Ignatius’s confession is a retrospective tale of religious devotion, temptation, and a supernatural turning that left him separated from the faith that had defined his life. Told to Glynis in a moment of intimate distress, it explains not only how Ignatius became a vampire and entered another couple’s service, but why loving Glynis feels to him like a return to the very spiritual peril he has spent his life trying to atone for.

The Confession and Its Frame

Ignatius tells his history while Glynis sits with him, combing her fingers through his hair and weeping as she listens. Her tenderness cannot soothe the memory: she senses what happened before he reaches it, and, when the account turns painful, covers her face. The scene makes the story an act of disclosure between lovers, not a detached chronicle. Ignatius speaks from a present in which he fears that he could become the cause of Glynis’s destruction; the history he recounts gives that fear its weight.

His story begins with a past in which his religious vocation was the organizing principle of his life. He says that, from childhood, he loved God and found solace in his village church, where he prayed daily after his chores. A priest recognized his calling while he was young, and his parents released him into the church’s care. Ignatius studied and worked diligently, taking vows of poverty and celibacy as more than formal obligations: he understood them as a pledge of love to God alone. He grew his hair long after the example of Samson, using it to remind himself not to love a woman or be weakened by the flesh. In that earlier life, he says, he heard God’s voice and knew peace.

From Parish Priest to Vampire

After receiving a small chapel in a village, Ignatius served its people through ordinary acts of care. He sat with the elderly as they approached death, baptized newborns, and encouraged villagers enduring hard lives. This pastoral work gives the rupture that follows its particular force: the man who had guided others through the thresholds of life and death is himself drawn into a condition that cuts him off from the sacred world he served.

One night, a crowd dragged a young woman through the streets, accusing her of witchcraft. She had been found asleep in the home of an old woman who had died, and the neighbors believed she had stolen the woman’s soul. Ignatius saw her fear and intervened, ordering the villagers back before taking her to his cottage beside the chapel. She clung to him and wept, then huddled in a corner. He offered soup and bread, but she turned away from them.

As winter approached, the woman grew weaker rather than stronger. She scarcely spoke, would take only thin meat broth, and would not let Ignatius approach even to read to her from the Bible. Concerned that keeping her with him was unwise, and aware that he was attracted to her beauty despite his vows, he wrote to arrange her transfer to a nearby convent. He tried to keep his distance, sitting by the fire rather than looking at her as she lay curled on her cot. His efforts at restraint did not prevent the encounter that followed.

One night, while Ignatius washed by the fire, the woman came to him and asked for a kiss. He was half-naked; his robe and crucifix lay on a nearby table. He agreed to one kiss, but the kiss became the moment in which he forgot his vows and felt himself lost to her. She bit his throat and drank deeply, nearly extinguishing his heartbeat. Then she invited him to drink from her and know eternal life. Ignatius drank. The account presents his change as both a bodily assault and a surrender to desire: he is terrified by what is happening, yet says that lust keeps him bound to her.

Loss, Service, and Penance

When Ignatius awoke, the signs of his former religious life had become inaccessible. He could no longer touch his crucifix or enter his church, and he no longer felt God’s presence. He describes himself as separated from everything he had held dear. Anger and lust followed the transformation, and he told himself that if his soul was lost to sin, at least he had taken pleasure in the woman. The thought did not resolve his spiritual crisis; it sharpened it.

The woman then asked him to help her return to her husband. Ignatius understood this request as proof that he had foolishly damned himself: after turning him, she directed him back into the service of her marriage. He says he still serves both her and her husband, and loves them dearly. At the same time, he undertook penance, hoping that God might one day let him feel the divine presence again and restore him to service. He describes that continuing effort as a personal quest for salvation, an attempt to endure the hell of his condition rather than mistake it for freedom.

Glynis, Love, and the Prophecy

Ignatius’s account leads directly back to Glynis. He distinguishes his desire for the woman who made him from what he feels now: he says he lusted after his maker, but that he loves Glynis as he has never loved before. Her gaze, he says, has struck him to his core; being with her brings joy, but also makes him fear that he has abandoned his penance once more. His words turn from confession to protest when he insists that he will not lose her to Astir’s prophecy.

Glynis weeps, but she believes Astir’s prediction will come true. She does not understand the precise circumstances in which it will be fulfilled; she does believe that she will destroy the one who loves her. The confession therefore supplies no resolution or reassurance. Instead, Ignatius’s history of forbidden desire and lost spiritual belonging becomes a warning threaded through their present love: the intimacy that consoles him may also place him in danger. His revelation deepens the bond between them even as it gives that bond a foreboding consequence.