Chapter Text
Morning came, just as pale and unwilling as Yennefer was. She sat outside on the terrace, having woken long before Tissaia. When the sculptor opened her door and saw the woman there, she sighed. Yennefer sulked, there was truly no other word for it. Sulked, with one knee drawn up so she could rest her hand on it, and her chin on that hand.
“You ought to eat, if you require it,” Tissaia said, placing a deep wooden place of porridge next to Yennefer and sitting on the edge of the terrace with her.
“What do you mean ‘if I require it’?” Yennefer barely perked up, seemingly like the stone that she had burst from the night prior. She shot an apathetic look at the porridge before averting her head.
With a sigh, Tissaia followed her purple eyes, finding their gaze to land on the river. “You are more than human. I’m unsure exactly how or what, but perhaps your needs are different than mine. I must warn you, however, I possess neither nectar nor ambrosia.”
“I’ll tell you if I require it.” There was a sting in Yennefer’s voice, more than Tissaia had expected. “I don’t know if I do, because I still don’t know more than my own name,” she said. “Still don’t know why I came out of your statue, where I am, what I am… But I know you .”
“Me?” Tissaia asked with updrawn eyebrows. She briefly met Yennefer’s purple gaze, only to find the other woman looking away quickly.
But after a deep sigh, Yennefer said: “Yes, you. I’ve heard your voice before. Don’t know exactly what you said but I… I felt it.” She let out a shuddering breath, rubbing over her arms despite the fact that it was a warm morning. “I know you’re lonely and that you sometimes wish you had a companion, but that you also think that no one would mesh well with you and your peculiarities. I know you have a past away from here. You were betrayed, you think you could’ve foreseen it but in the end you-”
“I never told anyone this,” Tissaia said, cutting Yennefer off a bit more sharply than she had wanted. It hurt, to hear it from someone else’s mouth. Then her surprise ebbed away when she saw how disheveled Yennefer still looked. Flakes of marble remained in her hair despite her best efforts the night prior, and whatever hair was free of it was sticking up in all directions. Other than that, Tissaia thought that the thin dress Yennefer wore looked cold on her. It was sentimental, perhaps, but the woman was her responsibility at least partially. “You should bathe,” she said. “The river isn’t cold yet.”
Yennefer didn’t seem more willing to bathe than to eat the now steadily cooling porridge that still stood next to her. But she looked at her hands, where a crust of marble still covered her knuckles. “Fine,” she mumbled as she slowly stood up. She winced as she stretched, causing Tissaia to wonder for how long she had been sitting there.
“I will see if I have something that fits you.” After nodding at the thin dress, Tissaia gathered the uneaten breakfast and made her way inside the house. While she was rummaging through her clothing to search for something that wouldn’t be too small for Yennefer, she heard the woman calling her name.
She looked vaguely angry when Tissaia arrived by the riverbank with a tunic, a towel and trousers over her arm. Luckily, Yennefer was half submerged in the water. Unluckily, she didn’t stay that way for long and Tissaia quickly averted her eyes, knowing that the dress was definitely sheer when wet.
“I have this for you,” she said, holding the garments and towel out in Yennefer’s general direction.
“And I have something for you. I’m not sure what exactly happened or what you did, but I used to look different.” After a few seconds of tense silence, Yennefer finally took the towel. “My face was different. My body was different. Not… not very, but it was sharper… before I came here.”
Tissaia had many questions. How and what and why Yennefer had materialised in her workshop instead of somewhere more divine. She wanted to ask if the resemblance in creation between hers and the creation of life was so similar that Yennefer hadn’t seen the difference, but she didn’t want to ask all those things while standing by the river. The seasons were turning, the water was getting a chill to it that affected the air.
~~~
In the evening, when they were eating dinner together, the questions came out. Tissaia had lit the hearth for the first time that year, the largest room in the house blanketed in warmth. She had made a large pot with soup, the kind with vegetables and oats. It was dished out generously, with thick slices of home baked bread. She was glad to see that Yennefer had only stirred listlessly in it for a few moments before starting her meal.
“I don’t know how I ended up in the statue,” she said in the small break between spoonfuls of soup. “I’m fairly sure you don’t have the power to create a being like that. You need magic for golems and the like, anyway, and I don’t sense it in you.”
Tissaia swallowed, trying not to appear too insulted. Her sculpting abilities may not have been magical, but she knew they were good.
Yennefer continued: “Perhaps you were blessed by someone. But I think I’d sense that too.”
Her dismissive attitude was rapidly starting to irritate Tissaia. It was thankless, and Tissaia had taken the responsibility to care for her in her own home, instead of sending her on her way so she could resume her relatively calm life. “You said you heard my voice before, perhaps there’s a clue in that? I only wish to figure out how this came about.”
“ Mhm , so do I,” Yennefer said as she reached for another slice of bread. “How did a sculptor with a troubled past manage to bring me back from wherever it was I used to be? Who was I? How do I remember? I have questions too, Tissaia.”
“Something with the water,” Tissaia murmured, not even entirely to Yennefer. She was used to being able to speak without receiving an answer immediately. Not so much now, however.
Yennefer sighed with irritation, letting her bread soak up soup. “Yes, I got that far myself. It’s too late today to go in again. But I’ll try tomorrow, maybe then I’ll figure out who I was before that dust bath.”
Tissaia had to bit her lip to ensure she didn’t reply with a snappy tone. The statue had been so beautiful, the woman that had come out so abrasive. She remembered the vague longing that had unexpectedly blossomed in her chest when she had run a hand over the smooth marble. It hadn’t been a “dust bath”, it had been a work of art. Now it was shards too small to work with, a footing that she could maybe reshape into small figurines and an unknown woman who was still glaring at her over a cooling bowl of soup.
The girls at Aretuza had been difficult, painstakingly so at times. They had caused Tissaia headaches aplenty in the years she had taught at the Academy. But they paled in comparison to Yennefer. Even the antics of Coral and Philippa couldn’t match up to how stubborn and coarse the purple-eyed woman was.
Next day, she tried to do something with the remnants of the statue. It was harder to focus while knowing someone was in the house, likely doing nothing, sulking around more. Even when she had managed to hoist the marble up onto a table and had taken out her heavy tools to divide it into manageable chunks, Tissaia found her attention wandering. It wandered to Yennefer’s purple eyes, to the way the marble had flaked off her skin when the statue had become undone.
Her thoughts could not stop. Tissaia kept pondering the how and the why of the situation. How had Yennefer come to life? Was she the statue? Had Tissaia shaped her or had it been divine intervention? Which god, then? Was Yennefer the deity?
Tissaia paused, resting her tools onto the wooden surface. It was hard to imagine, given how coarse Yennefer was to her. But she was beautiful. Tissaia couldn’t ignore that the notion of ‘divine beauty’ kept nagging at her. But she had made the statue. Shaped it with her own tools, drawn the sketch and polished the marble. Months had she poured into what was now a grouchy woman without memories, making her uncomfortable in the small space she had managed to carve out for herself.
Of course, she pitied Yennefer. She pitied the woman who had come into being by a miracle but had no memories of before that, only the inkling that she had been different before.
When she re-entered the house in the afternoon, she found her sitting before the hearth. Her hair was wet, and Tissaia felt a flare of hope. “Did you discover anything new?” she quietly asked.
“I… I remember fire,” Yennefer said. Her voice sounded strange, hallowed and hesitant, as if she wished she hadn’t remembered. “All around me, so warm I could not breathe.”
For a few moments, Tissaia couldn’t find words. “I’m sorry to hear that,” she eventually said, though she still felt as if that wasn’t adequate. Voicing empathy had never been her strong suit.
“Why? You have nothing to do with it.”
“I suppose not. Still, I wish you weren’t burdened with the memory.”
“I’d rather find out why I’m burdened with it. But tell me something you are burdened with. Tell me something about who you are, Tissaia.”
Since Yennefer occupied her chair by the hearth, Tissaia dragged one from the table over. She didn’t have the heart to tell Yennefer to move. Perhaps she had gotten soft, but given that Yennefer had just recalled a rather traumatic memory, she thought it best to refrain from bothering her about something trivial.
Momentarily, she started into the hearth. She knew that Yennefer had a vague idea of the past she was trying daily not to think about. But now the woman was asking for clarification and telling her everything made Tissaia uneasy. She looked at Yennefer again, the glow of the flames softening her features. There was something utterly enchanting about it that delayed Tissaia’s tale by another few seconds. She recalled how the setting sun had coloured the marble statue rosy when she had worked on it. Then she cleared her throat, shaking herself from her reverie.
“I used to teach, before becoming a sculptor. One of the most esteemed academies on the Continent was the place I used to oversee. I was… rectoress there.” The words left her lips uneasily. It was the first time that she had spoken aloud about her past life to someone else. Someone who watched her with an odd kind of curiosity. Someone whose piercing eyes never ceased searching Tissaia’s face.
“But something happened.”
Yennefer hit the nail on the head with that. Tissaia felt her breath shudder as she nodded slowly. “Yes, something happened. Some one wished for radical change, threw the old ways out and… me with it.”
“They tried to make you leave?” Yennefer’s dark eyebrows pinched together as she leaned forward a little.
“They did. I did not leave at first. Not until… not until a fire erupted where I had established myself, too. Then, I had to leave. I went quietly. No one knows I’m still… alive .” The word came out with such difficulty, because her throat clenched at the admittance. “No one, until you.”
“I suppose we’re both a bit out of place, then.” Yennefer’s dry comment was sobering in a way, giving Tissaia some room to breathe. “I get why I felt you were lonely, now. Still don’t know how I felt that, but at least I understand you.” She paused, her eyes flicking from the burning hearth to the small woman before her. “What academy did you teach at?”
That was a name that Tissaia hadn’t managed to get past her lips in a long time. She barely even allowed it in her thoughts at all. But Yennefer’s voice was demanding an honest answer, so she took a breath and tried to steel herself against the guilt she knew would come with the word. “Aretuza.”
Yennefer’s eyes went unexpectedly wide. “Arethusa? Like the river?” she asked.
“No, no. Aretuza , the last syllable is soft.”
“That - that can’t…” Her voice failing, Yennefer looked at Tissaia with her mouth open, a stunned expression slowly spreading over her features. “There was a river called Arethusa,” she insisted.
“Well, there is a dried-up river next to the academy. It still fills when it rains hard, but it was clogged with debris from a large battle over a century ago. An entire hill was razed, it still exists, just a lot lower than it used to be. The river alongside this house springs from the same-”
“Stop,” Yennefer demanded, her voice suddenly sharp, cutting through Tissaia’s sentence like a blade. But then, when their eyes met, Tissaia saw that Yennefer’s were glossy with tears. “Please,” she said, her voice quiet as suddenly as it had been loud before. “Please stop. I’m so… confused.”
“It’s alright. I’ll say no more,” Tissaia assured her. Her heart ached for the poor woman, who had been alive, in existence somehow, while the old river after which the academy was named had still streamed.
They stood almost at the same time, had a moment of stunned silence before meeting each other in the middle and wrapping their arms securely around one another. Tissaia tried to not think too much about how Yennefer could almost rest her chin on the top of her head. Instead, she slowly stroked her hand over Yennefer’s back, letting the woman lean on her and absorbing the few shocks of held-in sobs that she felt.
When they drew back, both still in disbelief, she said: “I assure you, I will help you find out who you are and what happened to you. I can offer you a promise, if you will have it?”
“I need to think about it,” Yennefer said. She licked her dry lips and sucked in a quick breath, blinking away the remnants of her tears, stubbornly refusing to let them spill over her cheeks. “Yes, I need to think. A few days, Tissaia, then I will tell you my answer.”
~~~
A day went by easily. The earlier tension had waned after their unexpected moment of emotion. While Yennefer busied herself with trying to regain more of her memories by spending time in the water, Tissaia worked in her studio again. Inspiration also came more easily after they had spoken.
She would try a series of small figurines, inspired by what had happened over the past few days. Most of them would likely be water-themed, but she wanted to try fire as well. As it turned out, that was a difficult thing to capture in a small piece of marble.
“What frustrates you?” Yennefer asked as they had lunch on the second day after their hug. She helped herself to another piece of smoked fish, gesturing for Tissaia to do the same. “Eat, while it’s still fresh.”
“Flames are so capricious,” Tissaia mused. “So hard to chip into the stone. It’s a paradox, capturing something so fleeting into something so steady. Their shape is ever changing and it’s difficult to translate my sketches on parchment to a sculpture.”
“Wasn’t so difficult when you made me.”
“No, but that was an image I saw in my mind. Fire is… there already. It’s an imitation that I need to make, not a fantasy.” Tissaia struggled with phrasing what she wanted to say. She didn’t want to offend Yennefer by calling her not real. But Yennefer, as she sat in front of Tissaia, hadn’t been there before. Not in flesh and blood.
But ‘a fantasy’ seemed apt, too. Yennefer’s image, her shape, her body, was still as strikingly beautiful as Tissaia had noticed when she was finishing the sculpture. It was a fact, just a fact that she couldn’t deny. So she told herself. Yennefer was objectively beautiful because Tissaia had created her to be so. And that was the issue, too.
She wanted the woman to be autonomous, but not knowing where her creation started and the influence of whatever Yennefer had been before ended made things difficult. She felt as if it was her duty to help Yennefer regain her memories, remember who she was and had been. But she was no young quest seeker anymore, and it seemed like a task too great for a woman like her.
On top of that, Yennefer’s beauty was affecting her. When they had looked each other in the eyes, both a bit watery, after their embrace, Tissaia had told herself it was just affection that she had missed. But she never had much of a desire for it, at Aretuza. It wasn’t something she had missed , rather something she craved now. Something new, yet something that her mind spelled out of her because she was too smart to see past it and too lonely to be able to ignore it.
Was it wrong, to long for someone of her own creation? The question kept her mind busy, moreso than she wanted. It was unfair, she thought, to feel that way purely because Yennefer was beautiful and she had shaped the marble that had become her body. But while Tissaia might have made her body, she hadn’t sculpted Yennefer’s laugh, the way her voice sounded and the way she moved so effortlessly.
It occupied her so much that she dropped a chisel onto her foot while cleaning up the workshop for the evening. The tool fell onto the bridge of her foot, almost where the joint of her ankle began. Since she wore open sandals, it bruised and bloodied her skin.
The sound it made as it clattered to the ground and the sound she made, a sharp cry, instantly alerted Yennefer. The woman came running into the workshop, hastily pulling on the belt around her waist to affix it. Her hair was still wet from her most recent venture into the river.
“Tissaia! Are you alright?” she asked as she ran up to the smaller woman.
“I’m fine,” Tissaia assured her as she leaned against a workbench, prying off her sandal to inspect the wound. “It’s not deep, I just dropped a chisel.”
“Well, uhm … lean on me, I’ll get you a cloth and some salve.” Yennefer offered her arm, glancing down at the blood that sluggishly trailed over Tissaia’s foot. “Come on, you stubborn woman.”
After another moment of hesitation and a huff at being called stubborn, which she knew was correct, Tissaia shifted her weight onto Yennefer’s supporting arm, leaning against her and taking one slow limp after the other until they had made their way to the terrace.
“No, no, I can do that myself,” she said when Yennefer kneeled next to her to hold a wet rag to her injury. The thought of Yennefer’s hands on her skin was a bit much to bear, given what had caused her to drop the chisel in the first place. “If you would clean up the rest of the workshop? Just put the tools in the crate I had pulled out already and put the table away. I’ll reorganise tomorrow.”
Yennefer gave her a bit of a weird look but then nodded. “Alright, but if you strain that foot by redoing everything tomorrow it’s not my fault.”
~~~
A few hours later, when Tissaia’s injury had been cleaned, bandaged and the initial swelling had faded, she had managed to make them some dinner. Hobbling around her kitchen was less than graceful, but putting some leftovers with a bit of meat into a pot and letting it simmer.
She sank into the chair near the hearth with a sigh, accepting that Yennefer wouldn’t have her eat at the table because there was a chill in the air and the hearth was warmer. “Are you usually this caring?” she asked, recalling how coarse Yennefer had been the first days.
“I suppose I’ve grown a bit attached to you,” Yennefer said, cradling the warm earthenware bowl with the pot roast. She cleared her throat rapidly and stared into the flames.
Tissaia hadn’t ran a school of young women for decades without gaining knowledge of at least a few mannerisms. She knew that particular throat-clearing, and the slight blush that dusted Yennefer’s cheeks, as much as the flames did to hide it. This was, however, perhaps the first time that she was glad to see the particular way that Yennefer behaved.
“It’s alright,” she quietly said, reaching for Yennefer’s hand that tapped restlessly onto the arm rest of her chair. “You can say it, if there’s… an attraction between us.”
“That’s the rub, isn’t it?” In a split second, the abrasiveness that Tissaia had seen fade the past day had completely replaced Yennefer’s earlier cares again. “You… you made me.”
Tissaia wetted her dry lips with her tongue. “That is debatable,” she said. “You were someone beforehand, just… a long time ago.”
“That doesn’t change it, Tissaia. You made this body, what I am now. I came alive again through some kind of magic, and I don’t know what’s part of that magic anymore.” Yennefer gestured to herself with one hand, then set her meal down onto the low table before the hearth. “What I’m feeling, I don’t know if it’s because of anything real or true.” She met Tissaia’s eyes with her brilliant purple ones, and the sculptor wished she hadn’t. “If it’s magic… how could we ever know it’s real?”
“I - I don’t know,” Tissaia fumbled with her words. “I’ve never dealt with magic in this way. But we could try? We could see whether it’s real or not.” She desperately hoped it was, but didn’t voice it. The situation was precarious enough.
Yennefer unfortunately didn’t give her the chance. She got up from her chair, shaking her head. “If it’s not real, it won’t matter how much we try. I don’t know why I feel this way, I don’t know who I am or who I was.”
“Yennefer, please-” Tissaia tried, but it was of little use. Yennefer stood up and the sculptor followed her a moment later. Her hand brushed against Yennefer’s clothing when the taller woman ran for the door. A sharp pain shot through Tissaia’s injured foot and she stumbled, unable to stop Yennefer from running out of the door and into the falling dusk.
Then, she suddenly stopped in the door opening, her purple eyes blazing. In them, Tissaia saw such directionless, chaotic anger that she was a little unsettled. But Yennefer was pausing, if only for a split second. Before Tissaia could make up her mind about approaching her, she turned and vanished into the darkness beyond the terrace.
To Tissaia’s left, an earthenware carafe of water rattled where it stood on the table by the hearth. In a split second, it went from trembling to swaying, to being flung off the table by an invisible force. Though the sound it made when it hit the ground was loud and jarring, it didn’t break nor roll very far. The water spilled out and made its way between the floor tiles. In the time that it took Tissaia to put the carafe back and throw a rag onto the puddle, she knew Yennefer would have run off far already if she wanted to.
That realisation suddenly scared her, losing the woman in the darkness. With her injured foot and diminutive stature, she knew that catching up would be hard if not impossible. The only perk she had was that she knew the area whereas Yennefer did not.
In preparation, she put on a woolen half-cloak and grabbed a lantern off the crook on the outer wall of the house. The cold air bit into the skin of her face, such a difference from the warm hearth. Tissaia steeled herself, she had to find Yennefer. She could not lose her now.
To perhaps the greatest relief she had ever felt, she didn’t have to search long at all. The fading rays of the sun shone on an outline standing in the river before her lantern did, just like the way the sun had illuminated the marble statue on the eve before it had come to life.
She hesitated with approaching, because as she got closer, she saw that the water around Yennefer slowly rippled outwards like a pulse. There was an odd sensation in the air, like a power prickling across her skin. It was magic, Tissaia instinctively knew.
“Yennefer…” she softly said, setting the lantern down onto a rock and wading into the water despite her wariness of the trembling waves in the river. “I only want to help you. I’ve… I’ve lost all I used to have -” The words came slowly, with difficulty, as if she had to scrape them from her lungs. “ - because I couldn’t help the right person at the right time. I don’t want to lose you too, and… I think that the truest feelings always hurt the most. Allow yourself to feel them. Don’t make the same mistake I did. Please.”
As she waded further into the cold water, so far that it came up to her waist whereas it only reached Yennefer’s thighs, she saw that the other woman was trembling just as much as the water around her. She had covered her face with her hands, sobbing into her palms with shocks that made her entire body shudder.
“H - have you ever used that word before?” she asked Tissaia as she uncovered her reddened eyes. They were searching Tissaia’s face, that piercing look in them never having left.
“I… Only when it was already too late,” Tissaia said.
“It’s not,” Yennefer sobbed. “It’s not too late now. I - I just…” She was startled when Tissaia carefully laid an arm on her waist, uncaring for the water that crept further up into the fibers of her tunic. But then, she covered the sculptor’s hand with her own. “I remember,” she said.
There was a long pause, in which she scooped up some of the river water with her free hand. As it poured from between her spread fingers, Yennefer breathed out harshly. Something sparkled in her eyes. Literally, the purple briefly lit up and glowed in the dark of the falling night. Then the water droplets stopped their course back into the river, drifting around her fingers until she released her breath and they fell.
“I remember. This river is me. The source is… where I died, a long time ago.”
“The battle? That legend?” Tissaia softly asked.
“Yes. Sodden Hill, where the white flames consumed everything. Me included, but my body became one of the waters that put them out. I am not human, Tissaia, but you knew that from the beginning.” Yennefer frowned, opening her mouth and closing it again, seeking the right words. “I’m a naiad, a water nymph. This river is what my essence became when I died. And you… you spoke to it. Something that was left of me clung to that, even though your words were not really meant for me. And when you used the water to clean and sculpt the statue… there was such emotion in your work, such desire, such profound feeling. I think that’s when I remembered I wanted to live.”
She turned fully to Tissaia, grasping her hands and holding on quite tightly. “I sought you out, without being… being , fully. And apparently I found enough footing when you used the river water to sculpt your statue. I could become conscious again, my essence, well, in that statue.”
“I think that you guided me before that,” Tissaia said. “When I sketched, it was as if the drawing assembled itself. Sometimes when I worked, I did so faster than I ever had before. Don’t you think you blessed me before you were aware of it?”
“I don’t know,” Yennefer truthfully admitted. “I only remember waking up in the dark of your workplace. And dying in the flames, but nothing in between. I can bless you now, however.” A smirk spread over her lips as she drew up one dark eyebrow. It was a satisfied smirk, her goal clearly reached as a blush spread up Tissaia’s face.
Tissaia had to lick her dry lips, wordlessly gasp and clear her throat before she was able to form any sensible reply. “Not in the river, it’s too cold,” she managed.
“The river, which is me,” Yennefer said, the grin still on her face.
Picking up her lantern and making her way up the riverbank despite her soaking wet trousers and tunic, Tissaia returned her smile. “Yes. Do you propose a name? I can hardly call it ‘Yennefer’ as well.”
As they reached the terrace, Yennefer slowly nodded. “There were those who used to call me ‘Yenna’, a long time ago. That would be apt.”
“ Yenna , for the river, then.” Tissaia held still by the fireplace, where their meal had been left unfinished. She sighed as she went into her bedroom to retrieve and put on new trousers. Then, when she returned, she found that Yennefer had moved the two chairs much closer together. “I meant what I said earlier, that I want to help you discover who you used to be. You said you would think on it. Have you?”
“ Hmm , I would like to travel to the source. Perhaps I could remember more. What exactly happened, who was there when I fell… But it’s a bit of a journey. I don’t want to push you to go with me.”
“Yennefer, I am aching for a journey,” Tissaia said. This time, she was the one who grabbed Yennefer’s hands and clasped them before her chest. Their bodies brushed against one another, the want suddenly so clear in their eyes.
It wasn’t clear who closed the distance between them. They both leaned forward, their noses brushing against each other before Tissaia tipped her head a little to welcome Yennefer’s mouth against hers. For the first time since her isolation and perhaps for the first time in her entire life, she fully gave herself to another person. It was an odd thought to her at that moment, but she swore that she could taste Yennefer’s nature as more than human. But even that faded when Yennefer’s hands came to rest just underneath her jaws and the water nymph pulled their bodies closer together.