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Who said that they did not share the same root? If languages and goddesses shared roots… why not the monsters that walked among us?
I read the runes I had translated.
In a circle of thorns,
With blood freely given…
I knew ‘tears’ in the next line, the rest still undeciphered.
But it was close enough. It was a root, a common cause. The only problem was that I still couldn’t think of how the hell it applied to Wargyr. His ritual was clearly defined by a frenzy of savagery, offerings of flesh and blood spilled by force, not thorns nor willingly-offered blood.
I closed my eyes, clamping down on frustration. The vampires had always hated the wargs… so why write their god’s name in the very first chapter of a sacred vampiric ritual book?
Because Miro was right. It was the ritual of Wargyr… for vampires.
They are the same, I wrote, defacing my own lexicon. They encoded this in their traditions because they knew they were the same. They knew fiends and wargs come from the same dark place, with the spilling of blood and tears. They retained the knowledge that to become a fiend was a dark and twisted thing, the same as the wargs. Both wargs and fiends must kill to become what they are.
I stared at the words, tapping my pen on the page.
Very well. I could, on some surface level, accept the similarities. But the fact remained that I had asked Miro for that information, and I didn’t trust him as far as I could throw him.
I knew Bane had killed before. I’d been there when he sentenced Derog to death and carried out that sentence himself.
But I struggled to imagine him performing the ritual he’d described… forcing torment upon an i
Why? I asked myself. Because he leaves you poems and roses? You truly can’t imagine him acting the monster?
No… it was that I didn’t want to imagine him acting the monster. I was so used to seeing him in a certain way that the idea of extreme, rabid violence, not a tidy execution, seemed anathema to me.
I couldn’t envision Bane doing the things the wargs had done in Tristone. But if Miro was right… he had. He’d done absolutely forsaken things.
For a good reason, I reminded myself. The wargs were powerful, fast, far more so than the average vampire. If Bane had chosen to perform such a rite… it had to be for the sake of being able to stand against them.
I looked back at the deciphered ritual, struggling to place it with this unwelcome knowledge, considering similarities.
Languages, goddesses, monsters… maybe they all shared a root, sprung from the same fertile soil, watered with blood and pain. Maybe the page I’d been deciphering was the ritual to convert a vampire to a fiend.
Or I was just being ridiculous and leaping to conclusions. My translations had hardly even begun, and I was already trying to link Wargyr and the vampires, making them out to be the same thing.
The answer was simple: more research. I tore the page with my accusing revelation out of the journal, fully intending to throw it in a fire the first chance I got.
But my feet didn’t turn towards the library. I was tired, worn out from endless hours of research and translation, and from a sleepless night contemplating the unthinkable.
I took a deep breath. I trusted Bane with my life, did I not? I trusted him.
So I needed to ask him if he’d done it. If he’d once been like a warg himself, or if Miro had lied. If the ritual to become a fiend was gentle, with freely given blood… or a nightmarish bloodbath full of horror and despair.
I looked at the page I still held, torn from the precious journal—I didn’t want to deface my journal by comparing the fiend I adored to the wargs. I folded it and shoved it deep in my pocket.
It would hurt him terribly… but the similarities were undeniable. He would tell me the truth of how he’d been created.
All I had to do was work up the courage to ask the fiend himself.