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"The boy knows his place, young pup," Hamdi snarled as his golden gaze flickered between Nyrielle and Ignatious. In a movement that would have been too quick to be seen by anyone who wasn’t a vampire, the High Lord’s hand dropped to the hilt of his sword, baring an inch of cold Darksteel while he took half a step toward the trembling Inquisitor.

Caught in the middle between Nyrielle’s cool, reassuring darkness and the seething violence of High Lord Hamdi, Ignatious’s knees buckled and were it not for Nyrielle’s hand taking hold of his robes, he would have fallen to his knees.

Visions of Hamdi’s cruel, smiling visage filled his mind.

In his mind’s eye, he could already see Hamdi’s tongue licking blood from a skinning knife after tossing chunks of Ignatious’s flesh to a pack of hungry wolves.

The wounds healed, each and every time, as if they’d never been there before.

At times, Ignatious wondered if he’d gone made and the gruesome torture had been a fever dream but every time he convinced himself that it hadn’t been real, Hamdi returned with his skinning knife and that sickening grin.

"Out with him," Hamdi said. He let his sword slide back into its sheath but his hand never left the large basket-hilt of the weapon. "This one never should have been let loose from his mother’s teat, but now isn’t the time for him to hide behind your skirts. No matter how reprehensible your behavior has been, I won’t discipline an unbridled descendant in front of her own progeny. "

"The words you’re looking for," Nyrielle said coldly. "Are ’Your Eternity, I request a private audience.’ Since you are the sire of my grandsire, I will grant you the privilege of making your request from your feet instead of your knees."

As she spoke, Nyrielle reached out with her free hand, extinguishing half the lamps in the room with a flick of her fingers and drawing on the greater darkness to wrap a cloak of cool, soothing shadows around Ignatious.

For any of her other progeny, she could conjure the same sensation as the joyous moment she sank her fangs into their necks, triggering memories of her bliss filled bite.

For Ignatious, however, every moment of his transformation had been deliberately agonizing, and conjuring those feelings within him would only drag him from one trauma to the next.

Since she couldn’t give him a grounding memory of pleasure, she instead wrapped him in the cold detachment of the grave, quashing his ability to feel pain or fear.

It wasn’t much comfort for the tormented vampire, but facing off against a vampire hundreds of years older than her, it was all she could offer her traumatized progeny.

"A puffed up title doesn’t mean anything without the strength to rule," Hamdi said, his lips curling back in a fang baring sneer. "You’re barely holding on to the tiniest corner of Torbin’s territory, playing games with these pathetic humans and falling victim to their laughable sorcery.

But now, I see how it is. You favor these superstitious fools.

No wonder your parents burned at their hands.

My most talented progeny died so you could make nice with the invaders. "

"Impudent fossil," Nyrielle snapped. With a twitch of her dark wings, half a dozen shadowy feathers shot out from her wings like bolts from a crossbow, streaking across the small sitting room faster than an eye could blink.

Yet for all their speed, Hamdi moved just as quickly.

Drawing the sword at his hip would have taken far too long, but his hands conjured long wicked claws of pale silvery light that tore through the air and shredded four of her six feathers.

The fifth feather went wide as the older vampire moved to strike and only the sixth feather inflicted any harm, slicing through the sleeve of his tunic and spilling a few drops of blood before Hamdi stopped the flow of blood through sheer force of will.

"My parents were your descendants," Nyrielle said darkly. "As was my grandsire. They deserve your respect for what they endured to prevent an even greater tragedy. I’ll have your apology or I’ll have your claws," she said.

This time, as she spoke, darkness gathered to her hand, forming a familiar executioner’s ax while her eyes turned from midnight pools into orbs of pure darkness as if she had become a creature of the abyss, gazing back at her ancestor from the depths of an unspeakable void.

"Ridiculous posturing before your progeny," Hamdi snapped as his right hand dropped to the hilt of his heavy bladed sword. This time, however, the blade slipped completely free of its sheath as he lunged forward. His aim wasn’t Nyrielle, however, but the trembling former Inquisitor that she tried to shelter from his presence.

If his wayward descendant wouldn’t remove the offending wretch, Hamdi would take care of the man himself.

In the end, perhaps it was even better this way.

Since Nyrielle had taken Skoll from him, he would remind her what it felt like to lose one of her prized progeny and at the same time put an end to the inflated ego she seemed to have developed in the past century since retaking a portion of Torbin’s Vale of Mists and declaring herself an Eldritch Lady.

Nyrielle moved through the shadows of the room like smoke. In a blink, she’d shoved Ignatious into the chair she’d occupied just minutes ago and placed herself firmly between her progeny and the charging High Lord.

Shadows danced with pale silvery moonlight as Nyrielle’s axe met Hamdi’s sword with a resounding -CLANG- that rattled the wine bottles and knocked over the goblets on the table, spilling the wine that Ignatious had never touched.

"You think you can harm my family while I’m standing here?

" Nyrielle said as they separated from their clash and eyed each other with growing hostility.

"If you’re senile enough to think you can bully Ignatious in my presence, then perhaps I should take more than just your claws," she goaded. "Perhaps I should take your head!"

The first collision was met by another and a third before the two vampires began moving too quickly for even Ignatious’s eyes to follow.

Yet, as he watched the flickering shadows fighting to envelop the terrifying silvery radiance, Ignatious found his heart beating with a warmth it hadn’t felt in more years than he cared to count.

Family... Nyrielle was fighting one of the most powerful High Lords on the continent to keep him safe. His heart warmed at the notion that she cared enough to protect him but at the same time, his hands began to tremble as he watched their fight move back and forth across the sitting room.

Was he really going to sit here and watch while she risked herself for him?

His hands clenched into fists as shame and gratitude warred within his chest. After decades of exile, after lashing out and destroying a portion of her ancient fortress in his grief and hatred for what she had turned him into, she still called him family.

She still found some portion of him worthy of her protection.

The realization seared the core of his being like the condemnation of the Holy Lord of Light himself, urging him to stand and fight at her side.

If any man could be called his true enemy, if anyone in the western lands could be considered a ’demon’ then surely it was Hamdi.

Not because he was Eldritch or because he was a Vampire but because the only thing that seemed to bring the man any delight was the look of suffering on the faces of people caught between his claws.

But as the battle raged on, his body betrayed him.

No matter how much his mind screamed at him to move, to help, to do anything at all, his muscles remained locked in place, while every flash of silvery light conjured memories of Hamdi’s skinning knife and that terrible, gleaming smile.

No matter how much he wanted to, the chair Nyrielle had flung him into might as well have been a prison cell, wrapped with the same thorny twisted iron as the Tangled Tower.

Hamdi didn’t even need to lift a finger to pin Ignatious in place... he’d constructed a cage around the fallen Inquisitor long ago, and now, even as he watched Nyrielle fight on his behalf, he felt powerless to escape it.