The Vampire & Her Witch-Chapter 572: Humility And Hubris (Part One)

"So, even though you died," the vision of Ashlynn asked as she gazed at Ollie. "Isn’t this an ending you can accept?"

For several minutes, Ollie said nothing as he tried to process everything Ashlynn had told him. He, Harrod and Milo, along with more than a hundred other soldiers, had died to save the villagers and perhaps even the Vale itself from the Inquisition’s terrifying curse of the second sun. Owain, the leader of the invading army, had escaped with most of his men, but the losses he’d suffered had been ruinous and the losses suffered by the Church had been even greater.

"Am I supposed to accept that the best I could hope for in this situation was to die a heroe’s death?" Ollie asked, looking at the vision of Ashlynn with a complicated gaze as he tried to sift through the simmering stew of emotions boiling within his chest.

Perhaps it would have been easier to accept if he’d arrived in time to prevent Milo and Harrod from dying... if he’d saved his close friends along with the villagers then, even if he failed to kill Owain, he could at least say that he had done right for his friends and for Old Nan.

But when he thought about it, in the instances where he’d focused completely on solving the crisis within the village, he’d lost Old Nan, and when he fought against the Lothians, he lost Milo and Harrod. It was like the trial was telling him that he would have to accept someone’s death, one way or another.

"Was there really no way to save everyone who mattered?" Ollie asked. "Even if it cost my life, if I could have protected the people who mattered the most..."

"Of course there was a way," Ashlynn said, startling Ollie with how easily the words fell from her lips. "What would have happened if you had ordered them to remain here, perhaps with a dozen or so men, to keep the village safe if Owain attempted to send men to attack it while the battle was occurring."

"Lord Owain wouldn’t do that," Ollie said. "There would have been no point to ordering them to protect the village other than to," he said before his voice trailed off as realization struck him. "There would have been no point other than keeping them away from danger. But, they wouldn’t have wanted that. They would have resented me for keeping them safe that way," he said as he hung his head.

"It would have been worse for your men as well," Ashlynn pointed out. "They needed an experienced commander and while Harrod doesn’t have much experience, he knows more about soldiering than most of the men did. And Milo was the deadliest archer on the battlefield. No one else could have fired an arrow through a target as small as the visor of a knight’s helmet and he did it more than once."

"You might still have had victory," Ashlynn said. "But it might have cost you another twenty, thirty, or forty men to save those two. Would that have been easier to accept?"

"No!" Ollie said fiercely. "Of course that wouldn’t have been better. But what if I had been better?" Ollie asked. "What if my protective amulets had been better, or if our ambush had been better, or if I’d sought Owain out in the very beginning, or..."

"Ollie," Ashlynn interrupted, stepping up close to the young man and placing a finger on his lips. "Think very carefully about the virtues you have chosen, and ask yourself if you’ve lived up to them in this trial. In this last battle, even though you were consumed by rage in your battle against Owain, did you keep your head about you through the rest of the battle, never straying from your just cause and hunting down the people responsible for tormenting your village?"

"Yes," Ollie said. Though he hadn’t enjoyed holding back when he could have unleashed several more storms of cypress needles across the battlefield, he knew that the most important thing for him to do was to hunt down the Inquisitors, eliminating the threat they posed to both his army and the villages beyond. "As much as I wanted revenge, especially on Owain, I put justice first and fulfilled my mission."

"And did it take courage for you to repeat this trial over and over again, even though doing so meant facing terrible pain and grief, every time you tried again?" Ashlynn asked.

"It did," Ollie admitted. "Part of me wanted to give up after my second failure and the pain of my third failure was so bad that at first, I didn’t even want to open my eyes, much less try again. It was hard to keep going, but I couldn’t give up, not when you and everyone in the village is counting on me to succeed in this trial."

"Justice and Courage," Ashlynn said, ticking off two fingers on her hand as she spoke. "I don’t think we need to mention your Strength, you’ve pushed yourself constantly to grow stronger and to shoulder greater burdens over the course of this trial."

"But did you notice," Ashlynn said as she looked deep into Ollie’s pale eyes. "Did you see how often you gave the people around you Hope? Every time you came with a new idea, each time you stood next to them in the fields or when you distributed protective amulets to them, did you realize that you were also giving hope to the people who depended on you? Did you notice how much brighter their eyes were when you were around, or how much straighter their backs were after you visited them?"

"I, I didn’t think of it that way," Ollie said as he struggled to recall the way the villagers had looked at him during the trial. It was hard to remember anything specific, but when he thought of his most recent experience and the shining look on Old Nan’s face when she held the amulet he’d prepared just for her... he couldn’t deny that there had been more hope in her eyes than there had been in any of his previous attempts at the trial.

"I guess you’re right," he said after a few minutes of thought. "I was too busy thinking of the next thing I needed to do to notice but... I guess I helped to keep their spirits up, even if it was just a little bit."

"Then, if you’ve done so well with your other virtues," Ashlynn asked. "Why is it that you’re struggling so much with Humility here at the end? Where has this hubris come from, to think that you and you alone can produce the perfect happy ending where only the guilty people perish and none of the people you treasure suffer?"