Chapter Text
(Art by mercinsm on tumblr!)
Tissaia didn’t know where she would have been if not for the river. The softly rushing water that perpetually flowed on some distance from her house. It saturated the ground deep down, filling the well even in the drier months. It provided her with water for her crops that she grew in her little garden, refreshed her every morning and evening when she bathed and of course, it was the source for the water she needed during her sculpting.
Years ago, before Tissaia fled from the isle of Thanedd, she had lived a very different life than that of a sculptor in a house all by herself. Well, perhaps not so much. She had been a different kind of sculptor. Metaphorically, she had also formed many young women from rough material to a smooth statue. Such had been her work, as rectoress of the esteemed academy of Aretuza. She had been there for more than two decades, diligently fulfilling her duties day in, day out.
Then, there had been the coup. In hindsight, she should have seen it coming. The betrayal, the fighting, the fire. But it had been too late, when she had realised that there would be no option to maintain the old ways she had been taught and had taught herself. It had been moments too late, and those moments had mattered everything.
“I could have been more graceful about it,” she said, one dewy morning, as she disrobed and stepped into the shallows of the river. Tissaia spoke to its waters, because there was no one else she could speak to. “But I was panicked. You know that few things ever panic me. I suppose it was the unexpected that did me in. Still, still… I could have been more graceful.”
A hastily written letter and the remnants of the sacrificial blood for the altars, which had been performed before the banquet, sprinkled onto her desk. That had been the goodbye of Tissaia de Vries. Many months later, on the other side of the Continent, she had found a place where no one knew her name. Somewhere she could live in peace, but forever in shame of the downfall she could not prevent.
“It has gotten easier,” she said to the river when she climbed up onto the pier she had built. It was neither big nor special. Just a few wooden planks and some sturdy logs anchored deep into the bank. It flooded completely in the wet season and she had to replace some of the planks often. “The more I work, the less I think about it. That way, you will not have to hear me lament about the same things every morning and evening.”
She had heard the many legends about water gods, nymphs and spirits. Never seen one, naturally. If there had been any in the river to begin with, surely her complaining in the beginning of her time by its banks had scared them all off.
Sculpting had been her hobby for a long while. Something she had tried to pursue in her youth, something she had always been admirably good at. Unfortunately, her teaching skills had been far more wanted, and thus her life had taken a different path. After the fall of Aretuza, however, she had spent some years honing her craft until she could live from it.
“Live is a strong word. Not in any capacity close to how I used to,” she reminded herself, before realising that she had stood still in the river for a while. “ Ah, well, enough of that,” she murmured as she towelled herself dry and put on her clothing.
It was nothing like the dresses and cloaks she had worn at Aretuza. No, this was clothing fit for hard work. A tunic of sturdy fabric, reaching over her knees and pinned at the shoulders, then a half-cape when it was colder. When at work, she wore a leather apron to protect the fabric underneath from the dust and grit. She usually went barefoot in her house, but today she needed her sandals. Once she had laced those, she went on her way.
It was market day. Tissaia didn’t have a lot of time to admire her workspace. Still, as per her routine, she opened the doors and pulled the curtains to the sides so the light could shine in. Then she made her way through the large hall to collect figurines and other small sculptures to sell. The middle of the hall was open, free of crates and scaffolding. There were a few tables she could fold down from the walls, on which she made her smaller works. But the middle had been unoccupied for quite a while. No matter, Tissaia did not often have money for large blocks of marble regardless.
She collected her wares and loaded the crates into her small wagon. Then, once she had spanned her mule before the wagon, she set out for the market. Even with the mule, it was almost an hour on a good day. There was always this moment when she could not hear the river anymore, which was a moment of brief sadness.
At the market, she had a routine like at home. Announce her presence by the overseer, head to her stall and begin to unpack her wares. This week, it was sadly largely the same as what she had brought the week prior. The town was not that large, perhaps people had grown tired of her sculptures. Still, she tirelessly arranged her crafts. Small, decorative sculptures of soapstone at the front, many looked like trinkets from nature like animals and leaves. She had a few sets of game pieces as well, with wooden boards to match. There were some stone bowls and cutting boards, slate for writing and a few larger artworks. One, her most recent finished work, was a bust of a young woman in red marble. She was both quite proud of it and wanted to sell it as soon as she could. Not because of the money, but because she had unwittingly caught a bit of the likeness of one of the girls she had taught. This bust bore a resemblance to red-haired Coral, with her wild locks and wilder grin.
It sold at around midday, a heavy pouch of coins being exchanged from a man she had not seen before. His clothing looked foreign, something Tissaia took note of when he left with the bust on his cart. As she stowed the money away, she leaned in the direction of the woodworkers’ stall next to hers.
“Where is my benefactor from?” she asked.
One of the women manning the stall snickered as she stepped closer. “Trading caravan. It arrived yesterday. Let’s hope their pockets are lighter when they leave, eh, Tissaia?”
“Let us hope that indeed,” Tissaia replied with a small smile of her own before returning to the stool behind her stall.
It wasn’t quite the end of the market day yet, but eventually she left her wares briefly in the care of the woodworkers. She had made quite a profit, much more than usual thanks to the folks from the trading caravan. Such money she should put to use, and the time to make purchases was coming to an end. With quick but determined steps, she stalked to the far end of the market, near the road that led out of the town. She passed by an ensemble of musicians that played not unpleasantly, so she tossed them a coin.
Her destination was the workmen from the marble quarry. They stood near the fountain with their list of prices for different blocks of stone. Usually, Tissaia bought smaller pieces from other salesmen, rather than at the source. But today, she felt emboldened by the profit she had made. Thus, she stifled her lingering discomfort surrounding the large purchase she was about to make, ignored a joke from one of the men about her height and ordered a large, rectangular block of marble. It was certainly higher than she was tall.
Once home, freshened up and having dinner, she mulled over her decision. Tissaia wasn’t often someone who second-guessed herself. Then again, she wasn’t often someone to make an impulsive purchase either. But, she told herself, she still had plenty of smaller works to sell as she worked on the large piece. Either way, she could not cancel the order by the quarry now. It would be a treat for herself, something to get lost in. Perhaps, something to finally put her old regrets to rest for good.
~~~
It arrived ten days later. Tissaia, who had expected it to take a little longer, came out of her workshop in her working clothes, dusting off her hands on her leather apron before tentatively greeting the men who came to bring her purchase. She was keenly aware that she had fine soapstone dust on her hands and likely in her hair as well. Thus, she didn’t waste a lot of time with pleasantries, instead moving to open the largest door of her workspace. It was half the wall, needing to be pushed sideways so it folded double lengthwise. Enough for the marble block to be rolled in on a number of logs.
Now that she stood beside it, Tissaia found it definitely bigger than she had expected. In the middle of her workshop it looked cumbersome, the white out of place against the wood, earth and grey stone of the building. But it was there now, and Tissaia could only remove it by sculpting. And she could only start sculpting once the idea for her next artwork had settled within her mind. In theory, it was quite simple. In reality, she first had to clean up the soapstone figurines she had been making at one of her tables, wash her hands in a bucket and retrieve her drawing gear.
When she had finally set everything up, it was later than she had expected. The sun crept nearer to the horizon, its light slowly colouring orange. The situation made Tissaia frown and almost decide against getting her sketchbook. But the stone was here now, and she desperately wanted to make a start, if only because she knew that the best way to let ideas come to fruition was to sleep a night on them. But then there had to be an idea to begin with.
She climbed the ladder to the upper level of the workshop. It was nothing more than a small gallery, a couple planks that jutted out from the wall, almost the entire way around the inner space. She used them to walk around and look at her art from above, or to open the large sections in the roof to let more light in, as she was planning to do now. With some effort, the wood slid aside and the light of the setting sun blanketed the interior of the workshop.
Instantly, the marble seemed softer, more malleable, more fit to work with. The light did wonders, highlighting the soft veins of whiter stone that snaked over the block. Tissaia was so intrigued by the sudden transformation that she stopped, not quite ready to take up her sketchbook yet. Instead, she slowly walked around the stone a few times, mapping out the changes in colour, narrowing her eyes and trying to imagine the shapes she could draw forth from them. The sculpture would become more natural if she went along with what the stone had already drawn out for her. It was a good place to start.
She put her writing gear onto the parchment, copying a particular band of lighter colour that curled in the top of the block. A flowing lock of hair, perhaps. The end of it was starkly contrasted with a darker swathe in the stone, which melted back into the lighter colours lower down. Where the lighter shades of white cut into the darker, Tissaia ran her finger over the stone. She traced it in her sketchbook, underneath the other line. This one was supple and flowing as well, in the way that a vine could drape itself over a beam of wood. Or in the way that clothing can flow over the curves of a body.
There was a very subtle jut on one side of the stone. The edge was just not quite smooth when she ran her hand over it. In the whorls, the small diversions of colour in the white, she slowly but surely started to see a shadow of the art it could become. Avidly, Tissaia drew what she saw, notating on several pages in her sketchbook the things that the stone revealed to her as she walked around and around it. She found that she could only stop when the air became too chilly and the light of the sun had truly started to fade.
Unlike most other days, she barely gave herself time to eat dinner calmly. After quickly washing her plate and pan in the river, murmuring an apology for her haste, she took the pages out of her sketchbook and laid them out on her table, in an attempt to piece together some imagery. She laid the pages over one another, held them up against the light of her lantern, shuffled them around and repeated. There. They started to come together, causing a small smile to appear on her mouth, as hesitant as the drawings seemed to reveal their secrets. But they did, as the night went on.
Tissaia traced lines from one sheet onto the other, piecing together her sketches into a second work. The line on top remained the flowing hair she had seen instantly, she decided that the darker patch of stone underneath could work as head and shoulders, the lighter band that cut into it as the hem of a dress. It would be a loose garment, then, a length of cloth that draped over the body of her sculpture. The long hair suggested a woman, and Tissaia wanted to sculpt a woman. Someone careless in her elegance, as the lines on her parchment suggested. The way the body seemed to curve would mean a sitting position, but there had been a line on the marble that fit so well as an arm that Tissaia couldn’t ignore it.
A woman, then. Sitting in a relaxed way, leaning one one hand, the other across her lap in a relaxed way, but not limp. Her body twisted a bit, following the natural patterns in the stone. Full lips, a firm nose, her hair flowing down the back of her neck on one side. A loose dress in folds over her body.
Tissaia drew back from her paper, suddenly shaken out of the daze, the intense concentration that had taken her. She blinked, feeling her eyes briefly strain to focus on anything else than the sketches. A gasp escaped her, when she finally did look again. The woman she had drawn seemed to stare at her, her eyes piercing and her lips in an almost mocking smile. Tissaia looked back with a kind of annoyance. She felt cold, the chill of the night having snuck up on her as she was engrossed into her work.
But this woman, the drawing, continued to try to mock her. She did not look like any face that Tissaia had ever seen. She did not look like Triss, curls and freckles and smiles. Nor like Sabrina, sharp and stern, confident. Certainly not like Vanielle, gentle and soft with her hesitant smile. Or wild Coral, with her crooked grin and fiery hair. Philippa, haughty, with her dark eyes and the ever-calculating gaze in them.
Tissaia could continue to list examples from every class she had ever taught, but none of them seemed to be like this woman. It was vexing, truly. So much so that she eventually placed the drawing in her sketchbook with a discontented sigh and went to bed, trying not to see the woman every time she closed her eyes.
~~~
The next day, Tissaia began with shaping the rectangular block of marble in the general dimensions of what she had drawn up. This meant to round off the upper corners, take large pieces out at the sides, until the shape was more organic and slightly less massive. She had the sketch pinned on a wooden board on the wall, where the woman drawn seemed to stare unflinchingly into the workshop.
Wealthier sculptors had assistants to do the rough work, Tissaia knew. People who were not hiding from the past, she bitterly added in her mind. It was hard work, this part. Whereas the fine sculpting was taxing for her fingers and hands, this rougher work required all the strength she had in her arms and back. The tools she had to use were heavier, almost cumbersome in their use. Both the tools and she required copious rinses and refreshes in cool water from the river. Sometimes, she even waded up to her knees into the water for a while.
When she’d had enough of a break, she headed into the workshop again, starting to move the large pieces of marble aside so she could start with the other side of the block. Some of the bigger ones were usable for smaller artworks, but most of the grit she saved in sacks. It was good to make rough paths from, in her garden, or to give to the river to polish and carry it away.
The river. Her mind always wandered to the river whenever she was cleaning her workspace. While she had hiked a fair way up its course, she had never seen the source. She knew all about it, however. It was a famous legend in the area, one of the first things Tissaia had heard when she settled there. When she had a menial task at hand, she sometimes recalled it.
A long time ago, centuries at least, there had been a battle between the gods of the south and north. They had brought their armies to a place called Sodden Hill. Armies containing all manner of creatures and beings. This river had been one of them, a naiad, a water nymph. She, along with the rest of the defenders of the north, had fought bravely against the invaders and won, against all odds. However, she had died not long before their victory, and during her last breath she had abandoned her mortal form and became the river that sprung from the heart of the blackened battlefield. Her waters had put out the raging fire, the ash had darkened the stream for years. It saddened Tissaia, to think of such things.
The days slowly waned into weeks, the marble slowly gave way to the form Tissaia wanted to see within. She overworked herself in the beginning, waking up with aching arms too painful to use the heavy chisel and mallet with. As she busied herself with the soapstone figurines again, she sometimes found herself staring accusingly at the sketch of the woman she had drawn. It was silly, she knew. Maybe the loneliness was finally getting to her.
It would be nice, to have some company. Especially now that she went to the market less often. The statue truly took up more time than any project had in the years she had been living on her own. Even the busts didn’t consume her attention so, though they took longer to make because she didn’t spend weeks after one another working on them. It was as if this statue was aching to be made, to be born by her hands. Tissaia dismissed the thought.
It would be nice, to have someone to speak to. To be able to exercise her voice in a different way than talking to the river. To have someone who properly talked to her, unlike the smalltalk at the market stalls. Perhaps it would even be nice to receive comments on her art that were not from clients who wished to buy it. Tissaia stopped chiselling when she found that thought going through her mind. When had she become so sentimental in isolation?
She picked up a soaked rag from the bucket of river water and wiped the marble clean of dust. It had been three months since she had bought the block, and now the shape of the woman was starting to be mapped out properly. To Tissaia’s own surprise, she had left the bottom of the stone mostly intact, only roughening the straight, smooth edges and hard corners into something a touch more natural. Something like the texture of the rock faces higher up the river’s path.
“Now then…” she mused, placing her tools on a table and washing her hands. “Shall we reveal you?”
There was a kind of reverence in her voice that had been much rarer in the past. Maybe sometimes she spoke to one of the girls she had taught like that, on the day of their graduation, but otherwise Tissaia steered clear of that emotion. Truly, she had changed in her isolation. She wasn’t certain whether it was for the better or not.
That evening, she brought a full sack of stones to the river. Carefully, she rolled the cart in as deep as it could go, before taking a metal scoop and bringing one portion after another to the deeper waters. Sometimes she wondered what effect her sculpting efforts had on the river, if people further downstream noticed the fragments she strewed into the waters. Perhaps with this pale marble, they would.
Caught up in her thoughts as she was, unusually so, Tissaia suddenly found herself slipping on the pebbles in the river, tumbling. The scoop flew from her hand as she moved to catch herself. Her pride was more bruised than her body, because she avoided falling hard. Perhaps only her left elbow would be a bit blue by morning.
“What was that all about?” she asked aloud, half scolding herself, half at the river whose smooth stones had rolled under her feet so suddenly. Unsurprisingly, there was no answer but the calm tinkling of the streaming water. It almost sounded like a laugh of sorts.
~~~
Tissaia worked through the changing seasons, as the heat of summer slowly cooled down. It made sculpting easier, less sweat accumulated in her thick working clothes, the leather apron wasn’t exactly letting heat escape either. But as she shaped and polished the marble, time flew by.
She had put off working on the woman’s face for a bit, only roughing out the dimensions of it. Hair, chin and nose. However, she could not avoid it forever, so when the day came that she had finished polishing the collarbone area until the marble had the softness of skin itself, she stepped back from the statue with a huff.
It was not that often that Tissaia was immediately so proud of herself when looking at a work in progress. Now however, the sheer scale of the work before her took her breath away slightly when she looked upon it from a small distance. Still, she was not satisfied. She took a wet rag and carefully wiped the dust from the neck and collarbones of the sculpture. The cut that the neckline of the dress made was quite deep and plunging, the chest almost seeming warm and soft where it was bared. Because it was white, the fabric looked sheer, like waves that curled around this woman’s form.
A shuddering breath left Tissaia when she cleaned the fine dust from the shoulders of the marble body. She could not become overtaken by a blush at the action of cleaning a work she had made with her own hands, she told herself. Thus, she stubbornly cleaned the creases of her work until the torso had a gleam of water on it. Tomorrow, she would start with the face.
And what a face it was. The details took Tissaia two more months, each day using her smallest tools for the job, anointing the statue with litres of clear river water to wash away the dust, standing on ladders and stools to get in the best positions to capture the woman she had sketched those first days.
Once she was done, Tissaia felt as though she had sculpted herself a companion, such heart had she poured into the artwork.
It was almost as if she had not truly intended to make the marble woman look as she did. As if something else had sometimes controlled her hands and tools. Though when Tissaia looked at her sketch, she saw the same kind of boldness, translated from paper to smooth marble.
Even though the eyes were wrought from blank stone, they carried the challenging, piercing gaze of the sketch. Perhaps this was helped along by the defined jawline of the woman and the slight frown of her dark eyebrows. She was slender, but carried a sort of strength in her posture, the lines of her shoulders and back.
She sat on an uneven underground, the same marble as she had been hewn from. Tissaia had wanted to sculpt a pillar underneath the bent elbow the woman was leaning on, but eventually she had decided it looked better if she would keep it rough.
The sculpture looked like a goddess, yet so intensely human at the same time. Her beauty was a kind of divine, Tissaia had ensured that. But her features were so bold that she could close her eyes and imagine them coming to life as a person. At that moment, when Tissaia stepped back from her finished work to admire it, she wouldn’t have wanted to part with it for a fortune.
But it was late, and the creeping cold of the night was starting to seep into the workshop. With some difficulty, Tissaia tore her gaze from the statue and retrieved a large cloth to cover it with, to shield it against the elements and the vermin that sometimes got into her workshop.
There was a certain longing deep within her, when she was heading to her house. Unable to stop herself, she looked back into the workshop. Berating herself for her fickle impulse, she walked up to the covered statue again and took the protective cloth off. The reddish light from the setting sun shone through the opening of the door, the only source of light in the workshop. In the rosy dusk, the marble took on a different tint.
Tissaia found herself sucking in a breath through her teeth, for the white had turned to soft, supple skin under the glow of the sun’s last rays. She stared with open mouth at her creation, completely transfixed. Reaching out, she placed her hand in the crook of the woman’s arm, almost disappointed when nothing more than cold stone met her touch.
Suddenly, with a shock and a scare, she retracted her hand, stiffly clenching her fist to her chest. This was folly, she told herself. It’s just a statue, no matter how beautiful it looked. She would search for a potential buyer in town the very next day.
~~~
She went to sleep early that day, trying to bury her unease in the dreamworld, hoping she would wake up refreshed of the impulses that had taken her so abruptly. While sleep took her quickly, as she was tired from the day of putting the finishing touches to the statue, she was shaken from it shortly after the sun’s last rays had disappeared.
A loud crash woke her, had her sitting upright in the blink of an eye, panting. With a shock, she grasped around for the lantern, extinguished as it was. She almost fell over her own feet in her haste, because to her horror she realised the sound had come from the workplace. Once she had located her flint and steel, alighted the lantern and put on a mantle over her sleeping clothes, she sped barefoot towards the building.
As she pushed open the heavy door, she wondered what could have happened. Her heart hammered in her chest, for she knew there was only one object heavy enough to have caused such a loud crash. The marble statue she had poured so much of herself into. But it had been standing free in the middle of the workshop, covered by the cloth, no hazards in sight. All of her ladders were secured, nothing could have fallen onto it unless the roof itself had collapsed. But the carrying logs were sturdy and she checked for woodworms often. There was no storm that could have ripped the roof open either.
Still, the statue had fallen. Tissaia gasped when she had pushed the door open and shone her lantern into the workspace. It lay broken in disarray on the floor of the workshop, marble flakes everywhere, the footing still upright but the rest demolished.
“No…” Tissaia whispered as she walked up to the mess. She felt her chest tighten and her throat clench. Her largest, perhaps most beautiful and definitely most challenging, time consuming work, in shambles from unknown causes. Tissaia was almost reluctant to approach, reluctant to embrace the reality before her.
Perhaps someone had broken into her workshop. They could still be hiding somewhere. Tissaia scanned her workshop with the lantern in hand, suddenly feeling very exposed and vulnerable. She could sprint for one of her tools if she had to, but she was not a physically strong woman. Finally, there was movement other than herself. But in the last place she had expected it.
The statue moved. It shivered and it made a sound too. A soft groan.
Tissaia was almost too surprised to move. Surprised, then frightened. She had made this statue, slaved over it for months, polished every inch. And now it was moving. She knew the stories of the gods, the legends and the tales that were embedded in the culture of the Continent. Her mind went to the festivities and the rituals at the temples. Those were the places where supernatural things could happen. Not in her own workshop.
Still, she approached. It was her workshop, after all.
The light of the lantern washed over the figure on the floor. A woman, dressed in an almost sheer, white gown with decorative golden threads, precisely as she had imagined it to be when she had shaped the stone. Marble dust coloured her skin greyish, stuck to her black hair and clothing, but a breath rippled through her form, startling Tissaia anew. Then she saw the eyes. A shock of purple. No human could have had purple eyes. Whichever being she was looking at in her dark workshop, it was nothing she had ever seen before.
Just when she was doubting what to do next, because the unknown woman could be dangerous, since gods were fickle, another shock went through her body. She lifted her head, thick trails working their way through the marble dust on her cheeks. A sob spilled from her lips. The woman was crying. Perhaps the pain of sudden existence was so great.
Tissaia knelt down, placing the lantern on the floor and hesitating a moment before reaching out. Where before she had expected to feel warm skin but had met cold stone, now it was the other way around. When she laid her hand on the woman’s arm, it felt so utterly human.
“It’s alright… let me help you,” she murmured, fighting down her own bewilderment in favour of wiping the marble flakes out of the woman’s hair. Her efforts were met with a soft gasp, a jerk of her head and a flash of anger in those purple eyes.
“Where am I?” the woman asked in a biting, rough voice which sounded as if she hadn’t used it in a long time.
“You are in my workshop. I am a sculptor, my name is Tissaia. I live near a river, in the south of the Continent.” Speaking slowly, deliberately slowly, Tissaia hoped that as shocked by her sudden existence the woman was, she would not turn against her. She was but mortal, her statue that had come to life was clearly something more.
The woman’s face turned to a snarl, then set in a tension-filled expression. “Bring me to that river,” she demanded, slowly sitting up and looking down at her hands.
Yes, the river. It made sense, the woman was still covered with the remnants of the marble shell she had burst from. Tissaia helped her up, supporting her as she slowly led her through the still open door of the workshop and down the riverbank. Once in the shallows with the water coming up to her knees, her companion’s legs suddenly buckled and she fell into the river. Tissaia could just avoid going in after her, barely holding onto the lantern.
The woman seemed to be alright, though. Scooping water up with her hands, she cleaned the marble dust and flakes from her body and hair. The dress was definitely more than sheer when it was wet and, out of decency, Tissaia averted her eyes to the woman’s face. With every scoop of water, more of her features were revealed. But Tissaia already knew them, she had sculpted them herself after all. To see them set in flesh was something different though. The bold nose, slightly wavy hair, those eyes that never lost their penetrating gaze.
The silence apart from the quiet splishing of the water became pressing, so Tissaia opened her mouth to speak. “What is your name?” she asked. But a statue come to life, a being seemingly so freshly created, inexplicably and unknowingly by her own hands, might not even have a name, she realised. “Or a moniker of sorts, if you don’t know. I could try to think of something-”
“I
have
a name,” the woman interrupted. She wiped her brow, the indignant look in her eyes never leaving Tissaia’s lighter ones. “My name is Yennefer.”