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Eskel doesn’t know how long he’s been here.
He doesn’t know where ‘here’ is really. Or what’s happening. All he knows is the sharp, broken-bone pain in his back, the cold wrongness of the dimeritium clasped around his wrists, the shivery, not-all-there crackles of chaos sparking over his skin. He wants to scratch himself, thinks he might rip his skin off if he could, but his hands are chained to the wall on either side of his head.
He can sit, at least. Small mercies. Even though he can’t lie down, even though he can’t writhe and yelp and scratch the way he wants to, at least they— who?— aren’t forcing him to stay on his feet.
He thinks he should be more afraid than he is. That he should be sobbing, begging, cursing this place and everyone in it. But he just feels...small. Smaller than himself. Like he’s been crumpled up into a tiny ball and shoved deep within his own skull, far away from the rest of his body. Looking out at the world through eye sockets that are ten times bigger than he is.
There were potions, he thinks. He knows actually, remembers with sudden clarity the violet liquid that they forced between his lips. They’re what made him small, he thinks. Sedative, says the part of his brain awake enough to think. They gave you a sedative.
It had worked well, clearly. Dropped him like a stone, made him too small and too calm to do anything about the pain coursing through his skin. He thinks it might have even made the pain more bearable.
No. He knows that.
“It’s not working! It’s not working!”
A howl of pain, a back arching off a cold, stone table. White hair tangling together as a head is thrown back and forth, trying to shake off the agony.
“He has unique mutations, you said?”
“Yes, he—”
“—must be resistant to the sedatives, but it seems like the rest of the potions are—”
“—working, I can see that.”
“Well. No going back now. He’ll just have to tough it out.”
That’s important. He knows that’s important, he knows that’s bad, but his memory is jumbled up, as tangled as that snow-white hair. He shifts against the wall, his hands twitching against the restraints. He wasn’t alone when he came here. He wasn’t alone when they gave him the sedative. There was someone else.
He runs his fingers through long white hair, grins as a warm head drops against his shoulder. There’s a soft rumbling noise, almost like the purring of a great cat. His fingers brush along a smooth jaw, an arched cheekbone, before coming back up to bury themselves in the hair.
“You ready to see the world?” he asks.
Why is the world like this?
He whimpers, straining his eyes to make out something, anything, in this dark hole he’s been thrown into. A crack of light from under the door, a bit of starshine filtering in between bars. A flash of white hair. Nothing. Nothing at all, just a blackness so deep that he thinks he might drown in it.
He feels like he’s being unmade. Like the itching in his skin is unraveling it, unraveling him down to the last bit of marrow. He’s unspooling into the darkness. Maybe that’s why he feels so small. Maybe that’s why everything seems so untouchable. The barrier between him and the world is dissolving.
He twists his wrists in cuffs, the small jolt of pain barely registering over the insistent humming in his bones, but it’s something. It’s some reminder that he’s real, that he’s not quite gone yet. He’s still part of this place because he’s bound by it.
Lips on his. Hands around his waist. They’re in the dark together, and half of the breaths they share are hitching sobs. They cling to each other because they don’t know how long they’ll be allowed to live. And the worst part. They don’t know if they’ll be killed together, if they’ll be allowed to pass from one hell to the next in each other’s arms.
“What are they gonna do?” Eskel whispers in between kisses. “What are they gonna do to us?”
A body shudders against his. Fingers grip him tighter. Eskel wonders if he’ll live long enough to bruise.
“I don’t know,” a voice breathes. It’s warm. Clear as a bell. Like springtime honey, fresh from the comb, dripping into Eskel’s mouth and filling him with sunshine. “But I—whatever happens. I love you. Okay? I love you.”
Another kiss.
“I love you.”
Another.
Eskel breathes in the warmth of a world he may never see again.
“Love you too, Ger.”
Geralt.
He throws himself forward, yanking on the cuffs as hard as his exhausted body will let him. Geralt. Geralt. They took Geralt, they took Geralt, they took him—
A scream splits the air in half. Hands scrabble at a stone table. A head thrashes back and forth. And Eskel notes all of this with a sort of distant, hazy concern.
He watches his love burn from the inside out, and he does nothing.
“Well, it worked on this one at least.”
He’s hauled to his feet.
“Eskel!” Geralt wails. His golden eyes are clouded with pain, but they find Eskel’s with the same unerring certainty of an albatross coming home. “Eskel, please—”
“Put him back in the cell,” their jailer says. “It’ll work better if he stays calm.”
“You can fight them Eskel, you can—”
“Can’t you shut him up?” hisses the man holding Eskel. Their jailer huffs and snaps his fingers.
Geralt’s mouth flaps open soundlessly. His eyes go wide, frantic. The muscles in his neck contort like he’s shrieking.
Still no sound.
“Better?”
“Much.”
He bows forward, his forehead nearly scraping the ground, his shoulders wrenched to the point of burning.
Or no. Wait. That’s not—
There’s something—
He squeezes his eyes shut, even though it doesn’t make a difference, and breathes through his mouth. What’s—
What’s happening to him?
What’s happening to Geralt?
***
There’s a hand against his face, small but sword-calloused. He leans into the touch, an instinct born out of nights and mornings tangled together. A faint sob is all he gets in response, and his face twitches into a frown. Geralt should never cry at his actions. Should never cry at all, if Eskel has anything to say about it.
“Eskel?” Gods, his voice is shaking. He’s never sounded like this before, except after the Trials. It’s raspy as all hell too, nothing like the warm honey that Eskel is used to hearing. Like he blew it out by screaming. He puts his other hand on Eskel’s shoulder, shaking him a few times.
“Please,” he begs. “Please. I can’t do this alone.”
Eskel groans. He reaches up his own hand to cover Geralt’s.
“S’alright,” he mumbles. There’s another sob above him. Hot tears splash down onto his face. “M’here, Wolf. M’here.”
“Thank the gods,” Geralt breathes. “Can you sit up?”
“Yeah.” He gets his hands underneath him and leverages himself up with a groan. He feels...off, somehow. Unbalanced. Like stepping onto a boat for the first time, clinging to the railings helplessly as the waves battered him back and forth.
“Wha’happen?” he asks, groping blindly for Geralt’s face. When he finds it, he settles to the important task of wiping Geralt’s tears away with his thumb.
“They injected us,” Geralt says. “Separated us, d’you remember that?”
“Mmm. You were hurt.” The past few—hours? Days?—crash over him like a tidal wave. Geralt’s face, screwed up in agony. Geralt, begging Eskel to fight, to save him. And he hadn’t. “Fuck, Geralt, you were screaming and I just—”
“It’s not your fault,” Geralt says, cutting him off sharply. “The sedative they gave us was strong enough to knock out a troll, apparently. I heard the mages talking about it. It just...it doesn’t work on freaks of nature, I guess.”
A huff of air passes over Eskel’s face, a half-hearted laugh. Eskel’s heart shatters just a bit more, like it always does when Geralt talks about himself like this.
“Still,” he says, shifting his hand from Geralt’s face to his hair. “I’m sorry.”
“You’re not gonna let us stop this conversation if I don’t let you apologize, huh?”
“Nope.”
“Then I forgive you.”
It’s Eskel’s turn for a weak laugh.
“You always do.”
The corners of Geralt’s mouth twitch into a smile beneath Eskel’s fingertips.
“Do you, um...do you know what they’ve done to us?” His voice is careful, hesitant in the way it was when he told Eskel that he’d been selected for the extra trials. Like he’s holding back a blow.
The unbalanced feeling gnaws at the corners of his brain. There’s something fundamentally different about him, he knows that, but he can’t place it, he can’t figure out what it is they’ve done to him.
“Do you?” he asks.
In response, Geralt slides his hand from Eskel’s shoulder to his back. And then. Then he keeps moving it, outwards, away from Eskel’s torso, where there should be nothing but air, but—
But Eskel can—
Eskel can still—
“What the fuck?” he chokes, because he can still feel Geralt’s hand, sensation where there should be none. He shakes his head wildly, twisting back a hand to reach for his own back. His fingers connect to something, but—it’s not his body, it can’t be his body, even though he can feel himself touching it. Because he’s made up of skin and flesh, bone and muscle, and this thing has all of those, but—
It’s covered in sticky, damp feathers.
Oh gods.
“They gave us wings,” he breathes. Now that he’s named them, he can sense them like he does his own arms, the offness in his brain settling into certainty. He can even move them a bit, the muscles twitching up, clumsy in their newness.
“Yeah,” Geralt whispers. “Yeah. They did.”
“Fuck, Geralt.”
“Doesn’t seem like the best time for it,” Geralt says, laughing nervously.
“Oh, shut up.”
“I mean between the creepy mages no doubt watching us and the new appendages, it seems like a rather—”
“—you really take every opportunity to tell a dirty joke, huh?”
“—inopportune moment. And yes, Eskel, but really. Pot. Kettle.”
Eskel snorts, leaning forward to wrap his arms around Geralt. And yeah. There’s a carpet of feathers beneath his hands,wet to the touch. Evidence that yes, this was done to Geralt too. Because of course, the world took every opportunity to steal a bit more of Geralt’s humanity. It couldn’t just be Eskel that this happened to, couldn’t just be Eskel with the rotten luck to run across a den of mad mage-scientists. No. It had to be them both.
“We’ll get through this,” Geralt says, his voice rasping by Eskel’s ear. “You and me. Like always?”
“Like always,” Eskel echoes. He closes his eyes, resting his head against Geralt’s shoulder. “Gods. The masters are gonna kill us.”
“We’ll worry about them when we get out of here,” Geralt says. “I’m sure I can pull the same ‘advancement of magic, new species of Witcher’ bullshit that they did on me. You watch, they’ll just be angry they didn’t think of it first.”
Except they weren’t supposed to walk the Path together, Geralt and Eskel. Too much emotional attachment, too much weakness. Going back, letting the masters see what had happened...it would be admitting to disobedience. There’s no way that they’d buy them being captured specially, not when the whole keep knew what they were to each other.
But Eskel’s sure that Geralt knows that. And he’s equally sure that Geralt needs an idea of home to cling to right now, the thought that they’ll just make it back to Kaer Morhen and be safe, be cared for after this nightmare.
No harm in indulging in that fantasy, at least for now.
“I’m sure you’re right,” he murmurs into Geralt’s hair.
***
The next morning, they’re dragged out of their stinking cell and into the light, the mages babbling excitedly at each other, poking and prodding at them with long, cold fingers. Eskel ignores all of them, staring at Geralt. At what they’ve turned Geralt into.
Some of the pieces are familiar, things that both of them have collected over their time here. The dark circles under his eyes, the thinness to his face, the grime clinging to his skin. His tangled hair, the white nightgown they forced him into, stinking of sweat. He hurts to look at, just as he has the last several times they were brought into the light.
And then there’s the new. The massive wings rising behind him. The feathers are as white as his hair, or at least, Eskel thinks they are. It’s hard to tell under the layer of dried blood coating them, matting down the feathers and spilling over Geralt’s nightgown. Evidence that these were not just formed out of the air, grafted to him by magic. They’d burst out of his skin, they’d split him open, and he’d felt every minute of it, and Eskel can’t breathe from the horror of it.
Geralt is staring back at him, his own eyes wide with shock as they flit over Eskel. He can’t imagine that he looks much better than Geralt. Look at the two of them, a pair of bloody, mangled harpies.
One of the mages clucks disapprovingly, running a hand over Eskel’s left wing and wrenching it away from his body. He yelps in pain, the brand new muscle stretched beyond how he’d moved it last night. Geralt starts forward, but another mage grabs his wings, stopping him in his tracks.
Eskel can see his own feathers out of the corner of his eye. They’re bright red, redder than his blood. A cardinal’s wings, he thinks.
“Sensitive, still,” the mage hums. “But they need to be bathed, if we are to see the full effect of our work.”
Eskel had spent the last gods-know-how-many weeks longing for a bath. But he knows that they’ll be tugging their wings in all manner of terrible new directions, and suddenly, he’d give anything to stay dirty a little bit longer.
“No,” he croaks. “Please, don’t—”
“We could magic them clean,” suggests one of the other mages. Fringilla, that’s her name. She’s younger than most of them—doesn’t look like she’s gone through her Ascension yet—and she always turns away when the other mages get particularly brutal.
“No,” says the mage tugging at Geralt. “I want to see how the feathers react to water.”
***
It’s excruciating.
***
When it’s over, when they’ve been cleaned and examined and dressed in new, unbloodied nightgowns, they lie curled together in the dark. Geralt’s face is buried in Eskel’s chest, small huffs of air washing over Eskel’s sternum. His cries are quiet, but not silent.
Eskel reaches a hand around him and rests it, gently, so gently on Geralt’s right wing. He runs it over the feathers like he’s stroking a cat, soft and comforting. He hopes it’s comforting at least. Geralt needs the comfort right now. They both do.
“You know,” he says, tucking a few wayward feathers down. “Birds groom each other in the wild.”
“Do they?” Geralt says, his voice shuddering.
“Mmm. Mated pairs especially. Remus told me while we were out hunting. Says you can always tell a mated pair of ducks because they’ll be the ones grooming each other.”
“Is that a hint?” Geralt snorts through his tears. He slips his own hand over Eskel’s wings and starts smoothing the feathers back into place. Eskel shivers at the feeling. It’s soothing, almost like a shoulder massage, but more delicate. Gentle. Nice.
There’s such a shortage of nice feelings in this place. It would be a shame to turn this one down.
***
They aren’t allowed to fly.
Eskel would assume that, with all the effort the mages put into giving them wings, they’d want to make sure that the wings actually worked. But apparently not. They’re too busy muttering about the internal structures, running strange glowing stones—scrying stones, according to Geralt, he’d seen his mother use them—over their bodies and chattering about bone density and muscle mass and oxygenation levels.
“Could be prone to breaks,” Fringilla says with a frown, running the stone over Geralt’s shackled hand. Eskel clenches his hands into fists, wincing as another mage pulls his left wing out straight. They still hurt to move, even after several days. He wonders when the pain will stop. If the pain will stop, if his body is even capable of adapting to an entirely new set of limbs without screaming that something is wrong.
And they didn’t just give them wings, apparently. They’d changed everything else about their bodies, right down to their blood and their bones, and what does she mean, “prone to breaks?”
“Well?” the mage examining Eskel says, not looking up from where she’s scribbling down notes. “Test your theory.”
Geralt twists his head to the side, his bright golden eyes finding Eskel’s, holding them. Neither of them bother begging for mercy. That’s never done them any good, not at Kaer Morhen and not in this place.
Fringilla hesitates, her thumb pressing into the back of Geralt’s hand, her eyes bright in the dim room. She looks impossibly young in that moment, younger than either of them. He’s pretty sure she’s the same age as a pre-trial trainee—14? 15, at the oldest?
The other mage heaves an exasperated sigh, letting go of Eskel’s wing and storming across the room.
“Honestly,” she says, forming a fist with her right hand. “If it weren’t for your uncle I’d have you out of here faster than you could blink. You clearly don’t have the guts for advanced magic.”
For a moment, Eskel thinks she’s going to hit her. Fringilla clearly thinks the same, flinching backwards and throwing up her hands. But the other mage doesn’t even look at her. She just slams her fist into Geralt’s outstretched hand.
The crack of bone echoes around the small room.
Geralt doesn’t scream. Doesn’t even exhale. He just closes his eyes and clenches his teeth. They’ve both been hurt far worse than this. This isn’t that bad—it isn’t—it—
She snapped his bones like they were pine twigs—
“There,” the mage says with a sigh, brushing her hands together like Geralt’s skin has dirtied her. “Your theory was correct.”
***
“How are we supposed to fight like this?” Geralt whispers later, when they’re back in the dark. Back in the grave, Eskel thinks, because that’s what this feels like. They’ve been buried alive and left to rot, unseen and unseeing. Tucked into a corner like unruly children, like old and unloved dolls. Sometimes he wonders if the mages will just leave them here, see how long it takes not-quite-witchers to starve to death.
Eskel cradles Geralt’s broken hand against his chest. Presses his lips into Geralt’s forehead and hopes that everything he feels— I love you, I love you, I love you— will pass directly from his skin to Geralt’s.
“I don’t know,” he says. “But I know we’ll find a way. We always have.”
“It’s just—I knew what we were supposed to do before. Humans hated us, the world hated us, but we had a purpose. We had a job, an important one, and now...”
And now, they can’t kick a bruxa without breaking a foot. And now...could they even use a shield without their wrists snapping under a too-hard blow? Eskel gets thrown into a tree or boulder at least once per contract, it seems, there’s no way they can fight the way that they were trained.
There’s no way they can fight like witchers.
“...now we have no place,” Geralt finishes, his voice practically a whisper.
“Then we’ll make one,” Eskel says. “Even if it’s just for the two of us, we’ll make one.”
***
They’ve been in here for...hours? Days? Eskel can never tell, but he’ll say hours for the sake of his own sanity, they’ve been in there for hours when the door opens. He tenses, curling in front of Geralt like he could hope to shield him from any further harm.
“Here.”
Fringilla stands silhouetted against the hallway’s torchlight, the flickering flames casting wild shadows across her face. The smell of stew fills the room, warm and rich and reminding Eskel of long winters in Kaer Morhen, of laughter and stories and home and he thinks he might start crying right here and now.
She puts two bowls down on the ground, watching them warily, like she’s expecting them to bite her. He considers it for a moment, considers rushing her, snapping her neck, grabbing Geralt and getting the hell out of here. She’s a child, yes, but—
But so are they, really. Yearlings, the master witchers called them. They weren’t on the Path for two seasons before they were snatched off of it, before they were chained and hurt and locked away in the dark. These mages, this mage and all her sisters, saw them as easy prey.
“Thank you,” Geralt whispers, picking up one of the bowls. He smiles at her, a bit crooked. Fuck. He wouldn’t want this girl dead, not even after she made the observation that got his hand broken. Of course he wouldn’t, he’s too…
He’s too Geralt. He’s too much himself, and Eskel hates himself for thinking that.
Fringilla drops her gaze to the floor, worrying her lip between her teeth.
“You shouldn’t thank me,” she says, voice tight. Geralt opens his mouth to respond, but he can’t get a word out before she’s spinning on her heel in a swirl of skirts, leaving them in the dark.
We could have killed her, Eskel wants to say. We should, if she comes back.
Wordlessly, he stretches his fingers over the dark floor and finds his own bowl of stew. It tastes like life.
***
Weeks later, the endless routine of tests-blood-hunger-pain-sleep-breathe-recover is broken in the middle of the night. Sobs jolt Eskel out of his restless sleep and he reaches across the floor, mind a whirl of GeraltishurtGeraltisdyingGeraltneedsme before he registers that the sound is too far away and too high-pitched to be Geralt.
Geralt’s hands find his in the dark, twining their fingers together. His breath is short and sharp in Eskel’s ear, the same way it had sounded when villagers had pelted Eskel with rocks when he dared ask for more money on a werewolf contract. Like he can hold back his anger in every part of his body but his lungs.
“Are they saying anything?” Eskel asks, wondering if Geralt’s more sensitive ears can pick out something that his cannot.
“No,” Geralt grits out, his voice tight with rage. “But they’re laughing.”
Eskel swallows back a mouthful of bile and runs a hand down Geralt’s back, his fingers skirting around the base of his wings. The sobs grow louder, and Eskel can hear the laughter too now, and he grits his teeth against the burning rage in his throat. Because fighting won’t help. Defiance won’t help. There is only survival, for them and whoever else has been dragged into this hell.
The door swings open. Two of the mages’ lackeys—ginormous men with the teeth, claws, and thick skins of wolves—peer into the cell, holding a small figure between them. It’s a girl, no older than thirteen. She hangs limply between them, held up by her arms. Eskel isn’t sure if her knees have given out from terror, or if the mages have given her sedatives, or if maybe she just can’t walk. One of her shoulders is pushed up, the other down, her spine curled into a hunched shape, and he isn’t sure what kind of mobility that would leave her with.
Her eyes—a bright violet he’s never seen on a human before—go wide at the sight of them, flicking back and forth over their wings. She whimpers in fear, sinking even further down in the wolf-men’s arms. Their laughter goes louder, and Eskel flings out a hand to the side instinctively, catching Geralt before he can lunge at them. The claw marks on Geralt’s chest still haven’t healed from the last time he tried to fight them, and Eskel refuses to let him acquire any more.
“That’s it,” one of the wolf-men chuckles, shaking the girl like a ragdoll. “Listen to your master, puppy.”
“You’re one to talk,” Geralt spits. “Hanging on to the mages’ every word, letting them turn you into an actual dog—”
The wolf-man scowls, shoving the girl to the floor at their feet. She goes down with a small cry and stays there, limp, shivering with fear. Like a rabbit under the teeth of a starving fox. The wolf-man steps over her, grabbing Geralt by the throat and hoisting him into the air. Geralt chokes, clawing at the wolf-man’s arm, but his fingernails skitter off the thick hide like a sword off armor.
“No!” Eskel screams, throwing himself into the wolf-man’s side, all thoughts of survival cast out of his head. Because Geralt’s face is turning red and he’s gasping and gasping but getting no air, and Eskel can’t—
The wolf man spins to the side, gracefully, thoughtlessly, his hand a blur of glinting sharpness. And Eskel is a witcher, with a witcher’s training and a witcher’s reflexes, but he also has a massive counterweight on his back that he hasn’t yet woven into his muscle memory.
He tries to dodge.
Tries.
And then the world is red and pain and the side of his face is on fire, and he can hear a thin thready sound that he thinks is Geralt trying to scream around a crushed throat and what is happening, what is happening, what is happening to him?
“You’re right,” the wolf-man laughs. “You’re not a puppy, not anymore. You’re much more fragile than that, little birdie.”
There’s a thud, a body hitting the ground, isGeraltDeadIsGeraltDeadIsGeralt—
“You’d be wise to remember that.”
The sound of a boot hitting flesh, the crack of bone, that horrible faint scream again.
“Have fun you three,” the wolf-man cackles, and then there’s the slam of a door and the world goes dark.
“Eskel,” Geralt wheezes, and thank all the gods, he’s alive. He’s alive. Everything will be okay if he’s alive. “Eskel, oh gods.”
“S’fine,” Eskel slurs, reaching up to touch what he thinks is Geralt’s face. “You’ve always been the pretty one anyway.”
There’s a strangled noise that might be a laugh and might be a sob, and then the darkness gets even darker.
***
Water on his face. Water layered over the burning, and he thought that water’s supposed to put out fire, but it’s just making it worse. He moans, reaching up a hand to wipe it away, but barely makes contact with his skin—does he still have skin?—before a small hand wraps around his wrist and forces it back down to his side.
“No,” says a girl’s voice, young but firm. “We need to keep the wound clean, the wet rags stay on. I didn’t tear up my dress for nothing.”
“He’s awake?” Geralt says. His voice is wrecked, and Eskel moves towards it, wanting to seek out the source, to trace the bruises around his love’s throat, to press his lips against them and vow that this, this will not happen again while there’s still breath in his lungs.
The small hands are back, forcing his shoulders back down to the floor, and his muddled brain connects them to the small, sobbing girl with the crooked spine that had been forced into their cell. The one who had been practically glued to the floor with fear. Gods, how long was he out?
“Stay down,” the girl insists.
“H’long?” Eskel mumbles, hissing as the movement of his lips sends a fresh wave of pain through his face.
“A few hours,” the girl says. “I think. S’hard to tell with all the darkness.”
“You get used to it,” Geralt rasps. The girl’s hands tense on his shoulders.
“Get used to it? How long have you two been here?”
Geralt sighs. His fingers settle on Eskel’s arm, rubbing gentle circles into his skin.
“They took us just after midsummer,” he says. “I don’t know how long ago that was, but—”
“It’s almost Samhain,” the girl says. And just like that, the fire is gone from her voice again. “They—they’ve had you for four months?”
Eskel swallows. They should be heading back to Kaer Morhen by now, ready to curl up in front of a warm fire with the rest of the wolves, preparing their stories of a successful year on the Path, of monsters killed and villages saved. They shouldn’t be here, starving and shattered halfway across the Continent.
“I suppose they have,” Geralt mumbles, and Eskel knows he’s thinking the same thing.
“And they—they turned you into witchers. And gave you wings.”
“We were already witchers,” Geralt sighs. His fingers slip from Eskel’s arm to his hair. “They just—held us, for months. Tested us, observed us, took samples from us. We thought—for the longest time we thought they were trying to reverse engineer the mutagens. But then one night, a few...a few weeks ago, I think, they brought us out of the cell and…”
His voice trails off, and his fingers move quicker through Eskel’s hair. And Eskel just wants to comfort him, wants to reach up and brush the tears off Geralt’s cheeks, wants to wrap him in his arms and never let go, wants to tuck every stray feather back into place. But he can’t even lift his head off the ground.
“They gave us the wings, yeah,” he says at last.
“Do you—do you know what they want to do to me?”
“...No,” Geralt says, after a long pause. “No, I don’t. I wish—I wish I could tell you, but they’re unpredictable. And they don’t exactly tell us what their plans are.”
A quick sniffle. A shuddery breath. The sounds of someone trying desperately not to cry. Her hands come back to Eskel’s face, dabbing the damp cloth over the slash marks.
“Th’nk’you,” Eskel manages to say. She startles, her heart stuttering up a notch in tempo. “We’ll...we’ll keep y’safe, ‘kay.”
“How can you promise that?” the girl says, her voice trembling. “In a place like this...to a person like me...no one has ever ... my own parents—”
My own parents. A tale as old as the first witcher. Maybe even older. He knows he has to say something, even though every word hurts. It’s important that he gets this out. It’s important that she knows this.
“No one’s ever kept us safe either, me’n’Ger. S’why we look out for each other. S’why we’ll look out for you too. When the world doesn’t wanna protect you, best thing to do is turn t’each other.”
Another hitching breath. Another. And then the girl lets out a small wail, her hands flying off of Eskel’s face. There’s a shifting sound, cloth against stone, and he thinks she’s curling in on herself.
“Hey,” Geralt says. More shifting, and low shushing noises, the same sounds Geralt makes when consoling a spooked horse. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”
“It’s not,” the girl sobs. Her voice is muffled. Pressed into Geralt’s shirt. “It’s not, it’s not, it’ll never be okay again, it’s—”
“I’m here,” Geralt murmurs, rolling over her fear like a wave over sharp rocks. “We’re here.”
***
“What’s your name?” Eskel asks the girl later, when she’s all cried out and back to tending to Eskel’s wounds. He suspects that healing him is her way of blocking out what’s happening. There’s a ripping sound as she tears another piece of fabric from the hem of her nightgown.
“Yennefer,” she says. “Yennefer of Vengerberg.”
They’re a long way from Aedirn but he doesn’t ask her how she came to this place. He suspects he knows the answer.
My own parents.
“Pretty name,” he says instead. “I once met a princess called Yennefer, down south, one of those little Nilfgaardian vassal states. Perhaps you’re related?”
“You really think I’m royalty?” she laughs.
“Hmm...no,” he decides. “No. You’re far too kind to be a royal.”
***
The next morning (Afternoon? Night? It’s all the same in the dark.) the mages come for Yen. She screams and spits at them, and Geralt clings to her as tight as he can, baring his teeth at all those who dare to come close. Even Eskel manages to get to his feet, putting himself between the mages and the two people that he’s claimed as his own. He knows it’s helpless. He knows that, but he just...he promised that he’d protect her, he promised he’d keep her safe. He can’t just lie on the ground and let them take her.
The lead mage looks at him. Laughs. And then she draws back a hand and slaps him across the face, right over the wounds that her wolf-men had left there.
He reels back, choking on nothing, and the other mages dart past him like a swarm of flitting hornets, falling upon Geralt and Yen with spells on their fingertips. A few murmured curses and Geralt’s limbs peel away from Yen’s shaking body, their movements jerky and unnatural. And then he’s pinned to the ground like a butterfly behind glass, his wings twitching as the mages force them flat against the ground. Two of them grab Yen by the arms and haul her up, kicking and screaming.
“No!” she hollers, “No, no, no, let go of me!”
“She’s not a witcher,” Eskel pleads, eyes squinted shut against the waves of pain in his face. “She’s a kid, what possible use could you have—?”
“A test,” the lead mage says, her voice prim and smooth as ever. She frowns down at the smear of red on her hand—Eskel’s blood—before wiping it off on her skirts. “To see if even the most broken can take our...adaptations.”
“Broken? She’s not—she isn’t—” Rage steals away the rest of Eskel’s words, and the mage just laughs again.
“She isn’t? Well then, she should do just fine.”
“ Eskel!” Yen screams as she’s dragged out the door. “Geralt, help—”
The door slams shut, cutting her off. There’s a flurry of movement to Eskel’s side as Geralt lunges to his feet and flings himself at it, slamming himself against the wood like maybe this time, just maybe, it will break beneath him.
“Let her go!” he yells. “Let her go, let her—”
“Geralt, stop!”
He reaches out blindly and catches a handful of Geralt’s wing. Geralt tears away from him and throws himself at the door again, and all Eskel can think of is Geralt’s hand, Geralt’s ribs, shattering so easily from a single hit. He reaches out with both arms this time, wrapping them around Geralt’s thrashing body and pulling him back from the door.
“It won’t work,” he tells him. “It—it’s never worked, Ger. We’ve tried so many times.”
“But she—Eskel, she—”
He goes limp in Eskel’s arms, and Eskel lowers them both to the ground in a tangle of feathers and limbs.
“She kept your wounds clean,” he says. “And calmed me down, and checked my throat, and—Eskel she looked out for us. We’re supposed to—”
“We’ll be there for her when she comes back,” Eskel murmurs, reaching around Geralt’s body to smooth down a handful of stray feathers. “We will. But it’s not gonna help her if you break every bone in your body.”
“I hate this,” Geralt whispers. He wraps his arms around Eskel in turn, burying his fingers in the feathers. “I hate this, I hate this, fuck, why is this happening?”
Eskel hides his face in Geralt’s shoulder. Hugs him tighter, tighter still, like he can press both of them together and out of existence, like if he just loves Geralt hard enough, they can fall away from their bodies and everything that’s been done to hurt them.
“She’ll be okay,” he says, speaking the words like an omen. “We’ll be okay.”
***
The door creaks open, slow and tentative. He knows, even before he turns around, who will be waiting there.
“Do you know how old she is?”
Fringilla’s voice is shaky, more uncertain than Eskel’s ever heard it.
“Younger than you, I expect,” he replies, curling his hands over Geralt’s shoulders so that he doesn’t wrap them around her throat.
“I...they say we’re doing this for a greater purpose. But I can’t see what kind of purpose would make up for what they’re doing to her. What they...what we did to you.”
She leans down and places two vials on the floor.
“Swallow,” she says. “I brewed it for your injuries.”
“You know this is just going to happen again,” Geralt says as he slips forward, gathering up the medicine. “Food, potions...it’s meaningless. None of it matters as long as we’re trapped here.”
Fringilla blinks, hard and fast, like she’s trying not to cry. Some cruel, twisted up part of Eskel wants to throw that weakness in her face, to mock her for showing emotion the same way the other mages had every time he’d screamed for Geralt. But he keeps his mouth shut, because Geralt...Geralt might just be getting somewhere with her.
“You can help us in a real way,” Geralt says. “A permanent way.”
“I…” she backs away, shaking her head rapidly. “If they found out, they’d kill me. Or worse.”
“So make sure they don’t find out,” Geralt presses. “You managed to sneak down here twice now without being caught.”
“That’s different than—”
“I want you to imagine something,” he cuts her off. “I want you to ask yourself a question, alright? And think about the answer, really think about it. What’s going to happen to us?”
She stares at him for a long, long moment, her chest heaving. And then she drops her gaze to the floor.
“You already know,” Geralt murmurs. “Don’t you?”
There’s a knife lodged between Eskel’s vocal cords, slicing him every time he gathers his breath to speak. Not to ask what— he knows that, it’s obvious in the way the mages speak about their organs with excited, wide-eyed brightness—but to ask when, to ask how. He and Geralt have spent hours upon hours whispering about look, the end won’t be so bad, we’ll be free at least. They’ve murmured stories about gods and afterlives and peaceful nothingness, just to try and cover up the terror of knowing that death is so, so close to claiming them.
She closes her eyes. Makes a sound almost like a sob.
“Picture what that’ll look like,” Geralt says. He’s holding the Swallow so tightly that Eskel is scared the glass might shatter in his hand. “What that’ll smell like. They’ll probably stick you on cleanup duty, I mean, you’re practically their apprentice.”
“Stop it.”
“Or maybe they’ll have you kill us yourself. Make sure you get proper training for the field.”
“Stop it!”
She stumbles backward, her hands twitching up to cover her ears.
“One last question for you, Fringilla,” Geralt says, and his eyes are blazing as bright as a wildfire. “What will they do to you, if you refuse?”
Her lip trembles, her eyes darting from Geralt to Eskel, like he might grant her sanctuary. He just raises his chin, throwing the cuts on his face into sharp relief.
“They…” she starts. “They won’t…”
She shakes her head and throws her weight to the side, slamming the door shut.
“Well,” Eskel says, dropping his chin back to Geralt’s shoulder. “That went well.”
“She’ll be back,” Geralt murmurs. His fingers feel heavenly against Eskel’s scalp, rubbing gentle circles into his skin. “I think I got through to her.”
Eskel doesn’t bring up all the times that Geralt’s been wrong about people’s capacity for good, all the times that he’s trusted people that wound up stabbing them in the back (or side or chest). He just closes his eyes and breathes in his love’s warmth.
If they must die, at least they’ll die together. At least they have that.
***
Eskel is woken from a fitful sleep by a creaking door and a loud thud. He shoves himself into a seated position, blinking against the corridor’s light. Yen is on the ground, flung there by two chuckling wolf-men. Eskel scrambles to her side, ignoring their taunts, their jeers, their how’s your face feel, birdie?
The feathers on her back gleam like spilled lamp-oil, inky black and shining with blood. They’ve modelled her wings after a crow’s, he pretty sure, matching her black hair. Apparently aestheticism is important to these monsters. They want their creations—their experiments—to look beautiful, in some twisted way, and Eskel’s gonna be sick—
She’s breathing. It’s faint but it’s there , she’s still alive. The surgery or spell or whatever the fuck the mages did to make them like this (and Geralt knows, Geralt felt it, Geralt had to live through it— stop it, not now, focus) wasn’t able to kill her. He takes her hand in his, squeezes it tight, just in case she can feel it through whatever combination of sedatives they have her on.
Geralt huddles beside him, head ducked down, ignoring the wolf-men even as his teeth grind together. He runs his fingers through her hair, murmuring apologies under his breath. Because of course, Geralt would find some way to blame himself for this.
“Little birdies aren’t gonna sing today, I guess,” one of the wolf-men sighs, clapping a hand on the other’s shoulder. “Guess they’ve learned to behave.”
And Eskel wants to bristle and claw and show them how well-fucking behaved he is, but the cuts on his face are a fierce, burning reminder of what happens when he crosses them. He can’t risk them turning their ire, their joy at causing pain, on the crumpled-up girl in front of them. So he just ducks his head and listens to them guffaw and jostle each other and—finally, finally— leave them in the dark.
“Gods,” Eskel says uselessly. He brings Yen’s hand up to his face, lowers his forehead down to touch it. “Gods, gods, gods.”
“There are none of those here,” Geralt says. There’s a soft rustling sound, and something cool touches Eskel’s cheek, wraps around his body. Geralt’s wings. Geralt is cocooning the three of them together in a small tent of feathers, shielding them away from the rest of the world.
It won’t work. But it’s nice to pretend.
***
Yen starts fighting as soon as she wakes up. One moment she’s lying far too still in Eskel’s arms, and the next she’s squirming and screaming, her arms and legs flailing out in a dozen different directions.
“You’re okay,” Eskel lies, rubbing gentle circles into her skin. “It’s us, Yen. It’s Eskel and Geralt. The mages are gone.”
She goes limp at his words, sagging against his chest.
“Did they—” she stutters. “Did—do I have—”
“Yeah,” Eskel croaks. “Yeah, you’re—you’re like us.”
She screams into his chest. It’s cracked and thin, so full of pain that it’s almost voiceless.
“You said you would keep me safe.”
“I know,” Geralt whispers. He’s curled up behind Eskel, his head dropped down onto Eskel’s shoulder. His wings still surround them, a barrier, a last attempt to keep an already-broken promise. “I know, I know, I know.”
***
The creak of a door. Soft footsteps. Eskel can see Geralt’s wings now, a shadowy blanket around them. They shift closer, tensing as if readying for a blow.
“I’m not gonna hurt you,” Fringilla says. “I—the mages made me sit through some of the...procedure and I can’t—”
She exhales, sharp and decisive. And then she steps backwards, out of the cell.
“That never should have happened,” she says. And then there’s the sound of retreating footsteps, the swishing of skirts as Fringilla makes her way back down the hallway.
Eskel can still see Geralt’s wings, illuminated by the soft torchlight.
The door is still open.
They scramble to their feet as a single, unbalanced unit, Yen swaying back and forth as she gets used to the new weight on her back. Geralt wraps an arm around her waist, holding her steady as she finds her footing.
“We need to be quiet. There’ll be other mages around, not to mention the hounds,” Eskel murmurs, folding his wings as tight against his back as he can. Need to keep a low silhouette, need to keep a light foot. After months of not using it, his stealth training comes flooding back shockingly fast. Like a sword kept rustless and sharp by a blacksmith, just waiting for a warrior to pick it back up.
They slip from the cell one by one, creeping across the stone floor with their bare tiptoes. Yen’s breath is sharp and loud in Eskel’s ear. If this were training, if he were one of the master witchers, he’d cuff her around the ear and tell her to breathe through her nose, dammit. But this isn’t training. All he can do is hold her hand and pray that no one hears them.
It’s not far to the exit. Just down the hallway and up the stairs and into the light. As long as none of their captors come into the cellblock they should be…
“Going somewhere, little birdies?”
...fine.
Fuck.
It’s only one wolf-man but he’s stronger than the three of them combined, as starved and brittle-boned and off-balance as they are. Still, Geralt bares his teeth and steps in front of Yen, his wings rising like hackles. The wolf-man just laughs, his clawed hand brushing the ground as he bends over, preparing to strike. Eskel’s face throbs.
“You’re never leaving this place,” he says. “In fact, I think this lil escape attempt of yours is just gonna convince the mages to hasten your...disposal, shall we say? The little one they’ll probably want to keep for a while longer, make sure that the changes aren’t gonna destroy her organs. But I highly doubt they need two witchers.”
Drool pools from the wolf-man’s mouth, spattering on the ground.
“Think they’ll give us the scraps when they’re done with you? I’ve always had a taste for chicken wings.”
His eyes flit over Geralt greedily, hungrily, and Eskel has to swallow back a mouthful of bile, even as he readies himself to die fighting. Because there’s no way in hell he’s letting Geralt get dragged back into captivity with that kind of threat hanging over his head.
The wolf-man shifts his weight onto his malformed legs. He leaps forward, every muscle primed to rip and tear and destroy.
“No!”
The word reverberates around the cramped stone hallway, and Eskel is reminded of the fiddler he and Geralt had seen in a tavern once, how he had made the music fill up the space, changing it with naught but a bow and his hands. It had felt almost magical.
There’s no ‘almost’ about this though. No ‘almost’ in the way that the wolf-man’s fur bursts into flame, wreathing his body in a coat of red. No ‘almost’ in his screams of terror and pain, no ‘almost’ in the look of utter horror on Yen’s face as she raises her hands in the air.
“I—” she chokes. “I didn’t—”
“You have chaos,” Eskel tells her, unable to disguise the wonder in his voice. He’d heard of this before, of magic springing to the surface when a young mage’s life is in danger. But he’s never actually seen chaos like this at work.
She tips forward into Geralt, blinking rapidly. Eskel’s not sure if it’s shock or exhaustion caused by magic, but either way they don’t have time to wait for her to get better. Already he can hear shouts and stomping feet from deeper in the compound. They’ll be here any second.
Geralt hoists Yen up in his arms, cradling her awkwardly against his chest. The tips of her wings brush the ground and one of her arms hangs down, limp and powerless. Her wide eyes scan the ceiling like it holds the answer to what just happened.
“Gotta go,” Geralt grunts. “We’ll figure this out later.”
Eskel nods, and together they dart up the stairs and into the bright, October daylight.
He had almost forgotten what the sun looked like. The sight of it stops his breath fast in his throat, makes him stumble in the middle of their mad dash for freedom. Next to him, Geralt squints upward, his wings twitching as he scans the sky.
“Do you...do you think we could…?”
He trails off but Eskel knows what he’s thinking. There is one good thing that might have come out of all this, if their wings are actually usable. The sky could be theirs.
“I dunno,” he says. “But we shouldn’t test it, not now.” Not when there are monsters nipping at their heels, not when Geralt has a teenager’s weight dragging him down. They can’t waste time trying and failing to fly.
Geralt nods, hoists Yen further up in his arms. Her eyes are closed now, but her heartbeat and breathing are both steady. Just exhausted. She’ll be fine. She will.
“Guess we gotta escape the old fashioned way then.”
They run for the woods.
***
“We can’t rest for long,” Geralt says, depositing Yen on the floor of the cave they’d found after five hours of running. “Gods only know what kind of tracking magic they have.”
Yen mumbles something, reaching out her hands. Geralt smiles, exhaustion written on every line of his face, and gives her his arm to cling to.
“Seems like she’s coming to, at least,” Eskel says, flopping on the ground next to Geralt. He feels just as tired as Geralt looks, every muscle screaming in protest at the idea of further movement. The two of them had traded off the duty of carrying Yen. Normally, this kind of running and lifting would be thoughtlessly easy for a witcher, the kind of work that could be expected out of an average contract even. But they haven’t moved this much in four months, and they’re starved and hurt and gods know how else the mages had changed their bodies—
Nope. No time for a mental breakdown right now. You can have one when you’re safe.
“Hopefully she can run by tomorrow,” Geralt says. He leans back against the wall of the cave, closing his eyes. The faint light of the setting sun does strange things to his face, highlighting the bruises, the caverns of his cheeks, the dark circles under his eyes. It makes him look smaller than he is. More fragile than he is.
Witchers are supposed to be special, they’re supposed to be strong, they’re supposed to be something more. Geralt more so than any of them. But in this moment, he looks like just another terrified nineteen-year-old struggling under the weight of his own survival.
Eskel presses himself into the side of Geralt that isn’t occupied by a clingy child, trails his fingers up Geralt’s spine. They settle at the point where his wings meet his torso, pressing down against the muscle. Geralt sighs, unfolding his legs and relaxing into the touch.
“Feels nice,” he mumbles.
“Yeah? I always feel a bit sore right here, figured you’d be the same.”
“Mmm.”
For a moment he thinks that’s all he’s gonna get, that Geralt’s gonna drift off to sleep and leave Eskel with first watch. But then he speaks, his voice quiet and uncertain.
“The hot springs would feel nice.”
Eskel stares at him for a moment, and there’s an ache in his heart that he can’t put words to. Because of course Geralt wants to go home, despite the fact that the master witchers will do gods-know-what to them for disobeying, for getting themselves captured. He loves too easily, too fiercely, too wholly. Of course he’s not going to leave his family behind.
And of course Eskel’s not going to leave him behind.
“They would,” he agrees, pressing his lips against Geralt’s temple. “You’re right, they would.”
It’s peaceful. More peace than they’ve had in a long time.
Of course it doesn’t last.
***
“Eskel. Eskel.”
He opens his eyes with a mumble of confusion. Geralt is kneeling over him, his eyes blown wide in the soft dawn light trickling in through the mouth of the cave. Yen is sitting up next to him, a look of exhausted terror on her face.
“What’s wrong?” Eskel asks, instantly awake.
“The wolves,” Geralt says, clawing at Eskel’s arms, dragging him to his feet. “I can hear them. They can smell us, or hear us, or something, I’m sure of it. We need to run. Now.”
***
The peace can’t last.
The freedom can’t last.
They can’t last.
The woods rush around them in a blur of orange and brown. He can hear the wolf-men growling too now, snapping at each other not ten meters behind them. Geralt runs beside him, his mouth set in a grim line, his hand a vice around Yen’s. She’s sobbing, stumbling every few steps, but forcing herself to push on.
Still, the wolf-men are gaining, slowly but steadily. Any moment now, they’ll be caught, torn apart, or brought back to the mages to be torn apart more slowly. Eskel shakes his head, as if he can bat away the thought of Geralt, chained down to a table and—gods, would they kill him before they started, since the sedative didn’t work on him? Or would they do it while he was alive and awake, stare at his heart as he screamed in agony—
“What do we do?” Geralt gasps next to him. “Eskel, what the hell do we—?”
“We keep running,” Eskel pants, because that’s all he can think of. That’s all he has left. “We just—we keep running until we find somewhere to hide.”
There’s nowhere to hide. He knows that. Geralt knows that. The wolves are too close. And they already found them once.
Still, they keep crashing through the undergrowth, out of all ideas but run. And it’s thinning around them—shit is there a lake up ahead? A river? They’ll be well and truly trapped if that’s the case, trapped between the water and the monsters with nowhere to go.
And then the trees open up around them and Eskel yanks himself back, fighting against his own frantic momentum. Beside him, Geralt and Yen do the same. Yen screams a little, before clapping a hand over her mouth, darting a frantic glance behind them.
There’s no point, Eskel wants to tell her. They know we’re here. They herded us here.
“Here” is a sheer cliff face a hundred feet in the air. There’s nowhere left to run.
It’s over.
They’re over.
He grits his teeth, bringing up his hands. He has no sword, no armor, no weapons at all. The dimeritium cuffs have stolen even his signs from him. But he’s still a witcher, and he won’t go down without a fight.
“Yen,” he says. “Get behind us.”
“No,” she sobs. “No, I’m gonna fight with you. We turn to each other, right?”
Her chaos is young. Powerful but fragile, capable of cracking, shattering even if she stretches it the wrong way. And she doesn’t have the element of surprise on her side this time—the wolf-men will be expecting her fire, will have spells and shields to counter it, if they’re smart.
She’d freed them. She made it so that Eskel doesn’t have to die in a cage. And he’ll be indebted to her for that, in this life and the next. But she can’t keep them free, Eskel knows. Geralt knows too, judging by his darting eyes, his trembling hands.
“Yen—” Geralt tries, his scream-torn voice soft around the edges. She doesn’t let him get another word out.
“It might k-kill me but at least you’ll be free,” she says. “T-that’s better than all of us—”
“No,” Geralt says firmly. He puts a hand on her crooked shoulder and squeezes gently. “We’re witchers. We don’t let kids die for us.”
“I’m n-not—”
“Yes. You are. And I’m so sorry that you’ve never been treated like one.”
Her face crumples. And then Geralt has an armful of sobbing girl, her face buried in his chest. He cups her head in her hands, shooting Eskel a desperate, furious look. We’re going to die, it says. She’s going to die. And that’s unacceptable, it’s not fair. That’s Geralt’s biggest weakness. He’s always wanted the world to be fair, ever since he was a child.
And Eskel’s biggest weakness? It’s that he listens to him. That he’d do anything, anything at all, just to help the world make a bit more sense for his love. He’d tear apart mountains, or dig new oceans, or pull down a star if he thought it could help Geralt sleep a little easier.
He’d learn how to fly.
Goddammit.
He drops his hands. The screams of the wolf-men are drawing closer and closer. He can smell damp fur, the rotten-meat warmth of their breath. If he focuses hard enough, he can even make out their heartbeats. Any second now.
“They don’t have wings,” he says.
Geralt’s furious look melts into one of confusion.
“If we jump,” Eskel continues, gesturing to the cliff, “they won’t be able to follow us.”
Yen sobs, curling tighter into Geralt’s embrace. Geralt’s brow furrows.
“We don’t know how to fly,” he says slowly.
“Guess we gotta learn quick then.”
Geralt closes his eyes. Exhales, long and slow.
It will be quicker, Eskel would tell him, if it were just the two of them. And less painful. Falling doesn’t hurt nearly as much as...whatever they’ll do to us.
“It’s our best option,” he says instead. “We all know it.”
“No,” Yen hiccups, peeling herself away from Geralt. “No, I can fight them, I can burn them all, I can—”
Eskel kneels down so that he can look her full in the face.
“You don’t have to sacrifice yourself,” he says. “I promised you we’d look out for each other, yeah? And I’ve done a shit job at keeping that promise so far. Please let me keep it now.”
“But we could all die. Instead of—it would just be me—”
“And that would be unacceptable.”
He takes her face in his hands, wipes away the tears. He wishes he could do more for her in this maybe-last moment. He wishes that these few seconds could stretch into eternity. That he could help her breathe easier, make her laugh. That he could find the words to tell Geralt how much he truly loves him. That they could all hold each other.
But there’s no time. So instead he says—
“We die together or we live together. Okay?”
She takes a shaky breath. Her eyes dart from him to the cliff.
“Okay,” she whispers. “Alright.”
There’s a cackle from the undergrowth, and he can see figures shoving aside the brush. They’re out of time.
He squeezes Yen’s hand, lets go, and turns to face the cliff. The wide blackness of the forest stretches below him, trees pressed so close together he can’t see the ground beneath them. The sun is creeping over the horizons, sprinkling specks of gold amidst the darkness. It’s almost like looking into the night sky.
Not a bad resting place, all things considered. And he doesn’t want to die. He doesn’t want Yen to die. He can barely even consider Geralt…
But. They’re free. They’re together. They get to die or live with the sun in their eyes.
It’s enough.
He takes a deep breath, almost like plunging into deep water, and leaps over the side. Behind him, he can hear Geralt gasping, Yen screaming. He blocks it all out and opens his wings.
They catch the air, or the air catches them, and he flaps with all his might, picturing the songbirds that woke them up every day at Kaer Morhen. And then, just like a dream, only better, because he’s here, he’s here, he’s actually here—
He’s flying.
The wind slips through his hair as he rises, twisting his head around to see Geralt and Yen following him. Relief rushes through him as their wings catch the air currents, buoying them up to soar beside him. There’s a wild grin on Geralt’s face, and he laughs like he did before the trials, simple boyish delight over something impossible. Yen looks far more shocked than delighted, shocked at her survival, their survival, the power in her own limbs. But even she smiles, flapping her wings experimentally and pulling ahead of them.
And just like that, they’re a strange little flock, flying north for the winter instead of south. And Eskel knows that his life—all of their lives—are always going to be different. Just like the trials, there will always be a before and an after. Their bones are hollow, and their nightmares are full of new kinds of monsters, and maybe their family won’t welcome them home.
But the wolves are howling on the ground below, furious but powerless to stop them.
The sky is theirs now.
