CHAPTER 1128: A BLEND OF NEW AND OLD

The formal dining room, nestled deep within the stone caverns behind the ancient fortress, had gone through several significant changes since the last time Ollie came here.

When he first visited, the room felt gloomy and dark. There had been a single chandelier hanging over a simple cedar table that offered up enough seating for Lady Nyrielle’s progeny and a few other guests, but no more than that. The walls had been lined with a few of Lady Nyrielle’s paintings, but it was difficult to appreciate them without the enhanced senses of a vampire.

Now, however, like much of the ancient fortress, the secluded dining room had gone through a substantial transformation.

The simple cedar table at the center of the dining room had been replaced by a large, elaborately carved oak table, the center of which resembled a map of the Vale of Mists come to life.

The table and matching chairs had come out of the deepest storage caverns, where they had lain since the fall of the Vale of Mists. As much as Cellach Lothian’s forces had destroyed when they all but burned the Vale to the ground, many of the treasures that had belonged to High Lord Torbin were kept in places so dark and deep that humans never discovered them before Nyrielle’s triumphant return to the Vale with her host of champion progeny.

"This is beautiful," Diarmuid said as he took a seat in the solid, high-backed chair that Ollie showed him to. "It must have been carved by a true Master."

"I’m sure it was," Ollie said, tracing his fingers over the carvings that, to his barely trained touch, felt both reverent and a little sad. "I never asked if High Lord Torbin had any progeny from the Heartwood Clan, but this table makes me think that he must have."

"Torbin?" Diarmuid asked, raising a dark eyebrow. "The vampire who ruled here before the Second Crusade?"

"The very same," Ollie said as he took a seat close to the head of the large table, leaving room for Sir Thane to sit between him and Nyrielle, just as he had done at Ashlynn’s betrothal banquet. "The table is older than the Kingdom of Gaal," Ollie said without a trace of uncertainty in his voice.

The table wasn’t the only thing that had come out of the depths of the storage caverns. Several gilded chandeliers, hung with glittering crystals, now hung in the dining chamber, adding both warmth and light to what had been a slightly cold and gloomy space before.

Most striking of all, however, at least to Ollie’s eyes, were the paintings on the wall. Once, they had featured only landscapes, painted by Nyrielle’s hand and reflecting the different villages of the Vale of Mists.

Now, however, two portraits dominated the wall behind the head of the table.

The first depicted a powerful, bearish figure from the Clan of the Great Claw, a man with shocking white fur that reminded Ollie of Commander Savis. The man in the painting seemed larger than life, even for a member of his clan, and he’d been painted sitting atop an imposing, angular throne made from blocks of stone that must have weighed hundreds of pounds.

Where the first portrait radiated awe and power, however, the second one was much softer. It depicted a human lord and lady, both with shockingly white hair, dancing beneath the moonlight in one of the ancient fortresses’ many gardens. All around the dancing couple, there were beautiful flowers, from lavender to night-blossoming jasmine, and many others, but in the painting, the white-haired dancers had eyes only for each other.

It wasn’t hard for any of the humans present to guess who the paintings depicted, but to Ollie, who had spent the most time in the Vale of Mists, they represented a tremendous shift in Lady Nyrielle.

As ancient as the fortress was, much of its history had been sealed away. Like the Great Hall that saw little use after Nyrielle recaptured her ancestral home from the humans who tried to conquer it, the ancient fortress had fallen into a strangely frozen present that reflected only the presence of Lady Nyrielle and her human progeny.

Ollie had long suspected that items like the table and the portraits in the dining room had been sealed away because they were reminders of what the Vale had lost, too painful for Lady Nyrielle to confront in her daily life. The young knight didn’t dare to speculate about what Lady Nyrielle felt when she looked upon the antique furnishings or deeply personal paintings, but he doubted the choice to display them was an accident.

After all, it would have been just as easy to have new things made, just like the rugs in the dining room which had been purchased from merchants from across the mountains, or the exquisitely polished silver goblets and utensils, made by artisans on Airgead Mountain within Ollie’s lifetime.

There was a blend of new and old within the dining room. A sense of ancient history that had been dusted off so that it could be properly treasured, sitting side by side with the most modern of touches. To both Ollie and Isabell, however, it also felt... incomplete. The dining room reflected the history of Nyrielle’s legacy in the Vale of Mists, but Ashlynn’s coven had yet to make their mark.

Silently, the two witches exchanged a look and a subtle nod of understanding. They both had priorities to focus on, including the creation of Lady Ashlynn’s Enchanted Grove and the ongoing transformation of the tower that the Mother of Trees had claimed exclusively for her coven.

But there were other places that the coven could begin to make a mark, and they silently vowed that, by this time next year, there would be far more signs that this place belonged to both vampires and witches, and that Lady Ashlynn was every bit as much a part of this place as Lady Nyrielle.

"I told you that we didn’t need to rush," a gruff voice said, pulling the witches out of their thoughts as a newcomer entered the room. "We’re almost the first to arrive."

"And who says that wasn’t my intention?" a smooth, refined voice added as a pair of figures entered the room. "After all, we’re meeting a ’cousin’ of sorts today, though it looks like the most interesting one has yet to arrive..."