A Scholar's travels with a Witcher

by Spike368

Sent out to gather the knowledge of the real world. A young scholar from the University of Oxenfurt finds a wounded Witcher on the steps to the inn where he was staying. So he starts gathering the material for his journals. Rated T for language I will be publishing this story on Royal Road /profile/349358

150. Chapter 150

(A/N: Warning: Arachnaphobes might struggle a bit. Beware of body horror.)

Ariadne led Kerrass and me to a door at the side of the central receiving area. There were signs of recent rebuilding work that had been hidden behind a curtain when we first came down here and as such, the doorway had not been visible.

Opening the door, we found ourselves in another, much smaller, room, similar to the one that we had just left. Largely circular after the entranceway, domed with stone paving slabs on the floor. It looked recently swept, you could see the marks in the dust where someone had done a very quick job of pushing all the dust together. You can always tell because there are tracks in the dirt that the individual bristles of the broom have left.

How do I know this? Anyone who has been told to sweep out a stable would be able to tell you the difference between properly brushed and hastily brushed. There are some instances of this that still set my ears to ringing.

Inside the room were two figures that were wearing the same cowled, heavy-looking robes that Ariadne's mother had been wearing. It was impossible to tell any kind of gender or characteristics under those hoods, so to me, they were just figures. Like statues in churchyards.

They were standing on either side of a magical portal. It was slightly different from the other portals that I have seen, including those portals that I have traveled through. There were no yellow or silver highlights. There were no runes around the edge. If you laid it flat on the ground then it would look like the service of a pond. A pond that was filled with dark, very dark, very red water. It looked thick and viscous so that if you run your fingers through it, your finger would literally leave a track in the liquid before the liquid came back together.

It was rippling.

We walked in, Ariadne leading the way when Kerrass swore.

"I fucking hate portals." He commented.

"Why?" I wondered. "I mean, you've always complained and you always give a different version as to why but…"

"It doesn't matter here." One of the figures spoke in a rasping whisper. By which I mean that there was no sound other than the words being formed. I knew what was said. So did everyone else there. But there was no tone to it. No pitch.

The figure pointed. "You will not be coming," it pointed at Kerrass. "Turn around and return to the entertainments of the other room."

"It was arranged…" Ariadne began.

"The Elder has changed his mind." The figure whispered. "You arranged for your betrothed to come. Nothing was said of a Witcher. You merely inferred it. The Elder suggests that, in future, you should be more careful about what you negotiate."

The lack of tone in the whispered words conspired to make it seem harsher than it actually might have been. In this case, though, it was impossible to tell.

Kerrass shrugged. "Well Freddie." he shook my hand. "It would seem that I won't need to wait before I spend the evening with the Queen of the Night and her three lovely daughters." He smiled, but the smile did not reach his eyes.

"Enjoy yourself Kerrass." I told him. "At least do your best to make sure that everyone has a good time."

"It's alright." He said. "It means I don't have to walk through that portal, and I brought a stamina potion with me to help with the ladies. Admittedly it was in case something else happened but..."

We both chuckled. He looked up and nodded to Ariadne as the pair of them exchanged a glance. Kerrass turned to go before turning back.

"I wasn't going to do this." He said to the two cowled figures. "But I think, in this case, I will indulge myself. If Freddie doesn't come out of this place, then I will find a way back in here, even if I have to dig with a shovel. Then I will hunt down every Elder Vampire that I can find and kill them. I know that it's supposed to be impossible for anyone other than a fellow Elder Vampire to do that, but I would find a way."

Then he turned and left through the door back to the party.

I looked at Ariadne and we shrugged at each other.

"Is he joking?" The other figure asked. A male voice, deep and raspy but still much more male.

I chuckled, I couldn't help it.

"No," Ariadne told him calmly. "Let us go."

The cowled figures didn't follow us into the portal.

For all that it didn't seem like a normal mage portal, it felt exactly like a normal portal. That same shiver as though someone has just thrown a giant bucket of cold water over you. The strange sense of displacement as your body gets used to the fact that it has moved without moving. The change in the air and the different feelings underfoot.

It was cold, very cold. It was not the damp, wet cold of the Skelligan winter that had greeted me when the Skeleton Ship was coming. This was a different kind of thing. It was insidious and crept down your nose and into your body. My extremities didn't seem to feel it but the rest of me felt like it was freezing from the inside out.

That, and the fact that the place that I stepped out into was utterly, utterly dark. I mean, so dark that I thought that I had someone's hands over my eyes. Dark enough that I thought I was blind.

There was another strange thing going on as well, in that although it was not difficult to breathe, I felt short of breath. I had a ridiculous urge to breathe heavily and suck down more air, quicker. I felt like I had done some deep exercise or climbed up a mountain to dizzying heights. The last time that had happened was when being exercised by Letho in the hills and crags around Kaer Morhen.

"Easy Freddie." Ariadne's voice came. "Easy, breathe as slowly as you can. Count. In for three heartbeats, hold for three heartbeats, and then let it out."

There was also an odd kind of pressure. My ears popped enough that it hurt and I felt the first signs of panic beginning to climb up my throat. I fought to just concentrate on my breathing.

Ariadne lit a torch. The sudden presence of the light was one of the more beautiful things that I had seen. Coupled with the fact that it was in the hands of the most beautiful woman I know, even despite her occasionally, recently renewed, sinister aura and regal clothes. The spiritual connotations were not lost on me either. The Holy Fire leading me out of the darkness and into the light.

Held by a Vampire that used to experiment on humans, Flame knows how much further up in the earth.

I know I didn't keep all of that from my face as Ariadne's expression flickered minutely.

"Sorry." She mouthed silently.

I shrugged. More evidence that all of this was a show for someone's entertainment. I resolved that I would not allow a sign, or a hint, of surprise or astonishment to cross my face.

The light did something else as well. It gave me a perspective on what else was going on around me. I was in a cave, it looked like a natural, underwater cave that seemed to have been carved out by the passage of water over however many thousands of years. I couldn't see any sign of machining or tools being used on the stone, which in turn meant that it was almost certain that this was a natural cave. But that perspective meant that I could suddenly see where I was and what was happening. My dizziness retreated, taking my panic with it and although I still found it a little bit difficult to get enough air into my lungs to be entirely comfortable, I started to feel better.

I looked around and noticed that the portal was still open behind me. That would mean that, if necessary, there was a way to escape. Something that was far more reassuring than it strictly should have been. I also saw that there was a bluish tint to the flame of the torch. Presumably, something to do with the oil on the torch.

"You made that gate didn't you?"

"Yes." There was a certain amount of pride in her voice as she used the one torch to light another that she passed to me. "A standing portal to a new area. A tricky piece of work. There are strange things in the air down here and random fluctuations in the… well. That's where it gets technical. As well as my other work, I might make that one of my next projects. A study on the formation of transportation gates and the various things that can influence the creation of those same gates. But still…

"The stipulation was that the gate would need to lead to a tunnel well away from the Elder's sight so as not to interfere with the planar portal that the Elder guards."

"Yeah," I said. "Would it though? Interfere I mean."

"It might," Ariadne said. "I would know more if I was able to examine what was going on with that other planar portal. But I did my best to ensure that this portal was as stable and self-contained as possible. I flatter myself that I did a good job."

"Was it not the way that your predecessors climbed to the surface?" I wondered.

"Oh, that happened long before my time. And they almost certainly had other ways of moving through the rock" She told me, leading me down what turned out to be a long, natural tunnel. It was slow going. It is hard to properly say how dark it was in that place. I was constantly lowering the torch to ensure that I didn't trip over something.

"So why a new portal?" I wondered, making as much conversation as I could.

"For you." She told me, there was a dim light coming from up ahead. Torchlight, certainly a light of flames. "The way that we, meaning other Elder Vampires, would come down here would not be usable by you. There is a certain… How can I put this…"

"An element of your natural abilities that makes you able to climb to the surface?" I suggested.

"Yes. Just about."

We walked on a little further and the light in the tunnel ahead seemed to be growing as we got closer. There was a growing feeling of dampness in the air and I started to feel a strange sensation in my movements. When I jumped, I seemed to be jumping that little bit higher than I had been normally. I felt lighter on my feet and found that I needed to concentrate on where I was planting my footfalls. There were also coming to be times where, instead of feeling as though I was struggling to breathe, the air would suddenly seem that much sweeter, leading me to feel light-headed.

But a different kind of light-headed. Less dizzy, more euphoric.

Then it would go back to the thin feeling of the air and I would need to concentrate on my breathing in order to keep myself from panicking.

Ariadne noticed. It was not lost on me that she clung to the surface of the rock with grace and ease, barely needing to scramble. She seemed to know precisely where to place her feet in order to get the most movement out of it.

"You are feeling the effects of the planar portal." She told me as she reached out and helped me climb over a particularly ominous piece of rock. "The portal itself is so small now that you could not see it with your naked eye. Even we cannot see it anymore and if the Elder knows precisely where it is in the cave that we are not far from entering, he has never pointed it out. It is, infinitesimally small. But the effects that it has on the nearby area remain profound in nature. You will notice that you feel lighter but resist the urge to jump up and down as these effects can change without warning. You could leap high in the air before being slammed back down to the ground with all of the force of a falling star."

I nodded. "How much force is that?" I wondered.

"There is a lake in Northern Kaedwen," she told me. "They call it lake Starfall."

"I have heard of it."

"Then you will know the legend of how a star fell to the ground there with enough force to create the lake, several hundred feet wide, deep enough that they haven't properly found the bottom yet. But according to mathematicians and scientists of both a mundane level as well as a magical one. That impact was caused by an object, roughly the size of your head."

I considered that for a moment. "On the plus side," I said. "I wouldn't feel it for very long."

"I would." She said. The way she spoke robbed the moment of its humor.

As we walked, the tunnel seemed to begin to be smoothing out until a pathway of sorts began to start forming. We came round the corner and the tunnel seemed to be beginning to widen out into a larger one. On the path, there were three more cowled figures waiting for us. They were waiting on this kind of a wide, landing bit of stone that reminded me of a boat jetty. There were large fire bowls at each of the corners of the landing and as the tunnel seemed to open out into a much larger cave. I could see that there were regularly spaced torches hooked into the walls.

There were also glowing blue-white crystals mounted into the walls, the way you occasionally find them in Elven ruins. For the uninitiated, they are like angular sculptures of glass that when you blow on them, glow with light.

Kerrass finds them annoying and strangely exhausting. He gestures at them with his air sign, only a similarly reduced version of the air sign, similar to the reduction of the flame sign that he uses to light candles and campfires. He is of the opinion that it makes people lazy and is always left with the impression that the Elves are laughing at him.

The first figure stepped forward.

"Please extinguish your torches in the bowl." It gestured as it spoke in that harsh whisper that I was coming to expect. We did as we were told given that there was now plenty of light.

"Do you consent to be searched?" The first one asked. There was a line of three of them now. The second was holding a large grey-white flat crystal that I didn't recognize.

"What for?" I wondered. "I mean, I can't possibly have anything that would hurt even a "young" vampire let alone the…"

"Freddie," Ariadne said, putting her hand on my arm with a warning in her voice. "You can ask your questions in a little while."

"Do as she says, human." There was no insult in the use of the species. It was just a useful word for them.

I shrugged.

Ariadne stepped forward first, much to my surprise, and held her hands out by her side while they patted her down. I finally noticed that her golden spider staff was nowhere to be seen.

The hands of the cowled figure were a brownish-grey. I don't know how much of the coloring was leftover from the light of the flames echoing up the walls though.

When my turn came, I held a mirror image of how Ariadne had held herself, and the, presumably, vampire searched me. Not gently, but certainly not as invasively as people might search a suspicious stranger who was moving into a private audience with the empress might be searched.

In the meantime I just stood there, waiting and following the basic instructions that they threw at me. Turn around, arms by your sides. Stand up straight. That kind of thing.

I decided that the cave that we were in was quite peaceful really all things considered. There was the sound of running water somewhere and the smell of oil smoke which was not entirely unpleasant. There was a smell to the burning that I couldn't immediately recognize and guessed that it must be some herb of some kind. Curiosity made me wonder what it was though. I still couldn't see right into the cave itself. There were some obstructions in the way but it seemed to be a fairly nice place. Not that I would particularly want to live down here or anything but still, it was nicer than some of the places that Kerrass has taken me over the years.

Then I realized what I was thinking and I chuckled. The cowl of the being that was searching me twitched upwards and looked at me. The way the light fell didn't give me much to see I thought I might be able to see the outline of a nose but I couldn't be certain. Then it nodded to itself and returned to what they were doing.

I entertained myself for a moment doing some interior decorating. Having a four-poster bed here, room for a cooking fire over there, and a wardrobe over there. I imagined myself inviting guests over to come and see my cave and giving them tours in order to explore properly.

The first guard was done with me and moved me onto the next one. This search was similar to, but not quite, the same as other searches that I have had done to me. It has happened twice and neither time was in the presence of anyone particularly important. One was in the presence of a mage that Kerrass and I were consulting on a particularly difficult hunt. I can now, at the time of writing, no longer remember the mage's name on the grounds that Kerrass took great delight in referring to him as "That Paranoid Toss-pot". He was obsessed with his personal safety and, to my mind at least, was rather overly paranoid about it all. But he had a wand that he waved over us in order to, in his words, "detect any hanging enchantments over you."

At the time, I was still using my amulet with Ariadne for the purposes of communication. That amulet and Kerrass' pendant were the only things that he could detect and he interrogated us on the subjects, far more than what was necessary and far more than the piece of information that we were after warranted.

We had to leave the two amulets in the safety of a box that he had enchanted, or so he claimed, to shield anyone else from looking in.

The other time was at a gathering at the hierarch's palace in Novigrad. This will have been during the autumn before we all went down south to see the empress get crowned. There had been some kind of formal dinner that night and the family had all been invited. Emma didn't go and as I, in her words, "knew how to speak religious" I volunteered to go to the party in her stead. She was wise in that all that anyone wanted to talk to me about was the scandalous affair of my sister and her magical lover.

They had waved a similar-looking wand over me at the time. The amulet that Ariadne had given me was in the shape of the eternal flame and when they found the enchantment on it, I told them that part of it would have been because we had got the Bishop of Angraal to bless the amulet. I told them that the person who had cast the enchantment was currently taking instruction in the matter of the Eternal Flame and as such, things were beyond reproach.

And as Emma so succinctly put it, I knew how to debate these men and as such, although we spent quite a bit of time talking about it all, there wasn't really anything they could do to complain at me about the amulet.

I did not call them out on their hypocrisy of using the hated magic in order to detect magic. I was more mindful of the family's political position than that.

This flat, paddle of white crystal that the robed figure was using seemed to be a more advanced version of that.

It glowed blue when they waved it near Ariadne. The blue turned into a greenish tinge when it passed over the thing that she had enchanted in order that we would be able to keep in contact with each other. They waved it backward and forwards over that point and seemed particularly interested in the particular shade of green that the paddle, wand, or whatever it was, was producing.

"You have used Magic recently." One of them whispered. How I heard it over the running water and the echoes of that same water, I do not know.

"I used magic to light the torches," Ariadne told them. "I would also suggest that there might be some magical residue leftover on both of us from using the portal."

Two of the figures looked at each other and I was as confident as I could be that there was some form of communication passing between the two.

"You also have a hanging enchantment over you to do with your…(Freddie: I am removing this so that people can't use it as a weakness like they did last time with the amulet.)

"It is a communications enchantment," Ariadne told them. "The other half of which is on Lord Frederick here."

"What is the full purpose of the enchantment?" The second of the two cowled figures involved in the discussion asked with a voice like a… Well… I kind of want to say that he "intones". He reminded me of one of the worst priests that I have ever heard speak. One of those that thought that his cassock gave him all the authority that he needed to do whatever the hell that he liked.

He was wrong.

"It allows the two of us, he and I, to communicate over vast distances without being eavesdropped on," Ariadne responded. "It also allows me to monitor his health and to know where he is at any given time."

She didn't look at me as she said this. I hadn't known some of that. I hadn't known that she was monitoring my health, but it had been strongly implied in a couple of the conversations that we had had on the subject.

I examined myself and decided that I didn't care.

The two cowled figures conferred a bit more. The third, the one that had searched the pair of us stood off to one side and seemed to wait patiently.

In the end, the cowled figures did not seem to be able to find anything wrong with anything that Ariadne had told them, and I was beckoned forwards.

It was a similar kind of thing. I stood there, held my hands out of my sides and they ran this thing over me. It glowed a much less vibrant blue when it passed over me before it flickered a deep, ugly-looking reddish-orange when they passed the wand over my heart and again over my eyes and around the back of my skull. It seemed to me that the color flickered a couple of times before vanishing.

This caused no small amount of scandal.

"What is this?" The question seemed more curious than I would have expected.

"What is what?" I retorted.

"You have the same residue of your passage through the portal and you have the same answering communication enchantment. But what is this other, flickering color?"

The figure turned and offered it to his compatriot and the two of them gazed at the paddle for what seemed a strangely elongated amount of time.

Then one of them grasped me by the chin and turned my head to an uncomfortable angle so that the light of another crystal could shine in my eyes. It was blinding and I could see nothing other than the bright light.

It was oddly beautiful.

An age passed where I was falling through stars, floating on a cloud and carried by a moonbeam before I returned to the cave, blinking and faintly wondering why I had not become a decrepit old man in the intervening time.

"He doesn't know." One figure whispered.

"Impossible." The second intoned…

Yes, that word fits.

"... He must know."

"Why?" The first answered. "We don't know what it…"

"It is another enchantment." The… I had begun to think of him as the belligerent one said. "They should both be killed for trying to smuggle an unknown…"

"May I see?" Ariadne asked.

Whisperer passed the wand over to Ariadne who held it over me. And frowned as this time, the paddle flickered once before she was unable to duplicate the response.

"There is no magic on this continent that answers to that specification." She told them. "And I have studied them all."

"You," Belligerent said. "You are but a child."

"She has studied this phenomenon of magic, or at least this world's version of it, more than anyone else my friend," said Whisperer. "If she says that it is not of this world then we have to assume that she is correct… And he has no memory of it. We would have found that. Even lies hidden inside the truth, or hidden from the speaker, answer to the rainbow crystal as well you know my friend."

"A false reading?" Ariadne wondered.

"Impossible," Belligerent said. "This has been protecting the Elder since before any of us were b…"

"Precisely my point," Ariadne said. "Magic is chaos in this realm. If something magical has happened to mutate or otherwise change its original form then that could result in a false reading. I don't think you understand what life is like above ground. Being in this world means that we interact with all manner of strange things and magical phenomena. As a result, the device itself might have changed or mutated. Also, when was it last used on a human? Let alone a human that has been as affected by strange magics like this one?"

"It has never been used on a human," Belligerent said as though Ariadne had just suggested he lick her boots. "No human has ever been…"

"And there you touch upon my point again," Ariadne said.

The two figures discussed matters a bit further before Whisperer told us. "We agree that the flickering is almost certainly the result of the changeable nature of humans, maybe some small mutations due to the prevalence of magic in this world as well as historic pressures and usages of magic about this particular individuals person." He spoke formally as though he was declaring something in a court of law, "You may pass."

The pair of them fell in behind us.

The third remained where he was and I guessed that he was the lookout left behind in case anything else should… I dunno… crawl up through the stone or something.

We were walking next to a stream now and there was a path that had been worn next to it. There were occasionally planks of stone placed in the same way that some wilderness trails have planks of wood in order to make the footing that much easier. We walked easily and silently with the two individuals that I had nicknamed "Whisperer" and "Belligerent". Now that we were walking through the more civilized areas of the cave, the amount of light that was around was increasing and it was not difficult to tell the two of them apart. Belligerent was bigger, broader, and had a dirtier robe which was of a lighter shade. Whisperer wore a darker shade of robe and was much slighter to look at. I wondered if Whisperer might be my future mother in law but there was no real way of telling that one way or the other.

The path weaved to the left and the right, occasionally bridging the stream, all the while, occasional bouts of ear-popping and dizziness continued to assail me so that I was often forced to stop in order to get my breath back or focus on my breathing.

I felt like a child being taken on a hike that was too much for me, or a decrepit old man trying to do some kind of active chore that was now past his abilities to perform.

After some minutes, I have no idea how many but it wasn't a long time, we emerged into a huge, underground cavern. When I had first had the home of the Unseen Elder described to me, I had imagined a dark, hole in the ground, utterly quiet and still. This was anything but that. This was large, well-lit by the Elven crystals and the lit fires. The music of running water was constant as it flowed over the various rock formations. There were crystals and things that I would guess to be precious stones and metals in the walls that glittered in the torchlight. Dwarves or other craftsmen of the mining variety would go mad to get into a place like this.

If any of that craft is reading this, do not go looking for the cavern, you will not survive the experience.

I was again struck with the thought that, although I would miss the fresh air and things, this would not be an entirely unpleasant place to spend the rest of eternity.

It was peaceful. The sound of the running water echoes around the cavern and around the many tunnels that seemed to exit and enter this place. It was a warren and an unpleasant image arrived of giant worms and insects that made their homes in places like this.

When I heard about the attendants of the Elder, I had imagined maybe half a dozen people doing their best to manage this being from another time and another place.

There were not a lot of people here. Certainly, there weren't hordes of people hanging around. But it was more than a dozen who turned to look at us from their featureless, shadowed cowls. Uncomfortably, a couple of them were even standing on the walls and ceiling.

"So many," I commented quietly. I had the feeling of reverence you get in the depths of the largest and most ornate churches, those places where to break the silence seems to be a kind of sacrilege.

"There are more of the older generations of us than we know," Ariadne told me. She was walking next to me as we went, plainly ready to turn and catch me should the dizziness or whatever overcome me. "After all their years, they find life in the modern world overwhelming and retreat beneath the ground. Either to sleep or to attend on the Elder One. The closest that your world would come to this kind of thing is for those people that retreat from the world to join a monastery or a convent. That and, so I'm told, the elder needs his attendants on a regular basis and so they are not small in number."

"The same way," I began thoughtfully, "that a King has more servants than the next noble, merely because he is king and therefore needs more servants because he is king and a king needs more servants."

"That is a fitting parallel." Ariadne said, "If a little insulting."

We continued to follow the path that was curving around the outsides of the cavern. One distressing moment occurred when I realized that I was walking up the wall with apparent ease. I nearly fell then and Ariadne caught me.

"Try watching your feet as you walk." She said. "Examine the ground in front of you and keep yourself grounded."

I did as I was bid for a while until I found that my sense of perspective had changed. I no longer thought of myself as walking on the wall, I was walking on the floor and that was now the wall.

It was helpful that the water seemed to spiral around on the floors and in the tunnels and the walkways of the cavern.

Eventually, we came to a drop off which led into a chasm, down which, all was blackness. We were still being led by Whisperer and Belligerent. Whisperer led the way and stepped out into the darkness so that their entire body seemed to rotate so that he was walking down the wall. Belligerent followed as though it was the easiest thing in the world.

I was game, but something in my body rebelled.

"Take my hand, Freddie," Ariadne said. "Take my hand and close your eyes."

I did as I was told and she led me on. It was like I was just walking down the same old path. I did not detect the edge, I felt no sense of odd movement, certainly no feeling of falling. Instead, I was just walking forward.

"You can open your eyes now Freddie," Ariadne told me.

We were walking down a long dark tunnel, as I looked back I could see the circle of light that led back into the cave of lights and running water.

"I thought that that was where the Elder lived," I said to no one in particular.

Someone chuckled, I thought it was Belligerent but I could not be sure.

"No," Whisperer said. "As I understand things, the way to think about that place would be to think of it as the first and only vampiric city. The cave where the Elder lives is normally dark so that nothing can distract him from his ancient vigil. There is no sound for the same reason. I hope you realize the great honor that you are being given just by being allowed in his presence."

I made some honored sounding noises but the truth was that I was beginning to wonder what might be going on.

"How will I see him in order to talk with him," I said.

"You could talk and he will hear, you do not need light in order to…" Belligerent spoke but Whisperer overrode him.

"

That has been taken into account. You will be able to see fine."

I nodded.

"So," I began. "The first Vampire city."

"It's not as impressive as you make it sound," Ariadne told me. "According to what my mother told me which she got from the earlier people, we emerged from the portal and there was simply not enough space for us all inside the portal cave. Therefore, while those of us that were scholars and understood such matters, studied the portal with the Elder, the rest of us needed somewhere to go.

"That other cave, with the crystals and the fires, was where we settled for the first, couple of hundred years or so while we waited for direction from the Elder and those people studying the portal."

"Should you stay or should you go," I wondered.

"Broadly correct," Whisperer said. "Although a vast simplification. There was much debate on the matter in all truth. The other two clans left and we were the ones that remained.

"You are human and therefore you will not be bothered by the presence of firelight," Belligerent said. "And we have discovered that Fire and heat are not going to impact that portal in any way. Therefore, that will be how the portal chamber is going to be lit for you."

It was getting dark again and I noticed that no one was lighting any torches in order to help me see. It seemed as though we were getting past that particular bit of whatever was happening. I was now, very clearly, getting the "Don't look the Emperor in the eye," speech where they tell you how many steps to take forwards, backward, how to bow, how not to bow, stand on one foot, advance 3 steps and then bow again before following any given instructions carefully.

Sure enough…

"When you speak to the Elder," Belligerent went on. "Look directly at the Elder. Feel free to make eye contact if you wish. You are in no danger from doing so. The Elder has agreed to answer your questions and will do so until such a time as he sees fit. When the Elder has decided that your meeting is over and he must return to his other responsibilities, I cannot recommend enough that that is the time that the meeting ends. At that time, an attendant will come for you and lead you back to the portal which will take you to the surface.

"Be respectful to the Elder at all times. Bow, to him upon greeting and bow upon leaving. You may feel as though the Elder is not watching you properly. This is an illusion and should not be taken for granted. Believe us when we say that the Elder is always watching and even when he is not using his eyes, then he is well aware of what is going on around him.

"Also bear in mind that the Elder's responsibilities are vast and unknowable for a mortal such as yourself to comprehend. Therefore, be aware that if the Elder doesn't speak for a protracted period of time, he is, in fact dealing with other matters that are outside the understanding of the rest of us. Be patient. If you are required to leave at any given time, have faith that the Elder will tell you so and that an attendant will come for you accordingly."

I nodded along. It is a mistake not to listen to this kind of thing. The droning on of the herald or whoever it was that gives these speeches can be tempting to ignore and just think about what you are going to be doing when you speak to whoever it is that you are going to meet. Do not give in to this impulse. Men and women have lost their lives over such things and I was more than convinced that if this Elder that I was going to meet really put his mind to it, then I would not even realize that I was dead.

As we walked, it got darker and darker as the tunnel moved further and further into the depths of the earth. We twisted and turned and I was now walking in pitch black. The popping of my ears and the dizziness spells started to become more and more intense and I was now, all but leaning on Ariadne. The two attendants, Whisperer and Belligerent didn't seem to notice or care a great deal. If they had been human then I would have expected to be hurried along, but here, when I needed to stop and take a breath, I was waited for patiently, the speech about etiquette would stop and I would be allowed to catch up with my thinking.

In that much darkness, it is strange how the other senses can become heightened. It really isn't a myth as I have sometimes assumed as what happens when you lose one of your senses. You find that your hearing becomes that much more pronounced and your sense of feeling along your flesh becomes heightened. I felt relatively safe, certainly a lot safer than I have done when I have been following one of Kerrass' torches along and down a pathway.

Ariadne held me by the hand and the ground was nice and solid under my feet. There was no feeling of rocky outcroppings or feeling of danger that I was going to slip or scramble up and down different things. The ground was pleasingly smooth and when there were different levels or steps, I was warned well in advance.

So when the darkness of the cave opened out into a new cavern. I didn't see it. I felt it instead. The air was suddenly cold on either side of me, there was an echo to the air that hadn't been there before, even in the relatively dead sounds of our footfalls and steps up until that point.

They shuffled me around a bit at Ariadne's murmured insistence so that they could find, and I quote, "a level of air and gravity that Freddie will be comfortable with."

Then light flared up all around me. It was sudden, roaring, and dazzling at the same time. It came with a sudden blast of heat that I felt sure singed my eyebrows more than a little bit. I flinched backward automatically and raised my arm to cover my eyes as a large column of fire shot up towards the ceiling.

The voice that lives in the back of my head, the same one that makes jokes about the clothing of kings, the one that mocked a Dragon about her staff and asked stupid questions of the personification of death. The voice that I am beginning to think of as being called Jack. That voice that looks out on the world and laughs at all of the things, including myself, that take themselves far too seriously.

That voice said "Very dramatic," in a tone of sarcasm so thick that I am not sure that the human throat could produce it.

I would later figure out that there had been a lit bowl of fire on the ground that had been covered in order to obscure it from sight. Then, by a conspiracy of exposing the fire to the air, or dumping a load of extra fuel on it, the fire all but exploded.

But in the literal heat of the moment, I did not have time to look to see what was going on. I recoiled from the flames as I watched them shoot from the ignition point, high up, well above me with the sparks rising even further than that. The flame seemed to be drawn towards a single point the way that water can be sucked towards a hole in the floor or a hole in the tub, it seemed to swirl in some way as it focused on this point before the flames as a whole seemed to die down again.

I tried to find the dot at that moment, the point where the flames were sucked towards and I couldn't. I wasn't fast enough to see it but you could feel the effects of it. It was as though the point emitted darkness.

I have had to describe this since and here is my best, most condensed attempt. Imagine a candle flame. A candle flame emits light, heat, and smell depending on the quality of the candle. Take away the heat and the smell and you just have a light source. Now imagine that instead of emitting light, the candle emitted darkness.

And then make the candle vanishingly small compared to the surroundings. It still emits light, but you can't actually see the light, only the effect that the light is having on the surroundings.

As for the flames themselves. They reduced to the size of a large signal flame. A large bowl of fire upon which a cone of logs had been constructed in order to house the fire which reared up. The contrast between the two, the strange point of darkness and the bonfire flame, gave the room a strange, eerie effect. Not quite burning flame but not quite a darkness. It was off-putting. Strange and disquieting.

I didn't pay attention to that though as there was a figure that stood in the light of the flame.

I don't know what I was expecting. He was grander than I was expecting when I imagined the elder. But also lesser in many ways. But the most surprising thing about him was that I found him quite handsome.

He stood a little shorter than me maybe. Utterly hairless and in the firelight, his skin looked pale and grey. His front teeth were pointed, stuck out, a little over his bottom lip and he seemed to hold his mouth slightly open for that reason.

His skin looked like thin leather that had been stretched over too much stuff. I felt as though I could see the stretch marks over his rib cage in particular and about how the skin had been stretched to fit over the breastbone and the ribs. When he moved, I kept expecting the skin to go too far and tear as it went with the same kind of ripping noise that really expensive silk makes when it tears. He seemed to wear a kind of skirt, but the flapping torn parts of it suggested that it had once been some kind of robe which, over the years, had torn and rotted to its current state. He was wearing an outer garment that in another context might have been considered to be a King's mantle, but the way he wore it seemed to suggest that it was more the mantle of a powerful priest.

As a result, I could still see his chest and the sunken belly. The skin was tattooed heavily in a display of lines and circles that I guessed to depict some kind of script although what it was, I couldn't have told you.

He was stood to one side of the fire and maybe a little bit behind so that we would still have to go round the fire to get to him. The fire was reflecting in his eyes, giving him the appearance as though his eyes were glowing.

He was smiling.

"Welcome," he began, a strange dark liquid leaked out of his mouth and between his teeth as he spoke, "The unseen Elder of the Vampiric race, bid you welcome inside my halls." He seemed to chew the words, the movements of the jaw, the teeth, and the tongue all seemed a little emphasized as though he had a piece of meat stuck between his back teeth.

In comparison to the horror of watching his mouth move, he spoke in a deep voice which only rasped a little as he spoke. It was, otherwise, velvety and smooth. If he had been human, I would have put him down to be some kind of courtier that was out of practice. Or the musician that had come out of retirement for one last gig.

As I say, he seemed charming and personable. He reminded me of a priest. That happened a lot and I hope that no priests are offended by that. Part of the situation was that I had already been reminded of monks as I had walked through the caverns. The hooded and cowled figures had stood around in exactly the same way that monks stand around when intruders come into their abbeys and their buildings. They treat you as interlopers and intruders and treat books as though they are sacred vessels that are somehow lessened when they are opened and read by normal human eyes.

So this being had that kind of attitude and air about him. The body language and the movements that he had looked like a benevolent village priest. The kind that is far more intelligent than the average members of his congregation and takes great delight in skewering the self-important while uplifting the rest of the flock. He would have been the kind of priest that would have rolled up the sleeves of his cassock when it was time to build a house, or bring the harvest in before gently chiding those of higher station for not getting down and helping.

All this is meant to show you just how put-off I was. I was expecting a grand and austere being. A towering figure of power and intimidation. I was expecting to feel the… I don't know… the history coming off him likes waves of smoke.

My brain frantically tried to remember the long lecture that I had been absorbing on the subject of etiquette and bowed back. I mean really, how is one supposed to remember all of that stuff when faced with someone that could eat you whole without really thinking about things.

Instead, I bowed deeply. I would have gotten down onto one knee except one of the few things that I had been told about the Elder that I could remember, was that he despises this kind of thing.

"I thank you." I began. "I thank you for your gracious hospitality and for your welcome. I am deeply honored to find myself…

"ADDRESS ME IN PERSON RATHER THAN MY MOUTHPIECE." The figure roared, his voice thundering in its rage. The sheer force of that anger, the depth of feeling behind it was like a hammer blow to the front of my skull and I fell backward.

Despite the tone of voice despite the anger and the rage that had been part of that onslaught. The figure's body language didn't change. He had opened his mouth wide in order to bellow but other than that, there was nothing about his body language that seemed to suggest that he was angry.

When I fought myself upright again after flinching back from the sheer force of that… rage, I looked back at the figure who had clasped his hands together in a strange way. I looked at the hands and I realized that he was pointing towards one of the walls.

I turned and what I saw there took my breath away.

That voice that I mentioned earlier. The sarcastic one. It said, "Now that's more like it."

Into the side of the cave, there seemed to be carved a vast figure made of bone. It was seated as if on some kind of throne that had been carved out of the side of the cavern by long years of this figure sitting there. It was huge, vastly imposing, and quite, quite terrifying. It wasn't looking at me, it was looking at a point in the air a little bit above the fire and off to one side. Like the other in the room, it was utterly bald, but in saying that, is to belittle what I saw. It wasn't, even remotely human. It was like the corpse of some kind of ancient King.

I never got the chance to measure it, measure him. Funnily enough, I don't walk around with some kind of tape measure and ask people how tall they might be. But when measured against me, it was well over a foot taller than me again. The skin, such as it was, was pale and dry. Closer in appearance to paper than to any kind of actual skin. His hands that were resting on the armrests of his, well, his throne, were elongated into long claws that put me under no illusion as to just how easily it would kill me if it put its mind to it.

And the only thing that he wore was some kind of loincloth that covered its modesty. Again though, I had the impression that the loincloth had once been part of some larger garment that had been eaten away by time, wear, damp and any of the other things that might be going on in a place like that one.

Like his, well, his interpreter, His teeth were pronounced, and if he had ever had lips, my guess was that those lips had rotted away to nothing. All there were teeth and those teeth were sharp. His eyes glowed, the irises standing out in the darkness as a strange, powerful kind of amber glow. This was more than just the flames reflecting in the depths of his eyes. This was an active storing of the light before that light was projected back outwards.

The throne, such as it was, seemed to have been shaped out of the wall of the cavern itself. There were no marks of ornamentation. There were no signs of chisels. No obvious effects of wedges or strikes of a hammer. I wondered if the stone itself had shifted around this figure in order to build a throne around him.

There might have been no marks or ornamentation on the throne. What there was was filth and dirt and all kinds of unspeakable slime that were dripping down the front and onto the floor where the stain vanished. It was impossible to tell what it was but looking at the ceiling and the wall immediately behind and above the Elder's throne, there were no signs of where any kind of liquid or filth could enter. Nor were there any signs of where it could drain away to. There was no water in this particular cave.

It took me a moment for my brain to catch up.

"Forgive me," I said, my mouth moving and speaking automatically. "I was unaware of the fact that you had an interpreter at all."

The figure was so still. For all I could tell, I was staring at a statue.

"Really? The interpreter said in the same tone. "An oversight on the part of those that have guided you here. I shall have to address the matter with them in a forthright manner later."

Ah, I knew this game. I was being tested.

"Such a shame," I said. "A simple oversight like this one. I trust that no insult has been given and I emphasize that I, at least, am not offended in the slightest way by the oversight. Please, do not punish the wrongdoer on my account."

"We will deal with the matter, later." The interpreter said, presumably in the voice of the Elder.

"Just checking though," I said. "You don't need my words to be translated to you at all?"

"No." Came the voice from the mouth of the Interpreter again. "Your primitive languages are easy to understand for one such as I. To answer your other question, yes, I am perfectly capable of speaking, but frankly, your basic speech is actually harder to understand than more proper higher pieces of language."

"Then why…?"

"Because your words are primitive." The being on the throne said. It was a harsh whisper and the voice was heavily accented. I have no idea why or what the accent was. "Your sentences are basic, your concepts are flawed and your entire language is barely the language of slime."

The interpreter took up the speech again as the Elder subsided. His lips had moved. Certainly, the jaw had opened and sound had issued forth, but the rest of his body hadn't moved.

"It is an insult to our mouth and to our tongue to force it to conform to so primitive a language and I do not like the way that it tastes. It is an insult to my mouth, just as it is an insult that we must take time away from our vital duties to speak with you."

I glanced at the Interpreter who had moved next to, and a little in front of, his master. He caught my eye, winked, and minutely lifted his shoulders in a shrug.

And then he screamed as the Elders bloody claws exploded out through the front of his chest.

The Elder had stood. I had not seen him move and he now towered over the rest of the cavern as he lifted the interpreter off the ground. Gore dripped down the Elder's arm and off the Elbow onto the floor. The Interpreter looked down at the claws coming out of his chest and screamed in horror again.

I felt a hand on my arm as a restraint but the truth was, I was so frozen by the sudden shift towards violence that I had absolutely no intention of trying to do anything.

Almost leisurely, the Elder's other hand pushed itself into the body of the hapless interpreter who no longer had the breath for more screaming. Instead, he groaned in, what must have been agony as his body started to spasm.

The Elder then turned towards me so that the Interpreter's body was in front of him and facing me. Then, the interpreter was pulled apart before my very eyes. Blood and gore splashed everywhere as the Vampire was ripped apart. In the same way that you might rip apart a roast chicken. It was like that. Sometimes, the muscle and the flesh, such as there was, were just torn. But other times, the efforts of the Elder were interrupted by the presence of bone and cartilage. There was no sign of exertion from the Elder though. There was just a brief pause before there was a series of wet, popping, snapping, and splintering sounds as the task was finished.

I know that Vampires are made from sterner stuff than humans are. So I have no idea if the interpreter died in that frenzy of bloodletting. According to everyone that had spoken though, the Elder did not kill his subjects so I had hope for the Interpreter's survival. Instead, I wondered if the Interpreter felt it as it all happened or whether his body and brain just shut down as it was happening.

The Elder made sure that there were only bits remaining though. When he was done with the torso, he pulled apart the limbs at the joints.

The now legendary former questioner of the Eternal Flame. Father Jerome. The man that will be performing my marriage ceremony. The man who, quite literally, brought me back to life. He told me quite a lot about torture. I don't know why. I was deeply, dangerously depressed, and suicidal at the time. The only time to rival it was immediately after I had tried to call off my marriage with Ariadne but that was a different kind of despair. That was self-loathing whereas my time with Jerome was more about convincing myself to live. So why he thought that telling me about thumbscrews and garrottes and red hot pokers and the utter uselessness of an iron maiden as anything other than an intimidation device would help with that? I couldn't tell you.

But tell me he did. And one of the interesting things, purely from a medical standpoint, was that when you put someone on the rack. You stretch them and distend limbs to the point of breaking them. It is not actually the cartilage around the joints that breaks. They can come away from the bone as the joint is weak. The muscles can tear but that's not the same thing. The joints can pop out of themselves, but the cartilage itself is actually stronger than steel. So when you think about things breaking, stretching, and snapping in limbs. It's the bone that's breaking. Not the cartilage around the joint itself.

Why do I tell you this important and utterly appalling fact?

Because the Elder pulled the Interpreter's arms and legs apart at the Elbow and the knee joints I don't know, maybe Vampire muscle and bone structure are built in a different way to humans.

When he was done with everything else, the Elder put all the ribbons of flesh and still twitching bits of bone and sinew into a heap, he placed the head on top of it before standing on the head in order to squash it like an egg.

Then he moved and sat back on his throne in a leisurely fashion.

"This is a solemn moment." The voice of the Elder hissed out of his barely open mouth. "Levity and disrespect have no place here."

I swallowed the first words that were coming out of my mouth. I wanted to know whether all of that had been a show for my benefit. I wanted to know if that particular interpreter had been chosen for a reason. I wanted to know if it was a point that the Elder was making for the benefit of someone else. I wanted to know if there were factions within the ranks of the Elder Vampires and I wanted to know if the Elder had just destroyed one of the leaders of an opposing faction. Or if he had destroyed a favorite of another faction.

But I said nothing. If it was a point, then the point was well made. The Elder might have promised not to hurt me and to let me out of this place alive. But in the same way that Kings can decide to break a promise for "the good of the realm", the promise of this Elder was worthless and would be worthless until I was well out of here.

The Elder waved a claw towards the bloody mess on the floor. As he sat on his throne, there was still blood, gore and other unspeakable things dripping from his arms and from the ends of his claws. He didn't move, nor did he examine them.

One of the two figures that had accompanied us, left. I thought it was Belligerent but I had lost track of which one was which given everything that had just happened. I was also not watching that carefully on the grounds that I wanted to keep my eyes on the thing that could kill me at any moment.

Three figures came into the room. Two had buckets and one was carrying a large roll of cloth. I didn't see beneath the hoods and as the robes were shapeless it was impossible to tell. But again, I wondered if one of the figures was my mother-in-law.

The one with the cloth spread it out next to the pile of gore and started shifting the bones and the limbs and things onto the roll of cloth. The other two placed buckets next to the Elder, from which they removed cloths, dripping steaming hot water that smelt of Lavender.

A fact that was oddly incongruous given everything that had happened.

Taking the cloths, they wiped the hands and the claws of the Elder clean as best as they could. The Elder didn't move or lift either hand so that they could clean underneath and so I imagined that there was still quite a large amount of filth underneath the arms where the cleaners couldn't get to it.

It was an odd sight. Not that disgusting as I have seen far worse in my time. Especially considering that I had met the man or being that the blood had belonged to, however briefly.

I have even seen similar scenes in the past. When Lords and nobles have made a killing in the hunt and their hands are covered in blood. If they are then forced to eat something or drink something with some semblance of manners about them, then servants are summoned with cloths of scented waters in order to clean them up before, for instance, taking the hand of a lady in order to kiss it.

The difference here was that the Elder didn't even try to make the work easier for his attendants. That showed a level of scorn and disdain that I found… distasteful.

They did their best before a fourth person arrived with a mop and a bucket and set about the impossible task of cleaning up all the gore from the floor.

There was another point being made here. Ariadne, the other escort, and myself watched the attendants work for a long time, saying nothing.

Then Regis turned up. He was wearing a new robe, similar to the ones of the other attendants. Whether it was over the top of his other clothes or not I couldn't tell. He greeted us with a nod and a slight smile before bowing to the Elder.

"Summoned, I have come." He said.

Then he howled.

I write that as though it happened straight away. As though he just opened his mouth and that the noise came out, but that's not quite true. I've thought about this a bit since it all took place and I have come to believe that it didn't happen like that. He didn't just open his mouth, it took a bit of time to get to that point. Not a lot of time, but it was still a little bit of time.

After he greeted us, he bowed towards the Elder. Then… and I stress, this all happened in a fraction of a moment, his eyes widened and bugged before his face twisted into a rictus of horror. His hands came up to the side of his head and covered his ears as though to shield himself from some awful noise. The scream also started slowly. It started off as a moan of terror and disbelief before it escalated in hysteria and volume.

Then he took a horrible, rasping breath before really, properly screaming with a harshness to it that made me think that screaming like that would actively damage the throat of a human.

His legs gave way and he fell, collapsing to his knees before even holding himself up in that position was too much to bear and he fell over sideways, curling into a fetal ball.

He didn't stop screaming. The only pauses came when he stopped to take a breath.

I went to help him. Regis is a strange person to know in that I found that I didn't really like him, but I already considered him a friend and was looking forward to seeing him again. I can't explain it any further than that. To see him in such anguish was hurtful to me and I went to support him. I don't know how I was going to do that. Something about taking him by the shoulder and holding onto him just to let him know that I was there so that he wouldn't get lost so that he would know that he wasn't alone.

So I jerked forwards, reflexively and I found my arms caught. On one side by Ariadne and on the other by the remaining guide.

I could see no face in the cowl so instead, I turned on Ariadne who returned my gaze impassively and with a serenity that I found appalling. I don't think I hid that from her and to be fair, in the there and then of the moment, I wasn't really trying to hide my feelings from her. I did see that her other hand was clutched in her skirts though, which is normally a good sign of her extremes of emotion.

I turned back to Regis and watched as he screamed himself hoarse. If the only thing that I could do for him was to witness his pain, then I resolved to witness it and remember every detail.

Eventually, the sound died down. Not because Regis was no longer in pain, but because he had, as I say, screamed himself hoarse.

"It can take people like that sometimes." Said the other attendant. Who turned out to be Whisperer for certain. "Especially amongst the young. There are many factors to be taken into account on the matter of whether or not a mind, or a body, can accept the presence of the Elder in them. But age, experience, and no small amount of training is heavily involved in all of that."

"And Regis is very young for all of his knowledge." Ariadne all but whispered it.

"He should not have killed that other one," Whisperer said. Interesting to me that he didn't know Detlaff's name. "I know why he did it, but there must have been another solution. Putting him into sleep would have done. After a century or two asleep, the other would have forgotten his heartbreak."

I very carefully did not reply that such an action might also have calcified Detlaff's feelings on the subject. As well as making him hate Regis as well.

"So is this further punishment?" I wondered. I was trying really hard to keep my emotion and disgust from my voice.

"It will certainly be part of it. I had wondered why the Elder was so easy on him." Whisperer made it sound so casual.

Regis had stopped screaming now and climbed to his feet. He was wobbly, jerky, and uncoordinated in his movements and as I saw his face, I could not keep myself from recoiling in pity and shock.

His face was a rictus of pain and terror. He was no longer screaming and his mouth was closed, but his eyes were screaming. I have no other way to put it than that.

A single line of blood dripped from his left nostril. I don't even know if Regis noticed.

"Such is the price for disrespect." The voice that emerged from Regis' mouth was the same as had emerged from the interpreter. It was deep, warm, vibrant. It was also, utterly unlike Regis' normal speaking voice. I saw the same movements in Regis' jaw that the interpreter had. It was as though he was also chewing something hard and tough at the back of his jaw, or trying to extract a piece of meat from between some teeth with his tongue.

But above all, the thing that sticks out in my memory more than anything else at this juncture. The same black liquid seemed to seep from Regis' jaw. It stained his teeth and dripped down his chin.

I forced myself to turn away from the wreck that had become of my friend and faced the Elder who was still sitting on his throne. The cleaning attendants were in the process of finishing their tasks and leaving. Belligerent did not come back.

"I shall try to remember the lesson," I said. "May I ask a question?"

Regis sighed in the voice of the Elder. "My understanding is that you were brought here to ask no end of questions. You waste more of my time by asking such a foolish one. Ask your questions, if I do not want to answer, then I will not."

"How is my friend?" I asked, gesturing towards Regis. "I thought he had already been punished for the killing of the other."

See that, taking on the terms of address that my opponents use? That's training that is.

"He is not being punished." The Elder replied. "It is an honor to allow me into his mind. He was told that he would attend upon me this night and this is how that works."

"I see," I commented.

"Humans really do enjoy wasting their breath, don't they?" You could hear the Elder's sneer. "Their breath and their time which is so finite that I really do not comprehend it."

I risked a glance over at Regis. The look of pain in his eyes had not retreated but there was a new look in those eyes now, one of sorrow and... Pity?

"But before I answer your questions," The Elder said, "I would first deal with some other business, if you do not mind, of course?"

(Freddie's note: For reference, when I say that the Elder speaks, he is speaking through the mouth of Regis. Believe me when I say, that when the Elder himself speaks, I will tell you.)

"Of course," I said, bowing in my best courtier fashion.

"Stand before me Eight legs." The Elder said.

Ariadne squeezed my arm as she passed me and moved to stand in front of the Elder's throne. I glanced at Whisperer and Regis. Whisperer was still cowled and Regis' expression had not changed from his expression of pity and horror.

"Report on your experiment Eight Legs." The Elder ordered.

Ariadne took a deep breath as a moment of realization struck me.

"This is about me," I whispered to myself. I didn't mean to speak aloud but I must have. Whisperer caught hold of my arm again and when I looked at him, his cowled head shook from side to side.

"The experiment continues apace," Ariadne reported. "The humans are in a period of progressive advancement. Popular thought is turning against the conservatives of their various religions, racism is declining amongst the educated and in the aftermath of the most recent war. The spread of education is, however, perhaps irreprably damaged after the damages done to the libraries of the north by religious zealots."

Notice how they were speaking in human language? I did. Especially for a language that had so many weaknesses according to both Ariadne and the Elder who had just delivered a speech about how awful our tongue is.

"All of that is fascinating." The Elder said. "But contains none of what we wanted to know. How would our people be accepted into the world as it currently stands?"

Ariadne took a careful breath. I was, again, struck by the fact that these Vampires, no matter how ancient, were not so different from ourselves in this. Ariadne was avoiding a topic. The Elder had seen it too and was not letting her get away with it.

"It is my belief that our people could settle in the more urban areas," Ariadne said carefully. Some people have fooled themselves into thinking that we do not exist and the majority of people would simply refuse to believe that their next-door neighbor was a Vampire. Those people, perhaps more knowledgable or more primitive in their levels of education, would be afraid. Any member of our species that was living openly as what they were would need to take steps to prove themselves in the eyes of the public."

"And how long would that take?" The Elder asked.

"It took me about a year and a half, but that could not be typical. I took over in a time and a place where the people had been used cruelly by their previous masters. Therefore I was accepted far more readily than most. I also had an element of their power of nobility over them. I was their noble protector."

"Yes of course. Are there any other ways that you would suggest that a Vampire could ease their way into human society?"

I knew what the answer was. So did the Elder, that was why he asked the question.

"Find a person of influence," Ariadne said. "Make them love you and then marry into the society."

If the Elder had been human, he would have nodded there. He had made Ariadne admit to a point.

"And how are your own efforts moving in that regard?" The Elder asked.

I watched as Ariadne tried to deflect the question. I felt relatively secure in what I was hearing. None of it was new to me. I knew that one of the things that Ariadne had agreed with her people was regarding this so-called "experiment" to see how human society would accept a Vampire. I also knew that her attentions towards me were helpful in that regard. The Elder was trying to hurt me…

I felt myself frown in thought. This was about me, but was it for me?

"I have made friends with many influential people," Ariadne said. "Including, but not limited to, the magical leaders of the continent as well as the Empress and ruler of the continent. I am on speaking terms with a number of other rulers and powerful people. I would describe myself as close friends with relatively few people, however. Some of whom date from back before my imprisonment in the tower. However, I am close friends with the leader and director of the most powerful mercantile company on the face of the continent."

"Who is this one's sister is she not?"

The gesture was a mental one, not a physical one. But I felt it, I very nearly saw it as if the Elder really had gestured towards me.

"She is."

"No other close friends?" the Elder seemed surprised.

"Using the common metric of the amount of time spent with each other, no," Ariadne said. "There are a number of people that I have hopes for a relationship maturing into such. A few people have turned out to not be friends who I thought were, and a few people that I had formally disliked have turned out to be moving towards friendship."

A distant part of me wondered who she was referring to.

"And how about the main subject of your experiment." The Elder wondered. "How is your relationship with him?"

"I…" Ariadne hesitated and I felt a shiver of ice run down my spine. "I am as confident as I can be that he loves me unreservedly."

"But you are not certain."

"No."

"Why not?"

"To be certain, I would have to read his mind, and to do that would violate a very fundamental foundation of his trust in me."

"Why is trust important? Simply make him love you."

"For this one, love is based on trust and respect as well as other factors," Ariadne told him. "Although he is an appreciator of physical beauty, that is not everything to him."

"What other factors?"

"Physical appearance cannot be denied."

Again, there was a pause where a nod should have been.

"I can see your young friend is confused about why I am asking these questions of you."

I wasn't. I had decided a little while ago that the Elder was being cruel.

"I said earlier," The Elder went on. Regis had faded into the shadows now, "is true. Your language is woefully primitive and lacks certain factors. However, there are other things that your people are simply too backward to understand. And one of those is regarding the study of society. The closest term that we might invent for your language about this study is 'Social Science'."

I nodded to show that I was following along with this so far. I was, I remember Ariadne touching on some of this very early on in our relationship.

"I grow tired of this." The Elder said. "You explain it to him."

Ariadne turned to face me. There was a sense that she was forcing herself to look me in the eye.

"There are two ways to study a society." She said. "The first is to do so remotely, as an outsider. The observer sets themselves up nearby and watches the society interact. They might, on rare occasions, interview the people that they are watching, but otherwise, they keep themselves separate from everything that is going on and do not get involved. The argument for this method is that you are not influencing the subject of your studies and therefore you get a far more unbiased impression of what you are watching.

"The stipulations of this would be that the observer would never be involved, never interfere, even to the destruction of the observed society. An example would be a society that lives next to the sea. An earth tremor occurs. The observer knows this to be a natural phenomenon and is also aware that the tremor will almost certainly cause a tidal wave and therefore flees. Society sees the tremor as the sign of the Gods and prays for their redemption. They are still praying as the tidal wave hits and drowns them all."

I nodded. There were flaws to the model. There is a recent paper written on the subject of scientific observation that states that the act of observation, no matter how remote, has an effect on the experiment. And I rather thought that this would happen here. The paper itself was about the presence of an observer affecting the Alchemical reaction by, among other things, breathing in the same air as the reaction. But there was a whole group of scholars arguing over where else the observation might have an effect.

"Tell him of the other way." The Elder said.

Ariadne took a moment, rearranged her skirts a bit, and ran her hands down her bodice.

"The other way is that the observer enters society as part of that society. They interact with people, they follow their religions, they have jobs, they interact with the social normality of that society with regards to its politics and etiquette."

"What else do they do?" The Elder prompted.

"They take a spouse." Ariadne made sure she was looking me in the eye when she said that before her gaze fell.

There it was. There was the point that the Elder was trying to make. I was a science experiment.

"Why do they do that?" The Elder was unsatisfied with the hint of doubt that he had managed to put into my soul. He wanted to widen the wedge, to shatter the bond irretrievably.

Ariadne took a breath and, again, forced herself to look me in the eye.

"The mating rituals of any society are vital towards understanding the society itself. Whether we want to believe it or not, the urge to reproduce is a vital one as part of the formation of any civilization. Even the decision not to procreate is important. Therefore, the interaction with that element of society is a vital part of any study into the way that they work."

"If the scientist." The Elder pressed, "follows this rational. Is love a part of that equation?"

"It can happen," Ariadne admitted. "But is rare and should be avoided at all costs. The scientist might have another spouse elsewhere that is not part of the equation or might have societal mores from their own society that would make love inconvenient. Not least of which is the heartbreak that might come when the observing scientist is recalled home."

"The heartbreak of whom?" The Elder asked.

"The scientist," Ariadne responded.

"What of the subject, the person whom the scientist has married? What of their heartbreak?"

"Such a matter would be irrelevant," Ariadne said.

I won't lie, that one hurt. I dropped my gaze without meaning to. I didn't know that I had done it until I realized what had happened. I took a deep breath and forced myself to raise my eyes to look Ariadne in the face.

She had turned away, back to the body of the Elder.

"So continue your report." The Elder told Ariadne. "You chose your subject for study. Why this one?"

"There were a number of factors." Ariadne began.

I won't lie here, the cold way that she recounted all of this was… chilling and more than a little upsetting. Some people reading this might be wondering why it was so upsetting, even now they will be thinking of all of the previous occasions where to the observer's eyes. Ariadne has proven her love and affection. Not just for me, but for others as well. And that is true. But I would also argue that those people saying those things have never stood there, in the dark. Feeling the cool damp air seeping into the depths of your being while you listen to the woman that you love talking about you as though you were something to be dissected under a microscope.

To later be discussed with her peers.

Not least was the issue that, a lot of what was being said, played on my own paranoia and lack of confidence that this had been the case all along. What followed, did not help.

"The first factor was in the manner of our meeting." Ariadne began. "I did not realize this advantage until later of course, but the subject rescued me from my captivity. This gave him a very real sense of responsibility for me. This was sheer luck on this part and I had in no way planned for it.

"The second factor was the matter of the subject's intelligence."

"For a human." The Elder prompted.

"Indeed," Ariadne agreed, "however, his intelligence was still relatively high and much higher than I would have expected for someone from the society that I had seen growing before my imprisonment. Again, this was sheer luck on my part. There were other potential subjects occurring at the time and this was one of the factors that were involved in my decision. An intelligent specimin, even relatively speaking, would teach me far more about the society that he was from than a stupid one.

"If the Elder would remember, it was about here that I agreed on the tone of my experiment and I started to actively and consciously choose my subject. This one had many other factors that were attractive to a person in my position…"

"What position was that?" The Elder interrupted.

"The position of scientist looking for a subject."

"So you weren't looking for a rescuer or someone to love or a way to artificially get yourself into society then."

"No. I needed none of those things. I was weak, certainly and I was invested in investigating the source of the totem that one of my other potential subjects was touting as a means to control me. I had already ascertained that the totem was incomplete, so I could have left at my leisure to rebuild my strength elsewhere before returning to society, whether human or Vampire, at my convenience. The only person that could have stopped me was the Witcher who was captive himself at the time."

"I see." The Elder seemed pleased. "Continue."

"So now I was actively choosing a subject and more and more factors suggested this one to me. Practically, he had rank, but not too much which would have been an inconvenience and brought too much attention on me. As I said, he was intelligent and valued education, which meant that his access to further sources of information would be considerable. He was also friendly with the Witcher who was the only real physical threat to me at that time, given my weakened state."

"Why not use the Witcher as a subject?"

"There would be distrust factors. He was trained to see me as a monster rather than that belief just being a matter of societal conditioning. And it was relatively easy to detect that he was too unstable mentally for such a relationship as one that I would want to foster. He might detect my manipulations and seek to destroy me. And this one was, by far, the better candidate."

"I see. Continue,"

"Psychologically, the subject was rather naive about the ways of the world although he was forcing himself to confront his own learned viewpoints at the time and I found that interesting. He was also, clearly, very lonely, lacking in personal confidence, and desperate for some loving company and affection. I thought that these factors would leave him vulnerable to my charms, meaning that I would be better able to overcome his, quite sensible fear of me. He seemed to be the obvious candidate for study and so I made my choice."

"How did you pursue him?"

"I questioned him about his society in order to fire up his intellectual interest in myself. I enquired about his romantic preferences which he was naive enough to tell me straight away. Not helped by his friend and companion who added some very interesting pointers as to how I could appear physically in order to appeal to the subject. None of which seemed to be insurmountable obstacles in pursuing him.

"Then I found out that I didn't need to pursue him at all. His society believes in arranged marriages and as such, I could simply go to his superiors and force the issue. The rest of the matter was merely cosmetic."

"Cosmetic."

"Simple things." She said. "I ensured that I would appear vulnerable. The subject was and still is rather naive and as such, he occasionally needs to feel as though he is a rescuer. So in appearing less than I was, he could feel a sense of pity towards me. I told him that I loved him. I cared for him as best as I could… In short I followed all of the rules of courtship in his society."

"Why?"

"I thought it would make the relationship far easier if he genuinely cared for, or loved me. It would leave him vulnerable for other experiments and factors at later dates."

"I see. Were there any other obstacles?"

"There were a few. One of my enemies nearly succeeded in driving a wedge between us when he tried to frame me for massacring a village. The religious issue was easily overcome by my conversion. His family took some time to come around and then there was the matter that he fell in love with another woman during the course of his adventures, forcing me to speed up my timetable and force the betrothal.

"

I thought of Marion and continued to say nothing. Why did I say nothing? I don't know. Partly there was the fact that there were still a set of attendants clearing up the blood on the floor, but partially because my heart was breaking a little bit. I didn't believe a word of it, but the fact that it was all so plausible, as well as playing into so much of my own paranoia and anxiety about allowing myself to love a person, any person, meant that I did believe it at the same time.

Doubt, the insidious death of trust. And still, Ariadne's droning, emotionless voice carried on.

"He was nearly taken from me." She carried on. "The Empress of the humans nearly decided that she was interested in him at the behest of his younger sister. But fortunately, I had forestalled that. He already loved me and I had already ensured that our betrothal had been sealed according to his customs. Enemies came for him and nearly killed him. That was a mistake on my part and I had overestimated his mental fortitude in the face of the horrors that he subjects himself to on a regular basis. He nearly tried to call the entire thing off as part of a foolish sense of honor."

"How much of this does he know do you think?"

"Up until now? I think he only suspected but put it down to his own paranoia. His instincts were telling him to flee from me, but his desperation to believe in the love, to believe that he was special in that he could possibly appeal to me. That made him blind to the dangers."

"Do you love him?" The Elder asked. This was the question that I had been dreading. Whether she answered in the positive or the negative, would I believe it? Could I believe it?

"No," Ariadne said simply. "I have pretended to it, but no, I do not love him."

"There are a number of your peers that believe otherwise." The Elder argued.

"I cannot answer to that," Ariadne said. "I have immersed myself in the feeling in order to pretend to it. But truth be told, the pretense was not hard, the subject was easy to manipulate. He is young and far too much of a prisoner of his own biology. I cannot answer for the accuracy of other people's judgments."

"Interesting." The Elder said before he addressed me. "Step forwards young man." He told me.

I was breathing hard. Whether I believed what Ariadne said before this night, or now, didn't matter. I could sort that out later when I had more time to think.

I took a step forward.

"What do you make of all of this?" There was a tinge to Regis' voice that had not been there before. Something close to curiosity.

"I am unsure," I replied as honestly as I could. "I have a lot to think about."

"You have heard everything that she has said. What she has said, is according to what she was ordered to do as part of her investigation. And I am the Elder of her race. She cannot lie to me. Given that, do you still love her?"

I took a deep breath and stared at the back of Ariadne's head.

"Turn and face him," The Elder ordered. "You should watch his face as his heart breaks and put it in your memory. I will be interested in your analysis of the process."

Ariadne turned. I looked for some kind of signal, something in her eyes, but there was nothing there. I wondered if she was wearing an illusion and so I looked at her hands. Clenched hands around the skirts would mean that she was in emotional turmoil. I expected that, I needed to see that I think.

She was still, her hands down by her side.

"Do you still love her?" The Elder asked again.

"Yes," I said. I wanted to make it firm, a defiant snarl into the face of this thing that was doing this to me. Whether I was showing defiance to Ariadne or the Elder, I didn't know.

I wanted to be defiant, but the doubt was doing its job. Hearing Ariadne say that she didn't love me hurt, even if it was a lie. It hurt me down to my soul.

I wanted to be defiant, but it came out like a sob.

"Yes, I still love her." I wailed before I could find my anger. I gritted my teeth and forced my tongue to speak. "I will not deny that there are things that I have heard today that have hurt me and hurt me deeply. But yes I still love her. She told me that if she had been rejected elsewhere, then she would have come for me, even if I had my rank taken from me, which was not beyond possibility at times. She told me that she would have approached me regardless."

"Really? Your rebuttal Eight legs?"

"I told him," Ariadne said calmly, "that if the matter in Angraal had fallen through, then I would still have approached him. That was all I said and all I meant. I would have chosen him. He made a good subject for study. If his rank was removed, I would probably have gone elsewhere with my interests."

She was right about that too. That was all she had said, it was only in my romantic memory that she had said elsewhere.

"I don't care," I said. I sounded childish and I knew it.

"Do you still love her?" The Elder asked through Regis' mouth.

"I do." I snarled it.

"Even though she lied to you?"

"I believe that she is telling the truth now," I told the room. "And I believe that she told the truth then. Beyond that, I must consider things further."

"You misunderstand." The Elder said. "She claims that, for you, love is based on trust. She lied to you and I can prove it."

The voice in the back of my head had a moment to take that in before it muttered in the back of my head 'oh, this should be good.'

I also had a moment to take a long look at Ariadne and tried to see if I could tell what she was thinking. My effort was not entirely successful. I thought that she might be standing a little stiffer but I was also aware that I might be seeing that because I wanted to see that. My brain was doing an interesting thing where it had kind of decided that it wasn't going to make any decisions tonight. It was going to absorb everything, take it all in, acknowledge how it all made me feel before setting it aside so that I could take it out later and have a proper look at it and make some decisions then.

After, say, I had had a good night's sleep and was no longer in the presence of a horrifically ancient thing that lived before the recorded beginning of history, that I still had to interview.

When the Elder started to speak through Regis again, I swear to the flame that the voice had taken on some of Regis' lecturing tone.

"You are aware of course," he began, not turning the ancient body towards me, "that our appearance is self-actualizing and under our own control. We change our shape and our abilities according to our needs as well as after a certain amount of practice."

"I was aware of that," I admitted. "Your senses become sharper the more you use them, Your claws and teeth become sharper when using them for combat. You are also, I have learned tonight, more powerful the older you get and the closer to the first generation of vampires."

"That is true." The Elder continued. "Our physical appearance acts on that. We can control our appearance if we choose to. It can take time, it is not a glamour or what you would understand as a magical effect."

"My understanding was that it's like practicing something, practicing a musical instrument or something." I tried to offer as a contribution.

"Largely correct." The Elder said, I wondered if the smugness in the voice belonged to the Elder or whether that was a part of Regis' general tone of voice. "Tell me, do you remember a conversation where she asked you what your ideal woman looked like? Or what you looked for in a romantic partner?"

"I do. And I remember Kerrass doing most of the telling."

"And do you remember her telling you that that was her natural form?"

And there it was again. The little doubt. The thought that I didn't believe but feared that it might be true.

"She lied to you." The Elder told me. "She told you that that was what her natural form was. It wasn't. She twisted herself to look like that in order to seduce you. In order to manipulate you for her own ends. She made herself into your ideal woman so that you would not question it when she insinuated herself into your life. It played off your vanity and your loneliness and your desires.

"She adjusted her hair to make it silkier and smoother. She increased the size of her mammary glands (Freddie: The scientific term for breasts for those people that don't know), she toned her muscles to pleasing human proportions, modeling her physical body on some of the other Sorceresses in the continent. Making sure that she was slim, with just the right amount of hip and leg. She adjusted her face to be close to the ideal form of beauty, which she took from where Eight Legs?"

"I took it," Ariadne began. "From the portraits of The Lodge of Sorceresses."

"Be specific." The Elder snapped. That was definitely not Regis.

"Specifically, I used the Elven appearance of Ida Aep Emean for a touch of non-humanity. Then a cross between Yennefer and Phillipa for Facial structure. Then I added a certain amount of softness from Emma, his sister. I made some small adjustments to appear youthful from the face of the Empress when I met her in person. The life and animation of that lady and similar."

"Why his sister?" The Elder asked as I searched Ariadne's face for the signs of those women that she mentioned. It took me a moment and I also had to acknowledge that I might have been imagining it due to my own… I don't know, mental state I suppose. But I thought I could see Lady Eilhart's chin and Yennefer's cheekbones.

"Freddie adores his sister, to the point of idolization," Ariadne said coldly. "He has stated often and publicly that all women that he meets are unconsciously compared to his older sister. He credits her with all of the goodness in his character and that he regularly declares her to be beautiful in his eyes.

"I also knew from his account in the matter of the Shadow in Amber's crossing, that he was tormented by his sexual arousal in the presence of a lewd hallucination of his sister. The Beast even commented on his tendency towards loving his sister in a minor way. I thought that that might encourage him to trust me a bit more if I reminded him, even a little bit, of the sister that he adores."

The Elder paused to let that sink in for a moment. I don't know what he was expecting me to do. It was a lot that he was expecting me to take in. Instead, though, I looked at Ariadne and searched her eyes, and wondered if my heart was breaking.

"So that is not your true form." The Elder stated rhetorically.

"No. We have no true form."

"Oh but we do, don't we Eight Legs." If the Elder moved, he would have been rubbing his hands with glee. "Show him how you dress for war.

Ariadne sighed as though faintly bored about the entire sequence of events. Her hands extended into claws with a strange kind of stretching noise. Her teeth lengthened into fangs, her cheekbones extended upwards and stretched the skin over the cheek hollows, while her ears lengthened into points. She snarled anomalistically.

"What do you think little human? Do you still love her?" The Elder's voice echoed.

I looked into the eyes of the creature that Ariadne had become. I looked into her eyes. The thing that I had been terrified to do for so long and looked for some sign of the woman that I loved.

And there was my answer, even before I found anything. I still loved her. Even as I looked and found nothing, I was looking for the woman that I loved. I know that the Elder was trying to set me this impossible task, this thing that I would not be able to overcome. But I still loved her, even if she was breaking my heart. I still loved her.

"Yes," I said and turned to look the Elder square in his fucking eye sockets. "Yes, I still love her."

I looked back at Ariadne then and thought I saw something in her eyes, a glimmer of some emotion.

"Do you know why we call her Eight Legs?" The Elder asked. "She is dodging the question, dodging the order that I gave her, for which I will have to punish her. I asked her how she dresses for war? That is how she dresses for war now. But that is also a matter of practice. That is not how she went to war in times gone past. It is not the way she appeared to the humans in this keep. That is not why the humans of the North called her Spider Queen and it is not why we call her Eight Legs."

I had looked at the Elder as his voice had continued to emerge from Regis' mouth. When he had done making this little speech, I turned back to Ariadne. Her eyes had widened, just a little, even in that feral combative state. Finally, there was an emotion in her beyond coldness and remoteness.

She was afraid.

"You know, of course," The Elder began again when he was sure that we were listening. "That vampires are typically associated with Bats?"

I nodded as I tried to guess what was coming.

"We can turn into bats, some of us can communicate with bats, and our… what we call 'War Form' is similar to that of a Giant Bat."

"I have read the account of Lord Geralt fighting Detlaff," I said. "When injured, Detlaff turned into a giant, bat-like creature that moved supernaturally fast and with a force that knocked Lord Geralt from his feet."

"Yes." The Elder agreed. "And that from a, relatively speaking, young Vampire. What you see before you is generally the most expedient form we can take for war. It uses characteristics that we need. But when injured or our body is under stress, we have a greater form that is more associated with the animals that we are most associated with. Detlaff and Regis, indeed the majority of the more public Vampires take the form of bats. But there are others as well.

"Many take the form of Wolves and have an affinity for that animal for example and their war form would be very similar to what you know of as Werewolves. This is, of course, highly insulting as those of us with Wolven forms would tower over even the largest Werewolf and we could tear them in two with relative ease. Indeed, the one you call Regis tells me that there is some evidence that the first Werewolves were cursed by Mages who were trying to emulate those early Wolven Vampires. But that is what happens, where the one you call Detlaff summoned an almost weaponized flocks of bats, these wolven Vampires summon packs of Wolves to do their bidding.

"Why are some Vampires affiliated with Wolves instead of bats? I will admit to it being a mystery. Bats came with us through the portals. Wolves were already here. There is an attendant somewhere that thinks it's due to personal character.

"But the woman, the Vampire that you love, is affiliated with Spiders. She would crawl about this keep in her war form because she would claim it to be more efficient. It would mean that she could scuttle across ceilings when people were in the way. She also found it useful when the other humans could not help but display their terror of her."

Ariadne glanced up at the Elder. I was watching her and she looked over at the Elder with fear and… I think it was horror in her eyes.

"Show him." The Elder demanded. "Show him why we call you Eight-Legs. Show him why the people in the lands that you call your home, called you the Spider Queen."

Ariadne shook her head.

"SHOW HIM." The Room shook with the strength of the Elder's order and Regis coughed and spat a black globule of Flame knows what onto the floor.

Ariadne backed away from the Elder, it looked like a reflex action. Whatever veneer of calm that she had once worn had fallen away. She backed away, looking at the other exits and the tunnels in and out of the cavern. She looked at me in fear, she looked at the Elder with pleading on her face.

The Elder moved again., just a blur. He was standing in front of Ariadne and then he blurred again as he tore open her stomach and her chest with a single swipe of his claws. Blood and other gore-splattered up the walls. More blood exploded from Ariadne's mouth as she screamed before coughing as more of it came. She looked at me again with such a feeling of sorrow in her face that made me sob.

Then the Elder was back in his seat.

Whisperer, who I had forgotten about, sighed and moved to the exit where some of the cleaning attendants must have been nearby. One of them came in and started to reclean the Elder's bloody claws.

Ariadne's blood on the walls was left to drip as she fell to the ground in fetal agony.

I jerked forwards to help her, to offer some comfort or… I don't know. I still loved her, despite the revelations that I found that I believed.

Whisperer caught my arm and held it firmly if not painfully. "She's not dead." He whispered for my hearing. "But she might wish she is."

Ariadne reared back and screamed. There was nothing human in that scream.

And she changed.

I'm going to try and describe it as best as I can. It is not easy and it is, by no means, pleasant. It might be a little late to warn you about this kind of thing, but if you are squeamish about changes to the body then I might suggest that you look away now.

My other problem is that I only saw this once and I have no intention if at all possible, to ever see it again. I was desperately trying to take it in, but I was also, desperately and instinctively, trying to look away and not see it. My heart bled for the woman that I loved going through something like that. But I was also angry, a little heartbroken and fascinated with what I was seeing.

So this is my best attempt to try and describe what happened.

As she reared back and screamed, it was as though the skin of her upper lip flowed up and over the back of her head. It was half growing, half stretching as it did so. The upper half of her face, her nose, and her eyes seemed to melt into this expansion of flesh until the top of her skull seemed to be smooth and pink with this new skin.

Her hair, hair that I had, in the past, enjoyed running my hands through the softness, shrank back on itself until it became relatively short and stubby. Individual strands melted together to form larger, tougher, and more individual bristles. After that, along with the stretching skin movement, it seemed to flow down and over the rest of her body. The bristles were sharp enough that I could see them tearing at her dress.

I then realized that her legs had been brought together by bent knees and what I had first thought was flexibility in the knee joints was actually the two halves of the legs melding together and then the one to each other. She was now a torso and a bottom half, joined by a narrow waist.

She was still screaming.

Like her legs melding into one, her arms seemed to fold back into the body. It was here that the dress that she had been wearing properly began to tear as her arms moved in ways that the dress was not made to accommodate. The movements were not smooth, they were jerky and as the limbs jerked around, I could hear the bones breaking and, I assumed, reshaping themselves.

Her scream was changing now. It was not just a scream, it was a shriek. I could hear the pain in that noise, but also rage and fear that ran down into the depths of my stomach. I wanted to flee, vomit and do more than a little bit of screaming myself. Whisperer held me fast though and I could not move.

Her lower jaw seemed to shrink. Her teeth and tongue had disappeared and I assumed that they had been absorbed into the, well, the flesh ball that she had become. The head also started to be surrounded by the growing and expanding flesh.

And she was starting to grow. Or rather, bloat might have been a more accurate description. Her mass was resting on the ground now, with no legs or arms to keep her upright. She was two balls of flesh. One, much larger, was what her legs had turned into. The other, slightly smaller but not by much. It was less round and more elongated. Where her chest used to be. What had once been Ariadne's head with a face that I loved, was just a bump now at the front of the smaller section.

The two balls were joined by a link and I could start to see the shape of a spider beginning to emerge as I realized what Ariadne was turning into. That might make me seem stupid in the heat of the moment but… heartbreak, stress, and so on.

I think I moaned.

She was still growing, the last tatters of her dress fell away as it ripped, only to be trapped underneath her growing form. Underneath the tatters of clothing was displayed a grotesque surface made of skin, viscera, and protruding bone. I have seen newborn babies as part of my travels, and it reminded me of that. The dark red, purple goo covered her as her skin as it stretched, tore, and was broken by new bone structure.

Her rear end just grew and grew until I thought it was not going to stop.

Her front section seemed to stop growing for a moment, just a moment. It was long enough that, even though I knew that the ending had not been reached, I began to hope that it was over.

It was not over, of course, it wasn't over.

Her eight spider's legs exploded in all directions from her fore-body. They were huge, far larger, and longer than I had been expecting them to be. The explosion tore through another layer of skin and showered the room in blood, torn skin, and associated slime. Whisperer hauled me backward as I was rooted to the spot, thus avoiding the spray of what can only be described as "fluids".

Later, I would see that some of this sprayed the Elder.

The six rearmost legs were long, powerfully muscled, and chitinous while the front legs seemed to be smaller and more precise looking. The pads of the two front legs seemed to have three, finger-like extensions while the others seemed to end in small points.

I don't know what happened next or what was going on, but it looked as though the legs were having an argument with themselves as they figured out what they were doing and how they wanted to work with each other. They drummed on the floor in the same way that an impatient man might drum his fingers before they got their act together and pushed on the ground, all at the same time as the spider stood up.

But she was still not finished. One last explosion as the bump that had been her head extended and then exploded forth again. It was definitely female, it was bony and muscled in the same way that the Bruxa that I had seen was. It was joined to the rest of the spider's body at around where the navel would be on a human and at the end of that, very, female torso body was the head of a spider. Eight eyes rested on the top that seemed to me to be moving this way and that. And a gaping maw underneath that was covered with two furry… I don't know what to call them. Fangs, or mandibles would both be among the right answers.

And there she stood. She was visibly trembling as she stood there, the pink flesh of a newborn, the pure, yellow-white of newly exposed bone, tatters of a black dress around her feet, and the blood and gore of rebirth still dripping from her form.

It might sound, or read, as though this took a long time. It did not. I didn't have an hourglass with me, let alone a minute measuring glass. But it was certainly less than a minute for her to finish changing. It was ertainly over in less time than it took for you to read all of this. It seemed longer than that though. Far longer. I ached for her.

She turned her head to look at me, her fangs and mandibles working. Then her legs moved until she was looking at the Elder.

If they spoke, I could not hear her, but I could guess. My first guess was that she was saying "There, are you satisfied?" But I was wrong. Later, I decided that what she was saying was "Is this enough?"

It wasn't.

"Is that how you would dress for battle?" The Elder asked her before the musical voice became harsh. "You are trying to look pitiable, you are trying to look vulnerable in this new state. You look as though a quick breath could knock you over. I told you to show him how it would look if you went to war. That is not how you would march to battle.

Ariadne shook herself. The head seemed to grow straight out of the almost human-looking torso and for a moment, it looked as though she was trying to shake her head. Then her legs intervened and the entire spider moved from side to side in a negative motion.

"SHOW HIM YOUR WAR FORM." The Elder bellowed, again followed by sounds of Regis hacking in the corner.

Ariadne turned back to me.

There were no human lips, no tongue or throat to cause a scream, she just chittered at me. Her eyes seemed to blink and flutter shut.

Her outset skin began to darken first, turning from a light pink to a darker, more purple color. Then I could see the outsides turning into a hardened shell. Dark, purple, almost blue in nature. The shell broke a couple of times which caused her to shriek in what sounded like pain as the shell broke before reforming into individual pieces to allow for better movements. In the same way that a Knight has several pieces of armor, Ariadne had separate pieces of the shell for the same reason. The plates were interlocked and interacted with each other. There was more goo now as the shells broke.

The legs changed as well, becoming darker, the rear legs became sharper. There were blades on them now and you could see the ends of those same feet had become pointed. It was all too easy to suspect what would happen if one of those legs thrust into the armored body of a Knight. I don't know, and I wouldn't want to test it, but I imagine that even the best-made armor of the dwarven, gnomic forges would struggle to stand up to a strike in anger from Ariadne.

And she was getting angry. There was no mistaking the tone of her shrieks any longer. She was getting angry and agitated. Her legs were drumming as they moved her backward and forwards. Looking at me, looking at the Elder, looking back at me, and then looking back at the Elder.

And then she was finished. Her huge rear section was now a solid shell, other than the very back which seemed to finish in some kind of stinger. Her legs, where they were not blades and dagger points, were covered in an armoured shell, as was the central torso with numerous extra plated to protect the leg joints. The shell segments continued up the torso protrusion in a way that made me a little uncomfortable to be honest. It certainly accentuated the abnormal female proportions.

I'm going to leave that there.

And then there was her head. Which looked like it was wearing a skull helmet, so close to the bone as it was.

"There you are, little human." The Elder hissed. "That is what the thing you love really looks like."

This was too much for Ariadne and she made a noise of rage that split my ears enough to drive me to my knees and make me see spots. I was hauled even further backward by Whisperer who had obviously been ready for just this happenstance as Ariadne hurled herself at the seated form of the Elder.

It all happened so fast. I had to train myself to get to the point where I could recognize what Kerrass was doing, to see through the speed and the training. So I can process movement, much better than I have been able to do.

So here's what I think happened.

Ariadne leaped at the Elder, legs extended, pointed at him. She tried to wrap herself around him so that he would not be able to move so that she could then slash at him with her upper limbs and cause damage.

The Elder, almost leisurely and casually, backhanded her so that she went flying backwards across the room.

Whisperer had me held and restrained in the entrance to that cavern as Ariadne and the Elder fought.

It did not take long.

Ariadne righted herself on the ground, getting her feet underneath herself before going to launch herself at the Elder again.

This time he was there to meet her, so she hadn't launched herself at him properly when he caught her, both by the joint between forward and back sections and by the neck. He then turned her, as easily as I might wrestle a child, and slammed her into the ground.

Once,

Twice,

Three times, the impacts shook the ground and caused a white goo to explode from Ariadne's mouth and rear end.

Then he held her on the ground and looked up at me.

"This, Little Human. This is the thing that you were going to marry. This is the thing that you claim to love. This. She has lied to you. She has manipulated you. She has made you love her and then when her experiment was over, she was going to leave you, broken and lost as she left to start her next experiment. So I ask you again. Do you still love her?"

He was still holding her. Her legs thrashed around, more than once making contact with the Elder's form. He ignored it.

I looked at the thing that had been Ariadne for a long time, time enough that it felt like an eternity. Long enough time to wonder if I was going mad.

"Why?" I coughed and sobbed at the same time. "Why do you insist on asking me the same question over and over again when you already know the answer. My answer has not changed."

"You still love her?" He demanded.

"I cannot deny that I have some thinking to do." I tried for my normal, scholarly bravado. It didn't work. It was getting to the point where it was all too much. I was having my heart broken, needed to rethink everything that had happened between myself and the woman that I loved, I had seen how she could really change, for real rather than in some kind of strange abstract manner and yet the creature that she had become, was lying on the ground. She was held there by something far more powerful than even she was, in the same way, that someone might hold down an unruly hunting hound. I desperately wanted a quiet, dark, and cool room to absorb everything that had happened and I could feel my mind on the very edge of breaking.

I forced myself to tear my eyes away from the struggling spider creature on the ground. She was still fighting. I ripped my gaze from her and looked the Elder in his shadowed eye-sockets that seemed to glow, reflecting the torchlight.

"But yes," I said. "I still love her."

"Prove it." He ordered.

My first urge was the stupid one. My first urge was to ask how he expected me to prove an emotion. It was a stupid urge, the urge to fight back at an authority figure. I knew it was foolish to be so glib and somewhere in the back of my mind, a little voice was telling me that more than just my life was at stake here.

I needed to think. I needed to think rationally, even if just for a moment, and in telling myself that I needed to think rationally, I started to do so. The answer was obvious.

I took a deep breath and looked back at the monster that Ariadne had become. I looked at the huge, bulbous body, pulsating with her rage and her pain. I looked at her hindquarters that were leaking web-fluid and venom in equal measures. I looked at the razor-sharp limbs and the chitinous joints to the rest of the body. I needed something. I needed a toe hold. I needed something in there that reminded me on an instinctual level, of the woman that I still loved.

I found myself looking at the female torso that came out of the armored middle section.

(Freddie's note: I know, I know that there's a scientific term for what goes on in the middle of a spider's anatomy and if I was in a position to go and ask an expert or find a reference book, then I would do those things. But alas, those things are beyond my reach at the moment.)

I looked and I saw the upper part of a woman. It might seem petty, it might seem misogynistic or lust-filled, or cosmetic. But I saw that shape. I saw the join where the midriff came out of the body of the spider. I saw the lumps in the place of breasts. I saw the shape and suddenly, it was easy to imagine that shape as being Ariadne's shape, wearing a suit of armor.

It suddenly seemed easy to imagine that that shape was Ariadne, that she had been absorbed by this thing that she had become and at that moment, I could no longer see the legs or the body or the bristly, unpleasant hair. I saw the woman. I looked into her eyes and I saw the woman that I loved. I imagined the pain that she must be feeling. Even if she was only as interested in me as a man who studies moths might be interested in the specimen that is pinned to the piece of card, I could feel pity for the woman that was being put through all of that. I could feel that compassion.

I resolved to show this Elder thing that humanity was more than that and if I could help myself, and the woman, get some small measure of revenge on the thing that had forced all of this. Then I would do so.

I looked Ariadne in the eyes. You see anthropomorphized pictures of Spiders that have two eyes larger than the others in order to somehow humanize the spider. This was not the case. So I just aimed for the middle and I tried to smile.

It must have been hideous, but I smiled anyway. I smiled and I took a step forward.

Ariadne froze as I did so, her legs and struggles stopped. I had never heard a Spider whimper, and I don't know for sure that that's what she was doing, but that's what I decided it was that I could hear.

I took another step forward, the third step was easier and followed on from the second in a much smoother manner.

Some more white liquid emerged from Ariadne's mouths, between the fangs, mandibles, or whatever the proper term is. She gave that noise again, the one that I had decided was a whimper.

"Let her go," I told the Elder. I wasn't looking at him and from this distance, I am astonished that he did as I asked. I blinked and he was back on his throne, but now he was watching Ariadne and me rather than some point in the air that only he could see.

She pushed herself to her feet. It obviously took effort and no small amount of pain. She backed away from me and used one of her forelegs in a waving, negative kind of gesture of denial. I ignored it and took a step further forwards. She backed up again and her hind legs started to reach a back wall. For a moment I began to think that I had her cornered. Just before what little part of my brain that was still working rationally, reminded me that spiders can climb walls and that was if she didn't jump over me and run down one of the nearby tunnels.

I stopped and took a deep breath and cleared my throat.

"It occurs to me." I began carefully. "That I don't know your name. I have heard a couple of different options this evening and I like none of them, so for now and until you tell me otherwise. I am going to keep calling you Ariadne."

Both forearms were trying to fend me off. Not really, but they were trying to keep me away. If she were human, I would have thought that one arm was fending me off, while another was trying to cover her face so that she couldn't look at me or see me.

When that didn't work and I took another step forward, she physically turned herself around so that she couldn't see me.

"Ariadne look at me. Please?" I made it a question.

She turned back and seemed to shrink from me a bit. Spiders can make themselves very small in order to squeeze through holes after all.

"Love is many things to me," I said. "You are right in saying that trust, respect, and all the rest of that are part of it. This…" I waved in the direction of the Elder, "thing wants me to prove that I still love you. I can think of no better way than to show that I trust you."

I took another step forwards and the spider form shrank back even further, protecting herself with her armoured legs. She was not turning back. I don't know why she didn't but… it didn't seem important. I could only see the woman now anyway.

"I don't care what you told me," I said as I took another step. "I don't care if all I am to you is some sample to be examined under a microscope to be disposed of when you are done with me. My heart breaks at the thought. I don't care if your nature makes you feel superior to me. I don't care if I am nothing more than a snack, or a bottle of wine."

I took another step forward. She still shrank from me, the huge spider form was visibly trembling. But she didn't retreat up the walls which I took to be a victory.

"If my heart breaks in the morning when I stop to think about everything that I have heard and seen tonight, then I will deal with that. I will go and get drunk with Kerrass. I will get him to take me to the Belles and I will…"

I shook my head to shake loose the lump that was growing in my throat.

"But that is for tomorrow." I declared in as strong a voice as I could manage. "For tonight, I still love you, even as my heart breaks. Now you can tear me apart now. I am under no illusion. In loving you I have laid my heart bare. You can do with it as you will. It seems that you want to break it. But for now, I am going to show that I trust you."

I took another step forward. She could not make herself smaller. So slowly, in the same way, that I would reach out to an unhappy horse, I reached out and put my hand out.

"I am going to step inside the reach of your legs, arms, whatever they are." I found myself chuckling. "You can kill me, or push me away or otherwise damage me. But I trust that you will not. I am going to stoep within reach of this body that you have never shown me and I am going to kiss you."

I felt another attack of hysteria wash over me as I took another step forward.

"I can't promise that I won't wipe my mouth afterward." I chuckled. "And I hope you will forgive me if I keep it relatively chaste and leave out the tongue."

I chose to interpret the chittering noises that she made as a kind of bitter laughter.

I took another step forwards and placed my hand on one of the legs that were shielding her face. It was surprisingly warm and there was a soft-furred feeling to it.

"I love you," I told her again. "I trust you. Let me show you, let me show him."

The leg under my hand moved gently and I pulled my hand back. The edge was razor sharp after all and I didn't want to lose my hand accidentally. I could see her face and as I looked into her eyes. I swear I saw sadness. There are no eyelids, no muscles on the corners of a spider's eyes to convey emotion like a dog or human does it. There were just the black, glistening eyes.

I took another step forward and I could see the mandibles where her mouth would have been. The larger, outer ones were furred while the inner ones were still more flesh-colored and covered with… goo. So I chose one of the outer ones.

I took a step forward.

She seemed to shake her head but I was too far in now.

I took another step forward and leaned the rest of the way.

I will admit that I closed my eyes to kiss her. It was a pursed lips thing, but I had been reassured by the feel of her leg that it would not be too unpleasant.

It was, as the leg had been. Warm and furry. It was like kissing the head of a newborn baby, or the paws of a cat. I held it as long as I could, which was not long. The surface I was kissing seemed to ripple under my lips and I pulled back.

"I love you," I said again.

She screamed again and I fell back, moving quicker than I wanted to.

The spider creature went into a frenzy of movement, drumming her legs on the ground, it hurled itself into the wall three times, rolled onto its back before righting itself again, spinning around in a circle before screeching again.

And then it fled down one of the side tunnels, moving impossibly fast.

I shuddered and wiped my mouth on the back of my sleeve. It was an unconscious gesture and I was disappointed when I realized what I had done.

The firelight from the torches flickered and as I looked down the tunnel that Ariadne had fled. I saw the light reflecting off something that was glittering. It was only a few steps away so I indulged myself and bent down. It had fallen into the water and I wiped the circular shape clean. Not that it was dirty, but I felt the necessity. I knew what it was but I held it up to the light anyway.

It was Ariadne's engagement ring.

What I want to write here is that I looked at that small circle of gold with its embedded gems. It was and still is, a minor work of art in the jeweler's craft and although I cannot claim to be unbiased in the matter, I would hold it up against many other examples, including some that are contained in some royal vaults that I have visited. The jewels are smaller to be sure but that was a deliberate choice on my part.

The purpose of royal rings and the like is to display wealth and power. It's there so that Kings and Queens can say, "Look, here is what I am capable of. I am rich enough and powerful enough to display these things on my fingers and around my neck as though they are cheap baubles."

There is also some use in having these things there in order to interfere with the normal use of fingers. It displays laziness and a lack of a need to lift the finger. I know that this is there and if you are interested in these small kinds of power plays, there are books on the subject.

For me though, I wanted a smaller ring, a more delicate approach. I wanted yellow gold because that was traditional and I thought that in a marriage as untraditional as ours was going to be, we needed some tradition to be there. After that, the main stone was a red one. I wanted a deep, burnished red that symbolized both of us. For me, it was the red of the eternal fire and for her, it was the color of blood.

That might be a bit on the nose, but at the time, I was a young fool that was making a giant leap of faith, I hope I can be forgiven.

On either side of the main stone, there are two smaller diamonds. I wanted round-cut diamonds because I just preferred the look.

I want to write that I took that ring and I held it up to the light. That I cradled it in my hands and shed a tear at the sight, for all that had been and all that I might be losing. I want to say that I weighed it in my palm as though I was weighing the significance of Ariadne leaving it behind. I want to tell you that I wondered as to whether or not she had left it behind deliberately and wondered what all of that might mean.

I would even prefer writing that I hurled it away in disgust at all that I had heard that day. It would be more dramatic and if this were a work of the bard I might have done that, before scrabbling after it in tears when I changed my mind before squeezing it in my hand so that I wouldn't let it go, sobbing in heartbreak.

But I did none of those things.

Instead, I slipped it into my pocket, patting it to make sure that I knew that it was still there and secure before I stood and stared down the tunnel that Ariadne had fled down.

"What do you think of my little display?" Came the Elder's voice. There was an attitude to it that suggested that he was repeating the question.

I asked him to repeat it again anyway.

I took a deep breath as I considered my answer.

"I charge you, to be honest." The Elder said. "I have promised to be honest with you, and I will, but before I answer your questions. You will be honest with me. What do you think of what you have seen and heard? What do you think of what I have shown you?"

"Honestly?" I asked.

"Of course. That is what I said.

I took a deep breath.

"I thought that that was unnecessarily cruel," I told him.

"It was necessary." He said. "Trust and respect are what you require for love. A nice pair of breasts completes the picture for a species as primitive as your own. A nice pair of breasts and a well-turned pair of ankles. If you were going to marry her, you should know the truth. That the breasts were fake and made that way simply to trigger your very basic and primitive lusts. You should know that the basis of the marriage is false. That she doesn't love you. To her, you are no more interesting than any other primitive that might crawl around in the dirt. You are a herd animal to her. In the same way that you use cows for their milk, we use humans for their blood. That is all you are to her, a passing fancy.

"Is it cruel to make these things clear to you? Is it cruel to show you the truth? It is often said that the truest form of friendship is telling someone an uncomfortable truth that they do not want to hear. Well, that is truth. She does not love you. She looks like that because she is using your primitive belief in physical beauty and to manipulate your naivete and loneliness. She acts like she does to keep you from fleeing from her, to keep you beneath her microscope. Is it cruel to tell you that truth before you tie yourself to her, body and soul?"

I snapped, laughter finally bubbling up my throat and out into the open.

"I didn't say that you were being cruel to me," I told him.

He stared at me in shok for a moment as the implications of what I had said sunk in.

There was a blur and then I couldn't breathe.

It took me for a moment before I realized that I was being lifted off the ground by my throat. I could feel sharp, bony claws digging into my neck. I could feel the ends of talons digging around my spine as the Elder's hand wrapped around my neck and he lifted me off the floor.

I did what I could. I kicked out but the length of the Elder's arm meant that I was too far away to be able to reach him with my feet. I used my hands to try and reach his face. Whatever part of me that was still thinking logically, as well as yelling at me for being snarky to the Unseen Elder himself, reminded me of some fighting advice which was that a person can't strangle you if you put your thumb in their eye. But again, the length of the arm made this impossible. So again, I was reduced to fighting for breath. I got my hands on his wrist and tried to dig into veins and tendons in the wrist as well as pulling myself up in a vain attempt to reduce the pressure on my throat.

The thought of prying the Elder's fingers apart was laughable.

He wasn't trying to kill me though. He was just showing me that he could. So I could know that I was going to die before he actually killed me.

"You dare," he hissed, still through Regis' mouth. "You dare question me? I am all that stands between these people and doom. I am the Elder, I am the ruler. I am king and priest and father and god. All that they do here is serve me. I cannot be cruel to them. They belong to me and if I choose to take some amusement during my long watch… then so be it."

He was not trying to kill me, but I was being strangled. My own weight, wresting on his thin, hard, bony hands ensured it. The edges of my vision were already going red and dark.

"Now you die." He said, "for every insult and insolence that you have displayed."

Regis' voice came back.

"But we promised that…"

"Silence." The Elder snapped as he back-handed Regis across the face. I found the sight funny. As the air left me, the sight and sound of a man arguing with himself seemed almost hysterical.

Regis staggered backward. Blood flowed from the gash down his face as he straightened.

For reasons best known to myself, I waited until the Elder turned back to me. He had turned his head onto one side as he watched me die. It was the same gesture that Ariadne uses when she considers something. The same one her mother also uses. Now the Elder used that gesture as he looked at me to watch me as I died.

"I have a message for you." I croaked.

"What?" The Elder pulled me closer so that he could peer into my eyes.

I didn't say anything, I was too busy struggling to stay conscious. The Elder's face moved. If it was a human, I thought it might be a grimace.

The grip around my neck slackened and I could breathe a little easier. I sucked a lungful of air down.

"A mutual friend says hello." I croaked.

He dropped me. My limbs didn't seem to want to work and I collapsed to the floor.

"Impossible," He hissed, showing that, thousands of years old he might be, but there are some cliches that even he must bow to. "I have no friends." He said. "What kind of friend could we possibly share? I am the Unseen Elder of the Vampiric race. I am…" He stopped speaking as, despite the fact that he was unknowable ancient and barely even humanoid, he grimaced as a thought had clearly just entered his mind. "I am…"

"Afraid," I told him and I smiled, as horribly as I could manage. "Old Red Eyes says 'Hello'."

I made the "hello" almost singsong-like.

The Elder's mouth opened slowly and a hiss emanated from it. Along with the black liquid that seemed to come from Regis' mouth and the mouth of the other translater before him. It was the first sound that had actually come from him in a long while as he stared into my eyes.

Then he stood and looked about himself. He didn't look humanoid anymore. He reminded me more of a cat or a dog that was looking for enemies. Then he stopped, before turning back to stare down a particular tunnel. It wasn't the tunnel that Ariadne had fled down. There was nothing that could distinguish that tunnel from any others but the way that the Elder stared into that darkness was…

I had been right. He was afraid. A part of my mind wanted to wonder what could make a being like the Elder afraid. Another part did not want to know.

Regis shook his head. It was the shake of a man waking up from a dream, or shaking off a hallucination or trying to clear their heads after drinking too much.

Regis, my good friend that I disliked intensely, was back in the room.

"Who is Old Red Eyes?" He asked, all innocence before he followed the same path as the last translator. The Elder just moved. Going from statue-like stillness to brief and horrifying action without any kind of intervening space in between. Where the previous translator had been a theatrical tearing apart, this one was much faster, angrier, and more brutal. The last one had taken a fixed amount of time. I had been given space to realize what was happening and to really see a person being torn apart. Regis was just torn into bits so fast that I only have a vision of individual flashes. Believe me, though, those bits are seared into my mind.

Including his look of utter shock and bafflement. There didn't seem to be any pain on his face.

Bits of Regis rained around me and Whisperer who was falling back from the Elder and myself. I couldn't see Whisperer's face, but I could somehow tell that he was looking from me to the Elder and trying to make sense of what was going on.

He clearly knew better than to ask the Elder too many questions.

Then the Elder spun and was back to staring down that tunnel. He peered at it, turning his head from side to side as he tried to see deeper and deeper into the darkness. I finally found my feet and moved so that I could look down the darkness myself to see what he was looking at.

I could feel my gaze being drawn into that shadow. Even as I gasped for breath and worked on banishing the rippling darkness at the end of my own vision while forcing myself to take in air. I looked with the Elder, standing well back from him. The flickering light of the cavern that we were in made the outcroppings of stone seem to flicker, move and loom in the shadows.

It was an untravelled tunnel. I could tell that much anyway. The pathway that we had used to bring us to this throneroom or whatever it was, had been smooth and well worked for ease of movement. There were other passages away. Ariadne had used one of them but the attendants had all entered from the same entrance that I had used. This tunnel was smaller, it was…

Creepier.

I looked and as I looked, I looked past the pools of darkness. The little shadows that were cast by the torchlight. I looked past them and the surfaces that glittered and the other bits that occasionally saw light with the shifting of shadows and flickering of flames.

I looked past all of those things to try and see what it was that the Elder was looking for.

Past them all was a gaping hole, it made me want to think of a wound. A wound in the Earth, a gash that bled darkness and shadow out into the rest of the world. It made me think that the rest of creation was an intruder and that the darkness was the real owner of existence. I looked, my gaze being drawn deeper and deeper. Was there something there?

I couldn't tell. I couldn't see. The torchlight had blinded me and robbed me of my vision. Was there something there?

Slowly, a suspicion began to crawl over my skin. It trickled down my spine and I shivered. To enter that wound, that gash of darkness, was to die horribly. To go there was to have your life torn from you in the most horrible of ways. There was nothing there other than pain, other than agony and suffering. And then there would be death.

There was something there. There was. I couldn't see it, but I could feel it. There was something there and it wanted me to go to it. It wanted me to step into the shadows. If I didn't go, it would follow me and it would be waiting. It wanted me to go. "Better to confront it now, to get it over with" it seemed to say.

There was something there and it was looking at me. I could feel it. I was sure. There was something there. Just in the deepest parts of the shadow. Something with red eyes.

Something that was smiling.

"What did he say?" The Elder demanded of me. His voice was oddly disappointing. High pitched and raspy but there was a power there that made you want to cover your ears with your hands. Like Fingernails on a chalkboard.

I shook my head and shuddered. The darkness had hypnotized me and I was suddenly back. The tunnel was just a tunnel and the Elder looked ridiculous as he danced from one foot to the other, peering this way and that way like a cat examining the mouse that has just roared at it.

"He took my hand and called me friend," I said.

"Such things as that don't have friends." He said.

"I did him a service," I told him. "A favor. He gave me wine from his wife's orchard. He told me to give you that message. He said to say that Old Red Eyes says 'hello'."

The Elder turned to look at me.

"Stop talking," Whisperer ordered in tones that I recognized as being the Elder's voice.

The Elder lifted the hand that had held me by the throat and sniffed it. He didn't look like a cat anymore. He looked like a dog.

He didn't like what he smelled.

Then he was next to me. I am sure that he moved through the intervening space. It was just that he moved so quickly that I didn't see him. He moved quickly enough that the wind of his passage ruffled the cloak that Whisperer wore.

I tried to reel backward. As invasions of personal space go, this was something, but I had my back to stone and had nowhere to go. He sniffed me, audibly sniffing me.

He smelled of dust and the blood from the remains of Regis' body that still dripped from the ends of his claws. If he breathed at all, in the way that we would expect a living person to breathe, it didn't smell of anything.

Another faint disappointment.

Then he moved again. There was a sound of cloth tearing as well as the wet sound of tearing flesh which was a noise I was becoming upsettingly used to hearing. It took me a moment to see what happened. The Elder had plucked the strange grey, paddle, wand, or whatever it was out of Whisperer's robes and had taken it back to where I was still pressed against the wall of the cavern.

The Elder had not been gentle, a gaping hole had appeared in Whisperer's robe and from that hole, blood flowed. Whisperer fell to their knees for a long moment as he put his hands over the wound and seemed to press, much as a human might press on an injury, before rising back to his feet a little shakily.

The Elder was passing the wand over me again. He moved quickly, slower than he could move but quickly. He focused on specific areas, especially around my eyes, my chest, and my neck. Then the wand throbbed a deep, reddish-brown. It throbbed once and then it broke, literally shattering in his grasp.

The Elder looked horrified. His eyes widened as he stared at the remains of the crystal in his hands. Then, like all powerful people that realize that there is something going on that they cannot control, he got angry.

He turned on Whisperer.

"We didn't know what it meant." Whisperer pleaded, and I heard his voice for the first time. It was surprisingly deep. "It flickered that color but we didn't know what it meant. We know about the magic and then…"

The Elder pulled his head off and crushed it in his hand. Whisperer screamed for just a moment as I heard the vertebrae break.

Then the Elder turned towards the entrance through which a figure stepped that I guessed to be Belligerent. It was propelled into the room, as though someone had grabbed them by the scruff of the neck and had hauled them into place.

"As we had been ordered." Belligerent tried. "We used the wand on both this one and the female. There were some hanging enchantments that we recognized and it was obvious that she had recently cast magic. Then we checked him and we saw that strange light. We had no idea what it was. The…" The cowl flickered towards me for a moment before going back to the Elder "... device has never used that color before. We assumed that it was some kind of errant eddy of the chaos. The human had no idea of what it was and was unaware of anything that might have been hanging over him. He was as confused as we were."

There was a pause as the Elder got right in his face.

"The female was as confused as we were." Belligerent went on, his voice rising in panic. "She suggested the eddy of chaos theory. The device had never been used on a human before and we assumed that it was just…"

He had time to scream as the Elder's claws cut him in half in a downward, diagonal cut, starting at the shoulder and coming out around the opposite waist.

It was not clean-cut and there were more sounds of tearing.

I could no longer control my stomach and I vomited. Why you may ask. I have seen horrible deaths. I have seen battlefield injuries that were that bad, and worse.

But even though it was only attached to a bit of a torso and a single-arm, with internal organs spilling out, bones hanging limp and all manner of other pieces of unspeakable things happening. Even though that was the case, the head was still screaming. It screamed for quite a long time as it's one remaining arm worked to pull itself towards the rest of its body.

The Elder picked the head up before slamming it back into the floor so that it splattered and the sound was cut off.

"Say nothing." The Elder told me in his strange high-pitched voice.

I did as I was told while more, presumably, vampires came into the room and started the laborious clean-up procedure. Regis was cleaned up, along with the two other men that had escorted me here. Again, I was given the uncomfortable feeling that, despite the horrors inflicted on their bodies, these people were still alive.

They were kept separate and when the cleaners came in, they made sure that the different bits were placed into large, leather bags before they were dragged back out. The attendants even came over and mopped up my vomit before another one came over and offered me a flask of something that turned out to be some clean water that tasted remarkably sweet given everything that had happened.

Then the Elder was cleaned up of the various bits of detritus and someone gave the room one last mop and inspection before they left. It all felt, remarkably routine. I began to wonder if the reason that the Elder needs so many attendants was that he kept tearing them apart.

"What else did he say?" The Elder asked as he climbed back up to this throne. For an ancient and unknowable being, he looked tired and very very old.

"He said that I and all of the people connected with me were under his protection. That you would fulfill your promises to me and then you would let me, and all that came with me, go. He told me to say that if you break your word then he will remember that the war is not over."

The Elder nodded. I got the feeling that I was now seeing the real Elder. That up until this point a lot of what I had seen was a pretense, something that he showed to others. To me, maybe even to his closest attendants. The theories of Ariadne's mother, that it was all weighing down on the Elder's head, began to seem more and more likely.

He seemed… human.

"Then I shall reiterate my promise." He told me after a long while. "You can ask your questions and I will answer them. When you are done, you may go along with your little pussy cat and the spider that you claim to love so fervently. I will not interfere with you, your family or the others mentioned and you have nothing to fear from me or any other Elder Vampire. The Lesser of our race are beneath my concern, however."

I nodded.

"What of Regis?"

"Regis was not associated with you before this night."

"He is associated, with an associate," I argued, echoing the Elder's tone. He was beaten and we both knew it.

"He will need time to recover." The Elder sighed. "Ask your questions. This has already diverted me from my task for too long.

"I'm going to need paper, ink, quills, and something to sit at and write upon," I told him.

We talked for a long time and I may say, he hated every moment of it.

Good.

Every so often, I could see him becoming visibly angry, and then something would catch his attention and he would look towards the other tunnel that he had spent so much time gazing down. Then he would subside and continue speaking.

We spoke for a long time. Long enough that by the time I eventually emerged, blinking and bleary, it was to find that the sun was well risen in the east and was a good way through its climb towards midday.

What did we talk about?

I'm afraid that I'm not going to tell you for two reasons. The first is that if I annotated that conversation, it would take a long time to publish and read. The second, less lazy answer, is that if I were to publish what he told me in this publication, I would be in breach of publishing contract and the angry little dwarf that runs the book publishing company would remove my spleen with an axe. He wouldn't do it personally, he would hire someone else to do it for him so that he could watch and pass comments on the axe-wielding technique. In short… You are going to have to buy the book or borrow it from the local library.

No sooner had I made it back to Corvo Bianco and recounted the evening, Lady Yennefer stole my notes and spent nearly as many leaves of paper making her own notes on what the Elder told me. She summoned Margarite Laux Antille the Rectoress of Aretuza to Corvo Bianco who, in turn, summoned another Sorceress that I didn't know. Then they all got very excited about the implications of what the Elder told me.

I could claim to understand about a quarter of what those three, astonishing women, talked about. Geralt and Kerrass didn't even wait that long and went out training in the meantime.

It was shortly arranged that Lady Yennefer's and my next book would be on the Unseen Elder. Where he comes from and what his history was. Similar to our work on Jack, I would write the history of the thing while Yennefer would write about the magical implications of what he had told us. There will then be a follow-up book about the nature of the universe according to the Elder with references to our published work as written by the new Sorceress. She wants to remain anonymous until things are a bit further along. Lady Margarita laughed and claimed that the lady in question does not work well under pressure and scrutiny, but is one of the finest magically adept academic minds on the continent.

Regis was fine. A couple of days after I escaped from the catacombs beneath Tesham Mutna, he walked into Corvo Bianco as though nothing had happened. He greeted me with a smile and a hug and all he would say on the matter was the "Grandma took certain steps." Then he went and hassled Barnabus Basil about the proper fermenting mixture used in Corvo Bianco's wine processes.

I still don't like Regis, but he is a good friend to have. And there is nothing quite as funny as unleashing Regis on an unsuspecting bystander. Barnabus Basil and he seemed to have something of a history though so it wasn't too cruel on my part.

As for Ariadne and I?

As I say, it was morning by the time that I got out of the caverns. I was tired, heartsick, satisfied beyond immediate comprehension regarding the evening's work and I was lugging a small satchel that one of the Vampires had found for me to carry all the paper that I had filled with my shorthand notes on what the Elder had told me.

I was escorted through the party cavern which was now completely empty and returned to its former dirty and decrepit state. Dirt enough that I was left wondering if some Vampire had a bag of cobwebs and dust that they could scatter over the ground in order to let everyone know that the place really was that deserted. Then I remembered the stated affinity for bats, spiders, and whatever else, so that image was possibly not that far from the truth.

The route to the surface managed to miss all of the places with the cells for the keeping of humanity and whatever else. As well as those chambers where the blood was harvested from the people that had once lived in the cells.

I wonder how that happened.

The climb to the surface was also much shorter. Again, not really surprising.

I was pushed out into the sunlight with a gentle, polite but above all firm little smile and a bow to find Kerrass snoozing in the courtyard of Tesham Mutna. He had our horses with him as well as my weapons and he opened one lazy eye to see what was going on before he slowly started to rise.

Out of spite, I turned and looked for the entrance to the catacombs of Tesham Mutna. I knew that it was there and I knew where it was, but could I find it? I pushed on every stone that seemed to protrude to see if it was some kind of secret button or lever or something and I went all the way up and down the wall. I even put my weight on several other surfaces to see if it was a weighted lever or something.

"It's not there," Kerrass said, coming up behind me, yawning. "I looked for quite a long time, medallion out and everything. I don't know if it's some trick, or some illusion or what. It's not magic, it's not an illusion or one of those magically hidden things that you need some kind of lantern to see."

He shrugged.

"Just another mystery," I said, sighing and rubbing my head. "I fucking hate mysteries."

"I've said it before and I'll say it again." He told me, passing me by daggers. "You love mysteries. You are already looking for the next one."

"Unfortunately true." I straightened from putting my boot knife back.

"Did you get what you came for?" He wondered, passing the spear harness over.

"All of that and more," I told him, finally looking at my friend.

Have you ever heard the term, "shagged out". That was what he looked like. It was a bright day and the late winter, early spring sunshine was burning off the rain of the previous day. So Kerrass had his shirt and tunic open. I could see scratches on his chest. His hair was unkempt, his eyes were a little bleary and his clothes weren't on properly. And now that I was more aware of things, he smelled of sex.

"Did you have a good night?" I wondered.

"Goddess yes." He grinned. "I have had nights of debauchery before. I have known things and seen things. I have spent nights with Succubi and I have literally loved a Goddess. But I have never known what it was like to love a Vampire."

He laughed and I laughed with him. It was good to see him happy.

"I tell you Freddie if I had known that that was what it was going to be like, I would have made a play for Ariadne myself."

My face must have fallen or something because he looked at me sharply.

"I take it that there was a reason that her horse was gone when I got out this morning." He said carefully.

I nodded sadly.

Kerrass sighed. "Come on, let's get back to Beauclair at least. You can tell me all about what happened and then we can get you to bed, or get you to the brothel, depending on what is appropriate."

"The brothel won't open till later," I argued, allowing myself to be pulled away from Tesham Mutna.

"Then we have time to drop off your notes, pick up Geralt, Guillaume, Gregoire…. Have you ever noticed how many people we know have names beginning with the letter 'G'? But also, Damien isn't married yet so he can come, that D'Alambourd person seems personable enough and cheerfully debauched. Fuck Freddie, even Yennefer might want to come as well. Then we can get you drunk first before we take you to the brothel. Also fed, I'm starving enough that I feel as though I could eat a whole boar by myself."

I allowed Kerrass to tug me along and climbed into my saddle.

We rode slowly. Spring comes early in Toussaint. The sun was out and the birds were singing. I could feel the horrors of the night beginning to recede in my memory. Leaving aside Kerrass' planned debauchery. I told Kerrass everything that had happened and a shortened version of what the Elder had told me. He didn't say anything about the cave and what the Elder did, even though he clearly wanted to. He did have some interesting things to say about what the Elder had told me, but again, that will make a chapter of the book.

We passed a Knight of Francesca on his business, leading a squire and a couple of guards on their way… somewhere. We stood aside for them and accepted their salutes. We stopped to help a farmer who was fighting a wagon that was carrying a load of grain. One of the horses had panicked at something and had pulled the cart into the ditch. Kerrass stopped to look at a signpost in one of the nearby villages which gave us an opportunity to have some breakfast. It wasn't the route that we had taken to get to Tesham Mutna, but the roadways and byways of Toussaint don't hold any mystery for us anymore.

The road carries on towards Beauclair and off to one side, the Ducal palace gardens are visible as a bank of green, carefully manicured hedges and the first spots of springtime color as the Winter blooms began to fade. The road gets quite close to the gardens and it was at this point, still some distance before the gates to the city, where I realized that I had brought my horse to a halt. I was looking over at the gardens.

Kerrass, in his still blissed-out state, had ridden on ahead before he realized that I was no longer following him. He turned and came back to me and watched me for a moment.

I nodded to myself and dismounted.

"What are you going to do?" Kerrass asked quietly.

"I have no idea," I told him. It was a lie, but I didn't realize that it was a lie until the words had left my mouth. I grimaced and handed him my horse's reins. "No that's not true," I said, slinging my spear over my shoulder and trying to decide what the truth was.

"I do not what I'm going to do," I told him. "I just… need to figure out how I'm going to do it."

Kerrass nodded and gazed at me.

"Be gentle with her Freddie."

I had no answer to that. So instead, I handed him my satchel of notes. "Take those to Corvo Bianco." I told him. "Yennefer will be really cross with me if she doesn't get first look at them."

"She can read that spidery bullshit that you call handwriting?"

"Kerrass, it's not an uncommon technique." I told him. "And for all I know, she invented it. It's not the sort of thing I would put past her."

He laughed. "I will see you at Corvo Bianco." He said. "Sundown at the latest."

There was a warning there. He was telling me that if I hadn't appeared by sundown, then he was going to come looking for me. And when he found me, he was going to smack the crap out of me.

"Sundown at the latest." I agreed before turning and walking towards the rose garden.

"Freddie." Kerrass rode up behind me after a moment. I turned to find my best friend gazing at me steadily. "I hope this doesn't come across as weird or too condescending."

"Not a good start," I told him.

He glared.

"But you should know." He went on. "I am really proud of you. You are a long way from the child that I met on the doorstep of that inn that time."

We looked at each other for what felt like a long time.

"That was a little condescending." I told him.

"Fuck off." He replied, laughing.

"I will see you before Sundown," I told him.

He waved and turned our horses back towards the gate.

For me, I turned towards the Rose Garden.

My path travelled over some rocky grassland before it started to dip towards a stream that borders the gardens. It's only a little stream and it's one of the things that has been harnessed to make the gardens that much more green and verdant. It's this stream that feeds the fountains and other water features which means that this low down, the depth of the valley seems a little exaggerated compared with the flow of the water.

I walked along the banks, enjoying a feeling of place. It was a strange feeling of knowing that I was by myself, a long way from home and that if I turned and just walked into the trees, then no-one would know where I had gone or what I was doing when I got there. I mean sure, people would come after me, but there was that feeling that I could just go off. Go off and be someone else.

It was an intoxicating thought.

I found a place where it was easier to jump across the water without getting too muddy from last night's rains and walked along the hedgerows until I found a place where I could vault over the bushes and force my way through what was left.

Then I was in the garden itself.

Words cannot express how beautiful that place is. There is debate as to who is responsible for that place. Whether it was put that way by the Elves and it is them that made sure that so beautiful a place of tamed nature could exist. Or whether the palace gardeners themselves were able to make it so. The truth, like so much else, is probably a mixture of the two. But the people of Toussaint, being the people of Toussaint, enjoy the debate and the argument.

I knew these gardens well now. I have attended banquets and parties. I have been to picnics and other small parties out here and even better than that, I knew where I was going.

When we had first come to this place, Ariadne and I, we had been fleeing before a wave of gossip and curiosity. Trying to get ahead of the tide so that we could sort everything out before everything started to converge. We had left the palace and the presence of the Empress without any kind of direction in mind, not anywhere that we were trying to go. We just wanted to find somewhere that was suitably private to have, what we both expected, would be an intense conversation.

We had not been wrong.

It was a little way in to the garden from the palace, around one of the gazebos and behind one of the green houses. There we had found a pathway that ran alongside a small stream with hedges of flowers protecting us on either side. Other paths were some distance away and although the privacy had been far from perfect, it had suited our needs.

It was here that I had proposed marriage to Ariadne.

It was slightly different now. The bench that Ariadne had hid behind when I offered her the ring was still there and as far as I know, it was the same bench. The main difference was that the hedges had been made somewhat higher, to around six feet. I imagined that there was some magic at play there as hedges take some effort to grow so tall.

The public reason for this hedge growth is to offer some privacy. I am told that since Ariadne and I reached our little agreement, it has become a fashion for well-to-do people to come to these gardens and for one partner to propose to the other at this place. It is now so notorious that people have passed out on the way to the place due to the pressure that they place themselves under.

But that isn't the real reason for the higher hedges. Open displays of that kind of thing are applauded in Toussaint. No, it was more that locals had also taken to quick, furious, and frantic lovemaking on the same spot. The hedges were there so that other users of the gardens didn't have to watch as people had loud and awkward sex on, essentially, a wooden and metal bench.

I don't know how I knew that she was going to be there. There was no message and we had deliberately made the link between the two of us so that we could only talk, we couldn't force thoughts or implant ideas. But I knew, and sure enough, when I slowly and cautiously came round the corner of the hedge, there she was.

I stood there for a moment or two, just watching her. She looked small and fragile. My heart went out to her and I had a nearly overwhelming desire to rush over there and hug her. Followed by an overwhelming urge to turn and run in the opposite direction.

I didn't want to do this. I wanted to wait. I wanted to delay and if at all possible, I didn't want to have to face her ever again. But that wouldn't be fair. Not for me, apart from anything else.

She was dressed simply, a dark woolen shift, tied together at the waist by a simple leather belt. It was basically uncolored with no dye so I could still see the off-color of the sheep in the weave. She was sitting in the middle of the bench, knees together, head down, hunched over with her elbows resting on her knees as she looked at the patch of ground in front of her. She looked to be the very measure of misery. And I hated myself for wondering if it was all an act.

That was what the Elder had done. He had introduced doubt into my mind. And upset as I was at Ariadne, I didn't hate her. But I loathed the Elder then. I saw the damage that he had done and I resolved that I would need to hire someone to read my work and make sure that I was not writing biased accounts. I would need to work really fucking hard to keep my loathing off the page when I talked about him.

This issue that you hold in your hand. I got Regis to read it as he was there and he seemed quite happy that I recounted the facts as I saw them. I was too overwhelmed at the time to be able to do anything else really.

Her hair was in a plait and she had pulled it around her shoulder so that it hung in front of her. I always liked that style because I like to see her neck. It was one of those things that is unexplainable to me. I can admit to enjoying all of the parts of a female anatomy. Certainly the legs and breasts, bottoms have their place too, but there is a special place in my heart for the necks of women. I don't know why.

Someone would probably come up with some analytical speech that says something about the exposure of the neck being some kind of display of vulnerability that appeals to the male psyche. I don't know if that's true. I only know that I have always enjoyed the neck and shoulders of the women that I love.

Well, I was there. I spent a bit of time, wondering how to open up the conversation. I was trying to think of a joke really, something to open up proceedings. To put a shield up so that I wouldn't be hurt any more. Something for me to hide behind so that I wouldn't have to show everyone how much pain I was in.

So she saw me, of course, she saw me. I don't even know why I was particularly surprised.

"You know," she began, not looking up. "I never expected to be happy."

I sighed and walked into the open. There was nowhere else for me to sit or lean against given that the one thing that all Rose bushes have in common is that they have thorns. So I sat on the ground. I didn't want to be standing for this conversation and to be fair, my clothes were covered in bits of Detlaff and other Vampires anyway so…

I said nothing. She looked up at me for a moment before looking off to one side.

"I am nine hundred years old." She said eventually. "But the truth is that I am much older than that. I stopped counting when I reached nine hundred as a conscious choice because, I didn't want to be aware of it when I crossed the thousand year mark. Reaching five hundred was bad enough but I rather thought that getting to a Thousand would be too much.

"Nine hundred years old and I have never been happier, or more surprised than when I was sitting here and you produced that engagement ring. It was astonishing. The same being that had surprised me before and I was being utterly taken to school by him. Twice. Within the period of the same year."

She shook her head.

I have never been happier than I was at that moment. I come back here, when Fringilla is available then I will tell her I'm coming through the gate, but every so often, when I've been away from you for a while, or this or that has happened, I come back here and I remember that moment. The moment where I was so surprised and so happy with it, that I fled from the shock. It was terrifying that I might have been so utterly wrong. That I might have completely, utterly failed and that I was so overjoyed that I had. Pleased to be wrong. For that alone I was astonished and I watched myself, the same way I watch everything, watching as I yelped in astonishment.

I come back and I try to relive that happiness."

She stopped talking for a long moment.

"It seemed only fitting that I come back here for the saddest." She said.

There was another pause while she stared into space. Then she nodded and looked up into my eyes. Her eyes were black and I recognized them. They were the spider's eyes.

There were only two of them, same as any human. But they were black.

"I am ready." She said. "I have taken some steps to ensure that we will not be disturbed. You may yell, ask questions and throw recriminations all you like and then you will never have to see me again. I will leave you to enjoy your happiness. I will take some steps to ensure that you are as happy as I can make you. I will suggest to the Empress that you are free from obligation although she might have to work to put your broken heart together."

I had looked away from her eyes when she started the speech, but now I took care to look back into her eyes.

"If the Empress has other ideas," she went on, "then I can mention your name to Margarita, your mutual love of learning would be well suited to each other. Maleficent is looking for someone to love at the moment and you could do worse than her. A little flighty maybe but... " She shrugged. "You might do well to ground her."

I couldn't help but smile.

"Are you trying to set me up with your friends?"

She said nothing. She looked away from my gaze which was, if I'm honest, a little more telling. But it might have been a pretense. Even now, she might be manipulating me and I hated that that thought kept coming up in my mind, that suspicion.

"I'm not going to shout." I began, "or at least, I'm going to try not to. There might be shouting later, as well as some tears and some recriminations to throw around."

She nodded as she listened.

"There are definitely going to be some questions though." I told her.

She smoothed her skirts and straightened, placing her hands in her lap. "Then ask them."

"Which one was a lie?" I asked but kept talking before she could answer. "Let me tell you what I think. I think that there was not a single moment of what happened last night that wasn't according to the Elder's design. I think he told you what to wear in order to remind me about the Spider Queen side of you. I think he ordered you to take me through the prison chambers and I think he emphasised his orders when you told him about how that might affect Kerrass. I think that every line of that conversation with him was rehearsed. I think that that interpreter that he destroyed at the beginning had done something to warrant a punishment. I think that Regis' pain was his real punishment and I think that he made you tell me those things."

"Close." She admitted. "He didn't expect you to sing a song at the party, or for it to have so profound an effect on our people. That was brilliant by the way." She grinned, and for a moment, I saw the old Ariadne.

"Nor did he expect you to kiss me. Neither did I." She hung her head. "I heard about what you said to him afterwards. Risky for you, and it nearly ended your life. If I have any pull with you, I would like to know how you did that."

"How I did what?"

"How you survived."

"Is he not telling?" I wondered.

"Anyone who asks is being eviscerated which leaves a day or two to recover. You quickly learn not to ask in our society."

"What a stupid rule," I commented. "So in my mind, it is not beyond the realms of possibility that the Elder ordered you to stand there and break my heart. He was obviously trying to drive a wedge between us. So which was a lie? I knew that you were allowed to live as part of human society was as part of an experiment. I knew that I was part of the way that you would join human society and I have deduced that you were watching our relationship, almost from outside yourself, like a scientist. I have had the feeling of you rushing off to make notes about our interactions on more than one occasion. What I didn't know was that the steps towards that relationship were so cold."

She listened carefully. My voice had nearly cracked at the end and she watched and waited as I regained control of myself.

"Both accounts are true." She said. "It is true, I chose you because you were vulnerable. I chose you because you are naive and although you are very intelligent, sometimes you can be really stupid."

"My sister often says the same," I commented.

"I know."

There was another, almost, shared smile. The language of love doesn't leave after a heart is broken.

"I chose you because I saw your body react to my presence. I saw you fight it so hard because you were also aware of the fact that I was a horrific creature of horror and torment. But you could not help but be taken in by the image of the young and beautiful girl on your arm. All the political reasons, all of it was true. I manipulate you. I did. And yes, it was because once chosen, I didn't want to lose my subject of study. I worked so hard to keep you close to me and yes, all the manipulations that I stated in that cave are true.

"It is also true that I chose this shape. I started off with the illusion of beauty that you described in your diaries. I started with that and then I worked to bring my physical form up to that standard. And yes, it was based on those people that I mentioned, and yes, that includes your sister. She makes the face a little softer, a little kinder."

She stroked her chin, running the palm of her hand up her cheek and through the hair at her temples.

"I liked this face." She said.

"I liked it too." I admitted. "Although I will also admit that it's a little creepy knowing that it is, in part, made up of my sister."

She smiled at my discomfort and again, for a moment, my Ariadne was back.

I had to look away as the tears pricked my eyes and the lump grew in my throat.

This was really hard.

"I wouldn't worry about it too much." She told me. "You would be astonished as to how many male perspectives of beauty are based on their mothers, aunts, or elder siblings."

"I don't really like my mother," I argued.

"All the more reason to fixate on your sister." She retorted. "And Freddie, your mother might have given birth to you, but in every other useful way, you were raised by your Elder siblings. As far as I can tell, Mark was your Father and Emma was your Mother in all manner except for the biological one."

I considered this. "Now that's a thought that's going to fester."

A wave of sadness washed over me. I was about to lose one of those parents.

"So everything that I said in the room of the Elder was true. I took steps to drive away other women that encroached upon your life, including an Empress and many other noblewomen, some of whom might have been better suited to you. I did manipulate your emotions and take advantage of your grief over your Father to work my way into your heart. I did portray myself as your ideal woman, not just physically so that you would not be inspired to look elsewhere for your affection and your…"

She stopped and shook her head.

"So yes." She went on, "I have played with you and I have studied you. I have watched you and I have studied the world through your eyes." She admitted, making sure she kept eye contact. "It has been a scientific experience for me. I watch myself as I go through these things with you and I take notes. My interest is scientific and it was that that triggered my interest in you.

"But saying that all of that is true doesn't deny everything else that I have ever said. You surprised me here but you also surprised me when you stood up to me when we escaped the tower and you freed me. No one has ever stood up to me in that way before. Your argument was well reasoned, it was based on knowledge, it was obviously fuelled by an intense terror of me. But you made it nonetheless. I was astonished and I wondered what else you might do to astonish me.

"I chose you for that reason. That was not a lie. I chose you because you are intelligent and it is not an insult to say that you are intelligent for your species. There are many really stupid Vampires and you met some of them tonight. You are charming in your own way and you fight, constantly, against your own fears and prejudices. You always seek to learn. As a subject of study, you are unparalleled in the interest that you spark in me."

I felt anger rise in my chest at that and squashed it. I told myself to listen to the intent behind the words, not what she was actually saying. She has often complained that our language is limited, well, let her intent speak.

"I was interested in you when you left Angral." She said. "I watched you develop through your time with Letho and was astonished about how honest you were regarding your recounting of our time together. It was then that I decided that I would take steps to prevent you from leaving my grasp…

"I am laying this out like I am already writing up an experiment.

"I was so scared for you when you went missing in the North. So scared and I watched my own terror with more than a little bit of fear myself. I felt like I was losing myself and that I was drowning. I saw you with Marion in the South and I remembered feeling jealous and again, Jealousy? Of a mortal? Outrageous.

"Everything that I said in the hall was true. Every word. But also, every word that I have said since we first met."

I accepted that. I would need to go through some of my records to see if there was any outright conflict.

"The method of study is accurate." She said. "As a part of the scientific study, you are supposed to immerse yourself in that life. Feel what you feel and live how you would live if you were part of that life. You have done the same. You were not satisfied with reading about Witchers and studying them from afar. You went out into the world. You experienced what they experience. You killed some monsters. You suffered the prejudices that they suffer. You even went through a small taste of what their creation is like. You became Kerrass' friend, even as you continued to honestly report his faults and failures."

"I didn't make him love me." I burst out. I was trying not to get angry, but it escaped. "Fuck, I'm sorry."

"Don't be. I deserve it."

"I didn't make him love me," I repeated. "I was always honest with Kerrass. I didn't pretend to be other than what and who I was. When he showed disdain for me, I deserved it. But it was honest. Yes, I lived his life. I experienced everything that you said, the danger, the hardships, the oddly boring nature of the work, and the mind-numbing tedium of moving from place to place. We have shared everything with each other apart from women because that was one intimacy too far. We have never spoken of it, but it is true all the same. I didn't make him love me."

She wouldn't meet my gaze.

"What do you want Ariadne?" I wondered. "Fuck, should I even call you that? Or should I call you Madame Eight-Legs or whateverthefuck?"

"No," she said with a shudder, please don't call me that."

"So what do you want?" I asked. "What do you really want?"

"What I really want?" She asked, raising her eyes to the heavens. "I want tonight to have never happened. I want to go back to how things were between us."

"With me believing the lie?"

"IT WASN'T A LIE." She wailed. "It wasn't."

She hung her head for a long moment. I expected something else to come after that but when she was silent for a bit longer, I decided that it was time for a prompt.

"You know that we can't go back to that right?"

She nodded.

I realized that I had stood up at some point. I looked down at her, looking small and vulnerable, and asked myself if I still loved her.

"Do you love me?" I said. "Do you love me? Have you ever loved me?"

"I don't know." She sobbed. "I don't know. How do you know? I don't. Does someone turn up and tell you 'Yes, you love that person? I don't know. I have never felt like this before and I am scientist enough to be fascinated by it. I want to study it, to take it in and savor it. I want to watch it from afar and see where it goes."

She spoke frantically and quickly and I found that I knew the answer. But I wanted to hear her say it. That might make me selfish but I wanted to hear her say it.

"He told me to say that I didn't love you. He did tell me that. But the truth is that I don't know. I don't know what that feels like. I have never felt it before. Poetry on the subject seems ludicrous to me. Paintings about lovers seem contrived and false. Statues and plays are staged. I went to see the play that was the greatest love story ever told when it was staged in Vizima and I couldn't sit through it. I wanted to yell at the characters for being stupid.

"I don't know. It is true that you were the subject of my experiment, but I could have found others. It had to be you, it had to be, there could have been no others. It had to be you and I don't know why. I could not allow anyone else to have you, it had to be you. The only reason I didn't kill Marion that night in Dorne was that I knew that would drive you even further away. I arranged marriage because it would tie you to me. I told myself that I did these things to keep my subject and that it had to be you. That statement is true as well, but that doesn't explain the desperation I felt that I had to keep you safe and keep you with me.

"I am over nine hundred years old. I have time to be patient, I could find someone else, but it had to be you, it had to be you. I didn't need all of those manipulations. I could have made myself blonde-haired and blue-eyed and loved any number of passing people, there would even be a scientific argument for doing that in that a breadth of data would give a more accurate result.

"But I only wanted it to be you. I wanted to study you, to love you and no other. I wanted to see how you made me feel and I wanted to see if I could make you feel the same.

"I know that I am excited to speak to you. I know that I look forward to your presence in the morning and dread the moment when you retire to your rooms at night. I know that when you smile, I smile with you. When you weep, my heart weeps with you, and when you are hurt, not only do I bleed with you, I have never known rage like it. I know that even things that I have seen before in my long life, look new when I see them with you. Food, drink, all of it tastes different with you.

"I have never known anger like it than when I thought that cult in the North had killed you. I nearly regressed then. I nearly terrorized that place to wipe them out. Turning into my war form and summoning the swarms from the depths of the earth like a black and chittering hide that would destroy the people that dared to take you away from me. I nearly did that anyway. I have never known fear like it when I thought you had been taken away from me. Yes, that was partly because I would need to start over, but also because you would have been taken away from me.

"And then again, the pain that you caused me when you came to my home and tried to break off our engagement and then again, the relief when I realized that you were sick and mad. That was the only way you could reconcile what was happening.

"I want you to be happy. I want to keep you warm and safe. I want to show you such pleasure and I am overwhelmed at my fortune that your pleasure is partially associated with giving me pleasure. I want to hold you, kiss you and… I couldn't wait for our wedding night, I have dreams and plans and fantasies about all of the things that we would do with each other, to each other, and for each other. I want to see your face at the moment of release and feel the satisfaction that comes with knowing that I did that do to you. That I gave you that amount of wonder.

"You know that I've had test runs at this. There is a moment that comes, just before the height of pleasure occurs where the eyes open and there is a look of fear there. Fear and wonder before the feeling becomes too overwhelming to ignore and I couldn't wait to see that in your face."

She was openly sobbing.

"Is this love Freddie? Is it? I don't know. I don't know. I hate it because it's tearing me apart. Emotions are overwhelming for our people. I have felt passion before but not like this, not like this. It never hurt as this does. I am older than some hills and mountains that have formed in certain parts of the world, older than some towering oaks that people describe as having been there since the continent was born. I have seen all of that and I know more of that and I have forgotten even more in the years since and I see nothing, no beauty or wonder than that which I found when I looked into your eyes and you smiled when you saw me. It happens every morning and every time we are away from each other. I feel this strange sensation whenever that happens and I don't know what it means. I take it out and look at it and wonder if I can suppress it. Then I find that I don't want to. I want to revel in that situation, that feeling, and that sensation."

She stared into space.

"I remember thinking when someone told me about what Detlaff had done for love. I remember thinking that Regis had done the right thing. I remember thinking that Detlaff was foolish and that nothing could drive me to such a depth of…"

She shook her head as the tears spilled out of her spider's eyes.

"What do you think now?" I prompted.

"Poor Detlaff." She said and hung her head.

I had my answer.

Now, the only question was how to bring this round to what I wanted to do. But Ariadne had not stopped talking.

"I meant what I said though." She carried on, not looking at me. "I will tell Emma about the wedding and I will liquidate what investments I have made in Angral to pay for any losses that she might have incurred in the preparation of the matter. I will also let the Empress know what has happened and then you will never have to hear from me again.

"I will mention your name to a few women that I know are looking for partners that might be suitable for you and who I think could make you happy. I feel that I owe you that much, and I encourage you to tell everyone that this was my fault and…"

She wasn't going to stop. She was going to keep going. I had seen it in her now, she was babbling.

"Ok, stop," I said, holding my hand up. She kept going for a while though, her mouth moving automatically as her tear-filled eyes looked up at me.

Spider's eyes.

Spider's eyes, they might be but they still shone with unshed tears the same as they had ever done. I found that strangely endearing.

"What happened in those caves hurt me," I told her. "I cannot lie and pretend that they did not. Nor can I pretend that they will have had no effect on me. My trust was hard-won and easily shattered."

"I know," she wailed, "I am so sorry. You reached out and allowed yourself to…"

"Look, please," I said, forcing a slight smile to my face. I had tears in my own eyes now. When I had proposed marriage, I remember a moment when the words were stuck in the back of my throat and I couldn't force them out.

"I meant what I said," I told her. "I still love you. I have desperately been holding myself back from just taking you into my arms and telling you that it will all be ok."

She hung her head. "I know, but it will get better, you will find love again elsewhere and…"

"Ariadne." I put a bit of asperity and amused frustration into my voice. "You are not listening to me. I know that you are more intelligent than me, more experienced, older, and all the rest, but what is true for me is also true for you. For a clever woman, you are sometimes really stupid."

She looked up at me. There was that head tilt again.

"I still love you," I told her. "I can't deny that I am hurt, and that will take some work to overcome, even as I know that that hurt is the result of manipulation by the Elder, but I am still hurt. And if you really cannot see the two of us moving forward into life, marriage, and love together, then we can part."

It was not feigned on my part, where my voice broke at the thought.

"But I don't want that to happen. I love you. What you describe as how you feel, sounds enough like love for me to be comfortable with that. Even if you came to it through a scientific curiosity, then that is love enough for me. And does it really matter how we come to our feelings? Love is love."

She was looking at me with her face as a rictus of horror and I felt my heart lurch a little bit.

"But…" She began.

"Also," I carried on. "Also, it occurs to me that the best way we could get our revenge on the Elder is to live happily together. That sounds…. Funny to me."

"But… I lied to you."

I took a deep breath. "And that hurts," I told her. "Please don't do it again."

"But… I lied. I told you that I loved you when I didn't know that I meant it. I told you that this was my real form when I had built it in order to appeal to your most basic needs. Youth and beauty that are copied from elsewhere in order to…"

"Yeah, I've been thinking about that," I said. "Humans do it all the time. Elves and dwarfs too I understand, although I cannot speak for halflings. We dress up, we get our hair done, and apply cosmetics and dyes in order to appeal to the object of our affections. You have only taken that to the next step. Also, you chose to look like that. Does that make it any the less valid?

"Youth and beauty can come with their own burdens as you have made clear to me. Men talking down to you, elders doing the same. It wasn't just me that you presented yourself like this too. You chose this appearance as to how to present yourself to the world. That was your choice. Does that make it a lie? Or does that make it a truth that you have chosen? And if it's the second thing, then who would I be to disrespect that."

She wailed. "But the lies. I lied to you. You said, up at the palace when you found out about Jack. You told us all that if we ever lied to you again then you were done with us. That you would never talk to us again."

I nodded. That was true, but in thinking about this particular situation, it simply never occurred to me to think about that. Ariadne kept going again though.

"I thought about that…" She was sobbing and weeping at the same time now, speaking through the sobs. "I have wanted to tell you the truths about me. I wanted to tell you those things. I knew what the Elder was going to do, or at least, I had a good idea. I wanted to tell you but the longer I left it, the more difficult it became. I wanted to tell you but I kept it from you to keep the illusion going just a bit longer. Just a few more days, a few more moments of happiness stolen…"

"It might be hypocritical of me." I interrupted. "But I just don't care."

She shut her mouth with a snap.

"I don't." I went on. "It hurts, it does. And with Emma, Mark, and the rest, then that was true. It is with you as well. What hurt there was that I might have saved someone. I could have been helping with Jack or the conspiracy or however you want to talk about it. Here? I don't know."

I tried to think about it again.

"But I don't care. It hurts, it really does and there is going to need to work to rebuild the trust between the two of us. But I don't care. I just don't. I love you."

She sobbed and I thought I could see it in the depths of those Spider's Eyes. She was beginning to believe.

"But… But..."

"Ariadne, or whatever you want me to call you. I have never met someone who is so determined to talk herself out of happiness."

She properly dissolved into tears then. Huge sobs shook her body as the tears openly fell between her fingers.

I took a deep breath and climbed up onto the bench next to her, pushing her over a bit to make room. Carefully and slowly, I reached out and put my arm around her shoulders, gently applying pressure as an invitation to lean into me.

It took a moment before she allowed herself to lean and then she let herself fall into me and I could wrap my arms around her properly.

She wept for a long time, the relief I think. Relief and a reduced sense of pressure. It was a long time before she calmed.

"So…" I began when I thought she was calmer. "So how will the scientific write-up of this even go?"

"It is really quite interesting." She said in a weak voice. "The relief I feel is… overwhelming. Would you object if I keep hold of you for a while longer? I feel the need for reassurance and wish to savor the feeling for future study."

I chuckled. "I can live with that."

We sat for a while.

"Although," I commented. "I do have to admit that I could go a lifetime without seeing your war shape again."

"The spider shape not doing the job for you?" She wondered and I thought I could hear the first signs of a smile in her voice."

"Nah," I said, stroking her hair. "I like a woman to have lips I can kiss and hair that I can stroke."

"I will take note." She said. "Fascinating. Now that the scientific bit is a bit out in the open, I may have to perform some experiments on size, shape, and appearance on you."

"Good to know, less surprises though please."

"So noted."

Another pause. "Does my Arachnid nature really bother you?"

"Not gonna lie," I began. "I did not enjoy the venom stinger or the web goop. Having said that, I could stand to be caught in your webs on the understanding that it was for sexual reasons rather than for you eating me."

There was definitely a chuckle there.

"I shall remember that."

"Also…" I went on. "Although I didn't enjoy the spindly, bristly legs, or the bulbous back section…"

"Or the mandibles and fangs." She suggested.

"I have to admit that the chitinous armored, female torso bit was quite… distressingly attractive."

She laughed.

"I mean it." I went on. "There is something particularly attractive about an armored woman that can kick my ass."

"Fascinating." She said. "You really do have a monster fetish."

"Honestly," I said. "Now, is that really a surprise to anyone? I know I've said it before but…"

We chuckled a bit more before just sitting there.

"So." I began, gently pushing her away. "Ariadne… Or do you want me to call you Madame Arachnid?"

She laughed. "No, not that."

"Lady Arachnid?"

"I will keep Ariadne if you don't mind. I like the name. It seems symbolic and then there is the reality that you gave me that name."

"Well, Kerrass and I," I said as I slid to the ground. "Also, are you going to keep that appearance now that the truth is out?"

"I might." She said. "I am used to it and it might make things awkward if I suddenly appeared differently in other circles. I might age it up until you reach your middle twenties and then stop. I still want to appear beautiful for my man."

"And the eyes?" I asked.

"Which would you prefer?" She wondered with the head tilt.

"Love," I began. "I want you to feel comfortable. If you want to have black, shiny eyes instead of the more traditional pupils and irises. Then I will support that. It will be weird, but I will accept it."

"I will work on it." She said.

"Also… Emma? As a facial template?"

"I can remove it if you wish,"

"Again, your comfort and…"

She muttered something and her face changed. "This is what it would look like without Emma's influence."

I gazed at the face. It was more angular. Sharper somehow. Less beautiful and more desirable. Less human but no less attractive. I felt as though I would cut myself if I kissed her cheek.

"You are still beautiful to my eyes," I told her. "How about this? How about, you can play about with your appearance if you wish. I would just like to know about it for when you are making changes and when you find a face that you are comfortable with. A face that you feel is you. Then I will be happy with it."

She smiled knowingly. "So long as it has all the characteristics of female beauty which Kerrass once mentioned."

I took a deep breath. I was suddenly aware that I was on shaky ground.

"Whatever you are confident and comfortable with," I said.

"Good answer Freddie." She said. "I will stick with my old face for now until after we are married and have established ourselves. Then, with my supposed aging, things might move around. I shall reserve drastic changes for the bed-chamber though."

I laughed at that as I knelt on the floor.

"In which case, Madame La Comtesse. As I asked, what, a little over a year ago." I held up the engagement ring. "Would you do me the great honor of being my wife?"

She looked into my eyes and I saw tears there again. Tears of a different kind this time though.

"I thought that I had lost it." She said.

"And I found it," I said, putting it onto her finger. "Honestly though. One day, one of us is going to try and call off this engagement and the other one will not try and stop it."

"That's twice from me," she said, "And only once from you?"

"I will let you keep that victory," I told her.

She smiled and looked at the stone, shining in the sun.

"Three times." She told me after a long moment.

"What?"

"Three times that you have astonished me."

We left that place. I bought her a dress to wear, and myself a new suit so we didn't have to go up to the palace to change. Then we walked the streets of Beauclair, reconnecting.

We went to Corvo Bianco, well before sundown to be greeted by an unsurprised-looking Kerrass and a Lord Geralt that was already pouring the Wine. Yennefer had already taken my notes off somewhere and was going through them carefully. We laughed and joked. Ariadne and I sat together and held hands.

So now, it is time to talk to you, dear reader. You have been with me for a long time now, several years and it has been an interesting time. I wanted to say thank you for your time spent in my company. It has been hard and easy, heartbreaking and so uplifting. I have fallen in love, become engaged, and found a friend that I did not look for. I have also, I hope, grown as a person far beyond that which I started.

It is my intention that this would be the last of the articles published in this magazine. But I will still be around. I understand that the magazine is working on a deal with my publisher to serialize my books and edit some of the more technical facts out. But that negotiation is still going on. I will be producing books now and as I write this, I am just finishing up my first draft of my part of the book on the Unseen Elder. That can expect to be published in a year or so.

The book on Jack is available from most good bookshops and is available in many libraries.

It is also possible that inspiration will strike while I am waiting for Yennefer to catch up and I will publish a story about Kerrass' and my life on the road. That journey is now over for the time being and I don't know when, or even if, it will start again. Conservative estimates suggest that it would be a couple of years after my marriage at least.

So once again. Thank you for sticking with it, thank you for joining me on this journey, and thank you for continuing to support me.

Thank you.

(A/N: This is not the end, but Freddie thinks it is. I am already hard at work on the next chapter. We are close to the ending now but believe me when I say that I will tell you when it is all over.

The idea for this chapter was given to me by someone from AO3 who wanted to ask me about the sociological implications of Freddie's work. It was they who suggested that the nature of Freddie's study of Witchers would be considered strange or unusual. We talked a bit and most of that discussion went over my head, but it did inspire what happened with Freddie and Ariadne here. At the time of writing, I can't find their name to thank them in person. Any mistakes in the method are mine though. But thanks to you, if you are still there, for driving the story.

And for everyone in general. Thanks for reading.)