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There is order. And there is chaos. The purpose of magic is to take chaos and turn it into order. The purpose of magic is to use chaos, mine it as the dwarves mine their mountains, sapping power from the world and bending it to your will.
It’s one of the most basic principles of magic, taught on the first day of classes to the young, first-year novices at Aretuza, even if the language is prettied up. Words are changed around, connotations made positive. The novices are permitted to be afraid of the rectoress, but not of magic. Magic is a gift, they’re taught. A gift that must be used responsibly. Just like anything else in life.
Yennefer knows, though, that for all the beautiful language and all the brainwashing, the truth of the matter is ugly. It always is. Beneath the beautiful mages are the scared, malformed teens. Beneath the sheen of orderly magic lies chaos, seething and churning, ready to wreak destruction. Beneath civilization lie the bones of elves.
She can pinpoint the exact moment her disillusionment with magic began. It happened when she was still young, still technically a novice, back when she was still stupid enough to dream. It happened during the very process that changed her, turned her from a malformed, hunchbacked teen girl into a beautiful woman, a sorceress with the world at her fingertips. It happened while she was lying on the floor, naked, covered in her own blood and sweat, pain shooting through her body like the world was on fire and she was the flame.
There is a price to magic, Tissaia would say. There is always a price to magic. Balance must be maintained. In order to create order, one must give something to the chaos. Feed it. Satiate it.
Turning her into a beautiful mage came at a cost, just like everything else with magic. The ability to have children would be stripped from her, taken and given to chaos in order to hide the frightened, hunchbacked girl.
It’s all explained oh-so-logically, ever so sensibly, like everything always is. You’ll never be able to create new life, the mages tell her. But the process in which that ability is taken will in turn create a new life for you. It’s all very poetic.
She learns, many years later, that not all mages have to pay the same price. Some are even able to have children. When she confronts Tissaia about this, storming into the rectoress’s office at Aretuza, Tissaia sighs and sets her book down carefully, wearily.
“The world doesn’t have an objective sense of fairness,” she says, and Yennefer almost turns to leave, because Tissaia has her teacher voice out. But she didn’t come all the way from Aedirn to storm out in the middle of a lecture, she came here for answers. “The price for you is not the same as the price for someone else. Someone like Sabrina.” Her eyes bore into Yennefer’s. “Some mages are… affected by chaos more heavily. It is not a mark against them, but it means the price of creating order out of them is higher.”
“And I’m chaotic. I’m a rogue element. Is that it?” Yennefer asks. She can feel the blood in her veins heating up, the ire in her voice, the dry anger. “I did my time here and I learned how to control myself. I can control my chaos, because you insisted on it. I wouldn’t have become a mage otherwise.”
Tissaia just looks at. her, not even rising, and finally replies, “Learning to control your chaos is not the same as not having chaos. You still have it, simmering underneath the beautiful face you chose for yourself. Waiting to explode.” She pauses, then says quietly, in a voice Yennefer has never heard before, “It was the same way for me, Yennefer.”
This isn’t news, actually. Mages are, as a rule, quiet about their past unless they have reason to boast. The only reason Yennefer knows anything about Tissaia’s past is from hints dropped that the differences between her and the obsessively orderly rectoress are not so great as they would superficially appear.
That knowledge doesn’t make her life any more bearable. Yennefer’s only consolation is that she doesn’t want children, doesn’t want to be a mother. She has bad memories of her own parents, and she’d much rather have power than change diapers. She’s not happy that the potential has been taken from her, but at least that isn’t a path she ever wants to go down.
“And when my chaos explodes? What then?” Yennefer wants both to leave and to stay, to force the ever-calm rectoress to admit that she’s right in some way. “Will it leave me? Will the last of this shithole’s influence leave me?” Why was none of this ever taught to the novices?
Tissaia sits in her chair calmly, hands folded neatly on the desk in front of her. She is, as always, the picture of order. No wonder she’s the rectoress of Aretuza; she makes her authority known in her quietness, in her perfect order. A living example of Order in a chaotic world. “Careful, Yennefer,” she says quietly. “You’re in control. Never forget that.” She brushes an imaginary bit of dust from her sleeve. “Your chaos will never explode,” she states matter-of-factly. “I trained you too well for that, and no matter how chaotic you might become, you’ll never let it take over. You enjoy your power, your wealth, your position far too much for that ever to become a factor.”
“Hypothetically, then,” Yennefer says, forcing herself to calm down, forcing herself to meet the rectoress’s icy gaze with a steel one of her own. She has an Aretuza education, she can do that at least.
Tissaia holds her gaze evenly, letting the silence stretch just long enough that Yennefer begins to feel foolish, small, stupid. Like she’s still a novice, sent to the rectoress for punishment. Finally, Tissaia says, “You of all people should know that we don’t deal in potential here at Aretuza. If you want to do that on your own, no one in the Brotherhood can stop you, but rest assured, you will not be receiving any help.” Her eyes soften, just for a moment. “Leave the matter, Yennefer. You have the world at your fingertips. Be happy.”
When Yennefer leaves, she’s not happy, but she is at least quelled. Tissaia isn’t right, necessarily, but she’s right for now.
Tissaia’s mistake, of course, was in assuming that Yennefer is content. Yennefer can’t remember the last time she was content. She imagines it was sometime in school, sometime before the illusion of magic was shattered, sometime between arriving at Aretuza and becoming a mage. But that was years ago. Yennefer is old now, by human standards if not for mages, and the court of Aedirn has long since ceased to hold any charm for her. Tissaia is right, though, in saying that she has the world at her fingertips. She does. It’s just that the world is so terribly boring.
She doesn’t envy Queen Kalis for all her children, all her daughters. Just because she’s angry that her choice was taken away doesn’t mean that she wants children in the slightest; on the contrary, she’d rather stay as far away from babies as possible. They remind her too much of her home: her poor, unhappy, angry home. There were always children crawling around the place. Her stepfather saw to that. Yennefer didn’t know how many siblings she had, and she didn’t care to take a trip back home and find out. If she never got near a baby again, it would be too soon, and she meant that with the long lifespan of a mage in mind.
Queen Kalis, for all her idiocy and entitlement, still suffers the pangs of being a woman. She rather envies Yennefer; admires her for her magical abilities, ignoring the many, many clouds and instead focusing on the silver lining of it all. “At least people see you for who you really are, and not what you can do for them,” she tells Yennefer, clutching her baby to her breast. “We’re all just vessels.”
And maybe, Yennefer thinks, after leaving Queen Kalis’s body behind to rot, as she buries the baby who never got a chance at life, maybe Kalis was right. They’re all just vessels. Kalis assumed that Yennefer was different because she’s a mage, and Yennefer hadn’t corrected her, but the truth is that being a mage made no difference. She’s been used her whole life: used by her stepfather to get some extra coin, used by Tissaia to get information out of Istredd, used by the Brotherhood to influence Aedirn’s court, used by the king of Aedirn to do his dirty little tasks that required magic. She’s a vessel, filled with Aretuza training that covers the seething, simmering chaos underneath. The chaos she’s been too good to reveal.
But she owes something, if not to Queen Kalis, then to the baby she failed to protect. Kalis was a spoiled, entitled bitch, and even if that isn’t enough to justify death, Yennefer doesn’t care too much about the political squabbles between a king and his wife. But what wasn’t fair, what wasn’t alright, was the death of Kalis’s daughter. She had life, and while there was life, there was a future.
Perhaps she escaped from an awful, meaningless future. Knowing the fate of royal women, Yennefer wouldn’t be too surprised by that, actually; women born into royalty or nobility are nothing more than breeding machines for more noble babies, preferably boys. They don’t get to rule, they don’t get any power.
If Yennefer could save that baby’s life, she could have raised it. Ensured that it would grow up into an independent woman, a free woman, without obligations to anyone or anything.
She owes that much to the baby she couldn’t keep alive.
When she disappears from Aedirn’s court, the Brotherhood doesn’t bother finding her. They don’t like her all that much, anyway: several of them didn’t even want to dispatch her to Aedirn, she knows. And in that leeway, in the grace that their dismissal has provided, she can find ways to undo their hold of her, reverse the irreversible. She owes more to that baby she couldn’t keep alive than she owes to anyone else: not the Brotherhood, not the king of Aedirn, not her family, not even Tissaia owns her. She has freedom.
So why does it taste so bitter?
She doesn’t know what to do with her freedom, with her sudden lack of responsibility. She doesn’t know where to begin her search, her quest. All she knows is that she has some sort of purpose now, a drive that was missing from the moment she arrived at Aedirn. No, earlier than that: from the moment they left her naked on the floor, covered in her own blood and tears, shivering in the intense heat, screaming, screaming, screaming –– but it wasn’t loud enough, because it wasn’t helping the pain. That was the moment.
Her pursuits take her far and wide, force her to seek out the help of lowlifes, dropouts from the academies or mages not skilled enough to attract the attention of anyone’s court. Thoughts and memories of Queen Kalis fade away, thoughts and memories of that baby, whose name Yennefer hadn’t even deigned to learn, fade away as well, lost to time. At some point, Yennefer’s desire to give a child the opportunities snatched from that baby morphed, changed into the plain and simple desire to have a baby.
It’s almost like a vendetta against the order of mages. Yennefer has everything, or if she doesn’t have it right now, she either had it or will have it in the future. The world is at her bloodied fingertips. The universe is an open book. She has everything. Everything except for a child, the one thing she can never have, the one thing the Brotherhood of Mages ensured she could never have.
If she were a slightly lesser woman, she would cry about this. She would whine and moan and complain because life isn’t fair. But Yennefer is not a lesser woman: she is powerful and beautiful and if she were any greater, she would be perfect. Life has never been fair to her; she was sold by her stepfather for less than the price of a chicken, she had to work twice as hard as the other novices to learn the same skills, she lay on the floor, covered in her own blood and tears and sweat, feeling the price she had to pay for her ascension. Her world has always been cruel.
Regardless, Yennefer intends to get everything the universe has withheld from her. She’s always been that way, always willing to do what she had to, always intent on her next conquest.
It’s almost poetic, she thinks, as she makes plans to prepare for this rogue djinn. She distantly recalls Kalis telling her baby daughter, the nameless girl who died all those years ago, that women are just vessels. Perhaps they are, she thinks, but what a way to prove it. If all goes well with her plan, she will have the power of a djinn at her command, and she won’t just have the world at her fingertips, she’ll be able to bend the universe itself to her will. Chaos and order will have no meaning, not if she’s successful, because she could reshape it all, take all that power, all that grandeur away from those mages who have made it their life’s work to reshape that chaos, reshape it into order.
She can feel her chaos lying just under the surface, ready to break free, churn forth, give the world and all that is in it a taste of true power. She’ll give them a show, alright.
In the aftermath, in the smoke and rubble, she decides it was a good thing that she failed. This was not the way to fulfill her wish. She could have died, probably would have. And, in all of this, she met Geralt.
He was a good person, she was sure, for all that he was a witcher. He could never give her a child, but since she hadn’t been able to solve her own problems, that was hardly the end of the world. And he was completely without strings attached, the first person she could love openly, without fear of manipulation or deceit, without worrying about how they were using her, without needing to wonder why he had shown interest in her. There was nothing binding them but pure attraction. And it felt good.
Not that it lasted. Their paths kept crossing, their love –– such as it was –– certainly was growing. But Geralt would leave, or she would leave. For all that they knew each other physically –– and she did, she knew every inch of that huge man, knew half the thoughts in his head, and could find her way around his body in the dark –– they still knew very little about each other. They fucked, and that was it. Oh, sometimes it was tender: long, slow, lingering, bodies touching, soft kisses up and down skin, embraces under bedsheets, hearts beating almost-in-sync (he’s a witcher, after all, and his heartbeat will always be slower than her own), but even then, they barely spoke, content to occupy their mouths with other, less dangerous activities. And other times, it was desperate, fast, passionate; sloppy kisses, unbuttoning and unlacing, frantic, rhythmic, a display of strength, a challenge of passion, not ending until they climaxed and lay together, sweaty and panting, in the aftermath. Either way, they don't speak. Speaking leads to arguments, and arguments lead to anger. Yennefer wouldn’t want to jeopardize the sex with talk of commitment.
It’s a rude awakening, then, when they finally start speaking. Not only is he dismissive of her, dismissive of her desire to have a child (and, some small part of her argues, he’s right: she would be a terrible mother. She’s too self-absorbed to give such attention to a baby, and she can recall a time when the sight of a child filled her with dread. But she won’t listen to that voice, she’s been focused on this for too long to just drop it). And when she learns that she only loves him because of a wish, that he only loves her because of a wish, a wish that he made, well, that’s far more than enough for her.
That she gave her all, made herself available to him both physically and emotionally, that she bared her heart along with her skin for him, and it had all been beyond her control. That’s the worst of it, really; she could easily go back to just fucking, she would be perfectly content with that, only their love isn’t real. Not even their base physical attraction is real. It’s all been engineered, all been manipulated, because of that fucking djinn.
It’s the right decision to leave Geralt behind, angry and alone. She ignores the way her heart yearns to go back and make things right, ignores the scared hunchback that just wants to be loved. It wasn’t real. And she can logically accept that, even if her heart can’t figure it out.
She’s done with being used. Done with being someone’s pawn. She will not let her choices be stripped from her, stripped like the ability to have a child. She’s powerful, she’s strong. She won’t let people use her for their own ends. It’s why she left Aedirn’s court. It’s why she rebelled against the Brotherhood. And it’s why she’s leaving Geralt.
And when she stands at the top of Sodden Hill and lets her chaos explode, when she singlehandedly defeats the advancing Nilfgaardian forces, when she alone can save the world –– she will.
But not for anyone else. She’ll do it for herself.
And she will stand at the top of that hill, bloodied and sweating, and she will not be beautiful, but she will be powerful. And she’ll be making that choice for herself.
There is order. And there is chaos. And rising between the two, blood streaming like tears down her face, is Yennefer of Vengerberg.