The Vampire & Her Witch

Chapter 1666: Painter and the Preserve (Part One)

Answaen had seen many things come and go in the long years since the glaciers retreated and the world she’d been born into all but vanished. The same could be said for her Master, who had lived even longer.

In Shubnalu’s preserve, however, the ground was littered with traces of times long past, and the air itself carried scents that hadn’t tickled her nose in hundreds of years.

Much of the preserve lay dormant in the winter. Neat rows of vegetables had been trimmed back and covered with straw while bronze trellises that had been bent by centuries of use awaited yet another year’s growth to do their duty again.

None of that mattered to Answaen as she carefully carried the chain-wrapped box through the orderly rows of Shubnalu’s garden. Her memories filled in the details as she passed each planter, recalling the vast orchards of trees tended by the Traceless Clan and the sweet fruit jelly they made from the predecessor of modern apples that could no longer be found outside this garden... just like the Traceless Clan could no longer be found in the living world.

In one corner of the garden, a large bronze bat created a bowl with its wings, standing at the perfect height for small woodland creatures to drink from it. According to Shubnalu, the statue had been the only gift presented to him by the Nation of Towering Trees that was good enough for him to accept. At the time, it must have gleamed as brightly as polished gold, but now, the aged surface of the bat had turned almost entirely black.

There had been a time when Answaen wandered the world in her Master’s wake, and she’d been continually surprised by how often they were warmly welcomed in the places they went. People who hadn’t even been born during the Age of Ice still knew the name of the man who had helped to end it, and Shubnalu’s name was spoken of in the same breath as the Mother of Trees and the Sovereign of Stars who had helped to lead the Eldritch out of it.

The Preserve was littered with relics of those years. Not just of things given as gifts and tributes, but remnants of the very best of what the Eldritch world had to offer in those days. Shubnalu never accepted anything less than perfection. For a fruit tree, a vegetable, or a stalk of grain to find its way into his Preserve, it had to be better than anything he’d encountered before. A hundred species could go extinct, and her Master would never mourn them, but if he could never again taste the crispness of the fruit that was neither apple nor pear and produced the ’best’ sweet jellies, he would have called it an intolerable tragedy.

Beyond the Preserve, which stretched for more than a thousand paces on a side, criss-crossed by several small streams, dotted with fountains and reflecting pools, lay the home her Master had built into the mountainside itself.

The stacked stones that formed the doorway were thick and heavy, standing like megaliths that could only have been placed through feats or extraordinary strength. The door itself had been cast from bronze, shaped to fit the exact contours of the stones it nestled between and decorated with scenes of animals that hadn’t walked the surface of the world since the days when Answaen had still been alive.

"Master," the Frost Walker vampire called, lowering her iridescent horn until it pointed toward the ground. "I have come with news of the world, and I’ve brought a guest," she said, speaking loudly enough for her voice to carry deep into the tunnels beyond the bronze door.

"Come."

Shubnalu’s reply echoed from every corner of the preserve at once, wrapping around Answaen like a soft, soothing cloak, and for a moment, she was a little girl again with tears rolling down her cheeks as she promised to come back to her people one day, to save them from the slow, inexorable retreat of the ice that no one had been able to explain.

She understood now that it had been the man who took her away who had been responsible for breaking her people, just as she understood why they had to be broken. She’d never been allowed to stop the retreat of the ice, but just like the plants and statues in this garden, she’d been permitted to preserve a portion of her clan, high in the mountains above the Dark Wood where the ice would never melt, even after the world had warmed.

It wasn’t a perfect solution to her people’s problems, but for Answaen, it had been more than enough to earn her eternal loyalty to the man who could have destroyed them utterly, but didn’t.

The inside of her Master’s home, when she crossed the threshold, felt even more familiar than the slumbering, dormant gardens outside.

The stone walls of the cavern had been smoothed by both Shubnalu’s meticulous hand and centuries of wear, and the center of each hallway dipped a full two finger’s breadth from the passage of countless feet over the centuries.

Toward the front of the cavern, fantastical scenes had been painted by hand directly on the stone walls. The intensity of the pigments had faded greatly over the years, but just like the plants outside, Answaen could still recall the days when they’d been bright and fresh, calling back to a time before there had been paintbrushes for her Master to use or canvas for him to paint on.

"The world was simpler then," she sighed as she walked towards the back of the home where she had once stayed at her Master’s side. If she were to turn left at the first crossing with another tunnel, at the end of a short walk, she would find a chamber that was still considered hers, filled with her own collection of treasures and trophies collected over the years, many of which she’d preserved in Eternal Ice.

For a moment, her feet paused, and she nearly made the turn by reflex alone. Her master was patient. If she arrived in two minutes or in twenty, he wouldn’t notice the difference. But the thought of returning to that space, where she still kept mementos of her long-lost home and her fallen elder brother, filled her heart with a sense of unease that she hadn’t felt in centuries and sharpened her resolve to return to her master’s side.

Someone had destroyed her brother’s horn, removing the last trace of him from this world. Once Answaen delivered her news to her Master, she was certain that he would send her out into the world to act upon it, and when she did, she intended to ensure that the person responsible for her brother’s destruction met a similar end...