself had just been strangely slow. Perhaps not. He’d changed fucking sex. She. Was it she? 

She almost asked, but then paused at the thought of entering a conversation with Silenos. He- she, damnit- was busy, Ensharia thought. Hands down on her own body, eyes tightened somewhat, magic humming in the air which already hummed so much of magic. The head was tied to her hip, protruding somewhat more now given that the hip in question was…Dear god. Ensharia looked away fast. 

It was just too nauseating. Silenos’ voice had changed, but she almost thought it might be easier to deal with everything if it hadn’t. She was still…Silenos. Speaking, gesticulating and enunciating in the exact ways she always had, making the new pitch of her vocal chords all the more jarring. Ensharia caught the vampire grinning at her from the corner of her eyes.

“Something funny?” She snapped, which only widened the grin. She still wasn’t sure what to make of this one. On the one hand, Ensharia had learned that her own biases- particularly those formed through education by the paladins- could lead her astray. On the other…

It was a vampire. The stories all converged on a few key details about her kind, and none of them good. Ensharia wouldn’t be dropping her guard just because one species had proven themselves better than the rumours. She still felt some way about that, but didn’t have time to unwrap it.

“It’s just funny seeing a paladin so…I don’t know.” The vampire shrugged. “Normally your sort go straight to mace-swinging anger, you’re more tempered at least. Makes your bafflement cuter to look at.” She smiled, not in a particularly endearing way, and Ensharia found that she didn’t like being called cute anymore by a vampiric woman than she did by living men. 

“How long have you been working with Shaiagrazni?” She asked. “A few weeks?”

The vampire actually had to think about it.

“Months, I think.” She said after a moment. “Yes, months. Though there’s been a lot of work between that- we’ve not spent much time actually interacting.”

“I can tell.” Ensharia noted. “You’re still with him.”

The vampire’s brow arched.

“Right, you and him had a falling out didn’t you?”

“A falling out.” Ensharia spat. “He killed thousands for no reason at all—using some weapon that he could have changed to spare them, but was simply too lazy to. No, he made me think there was more to him than evil, somehow, and I was stupid enough that it took me a long, long time to realise otherwise.”

Ensharia wasn’t sure when she began panting, nor when her voice raised so high. She caught Silenos from the corner of her eye, worried for a moment the man- woman, fuck- may have heard.

Of course, she hadn’t. While enveloped in her work, Silenos wouldn’t have noticed a falling star unless it hit her directly.

“What have you heard of him recently?” The vampire asked. Ensharia bristled, raising her guard. Even she wasn’t fully sure why. 

“Mixed reports. Cruelty, devastation. Conquest.” She spat each word like they tasted foul. In fact, they did. The vampire seemed as indifferent to Ensharia’s disgust as she was to everything else.

“And nothing else?”

Ensharia hesitated at that. It was, for some reason, tempting to lie. But she found the truth escaping her anyway. Why, she couldn’t say. 

“I’ve heard other things, construction done within the regions he conquered to uplift those in poverty. Widespread education and…Mixed reports regarding the battle with the Dark Lord.”

The vampire nodded, as if this was all expected. A remarkably frustrating habit. 

“Do you know how Silenos was captured?” She asked.

Ensharia actually didn’t. Loathe as she was to look stupid by admitting her ignorance, she knew it would be all the worse to guess badly in an effort at concealing it.

“No.”

“King Galukar,the idiot,threw himself into a portal the Dark Lord opened to escape- I think with Demonology. You need to understand, the Dark Lord was vastly beyond his power. He had no chance at all of besting him alone.”

Ensharia went cold. “Galukar?” She croaked. “Really?”

The vampire’s gaze didn’t waver. “It would’ve been like a child fighting a man. In fact, it was. And King Galukar would be dead…” She nodded towards Silenos. “If Shaiagrazni hadn’t leapt in after him to save his life. That is how he- she- was captured.”

Ensharia dwelled on that, considering it. 

“What I said about her risking her life to free us stands too.” The vampire added. “And we both saw the demand she made of the Demon, to bring back Arion Falls.”

That was what struck Ensharia in the end. Falls had been a misogynistic prick for each day she’d known him, but…He’d been so young. And he’d been seeming to grow, at least, in some respect. Hearing of his potential being squandered by an early death had touched her in a way she hadn’t known it would. Seeing Silenos resolve that had touched her more deeply still.

“You’re trying to make me think he- she- is different now.” Ensharia realised, rounding on the vampire. “Because it benefits you if we work together better.”

The creature called Hexeri looked at Ensharia with a level, sterile stare. She was not offended, nor defensive, nor, as far as she could tell, hurt. Merely patient. 

“I’m trying to help you realise that whatever glimmer of good you’ve been torturing yourself over getting tricked into seeing might not have been a trick at all.” She said softly. “I’m trying to help you realise that your judgement wasn’t as bad as you seem to think it was, and…Maybe introduce Silenos to the best chance she has at becoming less…”

Less Silenos. Ensharia didn’t need the sentence finished to understand. This one was eerie to speak with. Kind and cold all at once, speaking with her was like being bound in ribbons of silk.

“Some of the stories about your kind are true after all, aren’t they?” She asked without thinking. The vampire smiled. Ensharia considered her next move for a moment, then headed over to Silenos’ side.

The woman had grown her height, though not to the same towering scale that had once left her just a few inches shy of Galukar’s own. She was lean, still, and was only halfway finished in re-applying the changes that had evidently given her skin such a curious texture before. Ensharia found it disconcerting how much of a likeness she saw in her compared to Silenos’ previous body. As if she were her own daughter, perhaps. 

Is she a she? The grammar had not, as far as Ensharia knew, been invented. She defaulted to what felt right. 

“Silenos.” Ensharia began. “Do you mind if I have a word?”

Silenos’ head snapped around so fast, Ensharia found it seemed almost artificial. Like a thing locked and cocked in place, a crossbow loosed at the trigger-pull. She had forgotten how the caster gesticulated. 

“Yes.” Silenos replied. Ensharia waited for something more, some elaboration- perhaps a hint of what she thought about the prospect.

Then Ensharia remembered who she was talking to, and realised that none would come. She resisted the urge to show her frustration. That, above all else, would probably be pointless. Silenos wouldn’t even know what it meant.

The old lessons she’d learned of how to speak with Silenos came rearing back up. Ensharia would be dragging this conversation along by its tail, she knew. 

“It’s been a while.” She noted. Silenos nodded, said nothing. She continued. “I remember we didn’t exactly part on the best terms.”

Silenos tilted her head. Her hair was longer now, shorter than immediately after she had finished her regeneration- the woman had cut it from its original waist-length along with her unnaturally extended nails- but still longer than before. It waved and rippled as she moved.

“I have come to understand that I…Offended you.” Silenos said at last.

Ensharia felt her temper boiling back up.

“Offended me.” She replied, jaw tightening with the effort of biting back a scream.

“Upset.” Silenos amended.

“How?” She challenged her.

Silenos eyed Ensharia, seeming somewhat confused.

“How did you upset me?” Ensharia pressed.

Silenos thought about that for quite a while. 

“You view the lives of others as having innate worth, beyond simple productivity and capacity for accomplishment. You think sapient life suffering is, itself, immoral. It…Upsets you. And so what I did upset you.”

It was all delivered so strangely. Not through the tone of one merely deducing what she said, rather…Someone introspecting. 

“Have you been feeling that?” Ensharia asked. “About…Galukar, Falls?”

Silenos’ eyes grew cold, and Ensharia changed the topic instantly. 

“It has been a long time.” She repeated. “And, to be frank Silenos, I…I think I did miss you. Or, I missed the person I thought you were. Who I realise was not as far from you as the person I then went to think you were as I left.”

Even in her own ears, it sounded a jumbled and messy thing to profess. But then, it was a jumbled and messy set of thoughts. Ensharia almost winced. 

Silenos, though, merely shook her head idly. 

“I…I believe that…It is conceivable,” She was speaking slowly, almost exertively, “Plausibly true even, that I felt a sliver of loss at your departure as well.” Her face twisted up, as if the very admission revolted her. Probably, it did. But Ensharia was past caring. Despite the madness of it all, the fact that she was speaking to perhaps one of the more objectively evil creatures she had ever met, Ensharia smiled.

“That means a lot to hear.” She beamed.

Silenos snapped instantly.

“It means weakness.” She hissed. “You understand? A taint upon my glorious cognition, a festering wound in which the pathogen of emotion and sentiment can spread. A feebling of my intellect and collapse of my rationality. This thing you call humanity- this pitiable, mewling infantile process- it is something I have long since purged myself of. I purged it carefully and deliberately, you understand?” Her throat caught upon itself, eyes suddenly wet. With rage or sadness, Ensharia couldn’t tell. 

She hadn’t backed off. That much was a shock even to herself. Was it Silenos’ temporarily diminished threat, in the aftermath of their fight and her reconstruction?

Or did Ensharia just find herself confident that the caster would not hurt her?

“What made you choose to be like this?” She asked. A glance over her shoulder showed that the vampire Hexeri had already retreated to, Ensharia thought, the exact limit to how far Silenos had warned both of them she could maintain her “bubble of logic”. If anything Ensharia admired the woman’s restraint for not fleeing farther.

Silenos’ answer came after a long delay. 

“I do not wish to speak of that with you.” She replied. “Do not ask me again.”

Ensharia thought she detected a hint of pain there. It terrified her more than anything else Shaiagrazni had ever shown beneath her eyes. A caster moved by egocentrism or megalomania could do so much evil, but always of a predictable and rational kind. A person motivated by pain? 

They might do anything in the world. 

Silence hung between them, but Ensharia couldn’t bring herself to move away from Silenos’ side. After another few minutes, she was rewarded as Silenos spoke again. 

“I am a traitor to my people.” She breathed. “I internalised all the right ways of living a life, I learned the true ethics by which all should govern themselves. And I chose to defy them. I have no excuse. The code of the world was laid out before me, and I consciously broke it. Can you imagine that?”

“Yes.” Ensharia replied, thinking back to how she hadn’t slain Silenos upon seeing her Necromancy. How she’d opened up to the orcs. How she’d broken a thousand other tenets of her order, and been vindicated almost every time. “Yes.” She repeated. “I can.”