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He hadn’t wanted to return to Rivia. Never thought he’d need to.
There was too much there that he didn’t want to remember, too much pain, too much horror.
His own death was bad enough but he remembered more of Yennefer’s demise, more of Ciri’s distress and Dandelion’s pleading than he ever let on.
So when Ciri ripped a portal open in a mad scramble to get them both to safety when a hunt went wrong, it took him a long, breathless moment to process just where he was standing.
The portal shut with a snap of hair-prickling energy behind them and he bent over, trying to catch his breath and calm the spinning in his head at the same time. The weather was entirely different, the air warm, the sun streaming through recent rain clouds, the foliage around him smelling earthy and welcoming. It was all very disorienting. Under his feet were cobbles, thick with moss and tough grass, and he stared into them while he waited to see if he’d be sick.
When he wasn’t, he blinked, frowning down at his feet as he straightened up and tried to get his bearings. Ciri was behind him, gasping herself, and he would have turned to check on her had the ragged door of a long abandoned tavern not caught his eye.
His breathing stopped, his fingers going numb on the hilt of his sword.
“Geralt are you alright, I’m sorry I just had to get us out I know--” she had her hand on his arm when her eyes caught his stricken expression, and she frowned lightly. “Geralt? Hey,” she turned his head towards her. “Look at me, were you injured?”
He blinked once, swallowing, still too dry-mouthed to speak. She looked even more frightened then, and that tore at his heart.
“Geralt?”
“Ciri,” he managed at last, tightening a dead hand on his blade. “What year are we?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know, it doesn't matter though I can get us back within a day--I’m much better than I was--Geralt,” she shook him lightly, brow furrowing tighter. “What’s wrong?”
He looked up from her hand, shaking his head once as he slowly moved to put his sword away. He had to know. Now that they were there, he had to know, and he couldn’t register what Ciri was saying as he walked away from her towards the middle of the square.
Distantly, he was aware of her following him and trying to talk to him, but he was more focused on the decay around them. The city had been abandoned...maybe for hundreds of years, and yet strokes of it burned into his memory like molten iron.
The herbalist shop where a dwarf was thrown through a window and didn’t get back up.
The homes that had been blackened by torches.
The well where they’d hung a gnome and left her small body turning slowly.
Numbly, Geralt kept walking, distantly aware that he must be breathing, that his heart must still be working, but unable to feel anything but a heavy tingling. He was detached, in a trance, and when he finally emerged from a vine-swathed alley he stopped.
The place he remembered laying in a pool of his own blood was still there. He recognized a cracked slab that he’d broken a fingernail against, recognized the strangely shaped s tone where his knee had struck as he’d collapsed.
The stones that had drunk his blood, however, were ruptured beyond recognition, splintered into dust to make way for a forest of archespore.
He heard Ciri gasp behind him and a feeling like cold water poured through him, breaking his shocked state.
“Geralt….I--I’m sorry I never meant to bring us here,” she said, grabbing his hand in a harsh grip, her green eyes filled with tears. “I’m so, so, sorry--” she shook her head as he looked at her, but the dazed expression hadn’t fully left him.
He couldn’t form words, so he just nodded once and squeezed her hand, before gently letting her go.
Everything he’d been trained in as a witcher told him not to do what he was about to...but being a witcher hadn’t prepared him for Rivia and something deep inside didn’t care. He took a step forward, approaching the cluster.
“Geralt?” Ciri’s puzzled voice filtered in, but he kept walking. Her cries for him became more afraid, more desperate, and he heard her draw her sword.
“Geralt don’t,” she said desperately, and he stopped only a few feet from the plants, staring up at them, Ciri’s blade suddenly held across his chest. He looked down at her, his heart cracking to see the desperation, the raw fear in her eyes.
He reached up a gloved hand and brushed her tears away, gently moving her blade with his other. “Ciri, it’ll be alright.”
She shook her head. “No,” her hand replaced her blade against his chest and she shook her head again. “No Geralt, please just...come home. Leave this behind. Don’t...don’t leave me here again.”
Tenderly, he grasped the back of her neck and bent, pressing a long, warm kiss against her forehead. “I love you,” he breathed, and he let her go.
Ciri was not fast enough to stop him reaching up to touch one of the deadly blossoms, but she drew her sword up, flashing her silver to cut the head off before it could spear him.
To her shock, the plant shied away, and another bent closer, slowly, almost gently, and brushed timidly against Geralt’s limp fingers. Geralt looked down at it, white hair spilling across his shoulders, and Ciri stood there trembling and breathless.
“Geralt...what--”
“They...won’t hurt me,” he said quietly, looking up at them, taking a step closer. Two more bent to his level, great, deadly blossoms gazing back as if trying desperately to understand.
“They’re archespores, Geralt you’re not thinking straight,” Ciri pleaded, though she dared not try to make any more cuts when Geralt was standing so close to so many of them. The infestation was massive--one or two archespores were normal in an area. These had blossomed up like a grieving forest, at least a dozen growing taller than them both in the place Geralt’s blood had saturated the ground.
“They’re mine,” he said, still soft, now strangely calm. He ran his hand across the back of one stem that was bent low, and it trembled beneath his touch like a frightened animal. He brought his other hand up, instinctively working to soothe it. “They were born out of my blood.”
Ciri watched with a blank horror that mutated into sorrow, and as she watched the plants bend and weave around Geralt, she dropped her sword and brought her hand up to cover her mouth instead as she sobbed. “It’s true?”
Geralt hummed, brow furrowed lightly as he stood now in the middle of the cluster, the plants bowing around him so that he was surrounded but not engulfed. “It...has to be.”
“What...what do we do with them?” Ciri asked after a moment, watching with a numb fascination as one pressed into Geralt’s chest and stayed there, as if seeking comfort from his heartbeat the way Ciri herself had done countless times.
“We leave them to live,” Geralt answered, resting a hand on the one leaving pollen on his breastplate. “What else could we do?” He looked up, met her eyes. “This place is long abandoned, Ciri. They won’t hurt anyone here.”
She pressed her lips together, nodding as another tear struck down her cheek.
“Geralt, please forgive me I didn’t mean--”
Geralt’s expression cracked in sympathy and he held out a hand. “Come on. They won’t hurt you either.”
Ciri believed him, and stepped into the strange embrace. Only then did the plants close around them both, leaving them in a shelter of dark earth and green leaves. Ciri looked up at them, watching the sunlight cast through their leaves. Her hand closed on Geralt’s wrist and she thought of Brokilon.
“They’re...beautiful.”
“They are.”
“Maybe...this is what most people don’t live long enough to see,” she said, and Geralt looked at her, a question in his eyes. She gestured. “Beauty. Beauty from horror, from death. Nature is full of it we just ...usually don’t get to look.”
He looked up again, and Ciri rest her other hand on him as well, squeezing lightly.
After a long moment, he squeezed back, and they both disappeared in a flash of green.
The sussurrus of the archespores rippled across the square.