Page 148 of A Vow of Blood and Tears

Except my journal was open to a fresh page. A bloodrose with thick, luscious petals, still beaded with dew, laid atop it.

Sweet dreams,lover

I cannot have you by daylight

But I await the night

Sleep well, my burning flame

When the moon is high

I am yours again

I smiled widelydespite the dragging melancholy of yesterday’s defeat and the mostly sleepless night, knowing he would’ve gritted his teeth to rhyme it as much as possible, and it warmed my heart.

The bloodrose I tucked behind my ear after I brushed my hair. I would press it in my journal tonight and keep it forever. In one year I would drink Bane’s blood, and a hundred years from now I would open this book and see this bloodrose and remember it all, as fresh as if it were yesterday.

Instead of going to the library, I decided to check our thorns and roses. The last time I’d laid eyes on them, they had been dug up a little to create the golems—and perhaps staring at the thorns would give me some small insight into what exactly that maddening rune meant, and how it tied in.

The keep was almost eerily silent as I stepped into the Bloodgarden, making my way to the alcove where our thorns grew. For a moment, I stood there in surprise, wondering if I’d wandered to the wrong plot.

But no… that was ours. I distinctly remember this spot. It was just that the thorny brambles looked as though they’d been growing for years, rather than a single month.

They had crept upwards over the column, covering it with a riot of black thorns, green leaves, and tiny red buds. At the very top, the most new and spindly tendrils were reaching for the Tower of Winter.

I bit my lip, suppressing a grin as I knelt before it and touched a glossy leaf. The Mother had blessed us. Or the ancestors, or hell, even the Lady of Light.

I sat there and looked at it, my grin slowly fading to a frown.

Mother Blood or the Lady of Light. A heretic scholar had claimed they were the same goddess, shaped by different cultures through the eons.

The High Tongue runes were so similar to formal Veladari. Comparable enough that a theory had been postulated that they came from the same root language, so many thousands of years ago that any record of it was long forgotten.

But there were other commonalities to consider, parallels that had kept me up all night.

The fiends’ process of creation was also similar to that of the wargs, the need for violence, for pain, for conviction. Their strength, their speed. The hunting prowess of a creature of the night. The need to consume blood.

I forced myself to breathe evenly, thinking it through. It was undeniable, the links between warg and fiend, a rite confirmed from two different sources.

With trembling hands, I slid the ritual book from my bag and opened it.

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.

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