The Vampire & Her Witch

Chapter 1040: A Light In The Darkness (Part Two)

"Light upon the water, shine for those at sea,

Light upon the water, bring us home to thee,

Through the storm and darkness, through the wind and rain,

Light upon the water, guide us home again..."

Her voice was frail and weak, barely above a whisper, and still she had to strain to get them out. Somehow, despite how dry and parched her throat was, her eyes still held plenty of tears and they dripped slowly to the cold stone floor while she drew a deep, shuddering breath to continue her song.

The words that spilled from her lips would never be sung in any temple, nor were they written in any book of hymns, but to Eleanor, that didn’t matter. She’d taught countless men and women that intentions mattered more than mindless rituals, and even if they didn’t know the rituals to perform, the Holy Lord of Light would judge them for their deeds... He would hear the intentions behind the words, no matter their origin.

"Oh keeper of the beacon, standing tall and true,

When the gray sky meets the water and we can’t see through,

When the wind comes howling wicked and the waves rise high,

Keep your light a-burning bright to guide us by."

Perhaps Percivus had been right about one thing... She’d never truly left her heritage behind. There was salt water in her veins, and her sinews were braided like a main-sail’s ropes. But even on the darkest nights, when the fog closed in and the stars themselves were hidden away, the beacons on the shore still burned bright, guiding lost souls home.

Here in the darkness of her cell, when she most needed a miracle, it wasn’t the scripture of the Church she reached for. Instead, it was a simple shanty she’d learned as a young girl that could be heard on the darkest, foggiest nights, echoing from taverns across Blackwell City and all up and down the coast from men who put their faith in the Holy Lord of Light and the keepers of the lighthouses to guide them back to port.

"Light upon the water, shine for those at sea,

Light upon the water, bring me home to thee,

I’ve seen your blessed beacon and I know I’ve found my way,

Light upon the water, shine as bright as day."

There was no crew to sing the chorus with her, no one to ring the ship’s bell to ward off the dangers of the deep, but in the darkness of her cell, none of that mattered. Her heart cried out for light to banish the darkness, and the Holy Lord of Light answered her fervent prayer.

In the corner of the room where all that remained of her sacred robes were a few scraps of fabric, a brilliant, pulsing light pushed back the darkness, revealing a scrap of golden fabric with a trace of crimson on one edge that had refused to burn in Percivus’s flames.

For a moment, Eleanor thought she was imagining it. The cold did that sometimes, making people see things that weren’t really there. Giving people hope that rescue was coming when they were really just dying.

But the faint, pulsing light was real. She could feel its warmth, feeble as a candle flame, but real and reaching across the cell toward her frozen body.

"Please," she whispered, the word barely forming on her cracked and parched lips. "Please be real."

She tried to move toward the light, but her body wouldn’t respond. Her legs had gone completely numb from kneeling on the stone floor, and when she tried to unfold them, they simply refused to cooperate. Instead of standing, she toppled forward, catching herself awkwardly on her shackled hands as the sensation of pins and needles stabbing into her flesh consumed her legs.

Desperately, hardly daring to believe it was real, Eleanor began to drag herself across the stone floor toward the glowing scrap of fabric. She couldn’t even crawl, her legs wouldn’t work the way they should and the chains constrained her movements, so she pulled herself forward with her arms, inch by agonizing inch, the shackles clanking against the stone as she dragged her body forward.

The scrap of fabric couldn’t have been more than a pace or two away, the cramped cell wasn’t that large, but it felt like she dragged herself for leagues across the cold stone floor. Her arms shook with the effort, and twice she had to stop because the dizziness threatened to overwhelm her. But the light was still there, still glowing, still waiting for her to reach it.

Finally, after what felt like an eternity, her fingers closed around the scrap of fabric. It was warm to the touch, impossibly warm, as though it had been lying in summer sunlight instead of in a freezing dungeon cell. Whether that warmth came from the Holy Light of her own prayer or it was a remnant of the flames that consumed it, she couldn’t say, but it didn’t matter because it was there... And it was real.

She clutched it to her chest with one of her shackled hands, curling around it like a child with a precious treasure, and felt warmth begin to spread from the fabric into her frozen body. It wasn’t much, just a trickle of heat, barely enough to feel, but it was there, and it was proof that she hadn’t been abandoned.

"Thank you," she whispered to the fading, pulsing light as the cell turned dark again. Tears flowed freely from her eyes, but they were no longer as hopeless as they’d been. Despite everything that happened, the Holy Lord of Light hadn’t forsaken her. That alone was enough to give her the strength to crawl back across the cold stone floor, retrieving the thin blanket on her way to the rough cot.

She still didn’t know what it meant that she could call upon the miracles of the Holy Lord of Light even after Percivus had all but expelled her from the Church. She had no idea how he could draw upon Holy Flames while she summoned Holy Light... In some ways, she was even more adrift than she’d been before her confrontation with the fanatical Inquisitor.

But she wasn’t alone in her struggle. Her faith had been shaken to its core, but it hadn’t broken. She just had to hold fast while the tempest battered her, and find a way through the reefs and shoals that would try to break her.

Confessor Eleanor could never imagine doing such a thing. The idea of resisting the Inquisition was incomprehensible to the woman she had been before she joined her cousin, Jocelynn, on this perilous journey to the frontier. The young Lady Blackwell who she had been before she joined the Church, the noblewoman whose status depended more on her father’s shipping company than their family lands or inheritance, was even less equipped to face this monumental struggle.

But perhaps... if there was such a person as Confessor Eleanor Blackwell... If, buried deep inside her heart, she could pull out a fraction of the strength she’d seen from the captains who sailed the seas, and a sliver of the courage possessed by her Cousin Ashlynn to live an entire life hunted by the Inquisition...

Then perhaps Confessor Eleanor Blackwell could find a way to weather this storm and find the light that burned for her upon the shore.