Standing before the throne and Owain’s body, Ashlynn did her best to ignore the conversation taking place behind her while she focused on the task at hand. There would be a time to talk to Jocelynn about everything that had happened, and that time wasn’t far off, but right now, she couldn’t afford to be distracted.

The power of the Blood Acorn pulsed in her hands. It was a seething, living thing, steeped in pain, fury, and a deep desire to see the end of the Lothian line. The power within the acorn had been drawn from across an entire forest, and if Ashlynn fed that power into destruction, she was certain that she could tear down the whole of Lothian Manor.

Part of her wanted to. Her pulse quickened at the notion of tearing the whole of the manor down, stone by stone, so that no one would ever suffer in its dungeons again. The manor felt like a monument to a century of Lothian oppression and cruelty and dark bargains with the Church. It was filled with trophies taken from the Eldritch, including countless bodies that had been desecrated, stuffed and mounted as proof of the Lothians’ near infinite capacity for savagery...

She wanted to shake the earth, to tear it all down and set it ablaze, and the power pulsing within the Blood Acorn yearned to help her do so...

"No," Ashlynn whispered, though whether she was speaking to herself or to the Blood Acorn, it was hard to say. "Focus..."

Ashlynn reached out with her free hand, gently touching the wood of the Lothian throne, and for the first time, she felt the trapped, tormented spirit within the wood.

Pain wracked her body, driving the air from her lungs and nearly sending her to her knees with the intensity of it. The feeling of having been chopped and sawed and torn into hundreds of pieces was overwhelming, but the feelings that lay underneath that were even harder to confront.

The Church’s sorcery lay over everything, like a set of chains that bound the spirit of the Ancient Oak to the handle of a millstone. The spirit of the Ancient Oak had been trapped in decades of cruel labor, forced to support and nurture the Lothian line...

Yet somewhere underneath all of the pain and suffering, Ashlynn found a kind and gentle core of strength and a deep, abiding sorrow. Despite everything that had been done to it, the Ancient Oak had nurtured generations of mothers, ensuring that none died in childbirth, and no child was ever stillborn.

It had done everything it could to nurture children from the time they were innocent babes and it had carried a desperate, fragile hope that the children it had nurtured would grow up to protect the lands it no longer could...

"You poor thing," Ashlynn whispered as tears rolled down her cheeks. "Let me help you..."

Closing her eyes, Ashlynn extended her senses far beyond Lothian Manor. She followed the faintest thread of power that connected the Blood Acorn to the Ancient Oak in the Vale of Mists that had offered it to her, and when she spoke, the words she said were for the ancient tree alone.

"I need your help to free your child," Ashlynn said. "I need to break the chains that bind them to the Lothian bloodline and... And I need to put an end to the hatred and the rage before it consumes another innocent child," she said.

The thoughts that Ashlynn shared with the Ancient Oak extended far beyond the words themselves. Just as the tree had once shared its memories with her, allowing her to glimpse the earliest days of the Vale of Mists at the end of the Age of Ice when the tree was nothing more than a sapling, she now shared her memories of everything that had happened tonight, along with the truth of Samira’s child.

The sound of rustling leaves filled the air, and the people in the Great Hall looked around in confusion as the candles in the chandeliers flickered and danced in a wind that none of them could feel. A stately, ancient presence filled the chamber, leaving even the wise elders in the room feeling both small and childlike in comparison.

A soft, greenish-golden glow enveloped Ashlynn on the dais, and behind the throne, a faint phantom appeared, taking the form of a vast tree trunk with gnarled roots that ran along the stone floor and boughs that vanished into the rafters above the chandeliers.

"Sacred tree..." Lady Tosha whispered as she clasped her hands in prayer. "Saintess Ashlynn said they chopped down a sacred tree to make the throne... Is this, is this the spirit of the Sacred Tree?"

Similar whispers spread through the hall, and several people fell to their knees in prayer at the sight.

Among the members of the Inquisition, held captive under the watchful eyes of Diarmuid and the Templars, different words spilled from their lips...

"The Demon Tree..."

"Witchcraft..."

"Be silent," Diarmuid snapped before their words could spread. They weren’t wrong to call what they were witnessing witchcraft, but Diarmuid had learned all too well in recent days that the way the Church used the word ’witchcraft’ to mean ’evil abuse of power’ paled in comparison to the way the Church used the word ’miracle’ to refer to its own evils.

Seeing so many of the faithful recognizing Ashlynn as a Saintess provoked a wave of conflicted feelings in Diarmuid’s heart. The Church would never recognize her as such, solely on the basis of the nature of her power. But if one were to judge her by her actions, her efforts, and her desires to build a world that was free of the endless bloody conflicts that had torn this continent apart for centuries...

It was hard to say that Ashlynn was any less deserving of veneration than the Great Prophet and the Saint Teacher, two men whom Diarmuid had come to learn carried a power not greatly dissimilar from hers.

So who was to say whether the people were right to dub her a Saintess or not? What really made one worthy of the title and the burdens that went with it? 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝓮𝒘𝙚𝙗𝒏𝙤𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝒐𝙢

Diarmuid didn’t know. But he did know that tonight, in a clash between the miracles of the church and the power of Lady Ashlynn’s witchcraft, the Church had demonstrated its ability to descend into darkness, corruption, and wickedness time and time again. So, for tonight, until the people were ready to hear the truth, he kept his former fellows silent and let Lady Ashlynn do what needed to be done.

He only hoped that this moment would serve as the beginning of something greater and that it wouldn’t transform into the moment where the people who had just begun to support Lady Ashlynn decided to turn against her for using powers they didn’t understand...