The Vampire's Heart [Sequel to the witch's heart]

Chapter 11

"The original families sacrificed their unborn children to another god in exchange for that god to strike down the Gallo beast," Alyth says. "The god gave powers to the next child conceived in each family as a pity gift. This began the line of born witches."

Elspeth feels her stomach drop and has to take deep breaths as nausea overcomes her. Tears sting at her eyes and the walls seem to close in on her. She wants to do nothing more than curl up on the floor, become part of it and disappears.

"Why...why did they even go to such a god? Could they not think of anything that would not cost innocent lives?" Elspeth is unaware she is shouting, the ringing in her ears overwhelming her hearing. She rises out of her chair and backs away from her parents.

"For my entire life, you made me believe that my powers were something to be proud of," Elspeth presses her hands to her eyes, drawing in panicked breaths. 

"It is something to be proud of," Elspeth's father says. "You've developed your own strength and your own ways of using them that make you unique."

"No," Elspeth. "I've been living my whole life thinking I had a purpose and now you've taken that away from me." She takes Gregory's hand and pulls him up to her room as quickly as possible.

"Elspeth!" Her father begins to get up but Alyth puts a hand on his shoulder and shakes her head.

"Lyle, she needs to figure herself out."

"And what are we to do," he questions. "Just sit here like two twonks while our daughter has a crisis in her room?"

"Listen," Alyth says firmly. "This is not the time to fight, Lyle. Elspeth was given a book by a stranger and it just so happens to belong to the Gallo Beast? And on top of that only she can read it. Is that not something that requires the utmost attention?"

"Over the attention that we should be paying to Elspeth herself?" He counters.

"If we try to force her to talk to us, it will only push her away," Alyth asserts. "We must let her know that we are here for her but it would be a grave mistake to push at her. How many times did you tell Gammy about how you felt when she tried to force you?" 

Lyle slowly sits back down and puts his head in his hands, "I never told Gammy anything. Ever. Perhaps she'd still be here if I had."

"You can't blame yourself for that still," Alyth places her hands over Lyle's and brings them away from his face. "Your grandmother was so Catholic that she could probably cast the devil out of someone if she believed hard enough. What could you have said to her that she would have believed? 'Oh Gammy, by the way, my girlfriend is a witch and her reading said that you'd be in trouble'. Yes, that would have gone over swimmingly."

"I could have tried harder at least."

Alyth sighs and drapes her arms around her husband, "Dearest, sometimes the only thing you can do is be there and love someone for as long as you are able. She didn't even know she had the disease until she was dying from it, she never felt pain and went peacefully." Alyth presses a kiss into his temple. "Sometimes that's all we can ask for." 

"I suppose," Lyle muses. "Enough about this, we've been beating that dead horse of a conversation for years." He pulls the book Elspeth had left towards them. "I wasn't born into any of this, you're going to need to tell me more about the Gallo."

"His name was Latharn Denholm and he was a practitioner, like us. But he was so obsessed with the Druid way of life. The druids kept all their secrets guarded and Latharn thought he could find them. He got it into his head that the druids of old, not like any druid today, had left their secrets behind for someone worthy to find." Alyth sighs, "like a fool, he thought he could be that someone."

"He wandered all the way to France in search of his answers, hoping to find remnants of their world from before the romanization of Gaul. That is why we call him the Gallo beast, named for the Gallo-Romans. It was because of the Gallic wars that he was even able to find the work of the druids that lived there. He ignored the fact that the rituals were mostly incomplete and took this as a sign to continue their work.

He gathered a following, claiming to teach the ways of the druids. Somehow he avoided being killed for his preaching and then began the experiments. His followers were so entranced by him that they offered him their very lives to try and complete the rituals. Many of them worked but they were minor, nothing like the one that led to his demise. It was the most powerful of all he had found in his travels through the countries that used to be Gaul. The Druids believed in the immortality of the soul and Latharn thought that it was a spell to make his soul immortal. What the spell was actually for will likely never be known. He tried on his followers countless times. Either they would lose their minds, like monsters trapped in human flesh, or they would just drop dead."  

"And then comes the part that everyone knows, how one of his followers didn't want to be used and broke the circle which caused a backlash on Latharn," Lyle says. 

"I'm not really sure what caused the follower to turn on him like that," Alyth contemplates. "There were several witnesses, long dead now, but you know how everything gets twisted over the years. We only have the definites of what happened before then because he was somewhat of a public figure. Anyway, some say the follower rebelled out of fear, others say he wanted the power for himself. Either way, after that Latharn terrorized every magic user in the country." Alyth takes a deep breath, getting uncomfortable talking about him. "We're not even sure why he did what he did after that. He hunted and consumed practitioners far and wide for nearly twenty years. Those who survived an encounter with him said he was unhinged but that there was also a sort of method to his madness, for lack of better words. Some thought he was consuming the practitioner trying to steal whatever power they contained. Most believed it was because his thirst for power was the only thing that remained in his now broken mind."

"Then he was eventually killed by the Jotunn and so on and so forth," Lyle concludes. "But what I don't understand is what all this means now."

Alyth looks towards the stairs and swallows thickly, "I don't know but I don't like it."

I live! So here's that chapter that I said would explain a lot of the background. I also introduced Elspeth dad by name for the first time. I realized that neither of her parents got much time in the first book and now only her mother had been seen so I made sure to not only introduce her dad but also give him some background too! Anyway, I wanted to take a hot sec and stop focusing only on Elspeth for just a bit and to give you guys a bunch of info on the whole Gallo situation while also trying to be as historically accurate as possible. I tried to make this one long to kind of make up for not updating since may. so enjoy!! 

I tried to look through quickly to make sure but I'm gonna feel really dumb if I already gave her dad a name somewhere else.