Vessel

The meeting hall was empty.

Vampire lords didn't need to eat or rest. The pause in their meeting was a brief human custom they had adopted for the sake of gathering their thoughts together.

Servants moved all around through the halls of the cathedral. I followed silently behind Eden, my eyes on the ground.

We carried empty silver trays. Roman was somewhere on the other side of the great hall.

Then, after a bit, we found Conall in the scriptorium.

It was a circular room lined with shelves of old books. A single massive stained glass window depicted a forgotten figure casting the room in red and gold.

Conall stood in front of it, his back to us. He was simply looking out at the endless frozen sea.

Eden stepped into the room first. The sound of her boots echoed through the empty scriptorium.

I followed; I heard my heart beating in my chest. Roman would be near the entrance, guarding if this went wrong.

I felt it the moment I crossed the door. A cold sensation that had nothing to do with the sea. It came from the corner of the room.

Lilith.

She wasn't visible, but her presence was apparent. She was watching. I was certain of it. She had to know we were here, that we were following Conall.

"Conall," Eden started talking; she didn't try to change her voice one bit.

Conall didn't turn. "Sister," he said, his voice calm. "Servitude doesn't suit you."

Taking another step forward, she replied, "And those clothes suit you? Is tyranny your goal now?"

He finally turned, a smile still on his face. "A tyrant? No. The world is sick, Eden, and you know it. I am simply showing them the cure."

His eyes moved past Eden and landed on me. His smile widened. And you," his gaze shifted to me. "Have you come for revenge? Or have you come to thank me for the gift I gave you?"

"Thank you?" I repeated it without realizing it. My tone was angry. "Why should I thank you for anything you did to me?"

Conall laughed. "I freed you from insignificance. I gave your pathetic existence a value. Before me, you were nothing, a nobody. Now you are the infamous Winfield assassin. You will be remembered; isn't that a gift?"

He was trying to get a reaction out of me. I pushed back the rage.

"We know you planned to kill him, Conall," Eden said, her voice steady. "Lilith also knows. You can't hide it forever."

"Hide it? Why would I?" Conall spread his hands, a gesture saying that he has nothing to hide. "Eden, I think you misunderstood something. I am not hiding; I am proclaiming everything that was rightfully mine. Father's death was nothing but mercy."

He began to pace slowly in front of the window, his silhouette moving through the colored light.

"For centuries, our kind has been dying. Not in prideful battles, not under the sun, but here." He tapped his own chest. "In here. Rotting from the inside with a disease, a prison they call peace. A lie told to us by the humans and our cowardly leaders."

He stopped; his eyes looked at us, but his words meant anyone else who was listening.

"Do you even see it, Taro? You lived among them. Did you see the casual way they spoke of us? As monsters in a story. As bounties for their adventurers. We became fiction; they romanticize about using and controlling the image however they like. While they built armies, we debated how we should stay in this prison. We starved ourselves of our nature to appease them."

His voice was full of confidence.

"Father knew it. But he was weak, a coward who believed the peace could be managed. That our slow extinction could be negotiated. Pretending he had freedom."

I watched his eyes; they were full of certainty. He truly believed every word he was saying.

"And you think war is the answer?" I asked slowly. "Millions from both sides will die. And everyone caught in between."

Conall stopped, looked at me with a smile, and simply said, "Yes. It will be a merciful war. A fire that burns the sickness away, instead of this agonizing death we are facing. One generation of sacrifice to ensure a thousand generations of dominance. To give our children a world where they do not have to hide or fear because they were born the way they were. Is that not a kinder fate than watching our entire race fade into humanity's fiction?"

He looked at Eden, his expression softening. "I am doing this for us." His voice dropped to a near whisper. "He created me to be nothing more than a vessel." For the first time, I saw a flicker of raw pain in his eyes.

"He was a fool. And his weakness would have destroyed us all."

It was then, at the peak of his speech, that I felt a pull. The ring on my finger had the same reaction that it did to the ritual and then to the Ars Notoria.

The sounds around me faded slowly. Everything went dark, without me closing my eyes. Then my heart started feeling the same thing the ring did.

Then I saw them again. The lines.

Before, they were fainter, but now I felt more than that; it was their essence itself. Every creature had magic in it; it was a law.

Eden's soul had a crimson line. Roman, standing out in the hall, was a bright, steady gold. Some servants had a thin line of white and red.

Then I felt it, the terror the ring felt. Looking at Conall, I saw a line of deep brightness. It wasn't one line, but a tangled knot of them. Yet one stood out, thin and sickly, a strand of melting yellow that seemed to bind all the others together.

Then I realized it; he was born a vessel, yet a vessel still had magic in it. All those lines that were covered are all the previous children that Lord Winfield used as a vessel for his gains.

And the yellow line was connected to all of them somehow. I felt it with absolute certainty.

Wonder.

This wasn't a possession in the way I'd imagined. The Wonder wasn't a puppeteer. It was a parasite, an amplifier. It didn't give its host new desires; it simply took the ones already there—the ambition, the resentment, the pain—and validated them, stripping away reason and leaving only raw, righteous impulse.

Conall was still the one acting and moving. But Wonder just kept his foot pressed onto the next step, never stopping to see where he was heading.

My eyes opened again. The sound of the world came back.

I saw her; Lilith stood in the doorway.

She hadn't made a sound. She was just there watching us in her black and white maid attire. She looked at Conall, and while not knowing what was wrong with him, I felt as if she could see something terrible.

Her gaze shifted to Eden, then to me.

Lilith's contract, the core of her very being, was to preserve the Winfield house.

What did that mean in this situation?

Did it mean protecting its current lord, even if something was completely wrong with him, becoming a madman, and leading them to a suicidal war?

Or did it mean getting rid of him? Allowing these outsiders to cut down the cancer. It would weaken the house, but it might allow it to survive.

Her face was unreadable.

Then she noticed that I was looking at her, and in doing so, she just disappeared instantly again. Conall let out a short laugh. "It seems Lilith was as curious as you are. Now, if you are finished with your little intervention. You can leave."

He turned his back on us, walking back to the window. As if we were children who had just finished a harmless tantrum. He was confident in his truth.

Eden and I backed out of the room slowly. We met Roman in the hall; his face was pale and nervous, and he was resting on the hilt of his sword.

We didn't speak. From the look on his face, it was clear he had heard every word. We walked back to our posts.

We tried to talk to Conall, but not now. It seems like all we could do was wait for the final verdict.