Chapter 1751: A Gallery of Pain (Part Two)
It didn’t take long for Jocelynn to feel like she’d left the world she knew behind.
Within a few hundred paces, the walls of the corridor changed from neatly cut stones into rough walls of bare rock, carved from the earth itself. There was no light down here other than the lamp that Nyrielle carried, and the air itself felt unnaturally still.
The echo of Jocelynn’s footfalls was loud in her ears, along with the sound of her breathing and the beating of her heart. Nyrielle, on the other hand, seemed to make almost no noise at all. No matter how much Jocelynn strained her ears, other than the soft whisper of her skirts shifting as she walked, she was as silent as a spectre.
Jocelynn kept waiting for the tunnels to grow smaller or the walls to press in, but the ceiling was high enough overhead that she could only faintly see the light of Nyrielle’s lamp reflecting off it, and the walls remained far enough apart that she couldn’t touch both of them with her hands, no matter how wide she stretched her arms.
The longer she walked in the dark, the smaller this place made her feel. Jocelynn clung to the circle of light around Nyrielle, following her through every turn and branch in the corridors as she quickly realized that, without a guide to show her the way, she could never retrace her steps through the underground labyrinth.
"We’re here," Nyrielle said abruptly, stopping at a simple wooden door that looked no different to Jocelynn’s eyes than the dozen others they’d passed on their way here. "I’ll light more lamps inside, stay by the first one until I’ve finished the rest," she said before opening the door to a room that was too large for Nyrielle’s light to reach the far side.
It didn’t take Nyrielle long to light the pair of lamps to either side of the door. Then she vanished into the dark, moving with a speed that Jocelynn’s eyes struggled to follow as she lit more and more lamps around the room until Jocelynn found herself standing in a large gallery where dozens of works hung on the walls.
Unlike any gallery of art Jocelynn had ever visited, the paintings in this one were all covered beneath dull, gray cloths, and only half the available space in the gallery seemed to be in use, as if the exhibit wasn’t yet ready to be revealed.
Almost all of the cloths in the room wore their own coats of dust, some thicker than others, while a few bore faint fingerprints that suggested they’d recently been disturbed.
"Very few people have ever seen the contents of this room," Nyrielle said when she reappeared at Jocelynn’s side. "Your sister isn’t one of them."
"Is this a secret you’re keeping from her?" Jocelynn asked, swallowing heavily as her beating heart leaped into her throat.
"There’s no need for her to come here," Nyrielle said, shaking her head. "I’ve painted every piece here from memory," she explained. "If my darling wishes to know what I remember, she has only to ask. It’s a kindness on her part that she doesn’t, and cowardice on mine that I have yet to offer them up."
"I, I don’t understand," Jocelynn said. "If these memories are precious enough for you to paint them, then why wouldn’t you share them? Why keep them locked away in the dark?"
"Let me show you," Nyrielle said, placing a hand lightly on Jocelynn’s elbow to guide her to one of the covered paintings. When she pulled the cloth aside, Jocelynn gasped, a sharp intake of breath that momentarily froze her heart in her chest as she looked at a painting unlike any she’d ever seen.
In the painting, a powerful, bearish man with shocking white fur stood on the bank of a creek while the forest burned around him. Two brilliant, glowing swords had pierced his torso, spilling blood from wounds no living being could survive. On the ground, two Templars lay in the mud, their bodies broken, their tabards torn and bloody.
The white-furred man had been captured in a moment of unbridled fury and defiance, his mouth open wide to reveal long, deadly fangs as he screamed in rage. At the edges of the painting, more Templars pressed in, their swords glowing with a holy radiance as they surrounded the wounded man who refused to die.
"His name was Torbin," Nyrielle said quietly as Jocelynn tried to process everything she was seeing in the scene of fire and blood. "He was my grandsire, the vampire who took my parents as his progeny," she explained. "This was the last time I saw him."
"He knew then that we couldn’t win," Nyrielle said, wiping a pinkish tear from her cheek before reaching out to trace a finger down the painting’s unadorned wooden frame. "He ordered my parents to get me to safety while he held the line..."
"Then, he was a hero," Jocelynn said, staring at the painting as her eyes took in every bloody wound on Torbin’s body, along with the blood dripping from his claws. Two had already fallen to his claws, but against five more templars... There was no hope, and he clearly knew it, but he fought anyway.
"Heroes die pointless deaths for causes that aren’t their own," Nyrielle said, shaking her head. "He was family, and he died to defend the rest of us," she said before her hands moved again, hiding the painting from sight before turning to the one next to it and removing the cloth.
This one was stranger. The painting looked like it had been set at an angle so that ’up’ was the top right corner of the painting, and two wide, black bands covered the top and bottom of the painting, covering much of the canvas as if the subjects of the painting could only be glimpsed but never seen in full.
The portion of the painting Jocelynn could see held two youthful figures with shocking white hair. A lord in armor and a lady in a fine dress. The closer Jocelynn looked at the figures, the more convinced she became that the lord was holding the lady back. His fingers pressed deeply into her arms where he held her, and her posture leaned forward as if she wanted to run or to reach out...
"Baron Iarlaith Willowcreek and his wife, Baroness Orla," Nyrielle said. "My parents."
As soon as Nyrielle said ’my parents, ’ a ball of ice formed in Jocelynn’s gut, and a sinking dread swallowed her heart.
"Was this... Was this the same night?" Jocelynn asked in a fragile, cracked whisper.
"We were supposed to escape the Vale together," Nyrielle said quietly. "Mist City was burning; there was nothing left to defend... We’d come back for the few things we would need to survive to escape, but they," Nyrielle paused, pursing her lips together and closing her eyes as she grappled with a moment that felt more painful than her recollections had felt in years.
"They sent you away," Jocelynn said, reaching out to rest a hand lightly on Nyrielle’s shoulder. "They did what your grandsire did and fought so you could flee..."
"They bound me in chains," Nyrielle said, opening her eyes to look at the painting once again. "Sealed in a box to be carried by the ones they trusted the most. They betrayed me," she said softly. "What do you think it took to forgive them for that?"
"I, I don’t know," Jocelynn said, staring into the heartbroken eyes of the woman in the painting, straining against her husband’s grip as he held her back from comforting their child. His own eyes were grim, and the set of his jaw was determined, but the more Jocelynn looked, the more she noticed the tightness in his throat, as if he couldn’t bear to speak the words trapped behind his lips. Couldn’t bear to say ’goodbye,’ or ’I love you,’ or any of the dozens of things he thought he should have said long ago...
"I don’t know how you can forgive someone for that," Jocelynn said several heartbeats later. "Except that... They loved you. And because of what they did, you’re here now."
"But what if they could have been here with me?" Nyrielle asked. "Did they really need to die, or could we all have run?"
"I, I don’t know," Jocelynn said. She tried to think about everything she’d read about Cellach Lothian’s assault on the Vale and the ’human traitors’ who were captured and burned at the stake that night. She tried to remember if anyone had ever written about them turning a tide or stopping an advance or anything that would let her answer that, without their sacrifice, Nyrielle herself would never have escaped...
But there was nothing.
Under the weight of Orla’s anguished gaze and before Iarlaith’s grim determination, she couldn’t think of anything except that they must have believed there was no other way, or else they’d never have abandoned their daughter. Not with that much love in their hearts.
"Let me show you another one," Nyrielle said, gently putting the cloth back in place before guiding Jocelynn across the room to a painting whose cover was completely free of dust, as if it had just recently been placed there.
"This one will be the hardest for you to see," Nyrielle warned her as she pulled the cloth aside.
Already, Jocelynn felt like her heart had been broken into sharp shards that tore at her chest and she wanted to ask what could possibly be harder to see than the pain she’d already witnessed.
But when the cloth finally fell aside, the blood drained from Jocelynn’s face, and she felt her head growing lighter as the world began to spin, because this time, she didn’t need Nyrielle to tell her who the person in the painting was...
