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He understood why people scarcely came back out of the Cave of Dreams. When Blueboy Lugos told him what they were there to do and the legends surrounding it, he had thought “Cave of Nightmares” might be a more apt name. But spectral fish and whales swimming around in the air, with the serenity of a dream rather than the vicious cycle of nature, he understood. No predators took snaps at the silver-flashing scales of the shoals as they swept around the cave. No sirens or drowners sought to hold them underwater, and he didn’t even need to worry about holding his breath.
Of course, then there were the nightmares. Childhood fears made tangible, buried regrets bubbling to the surface. Geralt watched it all with a passive eye, doing his job. Spectres, beasts, and bandits were his day job. He had no doubt the cave had something special in store for him when it came to his turn. Lugos claimed his victory over his father by the point of Geralt’s sword rather than his own, and even if he questioned the valour of that, questioned if it was truly a valid test of bravery to have a witcher kill your inner demons for you, he said nothing. He was here to pay a debt.
As they walked on through the cave system, his ears picked up the hushed conversation happening behind him – though with the acoustics of the cave and the intoxication of his employers, he might have overheard even without his witcher senses. “Don’t witchers get nightmares?” asked Uve.
“Course they do,” chided Jorulf, who then spoke up, “Oi, witcher. What’s the scariest monster you’ve ever faced?”
Geralt should really prepare an answer for this question. He received it a lot. Mostly from small children… He glanced at the proud, juvenile men who had hired him for this expedition. Close enough. He was mercifully spared from coming up with an acceptable answer on the spot by an echoing whinny and the clopping of a new spectre coming towards them.
“What manner of creature is that?” gawked Jorulf, as its spined fins rippled and flexed, smoothly altering its course through the oceanic air.
“It looks like a drowner bred with a mare,” remarked Lugos.
“It’s clearly a sea-horse,” said Uve, with unfounded confidence, watching it circle the four of them with its front two legs horse-like and galloping, its back half a fish tail that swayed side to side.
“It’s a kelpie,” Geralt said, wishing Jabberjaw would go back to being mute, and the other two would join him. How he knew more about the creatures of the isles than three Skelligan men was beyond him. A kelpie hadn’t been sighted in Skellige in his lifetime, but still. Did people really care so little for the monsters they called their neighbours? (Experience had taught him that yes, yes they did).
The kelpie came to a halt in front of him, shaking its head as Roach did and making its seaweed mane float around its face. It snorted, and Geralt felt frost-breath cool his cheeks. The corner of a smile that had quirked up at the motion vanished as quickly as it had come when he remembered the way his breath frosted at the arrival of the Wild Hunt. He thought of Ciri’s extraordinary black mare called Kelpie and the way she could be summoned to her rider’s side with a charm he’d envied many times since learning of it. The chill settled over his skin, and was that dread, or was it Eredin?
The kelpie nickered, bucked, and bolted, and Geralt broke into a sprint after the beast. Dimly he was aware of confused shouts chasing him, but he had no attention to spare them. “Ciri!” he bellowed.
He dropped down a ledge in the cave and rolled across stone bricks. The keep was battered and frost crawled all over it, but it was undoubtedly Kaer Morhen. Here, she was here all the time, why didn’t he ride back to the Blue Mountains at breakneck speed the second he woke from the first dream of Ciri? Where else would she look for him, where else would she run for safety? Home.
“Ciri!”
“You are too late, Gwynbleidd.”
There was that familiar tug in his chest at the sound of his True Name. The hook on the end of Eredin’s line, the word he’d reel him in with when he strayed too far, when the fog cleared momentarily from his mind and he let his thoughts linger too long on Yennefer and everything else he’d left behind.
His silver sword slid out of its sheath with a shing sound. “Where is she?” he demanded.
The shining skull mask of Eredin’s armour glinted with blue light as he looked down on Geralt from his full seven feet. Geralt was small, and made of fragile skin and bone. Not like the metal exoskeletons of the Hunt with their towering stature, cold as ice but a thousand times harder.
Frozen spears sprang up around his feet, and he hopped out of the way, swinging his sword at Eredin’s hound before its icicle teeth could sink into his flesh. He used Igni to conjure a jet of flame that near-roasted the beast, and then swung his sword through its charred husk and into the oncoming hound. He cast Quen and finished it before returning his attention to the King. Eredin was almost gliding around the courtyard, and for a moment Geralt only thought of how Ciri would skate circles around him without breaking a sweat. He charged him, heard the chime of their swords meeting, silver on steel, and then felt the pressure between them disappear as he teleported away – Eredin slashed him from behind and kicked the back his knee, forcing it to buckle. He cast Igni, buying him a moment to regain his stance, and readied his sword for the next attack… which didn’t come.
“Coward!” he yelled into the empty courtyard.
A new warrior stepped forward. He didn’t recognise the armour, couldn’t bring a name out of the fog that still held his memories of riding with the Hunt. They made no greeting, no retort, just swung their sword, and he dodged out of the way. They danced around each other, him with ducks and rolls and hastily-cast signs, them with flashes of frosty blue portals and the graceful, brutal twirling of a skilled swordsman. He barely had any chances to do more than parry, being forced to step backwards around the courtyard. There was something about their movements that was familiar, though, and a pattern emerged. Before they could take their wide swing all the way around to connect with his chest, Geralt countered, a shove and an upward slash to the head, dislodging the warrior’s mask.
The warrior screamed and clutched their face when the mask fell, blood dripping through their fingers, while wisps of ashen hair stuck to it. A furious green eye pierced him, and she let out a roar as she swung her sword again, exposing the fresh scar on her cheek, mirroring the older one.
“Ciri—” Their swords clashed as regret and despair weighed down his stomach.
She teleported behind him, and he stumbled back, right into another blue flash and bloody strike to his arm, weakening his grip on his sword.
“Ciri, stop, it’s me. It’s Geralt.” She forced him back with relentless attacks he was barely managing to deflect, while she never seemed to tire. He dodged back further, out of her sword’s reach, and threw his own to the ground, breathing heavily. She stopped advancing, but the empty glare she was giving him didn’t quite delude him into thinking she was considering mercy. “I don’t want to hurt you,” he said.
“She is lost to you, White Wolf,” Eredin said. “Her destiny is with the Hunt. Zireael,” he pronounced, and there was a flicker of her eyelids, recognition of her True Name. A crucial moment of lucidity that the King would exploit to crystalise his intent inside her, force her to kill Geralt.
“You’re not defined by destiny,” he said, keeping his words low, like the thrum of a heartbeat, even as Eredin gave his command over the top. “You’re something more.”
He wasn’t afraid of dying. He wasn’t even afraid of his half-death with the Hunt, flitting between worlds. He could bear to run with them again, throw aside the warmth and love in his life and embrace the fog and cold, if it would protect Ciri. But abandoning her was only a blade’s edge better than hurting her, and so long as there was breath in his lungs, he would do his best to make sure he never had to do either.
His breath misted in front of him, and Ciri raised her sword. He closed his eyes, and there was a moment of tranquillity, like a sunrise over a snow-capped mountain, before pain and darkness dominated, cold ripping through his head like a wildfire across dry grass. Eredin was reaching into his mind again, twisting the White Wolf to his will. With Ciri in his clutches, the most useful thing Geralt could do for him was die. It burned like frostbite, both numbing and excruciating.
“Geralt!” cried Ciri. “Geralt, Yennefer, wake up!” He couldn’t move, he couldn’t speak, but Yennefer was beside him, cold and still and drained of power, and he was beside her, cold and still and drained of blood, but Ciri was alive, and that was the important thing.
He woke to Yennefer’s arms around him and sunlight dappling through the leaves of the huge, ancient apple tree that they were nestled beneath. Not far off, the gentle waves that took them here on their daughter’s command crashed against the shore. It was warm, and he let sleepiness continue its reign, nestling into Yen’s collarbone and breathing in lilac and gooseberries.
“Wake up, witcher!” commanded a gruff voice who didn’t belong on their island, and Geralt jolted awake to a cold and damp cave on the coast of Ard Skellig, and three idiots who were significantly worse company than a powerful sorceress he happened to consider the love of his life.
“Was I… was I out long?” he asked, sitting up. There was sleep in his eyes that he tried to blink out.
“A while longer than the rest of us,” shrugged Jorulf. “I guess witchers have a few fears after all, eh?”
Geralt had never claimed witchers had no fear, but he rolled his shoulder – stiff where the phantom Ciri had cut it, or was it his imagination? – and said, “Guess so.”
“You’ve paid your debt. You’re a free man,” declared Lugos, who promptly gathered his men and resolved to get the drinks flowing back aboard his ship. They did not invite Geralt, and he was glad, because he might have had to accept, and he was in no mood to drink with strangers.
He took a last look into the Cave of Dreams, its walls still and light dim, unspectral. The words of the Crones came back to him. Each time you see her, she will be a mirage. And if you find her – if – the girl will die.
He would see Ciri again. And together, they would kill Eredin, and they would kill those blasted Crones. Whatever destiny they saw for her, they were wrong. He believed it.
He had to.