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When Ciri first jolts awake, she doesn’t remember where she is. The panic is overwhelming for a second and she grabs for the dagger stashed underneath her pillow, before the sun-dappled shadows surrounding her resolve into the familiar shelves and crates of Kaer Morhen’s main hall. Trying to calm her racing heartbeat, she takes a deep breath and swings her legs off the pallet she spent the night on. The sound of someone in the kitchen is what has woken her, and she feels a twinge of annoyance at that, even though, given the amount of light in the room, she probably should have been up by now anyway. The last time she had stayed at Kaer Morhen she had been given her own room, but Avallac'h has taken the tower that Yennefer so recently vacated—the only room which is kept clean and liveable during the summer besides Vesemir’s and… well… neither she nor Geralt are sleeping there. They haven’t even had the courage to cross the threshold, yet. The pallets that had been pulled out of storage to house Kaer Morhen’s temporary defenders, as hard and spartan as they were, were still far preferable to opening that particular Pandora’s Box.
Despite the bright morning sun, she shivers at the memory of their desperate fight against the Wild Hunt, then shivers again at the memory of how it ended. Her adrenaline is still riding high from her panicked awakening and alone for the moment, she hugs herself as she wills her emotions settle. It’s a familiar ritual, one which she has perfected over the many mornings she has arisen in strange, even hostile, dimensions—sometimes alone, sometimes with Avallac'h, but always an alien. She can force her physical responses into some semblance of normalcy thanks to her witcher training, but that doesn’t stop her mind from continuing to spin out of control.
You are safe, she insists to herself. You are at Kaer Morhen and it is safe. The Aen Elle are still after you, but they are not here right now, not even close right now. Nothing awful is about to happen. You are going to get up, have breakfast, and train with Avallac'h, like you have every day since the battle. You need to train because the Aen Elle will never stop looking for you and you apparently have the power to repel them and if you had only known how to use that power earlier instead of just running away all the time than maybe Vesemir wouldn’t have had to—
“Zireael?” Avallac'h voice startles her out of her spiral.
She had been too focussed on her inner monologue to track his approach. She bites her lip in frustration and curses her own ineptitude. “Good morning, Avallac'h.” Her words sound more stilted than she intends them to be, forced as they are through the emotion clogging her chest.
Avallac'h just calmly raises a brow at her and in that moment Ciri wishes more than anything that he would lose patience with her, give her something concrete to rail against. But the elf just gestures towards the kitchen. “Come, break your fast. Geralt has left you some porridge.”
With another deep breath—not a sigh—she pulls her boots on and follows her mentor. On the small table in the kitchen, there sits the promised bowl of porridge and a pot of honey, along with a mug of tea—Avallac’h’s clumsy making of it likely the noise that woke her—and also her journal. She had been writing in it the night before by the light of the kitchen hearth and had evidently forgotten to put it away. A quick check of the twine that holds it together tells her that despite her carelessness, neither of the men sharing the castle with her have invaded her privacy. It isn’t actually that surprising: Avallac'h probably assumes her scribblings are boringly beneath him, and while Geralt would undoubtedly be curious, she is fairly certain he’d gouge both his eyes out before breaking her trust. He is, after all, the one who gave the journal to her, oh so many years ago.
“All witchers keep journals,” he had told her when he had handed her the crisply bound empty book. “Helps you keep track of contracts and monsters. Gives you a place to always tell your side of the story. The journals of the witchers who came before us are one of the greatest treasures of this keep. It’s good practice for you to start now.”
As a young girl in a keep full of witchers who—to put it mildly—occasionally struggled with emotional availability, it had seemed a little like a lifeline: a space where she could be as emotional as she wanted, as frivolous as she wanted, without fear of being seen as an annoyance or a failure. Not that any of the witchers, as gruff as they were, ever suggested she was, but it did worry her. She had clutched the gift to her chest tightly. “You won’t read it?”
Geralt had smiled. He always smiled for her. “Not unless you offer it to me, Ciri.”
Opening it then, when she was twelve, it had smelled of the sharp clean scent of new paper. Now, it smells, more than anything else, of her. It is exceptionally well worn, the cover is held on by only the thinnest strip of binding and the spine broken and cracked, and it is full of so much more than her childish musings. It contains her story, from princess to witcher to world-hopper and several different dimensions worth of creatures—more than even Geralt could ever dream of. She traces her hands over it now, a little amazed at all the impossible places this little book has been.
Avallac'h starts in on a lecture about her training and her potential, but Ciri only half listens, one hand shovelling porridge into her mouth while the other rests on her journal.
You should have kept running. It isn’t the first time since the funeral that she has had this thought, but it does feel even stronger today than previously. If you had kept running, Vesemir would be alive. If you had kept running, Yennefer and Geralt and everyone else wouldn’t be tying themselves into knots trying to find a way to fight Eredin. It was foolish to think that he would ever have lost your scent. Foolish to dare coming back here in the first place.
As Avallac'h drones on, she opens the book and idly turns a few of the pages, smiling at her slowly improving sketches. She had always loved to draw, and out of all the groups and individuals that had had a hand in raising her, the witchers had been the only ones who had ever encouraged her to continue. It wasn’t so bad, always being on the run. There were so many different interesting places and people to meet. There were enough new experiences that it didn’t even really matter most days that no place felt like home…
“Zireael!” Avallac'h snaps, exasperation easily evident. “Are you paying any attention to me?”
She had not been, but his theme is easy enough to guess. “I am a Source, a daughter of the Elder Blood. My power is prophesied to be beyond measure, enough to even stall Tedd Deireadh, but it’s useless if I can’t control it. Mastering my abilities is not only the responsible thing to do, it is necessary for the future security of any dimension I inhabit.”
Avallac'h narrows his eyes, obviously suspicious of her answer, but apparently she had guessed close enough to his rant that he cannot call her on it. “I’ll be in the main hall. Wash your dishes and meet me there.” He stands, straightens his robes and leaves, still limping a little. Her heart hurts to think that he has seemingly not fully recovered from his curse yet, a curse he only endured due to his association with her.
Ciri leaves her journal open as she brings her empty bowl and cup to the basin and gives them a cursory scrub. When she returns, the book has settled open on a sketch she had made a few dimensions ago of an adorable, but entirely alien little creature. It had looked like a chimera, a mess of animals stitched together with magic, but she had been told that it was remarkably a natural product of evolution. She smiles a little at the memory of that world and the near deadly summer she had spent there. Now that had been a Continent that needed a witcher…
There aren’t many blank pages left, she notices as she wraps the book back up, leaves the kitchen and drops it on her pallet. I could leave it in the library, grab a new one and just—
“Are you coming, Zireael?”
She rolls her eyes, a small act of rebellion that Avallac’h cannot see and therefore comment on, before joining him at the other end of the hall, where he has set up an array of crystals and a cushion on the ground in the centre of the pattern for her to kneel on. She knows they are supposed to help focus her energy, but mostly they make her feel like a bug under a magnifying glass.
“All right.” Avallac'h nods. “You remember what to do? The crystals will help you build power at a controllable rate. Too fast and they will stop you. Too slow and you won’t be able to activate them.” Ciri nods and Avallac’h waits as she settles herself. “Good. Begin.”
She closes her eyes and the crystals start to softly glow. It isn’t too late to keep running. The intrusive thought shatters her concentration and with a soft hum the light that had started to coalesce in the crystals fizzles out.
“Clear your mind,” Avallac'h says. “Focus on nothing but your power, your connection with it.”
With an exasperated sigh, Ciri tries again, tries to push her emotions down with sheer force of will and reach for her power. I can’t run, she tells herself, still keenly feeling the temptation. If I keep running now, Vesemir’s death will have been for nothing. A sudden clear memory of the sound his neck made when it snapped causes her to gasp and the crystals to fall dark once more.
“Again,” the elf orders and Ciri obeys.
Her third attempt lasts less than a second. She hasn’t taken the time to reground herself. The power swirls out of control almost as soon as she calls on it and the balancing crystals make a discordant noise as the interference rebounds and shuts her down with a shock. “Arg!”
Avallac’h unsympathetically raises an unimpressed brow, as she rubs her upper arm where the magical spike landed. “Take a moment to recentre yourself, and then try again.”
You have to do this. She takes a few deep breaths before closing her eyes again. If you had been able to do this earlier, he wouldn’t have died in the first place. Her brow furrows and she grunts in frustration at the sound of the crystals sputtering into darkness again.
“Keep your temper, Zireael. You’ve done better than this in the past. Again.”
She bites back the instinct to snap at him that when they’ve tried in the past she wasn’t freshly mourning a family member. She clenches her fists, nails biting sharply into her palms. She focuses on the physical pain instead of her turbulent thoughts and that seems to help.
“Good,” the elf murmurs. “Keep it steady.”
He doesn’t care that you’re grieving. You’re just a tool to him. The crystals sputter and spark.
“Zireael! Steady!”
Just a tool for revenge against the Aen Elle. Just a tool for fighting the White Frost. “Ah!” The feedback this time is stronger as she loses it. “Damn it all!” She stands and storms away from the setup.(5)
Avallac’h sighs quietly. “What is disrupting your focus this morning?”
“What do you think is disrupting my focus?” Ciri seethes, one hand clutching the wolf medallion around her neck.
Infuriatingly, Avallac’h does not raise his voice in response. “You have to let it go. It is over. You cannot change the past.”
“It’s not that easy!”
“I do not remember saying it was easy. Nevertheless, it is what you must do.” He gestures towards the cushion again. “Continue.”
Ciri swallows the scream that is bubbling in her chest. It would serve him right if she brought the whole castle down around his pointy ears. It’s not his fault you can’t do this. He’s trying to help. She throws herself back down in the centre of the crystals.
“Reach out slowly. Strong emotion cannot be the only path to accessing your power. You must be able to do it from a place of calm.” It isn’t anything she hasn’t heard half a hundred times before on a half a hundred different worlds. But the sound of Avallac’h’s steady voice is comfortingly familiar. “It is there for you, in your blood. Just reach out and grasp it, like the bow of a violin.”
If you can’t get this right, he might be the only one you’ll have left.
The crystals whine and fade to darkness again. “Zireael…”
Ciri ignores him and starts to channel her power again, stubbornly forcing herself to disregard the failure.
If you can’t get this right, they’ll all be better off if you run before Eredin mounts another attack.
There is a crackling of power before she is shocked, she gasps, but clenches her teeth and tries again.
If you don’t run now, you’re going to know what it sounds like when Geralt’s neck snaps.
The crystal to her left explodes, and with a howl of frustration Ciri pushes herself to her feet and heads for the doors out.
“Zireael!” Avallac'h tries to call her back, stumbles after her sure gait on his still weak legs.
She doesn’t stop until she is outside. The morning is warm, doing its damndest to melt the last of the snow that Eredin’s Red Riders had rode in on, and the air is refreshing. She takes two big breaths as she waits for Avallac’h to catch her, feeling a little guilty for leaving him behind. As soon as he does, she continues on at a slower pace that he can match. “It’s not working, don’t you see?”
“Discouraged after a mere eight attempts? Zireael…”
She refuses to meet his eyes; she can’t stand to see the disappointment that must be painted there. Her wandering gaze catches Geralt, sharpening his sword. She actively avoids meeting his eyes as well. It’s too hard and too late. I should just run. Knowing that neither Avallac’h nor Geralt would react well to that statement, instead she says, “How many times must I try?”
“As many as it takes.” Avallac’h stops, letting her continue on to the low wall that bounds the upper courtyard.
“But I’m not getting anywhere,” she yells back over her shoulder. I was never going to be able to do this. My whole life, I’ve always ran. That’s my story, the story in my journal. When I was a child, I ran from my then fiancé and met Geralt in the woods. When it fell, I ran from Cintra and met him in Sodden. I ran from Kaer Morhen and the temple in Ellander and Aretuza and Bonhart and the Aen Elle. I leave the people who love be behind to die and I run.
After an extended period of silence, Avallac’h finally responds, “We shall return to this later.”
Great. Even he’s given up on me now.
Geralt’s footsteps as he approaches are deliberately loud. She would never be able to hear him coming if he didn’t desire it. “Didn’t make it far first time out on the Gauntlet, either.”
“Geralt, please. Not now.” The last thing she needs right now is his pity, not when she’s contemplating abandoning him again. It has always been far too easy to talk to him, though, and she finds herself babbling, “By comparison, the Gauntlet was a walk in the park. But that’s not the point.” She crosses her arms across her chest, hugging herself.
“What is?”
“Avallac’h says nothing will come of this until I stop thinking about the battle. But at the moment I find it impossible to fill my head with kittens and vanilla pudding.” Geralt would not understand if she tried to tell him about her desire to run. Geralt always chooses to stand and fight. She turns to face him. “Tell me… how do you do it?”
“What?”
“Always manage to pull yourself together, focus, no matter what’s happening?” Some of her desperation must be showing, because he stares at her seriously for a second before answering. In that moment, she wants nothing more than to run.
“Hmm, there’s a certain ancient method. Vesemir taught it to me, and Barmin taught it to him.” Geralt wanders past her, dragging a hand through the snow on the rock wall.
“Will you take me into the mountains and make me drink hemlock?”
“The Skellige druids have used it for centuries. It always works…”
“Hey!” As soon as the snow hits her face, she wants nothing more than to fight. “You’ll regret that!”
She leans into her power, teleporting around the courtyard to try to blindside him, and lets loose. She doesn’t know how long the snowball fight lasts, or who actually wins, but she proclaims her victory proudly at the end of it regardless. She can see his fingers, pink and stiff from the cold. Unlike her, he was not wearing gloves, and yet he continued to play anyway. For her. The desire to run, which had already weakened, shrivels and dies in the fire of her resolve.
She remembers when she started training with him, how she had insisted that he was training her to fight, to kill her enemies. But Geralt had insisted that was not what witchers did: witchers fought in order to save lives. The end of the world is coming, and she is the only one who can stop it. It is her story, and if she has any say in the ending at all, she will not let this warm man standing in front of her freeze.
“You were right.” She throws her arms around him and feels his arm squeeze her waist in return. “That really works!”
She leaves her journal in the library at Kaer Morhen when she and Geralt head out after Imlerith. She doesn’t know of how much use it will be to anyone, filled as it is with foreign beasts, but it feels right that it sit there tucked in beside Geralt’s and Vesemir’s. No matter how this ends, whether they can defeat the Wild Hunt, whether she can stop Tedd Deireadh and save the world, it is, at its heart, a witcher’s journal.