The Vampire & Her Witch

Chapter 1032: Engineering An Accumulation of Small Successes

"I limited my efforts," Isabell confessed as she sipped a cup of warm, mulled wine, taking comfort in the familiar blend of spices that tickled her nose every bit as much as she luxuriated in the feeling of warmth that filled her belly. "And I spread them around beyond the village I’d been told to help."

She hadn’t come to the conclusion instantly after the second failure. It had taken her at least six more attempts at finding different ways to handle the outside world, but even if she avoided the avarice of the Church, her increasingly draconian methods quickly poisoned the paradise she’d crafted, turning the hidden valley into a gilded cage that her people longed to escape.

Finally, after what felt like a thousand years of watching everything she’d built crumble and burn, she turned her back on the village after giving them a single dam to stop the worst of the floods and teaching them how to build waterwheel powered mills to ensure they got the most out of each of their harvests. She irrigated a few fields to show them how the work could be done, but that was it. After a single year, she left, never to return to the river valley again.

It had become an exercise in ruthless discipline to hold back her best solutions, giving people only enough to prevent disaster instead of leading them into true prosperity. Where once she’d worn fine robes and a silver-trimmed witch hat that her adoring people had given to her in gratitude, she now donned simple gray robes and a tattered traveling hat as she moved from place to place, taking up the life of a rootless wanderer.

In village after village, Isabell found ways to leave behind small ’blessings’, whether it was in the form of homes that could withstand winter snows or summer heat, sewers that handled a growing city’s waste, or even leaving behind book shelves in an academy that would prevent the rot and decay of books placed on the shelves, she found little ways to help before she moved on to the next place, the next group of people, and the next challenge she could solve to prevent calamities, even if it fell far short of the challenge’s decree that she help people find a way to thrive.

"In the end, the Hemlock seed showed me the accumulation of my efforts," Isabell explained with a smile that contained a mixture of regret and pride. "Thousands of people who would have died as children instead lived to start families of their own. Scholars who learned from books that would have been lost to rot and decay, along with the problems they went on to solve. It showed me plagues that never spread through cities that had been drowning in their own squalor, and people who found their own ways to thrive, never knowing that I’d been there to help them avoid disaster."

"I had tremendous power at my fingertips and I always felt like I could have done more," Isabell said as she looked directly into Ashlynn’s emerald eyes, and in doing so, Ashlynn finally understood why the word ’polished’ best described Isabell’s new, silvery look. Her friend hadn’t just become brighter by chance; she’d been purified in the crucible of her vision, and tempered herself with an ironclad will that stopped her from intervening, even when she had the best of intentions.

"But the more I did," Isabell concluded. "The greater the burden it placed on me to keep it all going and the worse the catastrophe was when it finally arrived. After a while, I started to gain a feeling for when something might be excessive, so, no matter how much it hurt to turn my back on people in need, I made myself do it in order to avoid a new calamity."

"So, as long as you accepted the smaller victories, then you could keep the gains of your efforts," Ashlynn said, feeling suddenly lost as Isabell’s warning swept away many of her plans like waves erasing words written in the wet sand of the shore.

"The Hemlock is a very patient, very long-lived tree," Ashlynn added as she tried to imagine seeing things from the perspective of a tree that could live as long as Nyrielle had and even longer. "It’s willing to accept the accumulation of thousands of tiny victories over decades or centuries... That’s a very farsighted definition of helping people to thrive."

"Does that change anything about what you’re intending to do in order to help people recover after you topple the Lothians?" Isabell asked gently. "I know that you could create tremendous abundance if you wanted to. You could be a savior to the common people and they would worship you as a Saintess for transforming their lives if you used your full power to help them..."

"But as soon as I do that," Ashlynn said with grim acceptance. "The Church will never allow my kingdom to stand. They could never tolerate an alternative to their path of struggle, and if the people revere me the way they revere the Holy Lord of Light, then it becomes a heresy they cannot allow to stand. They’ll send their armies with their Exemplars and their Saints, and the war that follows won’t end until one of us is destroyed utterly."

"That’s the warning from the Hemlock seed, isn’t it?" Ashlynn asked. "It’s a warning not to disturb the balance so much that chaos follows."

"And it’s a lesson," Isabell added, nodding in agreement. "That sometimes, we’ll have the power and the knowledge to do more, but we need to restrain ourselves from doing too much."

"Who decides how much is too much?" Ashlynn asked rhetorically. "How far is too far, and how do we know when we’ve crossed a line that we shouldn’t?"

"I don’t know, Ashlynn," Isabell admitted. "I don’t know if we can know until after we’ve done something. I just know that, if we’re not carefully in building the brighter future we want to create, then we’ll create something so brilliant that it can never last... and for you and Lady Nyrielle, who will live far longer than anyone else, it’s even more important to find a way to build something that can endure, even if it means you accept a less than ideal outcome."

"Because if you attempt to do too much," Isabell warned. "It will all come crashing down. And if the tragedy that follows is too great, then you won’t escape the calamity that you provoke."