The Vampire & Her Witch

Chapter 1031: An Inescapable Calamity

Isabell had no intention of donning the mantle of the Engineer of Destruction once again. She’d seen where that road ended, and she had no desire to reach that destination in the vision or in real life. But there were other ways to prevent an army from claiming the lives of the people she needed to protect, and so she set to work as soon as the vision of Ashlynn faded away.

She began at the edges of the valley, planting a row of Hemlock trees that stretched as far as the eye could see, wrapping all the way around the perimeter of the valley. Each tree sent its roots deep into the earth, drawing on the strength of the land to grow faster than anyone would have imagined.

For each day that passed, the trees experienced an entire year of growth, reaching heights of two hundred feet or more within a single year. But Isabell went further than making them grow. After the first year, she transformed them once again, making their bark as hard as iron, and weaving their branches together until they formed a stronger, more impenetrable wall than any that had ever been built by human masons.

Still, this wasn’t enough. Isabell turned away from the people within the river valley, leaving them to enjoy the paradise she’d created for them as she nurtured a forest along the easiest approaches to the valley, transforming them from chaotic wilderness into an intricately arranged maze that would lead people to exit the forest far from the few remaining entrances to the river valley.

"I thought it would be enough," Isabell told the real Ashlynn as she recounted her story. "My people had never done anything to start feuds that couldn’t be resolved. They were happy to trade and share their abundance with anyone who approached them fairly. But it didn’t matter to the Church or the lords behind them who always wanted something more and believed that they had a mandate from the Holy Lord of Light to take back their ’Sacred Valley,’" she said bitterly.

"So what happened?" Ashlynn asked, curious at how the vision would have presented the forces of the Church to Isabell. "When the Church finally came to claim the results of your hard work for themselves, what did they do?"

"The first armies couldn’t get past the mazes," Isabell said in a moment of pride that quickly deflated. "But everything changed when the Inquisition started calling down fire from the heavens. It was like the sun itself had fallen on my forest, and even though it resisted the Holy Flames for a time... nothing could resist that conflagration forever.

The people cried out for their Hemlock Witch to save them, to fight back and smite the invaders who sought to destroy their peaceful homes. It was then that she realized that her people had come to depend on her completely to provide for them. She was the reason their lives were peaceful and prosperous, but she was also the reason the invaders had come to take away their homes. In the minds of some of Isabell’s people, that meant she was responsible for slaying their enemies.

"I can’t slay your enemies," Isabell protested. "I’m just an engineer. I can help you fortify your homes, I can build stout walls for you to shelter behind, but... if you want to slay your enemy, you’ll have to take up arms yourself to repel the invaders."

"But we don’t know how," the people protested.

"We aren’t powerful the way you are!"

"You didn’t prepare us for this!"

"Fine," Isabell said, raising a hand as their words pierced her heart like arrows fired from a bow. "I still can’t fight your enemies for you. If you truly treasure this place, then you have to help fight to defend it... But, I can at least teach you the ways of war," she said as she began to sketch the plans for a simple catapult. "This will let you throw stones into the ranks of the enemy’s soldiers..."

She hated doing it, but what choice did she have? But still, she couldn’t make herself take part in the brutal clash of armies. Once she’d taught her people the ways of war and slaughter, their existence as a refuge from the ugliness of the world had come to an end.

Either they would succumb to the forces of the invaders, perishing to the last man as the Church took possession of the fruits of her labor, or they would baptize themselves in the blood and fires of war, killing so many of their enemies that they would retreat to lick their wounds.

Then, the cries for retribution would begin. One war would lead to another in an endless cycle of violence that would last for centuries until no one remembered the ’Sacred Valley’ as anything but a fairy tale, and the people who lived there had buried so many of their kinsmen that the rows of headstones outnumbered the rows of cabbages.

"In the vision, I had the power to shape things to my will, and it was incredibly easy to do so," Isabell explained to Ashlynn. "I know that real witchcraft isn’t as simple as what I did in the vision, and I doubt that even you could create such a mighty wall of trees in just a year’s time without paying some kind of terrible price," she acknowledged.

"But it didn’t seem to matter," she said with a defeated sigh. "Even with all that power, the more successful I was, the harder it became to prevent things from ending in catastrophe. I started to feel like nothing I did would ever be good enough to last, or that I could only allow one or two generations of people to enjoy peace and prosperity by extracting a terrible price from their children or grandchildren."

"I see why you call it a warning," Ashlynn said, nodding in understanding as she imagined the toll Isabell’s trial must have taken on her. "How did you solve it? When you completed your trial, what was the final solution that you accepted?"

Privately, Ashlynn thought Isabell was still being too passive. She held herself back when she could have gone on the offensive. She refused to participate in the wars directly while she focused on building defenses and a place of safety for her people.

The inwardly twisted root on Isabell’s thigh made more and more sense the more Isabell explained. She’d tried building peace by encouraging her people to trade with outsiders. She tried keeping her valley secret from the outside world, but since she refused to keep her people prisoner in the valley, word always got out about the mystic valley where people could lead lives free from the struggles that the Church claimed were an essential part of life.

Eventually, Isabell had to have found a way forward or she never would have completed her trial... but just what was it that she’d discovered to solve the problem?