The Vampire & Her Witch-Chapter 1290: The Cypress Endures (Part Three)

Ollie closed his eyes and began to speak, his voice carrying across the water in a rhythmic cadence that was part prayer and part command.

"Cypress roots run deep and true,

Through flood and storm, they see us through.

When waters rise, and winds blow cold,

The Cypress stands, steadfast and bold.

It shelters all who seek its shade,

Filled with endurance that never fades."

As the words left his lips, Ollie felt something shift inside him. It wasn’t the healing magic yet; he hadn’t begun to wield the power that would knit flesh and bone back together. This was something deeper and more fundamental to the nature of a cypress tree. It was a strengthening of his own will and a fortification of his spirit against what was to come. As he spoke the words of his ritual, the mark on his skin began to glow with a faint green light, seeming to grow brighter and more vivid as the magic took hold.

His feet felt like they sank at least an inch or two into the soft, silty bottom of the stream until his toes were buried in the muck, anchoring him in place as the water flowed around him. From his feet, he could feel the earth beneath him, stretching north and west to the source of the stream in the foothills of the mountains and south and east to the place not far from here where the stream would join with the waters of the River Luath on its course to an even greater river that would eventually reach the sea.

Here, the earth guided the water, and Ollie leaned into the strength of the earth, drawn up through his feet and legs so that he could guide the rushing, cold power of the water flowing past his torso, bending it to his will and powering his witchcraft.

But even as the power flowed through him, the physical demands of what he was doing threatened to overwhelm everything else. The current of the stream pulled at his legs, trying to sweep his feet out from under him. The cold water made his muscles burn with the effort of staying upright, and his arms trembled as he held Cerys’s limp form above the surface.

The icy water lapped at her skin, washing away the dried blood that had crusted on her face and hands, and he could see the steam of her shallow breathing creating small clouds of mist in the cold morning air.

She was so light in his arms. So fragile. And the weight of her broken body, combined with the pull of the current and the bitter cold, made it feel like he was trying to hold up the entire world.

Ollie opened his eyes and looked down at Cerys’s pale face, at the massive bruise that covered her temple and the blood that still trickled from her nose despite the water washing it away.

"You may not be a knight, Lady Cerys," he said softly, his voice barely audible over the rushing water. "But I understand what you are. You’re a guardian. A protector. When your horse fell, you could have tried to save yourself. You could have let go of your son and maybe lessened your own injuries. But you didn’t. You held onto Dalwyn, you shielded him with your body, and you took the full force of the fall so that he wouldn’t have to."

His voice grew stronger, more certain, even as his body continued to shake from the cold and the effort.

"I know you won’t hear this as praise," he continued, hoping that the feelings behind the words would reach her even if she couldn’t hear or understand the words themselves. "I know that in your heart, you believe I’m a demon or a monster, something wicked that has to be resisted even unto death," he said softly.

"But I want you to know that I see you, Lady Cerys," Ollie said. "I see your courage and your sacrifice, and I think you’re worthy of the Cypress tree’s blessing for that alone. A mother who would give her life to shelter her child... that’s the kind of person the Cypress was meant to protect."

He had no way of knowing if his words reached her or not, but it didn’t matter one way or another. The words were as much for his own benefit as they were for Lady Cerys.

Lady Ashlynn had told him again and again that witchcraft was the magic of the heart, and so Ollie filled his heart with praise for Cerys and the things about her that he found admirable, leaving no room to see her as an enemy who had been taught to hate him and his closest friends almost from the day she was born.

Cerys was a mother. A mother who had risked her life to protect her son from something she saw as a deadly threat. She was a mother who didn’t hesitate to sacrifice her body to protect her son, and who suffered horrible wounds in the process.

A person could argue that Ollie was only healing Cerys in order to protect his mission, to salvage the fledgling alliance between the Vale of Mists and the Dunns before this tragedy could doom it. But the truth is that Ollie could never manage to endure what was coming for such an ephemeral and abstract reason. Lady Ashlynn might have been able to. She saw the bigger picture and the way that everything was interconnected. She could make such abstract ideals important enough in her heart to fight for.

Ollie couldn’t do that, but he didn’t have to. He didn’t have to protect an alliance between two rulers... he just had to save an injured mother so that she could continue to care for her children.

Ollie took a deep breath, steadying himself, and then began the second invocation. This one was different from the first, less about strength and more about transformation as he shifted his focus to taking what was broken and making it whole again.

"Let the stream wash wounds away,

Like blood and pain at break of day.

Let flowing water cleanse what’s torn,

And from the depths, let strength be born."

The magic surged through him like a tidal wave, and suddenly Ollie could feel everything. Every broken bone, every torn muscle, every ruptured organ and severed blood vessel. The pain hit him all at once, a crushing, overwhelming agony that drove the air from his lungs and made his vision go white at the edges.

It was a pain that obliterated thought, obliterated will, obliterated everything, including the will to live, because death... Death would be better than enduring even one heartbeat more of this all-consuming agony, and for the first time since Lady Nyrielle had taught him to touch the void, Ollie looked at the looming darkness beyond the white-hot pain, and he saw... relief.

Relief and release that called to him with a seductive song, just as it called out to Lady Cerys, offering both of them a chance to escape this torment, and it was so, so very tempting to give in to that siren call...