Chapter Text
If nothing else, the angels would always have the mountains.
Vampires disdained the peaks, preferring the comforts of their castles below. Wolves never ventured out of the treeline, knowing their limits, and werewolves obeyed the instincts of their less fearsome brethren. Even those few zombies sent by inquisitive necromancers soon ended up immobilised by the sheer cold (frozen stiffs, Bruna had once joked).
Humans, of course, would try themselves against any challenge; the ring of geists found below the taller peaks were testament to that. But even if the cold didn’t get them, the lack of air this high up always did. No magic had yet managed to overcome that barrier.
(Well, there was that necro-alchemist fifty years ago, with the geist-powered oxygen supply. If Gisela had been unusually ardent about shutting down that particular laboratory, her sisters couldn’t possibly comment.)
That meant that the peaks were the one place on Innistrad that the angels could be certain they’d be left alone. The temperature did not bother them, and their magic-aided wings made light work of the altitude. The prayers of humans was a distant, soft murmur, unintelligible below the sound of the icy wind.
It was, Liesa thought, the closest thing that any of them would experience to peace.
She alighted on the ridge between the two highest peaks, her feet touching smooth, chiselled stone, worn yet smoother by years of snowstorms. In front of her, a silvery brazier as large as her own wingspan stood, stocked with dark timber and covered with a light dusting of snow.
She’d flown for the better part of an afternoon to get here: Oberstedt, the highest roost of the angels, built by their hands and magic alone; a thin matchstick of a tower compared to the buttresses of the human settlements, but one that had nevertheless endured for millenia. The place where the four flights could gather to discuss any grave threats against the humans of Innistrad.
Nobody was here now, of course. The brazier remained unlit. A true gathering of the flights had not occurred for five hundred years, and Liesa had not stood here with all three of her sisters in the last hundred.
She’d come anyway, without any from her flight to accompany her. She had a grim task ahead of her, and she was selfish enough, she supposed, to want to ignore the prayers of the humans for a few hours before - to have a single moment to herself, the first in decades, before returning to her work.
It wasn’t to be. She heard a flurry of wings behind her, and turned in surprise.
The second youngest of her sisters, Gisela, had alighted on the far end of the tower, and was now walking to her with a purposeful stride. She must have sensed me flying up here and followed.
Liesa rose from her seat, mouth opening in greeting, but Gisela got there first.
“Liesa,” she said, “I need to talk to you about Valter Maurer.”
Liesa’s heart sank.
Valter Maurer. The rogue vampire.
Rogue, that is, even by vampiric standards. Valter, with his handful of neonates, and a couple of older allies, had been ravaging human villages inside Stensia, claiming to seek access to some higher power by glutting themselves far beyond what they needed.
Nonsense, of course - as if he were the first vampire to come up with the radical idea of ‘drinking lots of blood’. But vampires never recorded this kind of atrocity. They’d much prefer to pretend they were above such superstition.
Liesa had hoped that the Maurer lands were too far inside Stensia for word of Valter’s actions to reach Gisela. She supposed she should have known better.
“Yes, I’ve been keeping an eye on the situation. My parley with Rosina is tomorrow.”
“He’s slaughtered a family twice a week for the past month, sometimes two. At this rate the whole valley will be dead before summer, and then he will move further afield. Perhaps even into Gavony.” Gisela stepped forward, determined. “This has gone beyond parleys. I want the Goldnights to move in.”
Liesa tried not to sigh.
There were at least a dozen reasons why the Goldnights descending on the Maurer family would be a bad idea, the tenuous arrangements that Liesa had forged over centuries with Maurer aristocrats least among them. But Liesa would be a poor negotiator indeed if she couldn’t talk her own sister around.
“Gisela,” she said. “We’ve had this conversation before.”
Gisela shook her head. “This is different from last winter. The werewolves are much quieter. If we can get some of Sigarda’s flight - ”
“Werewolf numbers wax and wane. Yes, the Herons have some respite now, but they need to use it to build up Avabruck’s defences. There’s never enough time normally.”
Her sister didn’t argue.
Normally she did, at least for longer. The fact that she had relented so soon should have satisfied Liesa, but instead it worried her.
“I know you hate this,” she said, her voice softening. “I don’t like it either. I wish that there were more of us, and these compromises were not necessary. But we need to work with what we have.”
She reached out to take Gisela’s hands.
"We need you, we need your swords and your Goldnights, to hold the line. There are so many dangers in this world that cannot be reasoned with. Let the Dusk Flight buy you time to challenge the worst monsters.”
Gisela shook her head. “You’re right, sister. I know you are. It’s just…” Her shoulders slumped, the tip of her wings drooping to touch the cold stone floor. “It seems sometimes that all we can ever do is buy time.”
Liesa nodded. “I know. There are days in which the futility of it all… well.”
She paused, and looked out over the mountains, briefly lost in memories of darker nights, where it seemed that nothing she said or offered could stem the tide of human deaths.
A snowflake touched her hand, and then another, heralds of harder nights to come. The werewolves might be dormant, but it would still be a long, hard winter for every human in Innistrad.
Is there ever any other kind?
She turned back to Gisela. “When despair threatens, I remind myself: for every human we save… every one of them who lives to raise a family, to die comfortably of old age…” She nodded to herself. “As far as that human is concerned: we won.”
Liesa treasured every one of her sisters’ smiles. Bruna’s were sweet, slow, and gentle, like a dew-touched spring dawn. Sigarda’s were warm and welcoming, a well-stocked hearth and shelter from storms.
Gisela’s were sudden and radiant. The setting sun, breaking through cloud one last time before nightfall.
“It’s strange to hear you talk like this. I always thought that you were too…” She paused, and Liesa wondered what she had been about to say. “Too... practical, for such a thing as despair.”
Liesa smiled back, both amused and slightly concerned. Is that how they see me? Have we really grown so distant? “I’m practical, not heartless.”
“I know. I suppose it’s more that… you always have an angle. No matter how bad it gets.”
They grew quiet. More snowflakes swirled between them. As Liesa watched, they caught the sun’s rays, turning briefly incandescent, tiny fragments of pure light.
Gisela sighed, and moved towards the precipice. “I had better go,” she said. “Bruna has reported a pattern of graverobbing in Havengul… if you truly have the Maurer issue in hand, I should set out for Nephalia while there’s still some light.”
“Be safe, sister. I’ll send word if negotiations with Rosina turn sour.”
Gisela turned back for a moment, and Liesa caught her wry smile.
“With you leading them? I think it more likely that the Sun might extinguish itself. Be well, Liesa.”
She took off, red and white wings bearing her up towards the sun. For a moment, Liesa was blinded by the brilliant light, and then her sister was gone.