Work Text:
The writing was on the wall. It had been there all winter, souring the normally sweet atmosphere with his brothers that Erland had only a few short blessed snow covered months to savour, and now it had followed them like a spectre’s curse down the mountains and into the cherry orchards on the outskirts of Murivel. The eight of them, Erland, Arnaghad, Hansoldt, Ivar, Lir, Rhys, Barmin and Eivrar, had been far later setting out on their Path from Morgraig than usual that spring, held back as the witcher representatives, chosen by the consortium of leftover mages and mortal trainers that were trying to keep this floundering ship afloat, to give their two cents on the shaping of the castle’s future. It was an argument that had been periodically swamping the denizens of Morgraig like a storm in some form or another since the day they had limped back years ago to find their flighty creators had flown the coop, but whereas they used to have seasons of sun between squalls, now the weather seemed perpetually gloomy, constantly threatening rain. As a result of their delayed departure from the keep, the fruit trees were in beautiful full bloom when they’d found the empty storehouse on the edge of the property and deemed it a suitable location, far enough from the mages’ prying and scrying eyes, to continue the argument, thinly veiled as a civilized discussion amongst peers, that they’d been having amongst themselves all winter.
The whole way out of the mountains, as they trekked together in companionable silence or traded blunted barbs or cockily tried to one-up each other’s stories or lay sympathetically side by side under the stars, Erland had been nursing the tiny spark of hope that it had been the others causing the dissonance between them, that their disagreements were the fault of the mages, the humans, the non-witchers. Surely as soon as they could stand and talk as equals, free from distractions and the needling somehow ever present influence of the myriad little factions that seemed to grow and flourish like weeds over the summer months at Morgraig, they would be able to come to some unified compact. By the second night at the cherry-scented cedar storehouse he was thoroughly disabused of that notion, the spark of hope he’d carefully carried in his heart trampled into so much ash and smoke by harsh words spat in derisive tones, the unassailable barricades each witcher had stubbornly erected around their own position, and finally the ominous rattle of steel swords in their scabbards. No one had actually drawn, thank all the gods, but it was a close enough thing that they were moved to finally make the first unanimous decision of the whole endeavour and chose to disperse on their respective Paths for the season and resume the discourse, with hopefully cooler heads, again in the fall.
But it was, Erland was now convinced, already too late. The writing was on the wall, as legible here in the solid cedar slats of the storehouse as it had been in the craggy curtain walls of the keep: the Order of the Witchers was finished. Despairingly overwhelmed by the certainty of his prophecy, he proclaimed it Cassandra-like to the back of the bear of a man walking before him. “It’s over you know. This is the beginning of the end.”
Arnaghad, his oldest friend, closest confidant and most ardent lover, did not even deign to turn around, brown and bronze braids shimmering in the sun as he strolled leisurely down the path. “You are being an over dramatic child.” Despite the dismissal, the affection in his voice was evident, softening the impact.
“I’m older than you,” Erland heard himself argue back instinctively. Given their respective sizes and outlooks on life, he was frequently mistaken for the younger of the two, as if height and cynicism were better markers of maturity than experience and optimism. Arnaghad was the sole survivor of his round of mutations, a cocktail that particularly favoured growth, and the already tall Gemmerian boy had finally topped out, when all was said and done, generously north of eight feet tall. Erland, as a product of the very first experiments, when the goal had still been to produce warrior-mages, had had a mixture more inclined towards attunement to chaos and subsequently never cracked six feet. It was really only a handful of years that separated them, and Erland knew they didn’t amount to much in the grand scheme of things, but nevertheless the almost ubiquitous incorrect assumption sat like a splinter in the skin of the first witcher’s pride. He had already been mutated, almost ready for the Path, when Arnaghad had arrived at Morgraig, wide eyed and unaware of what was to come. It seemed important to him, somehow, that Arnaghad had never known him when he was human, but that he could still remember the dark, warm brown of the boy’s eyes before they had been bleached by the mutagens to the same cat’s eye yellow as all the rest.
Well aware of Erland’s pet peeve, and almost certainly poking it intentionally to try to derail the serious conversation Erland was trying to start, Arnaghad sounded even more amused as he responded, “Then act like it, oh aged first witcher, shining example to all of us following in your illustrious footsteps-”
Erland refused to rise to the bait. “Ivar almost drew on Rhys back there, or were you asleep for that part?” Arnaghad had little stomach for endless chatter and had, in an entirely irksome manner, shown his disinterest by napping through any bits of the discussion he found particularly boring. Erland scowled, realized that the displeasure written across his face was entirely inevident to his companion and quickly jogged forward so he could walk abreast of the massive man. If he wasn’t consciously thinking of it, Arnaghad could easily outpace any other man, or witcher, even at a casual walk.
“Little shit deserved it,” Arnaghad muttered, but obligingly slowed his steps, evidently unwilling to leave Erland behind, even if it meant a confrontation.
“It doesn’t matter if he deserved it.”
“I think it matters a great deal whether or not he deserved it.”
“He was expressing his opinion in the forum that had been created expressly for that purpose. Just because Ivar didn’t agree with it-”
“No one agreed with it.”
Erland’s nigh on saintly patience finally snapped. “I don’t give a single flying fuck if Kreve himself descended from the heavens in a thundercloud and proclaimed Rhys’ opinion unquestionable blasphemy of the most offensive kind, you can’t just draw a blade on a man for-”
“Says who, Erland?” Arnaghad was infuriatingly calm. To many of their brothers, he was known for having a bit of a temper, and Erland was not entirely unacquainted with the big man’s rage, the mountain booming into a volcano when provoked, but serendipitously anger in one of them had not as of yet ever incited a sympathetic reaction in the other. When Arnaghad was seeing red, Erland was able to calmly talk him down and in return the more flustered Erland got, the more stoic Arnaghad remained. It was one of the many ways they balanced each other and while objectively, after the fact, Erland could see the value in it, in media res it always drove him mad. As if declaring an unequivocal universal truth, Arnaghad continued, “The mages and instructors cull failed experiments all the time. Perhaps some just take longer to prove inadequate.”
He knew his lover didn’t share his all encompassing sense of fraternity for their order, but the ice in his tone still set Erland sputtering. “We don’t kill our own! We don’t attack our own! It would be unforgivable!”
“And this commandment is written where, Erland?”
“What do you mean, written where? It’s- it’s common sense! Loyalty is the founding tenet of any brotherhood!”
“Ah,” Arnaghad smirked, an uneven thing that showed the hint of a sharp canine on the left side. The asshole knew the effect his words would have on the other man. “More of the Griffin’s nonsense.”
Erland felt his jaw clench and teeth start to grind. “It isn’t nonsense. Sir Lywelyn had real experience with belonging to a burgeoning fraternity dedicated to a noble common purpose: something we could damn well use if we’re to keep this mishmash of a mess together! We need-”
Arnaghad dropped an arm across Erland’s shoulders, warm and apologetic. He pulled his lover closer to him, until Erland could feel the familiar tickle of the bear fur mantle Arnaghad insisted on wearing everywhere catching on the hairs of his neatly trimmed beard. “We need rules and order. We need a clear leader and structure of governance. We need a code of honour and to keep the shining light of our gallant cause fixed firmly in our sights.” He sighed deeply, an endeavour Erland felt not unakin to the massive bellows they had seen the peculiar Novigradian cult employ to keep their eternal flame eternal. “I know your position on this matter well, Erland. Even if I had slept through more than half of what was said, I would still be intimately acquainted with your position on this matter. You were neither quiet nor shy with your opinions.”
Which Erland had to admit was true. But he couldn’t just do nothing! The order was getting too big, too diverse. In the first few years after Alzur and Cosimo had abandoned them, they had been able to limp along on force of habit alone: train new witchers, administer the Trials, leave in the spring, return in the fall. But despite their creators’ dismissal of them, and the best attempts of the church to discredit them, they were too successful. There were monsters, thus they were needed, and, as they had since the beginning, they rose in answer to the call. But that drive was no longer enough. The Order needed a code, needed to formalize its positions and ideals or it was going to tear itself apart and there was nothing more frustrating to Erland than the fact that the man he loved most in the world couldn’t see that. He closed his eyes and leaned into the embrace, trusting Arnaghad not to walk him into danger. “You were.”
“What?” Voluntarily blind to the world for the moment, his other senses seemed more alert. He felt the rumble of the word in the barrel chest beside his ear as much as heard it.
“Quiet and shy with your opinions.”
They walked on in silence for a few minutes, Arnaghad not speaking, but squeezing Erland perceptibly tighter. Finally, as if he, of all people, was shying away from a fight, he offered solemnly, “You know my opinion.”
Erland sighed softly, a breeze more than a bellows. “Autonomy. Provide training and a safe haven, but otherwise leave it alone. Let each man work it out for himself.” He knew he shouldn’t say it, knew it was cruel and vindictive, but the almost desperate desire to make Arnaghad see why the Order would never work like that spurred him on. “Frankly, I was surprised to hear you say you disagree with Rhys. You both see this more as a commerce than a cause.”
Every muscle in Arnaghad’s shoulders and torso tensed as he spat out, “Rhys is undercutting other witchers on contracts, carving out a territory for himself where humans would rather suffer under the dominion of a monster until he appears with his reduced rates than pay a witcher what he is rightly owed for his work.”
Erland bit his lip, disliking the role of devil’s advocate, but pressed on. “Allegedly. That’s hardly how he described his actions himself. And even if he is, it’s a shrewd business model. And surely that’s how the market works, isn’t it? It’s the humans’ choice what they are willing to pay, after all. Everyone decides for themselves, that’s what you want, right?”
Arnaghad rumbled, deep in his chest, magma bubbling below the surface, but he commendably did not erupt. “You are misrepresenting my position intentionally to try and ridicule it and I don’t appreciate that, Erland. Do you think that if I lose my temper, I will lose the thread of my argument and break to your well woven reins? My reasoning is not so hard to grasp as that. A child could conceive of it. Fair wages for fair work, that is all I am demanding. Nothing more.”
It made Erland want to scream. “How is it fair that children should suffer, snatched up by hungry necrophages because their parents can’t afford whatever you have deemed to be the acceptable going rate for a rotfiend? How is it fair that farmers lose the very resource they could use to pay us when they can’t tend their fields for the noonwraith haunting them? How is it fair that we stand by, neglecting what we were made to do, for the lack of a fistful of coins?”
“How is it fair that we starve in the wilderness, broke and destitute, expected to work for pittance while every other profession is paid equitably for their service to society?”
“If we had a system, a way of looking out for each other, then we could afford to offer charity when necessary and take payment from those who can afford it. The world is not fair, Arnaghad, though we may wish it otherwise, but we can be bigger than that.”
“I am plenty big enough.”
“For Melitele’s sake, I’m not joking!”
“Neither am I, Erland. We all have to walk our own Paths. No one else can walk them for us. We are together for the winters, but you are not with me when I have to choose whether to take an unfair contract in order to eat that day or leave it be to try to pressure a community into changing their policy on witchers. You are not with me when I have to choose whether to risk the church’s wrath by entering a village or sleep alone in the rain outside its walls. You are not with me when I have to choose the value of a human life in relation to my own, or whether I can placidly bear the weight of the insults hurled at me without reaction when I do resolve that valuation in my favour, or what I should do with all my mutagen-given strength when I find it necessary to defend my right to exist in this world, to take up the egregious amount of space I was made to inhabit.”
“I am.” All at once, it was too much. He didn’t want to fight with Arnaghad, didn’t want to fight with any of them - not Ivar with his inscrutable visions nor Hansoldt with his cold logic nor Rhys with his layered schemes nor Lir with his passion for the fight nor Barmin with his focus on honing their skills nor Eivrar with his own penchant for experiments. He knew that they all had a different cocktail of foreign genetics erratically tacked on to their default biologies, as they were the last of those who survived the earliest Trials, and the formulas administered to them were far from standardized or perfected, but for all their differences they were fundamentally the same in their uniqueness from all other beings. No two of them were entirely alike, but they were all united in the fact that all they had was each other. That was precisely Erland’s point. He stepped out in front of the giant, acutely aware that without resorting to magic he had as much hope of stopping the man as he did an ice age. But, as always, Arnaghad chose to stop for him and Erland, as far as he was physically capable of, wrapped his arms around the other man, before insisting with the entire force of his being, “I am with you, Arnaghad. Always.”
He felt one of his lover’s large hands cradling the back of his head, fingers tangling in the single braided tail he wore. “So you’ve told me before, Erland.”
They stayed there like that, comfortable in each other’s embrace and the hopeful cherry laden scent of spring. Erland had met a man once, a warrior from an almost inconceivably far country, past even Zerrikania or Hakland, who had told him a story about cherry blossoms. They were revered in that country not simply for their delicate beauty or their sweet aroma, but for their transience and particularly for their state at the moment of their demise. Unlike other flowers or leaves, which clung to their branches until they were withered and ugly, long after the tree the sprouted them had determined they had fulfilled their purpose and subsequently ceased to nourish them, the cherry blossoms chose to fall while still in perfect bloom. They let go while they were still something beautiful.
“Maybe we should fracture the Order intentionally.” Erland almost didn’t recognize his own voice. “We can pair off, the eight of us. Lir seemed to mostly agree with me and Ivar and you had some definite common ground. Barmin and Eivrar were nearly aligned, which leaves Rhys and Hansoldt who at least share a similar mercantile attitude towards contracts. We can each pick a cardinal direction, divide up the work and just-”
“No.” Arnaghad’s declaration was final and brooked no argument.
Erland, ever one for hopeless battles, didn’t let that dissuade him. He pulled back from the embrace, but the big man only let him as far as arms length. “We will never reach an accord. It’s going to break us. If we separate on our own terms, deliberately, there is still hope of our individual organizations cooperating-”
“No.”
“We need to do it ourselves, now, before someone does something they can’t take back and it’s done for us-”
“No.”
“Agh!” Erland threw up his arms, finally severing Arnaghad’s hold on him. “You are impossible!”
Arnaghad raised a single unimpressed brow. “Were you not the one illogically insisting that you were always with me half a moment ago?”
“So how do you see the future progressing, Arnaghad? What is your solution to the dilemma we find ourselves in?”
Arnaghad frowned. “The dilemma, as you call it, is nothing new. We fight, we argue, but we want to stay together. So we will.”
“A fish can want to fly, it doesn’t mean it’s going to happen!”
“I thought you were a Skelliger; have you never seen a siren?”
“For gods’ sake, Arnaghad!”
“I do not see the honour in giving up.” The other man switched tactics, trying to use Erland’s own ideals against him. “I have a temper and an impatience for politicking. You have known this from the start. You are a stubborn, pretentious and sanctimonious prick. I have known this from the start. As long as we never expect anyone to be someone they are not, and can continue to accept and forgive each other as we have been doing so far, I do not see why we cannot eventually find a middle ground.”
Erland snorted. “There are things an honourable man should not accept, things that can’t be forgiven.”
Arnaghad scoffed in return. “I do not care what nonsense that knight put in your head. The only things which are unforgivable are those you yourself decide to make so. I can choose not to forgive a man who wronged me, choose to kill him for the affront, but that is me determining my own future, not me bending over and taking it from some useless concept of chivalry or-”
“Disloyalty. Faithlessness. Murder.” Erland insisted. “I can’t accept those sins, Arnaghad, not and remain myself.”
“You are being an over dram-”
“Do not call me a child again!" He hadn't meant to cast Aard, hadn't formed the Sign with his fingers, but as always in moments of weakness he felt his strong connection to chaos manifesting unintentionally. He regained his focus quickly, absolutely aching as the magic dissipated through his nervous system instead of manifesting into the world. It was an entirely uneeded reminder of what havoc the lack of discipline and self-control could wreak, but while the aborted display of force still easily whipped the detritus off the ground and up into a whirlwind around them, it was insufficient to move Arnaghad. "This isn’t a game or a whimsical bit of folly. The eight of us almost came to blows back there. It will come to blows in the future. If we are to maintain any semblance of order, if we are to keep the roots of us healthy, there will have to be consequences we all agree to in the event that any one of us breaks rank. Otherwise we will all just end up clinging desperately to that which can no longer sustain us until we are no more than rotting, dessicated husks of our former selves. Should we die ugly on the vine? Is that the destiny of witchers? Would you ask that of me?”
“I am asking you to live, Erland and maybe try for an ounce of humility. Your connection to chaos is stronger than mine, I will grant you that, but you are no seer. I am asking you to believe that we can weather anything, we two, even if it does come to pass as you say and the Order will eventually wither away.” Arnaghad was solid, sure, and steady, standing next to him felt like standing next to a force of nature or the very spirit of the earth itself. But for all that he gave off that impression, he was still ultimately mortal: at the centre of him a little boy with rich brown eyes who never knew the spearmaiden's unwanted son, eagerly sold to be an ingredient in Alzur's experiments when he proved too wild and impetuous.
“You are no seer either, Arnaghad. You can't just proclaim that we will endure for certain on nothing more than your fervent desire that it should be so. Where exactly do you think this infallible resolve will come from?”
Arnaghad reached out again, but stopped short of actually making contact. His hand hung wavering in the air between them, his eyes an open question desperate for an answer. “Do you love me, Erland?”
“What?” Erland couldn’t help but flinch and furrow his brows at the intensity of the question.
“Do you love me?” Arnaghad repeated the question simply, without artifice or allusion.
Erland stepped forward, planting himself firmly and intentionally in his lover’s arms again. “How can you even ask that of me? How could you not know?”
“And I love you.” Arnaghad hunched over, resting his chin on the smaller man’s head and enveloping Erland entirely. “That will be enough.”
“But-”
“That will be enough.”
Erland sighed into the embrace and titled his head up as Arnaghad titled his own down. He wrapped his arms around Arnaghad’s neck and met his eager golden gaze. “Never thought I’d have cause to accuse you of being an idealist, elskede.”
“Fair. I never thought I would have to convince you to have more faith, schatje," Arnaghad answered with a smile.
Erland stood on his toes to close the distance and they were kissing, just one of a hundred kisses they had shared over the years. Sorrowful kisses when parting, elated kisses when meeting, lazy kisses in the morning and passionate kisses in the night: they were all wonderful and unique in that overwhelming way that rendered them all individually inconsequential, their significance lying more in the sum of their parts than any specific element, and thus neither of them had cause to think in the moment that this one kiss would be, out of all those, particularly worth remembering. So instead of trying to etch the exact feeling of the other’s lips or breath or taste or scent into their minds, they simply surrendered fully to the overall sensation of their lover’s embrace and for one blessed moment it was actually enough and all was right in the world.
But spring was coming to an end, and summer was on its way. And all around them the cherry blossoms were starting to fall.