The Wicce

The Wicce is the long-serving witch of the Fort and one of the hidden community’s most important institutions. Neither merely a healer nor simply an elderly relative, she occupies a position beside the Fort’s Head in practical authority: she protects vampires from the consequences of their world, preserves knowledge whose origins have been obscured by centuries, and becomes the teacher through whom that knowledge may continue after her death. Her final significance lies in the way her decline binds together the Fort’s survival, Lola’s inheritance, and the painful passage from one generation to the next.

Identity and Place in the Fort

The Wicce has been with the Fort since its beginning, although the community admits that it knows little about its own origins. Vampires existed long before the current inhabitants, and their customs have survived even when the reasons behind them have faded into history. The Wicce is the person who might explain that buried past, yet there are no Ancients at the Fort from whom the community can recover it. Her knowledge therefore stands between an inaccessible antiquity and the Fort’s present-day routines.

Her authority is both institutional and practical. She sits on the Council and is described as being as important as the Head, Viktor, even though what she does in Council meetings or in her chambers is not fully known to the other vampires. This partial obscurity strengthens rather than diminishes her position: the Fort depends on a specialist whose work is understood through its effects more than through public explanation. The Head assigns tasks and addresses the community, but the Wicce represents the older, less visible foundation on which the community’s customs and protection rest.

The Wicce also embodies the limits of supernatural longevity. The Fort has access to long-life potions, but they do not prevent aging; they only slow it. She has lived long enough to serve the Fort from its earliest days, yet age has not released her from bodily decline. When the community learns that she is ill, the doctor believes that she will soon succumb to old age, and the loss is treated as a collective emergency because no other witch is available to inherit her knowledge.

Powers, Duties, and the Fort’s Crisis

One of the Wicce’s known functions is healing sun wounds, a role that makes her especially valuable in a vampire society vulnerable to sunlight. Her work is not ornamental magic. It answers a physical danger faced by the Fort’s inhabitants and helps maintain the community’s ability to survive. The Wicce’s importance thus joins mystical inheritance to medical necessity: she preserves traditions, but she also treats injuries that no ordinary member of the Fort can resolve.

Her responsibilities become urgent during a blood shortage. At a task-assignment meeting, Viktor warns that the Fort’s blood supplies are neither being depleted nor replenished in a stable way, creating a threat that could become critical without warning. In the same announcement, he reveals that the Wicce has fallen ill and that the Fort lacks another witch to whom she can pass on her knowledge. The search for a replacement is presented as worthy of a substantial reward, showing that succession is not a private family matter but a survival imperative for the entire community.

The Fort’s blood economy further clarifies the setting in which the Wicce works. Humans are brought to the lowest level, sometimes through recruitment or their own willingness and sometimes through kidnapping. They receive carefully chosen food intended to promote blood production, and nurses collect that blood for storage; some humans also seek the intoxicating experience of being bitten, while others prefer extraction through tubes. The Wicce does not personally administer this system in the supplied scenes, but her institutional role belongs to the same closed structure of custom, secrecy, and managed survival. The Fort protects its normal appearance because the Wicce has instructed them to maintain it, and that instruction helps justify the recruitment or abduction of human women who may later remain there and bear children.

Lola’s Grandmother and Successor

The Wicce is revealed to be Lola’s grandmother when Lady Mary brings Lola into a room where an old woman is lying on a bed. Lola recognizes her with a shocked cry, transforming the Wicce from a distant institutional figure into an intimate family presence. The revelation also gives Lola a direct connection to the Fort’s magical inheritance at the moment when her life is otherwise defined by uncertainty: Valnoir has withdrawn from her, she has missed her period, and she fears that pregnancy may force her to choose between love and motherhood.

Lola begins studying under her grandmother almost immediately. The Head announces that Lola might become the Fort’s new Wicce, and Lola learns that she may replace the older woman when she dies. At first she does not want the position, but she comes to regard it as an honor because it would mean taking her grandmother’s place. Her consent is therefore emotionally complicated. The succession offers purpose and belonging, yet it also asks Lola to accept the impending death of the woman whose approval and presence matter to her.

The training is compressed by necessity. Lola must learn in days what normally takes years, while the Wicce’s health visibly worsens. When Valnoir visits, the Wicce is propped up in bed by several pillows, haggard and deathly pale, almost as pale as the vampires around her. Even in this weakened state she remains alert to Lola’s emotional life. Hearing Valnoir outside, she asks whether he is the man who has Lola so worked up, while Lola tries to dismiss him as nobody. The exchange reveals the Wicce as both observer and intimate elder: she can read the tension Lola refuses to name, and she refuses to let that tension remain invisible.

Counsel, Prophecy, and Maternal Wounds

Lola turns to the Wicce with a question that is older and more painful than her struggle with Valnoir: why does her mother hate her? The Wicce explains that Mayumi May hides her feelings because she does not want to be hurt, then recalls the moment of Lola’s birth. In the Wicce’s account, Mayumi performed a tarot reading to see Lola’s future. Whatever she saw caused an immediate change in her; she pushed the cards back into the deck and never spoke of the result.

The Wicce does not convert that reading into a fixed prophecy. She tells Lola that Mayumi may have misinterpreted the cards and stresses that predicting the future is not precise. Her counsel resists the idea that a frightening interpretation makes Lola doomed. This is important because Lola’s fear is not only about fate but about inherited identity: she worries that something in the cards, in her mother, or in her own future has already condemned her. The Wicce answers by separating prediction from destiny and Lola from Mayumi.

Her advice becomes more direct when Lola asks whether she should try to speak with her mother after years of estrangement. The Wicce says there is no point because Mayumi has gone too far, and urges Lola to stop seeking her mother’s approval and love. She tells Lola to make a life of her own and identifies the pregnancy Lola is still reluctant to confirm. The Wicce reads Lola’s physical condition as evidence, tells her not to run from motherhood, and urges her to tell Valnoir. Her guidance reframes Lola’s crisis: she need not repeat Mayumi’s life, and becoming a mother does not require surrendering her own identity.

That counsel gives the Wicce a role beyond exposition. She is a witness to family history, but she does not use history to imprison Lola. Instead, she distinguishes Lola from her mother and offers the possibility of a different future. The phrase that Lola is not her mother becomes the ethical center of the grandmother’s instruction: inheritance can transmit knowledge and responsibility without transmitting another person’s failures.

Decline, Death, and Legacy

The Wicce’s decline is gradual enough for Lola to observe but not gradual enough to make death bearable. Lola notices that her grandmother sleeps more each day. The repeated sleeping becomes a visible measure of the body’s retreat, while the lessons continue against a narrowing span of time. Lola knows what is coming, yet the knowledge does not protect her from the shock of its arrival.

When Victoria and Viktor come to Lola’s room to tell her that the Wicce has died, the news strikes with overwhelming force. Lola feels as if her soul has been knocked out of her body and remembers little of what follows except Viktor catching her as she falls. The death is therefore presented not as a quiet administrative transition but as a rupture in Lola’s emotional and spiritual continuity. The woman who carried the Fort’s old knowledge, answered Lola’s questions, and sanctioned her succession is suddenly absent.

The Wicce’s death leaves Lola with an inheritance that is at once public and private. She has agreed to become the next Wicce, but the role now means replacing a dead grandmother rather than merely training under a living one. Her pregnancy, still entangled with uncertainty about Valnoir’s love, gives the succession an additional generational dimension: the old witch dies as Lola prepares to become a mother and assume the Fort’s magical office. Knowledge, bloodline, and responsibility move forward together, but none of them arrive without loss.

The Wicce’s narrative function is consequently double. She preserves the Fort’s continuity by teaching Lola, yet her death exposes how fragile that continuity is when institutions depend on one aging person. She is a healer whose own body cannot be permanently healed, a councillor whose influence is partly hidden, and a grandmother whose final lessons concern not only magic but freedom from maternal repetition. Her legacy is not simply the office of Wicce; it is the permission she gives Lola to inherit the past without becoming captive to it.