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She feels the chafe at her wrists, the metal digging into the skin. Another mark. Another slash. Where they bite into her, the ghosts underneath them whisper. They say I already got to me first. Take that, Nilfgaard. After all, what’s another scar? Something about being perfect has never felt quite right with her anyway, even though she’s wanted it her entire life.
She isn’t sure how long she stares. Time doesn’t exist here anymore. She’s blood and ash too. Part of her becomes the terror of the minds she slams into. Part of her becomes the scooped out core they have become. All of her, every emotion, she is consumed by. Nothing changes the fact that there is no Yennefer.
Days pass and the things that should heal feel as if they never will. Sodden has done this to her. A definitive before and after. Whoever she was before will never exist again now that she has brought the hot licking of flames to thousands. Ever since she has lost it. Did the dimeritium steal it? Did she use it all at the behest of someone whom she never imagined giving her whole soul to until she said ‘please?’ There’s got to be something, somewhere. With an elf, growing in a forest. She cares naught. There must be an answer in this void.
How many ways can you strip a brain? She finds out. Every morning, every night. It’s clockwork. She wants his days to burn and his nightmares to begin with her forcing her way inside of his mind. There’s never even a whisper of her though. Her heart leaps when she sees flames inside of him, but there is never Yennefer of Vengerberg. Her own clockwork is the stumbling back into the room that overlooks the sea. The looking at the list of names, the one she refuses to carve. Just a little longer. Just one more day. Tomorrow is the lie she tells herself.
Two bodies, two hearts, two vessels of thought. One very aware of the havoc she is delivering, the quiet magnitude of her search. The end result is a given. The other, however, searches for what can restore her without thinking what the true meaning of it is, of what she’s doing without ever saying.
They’re both trying to make their way back to one another. How odd it is to find that home, that comfort and the inescapable desire to attain safety, lies in another person, lies in the magic that binds to an art that was taught by a woman who might not like seeing a hollowed version of what she created.
Just exactly how long can they go on like this?
//
The forest had felt like the end of everything, strangely. Not Sodden.
As she walks, her shoes clacking against the stones underneath, she can still feel the saturated fronds and leaves beneath her fingertips. Her legs are weak, colt-like, from running and desperately wanting a portal to whirl to life, throat still feeling raw from the scream she let hang on the air after it refused to appear from her desperate incantation.
In that moment, another ghost had whispered. Aretuza. The tears had dried, the desperation eased. Something settled in Yennefer then. An obviousness to going back, to setting foot in a place she had sworn repeatedly to leave behind for good.
But you can’t, can you? Not as long as she’s there.
Yennefer purses her lips at the intrusive thought but then softens to it. The woman whom she is seeking is not the reason for her magic being absent.
Before Sodden, Yennefer would have blamed everything on her. Now, all she can feel is her own darkness, none of it touching Tissaia in her. There’s something about watching the seconds of a life before it may or may not die. What was there before is simply…gone.
Old hurts, old resements, old wounds—none of those seem to matter the second she hears Tissaia’s voice. The old Yennefer would have barged in without waiting, strode into the room to interrupt whatever the sheep’s bladders of full air are speaking about. The Brotherhood, for its many faults, has one grand one: they love the sound of their own voices.
“The elves are not our enemies,” comes from within the chamber and Yennefer finds herself wanting to hear more, wanting to float along on the cadence of Tissaia’s voice just a little longer. Wants to believe that once again, Tissaia is defending her. Not just the quarter part either.
But all good things must come to an end as another voice cuts in, one of no comfort, no safety. Certainly no joy. If ever Yennefer wished she could conjure fire at her tips, it would be to roast the owner of the voice on a spit like the animal she was paid four marks for.
“They’ve already aligned with Nilfgaard, proving what many of us have known for centuries. They cannot be trusted. If we don’t control this now, it’ll grow beyond even our capabilities,” he says and Yennefer’s ire is at an all time high. She clenches her fingers into fists, sets her jaw. Her heart races. “We’ll be burying a lot more than fourteen mages then.”
She cannot stand it any longer. The waiting, the words. Despite the pompous egos sitting in that room, there also exists the one whom Yennefer would walk across a Continent for, the only one worth all of that physical toil because a portal couldn’t bridge the distance.
“Thirteen,” Yennefer announces and she feels rather than sees Tissaia’s small body whip around in surprise. Somehow even without the magic, she can feel the woman’s elation, her heart cracking open without a single tether of magic between them. Somehow, Yennefer knows.
She finds the reflection of it in Tissaia’s face, all bleeding anguish and grief left to seep away into emotions her body simply cannot contain anymore. Yennefer finds a lifetime of holding back and in nowhere on her face, more etched across her features than she ever would have given away in the past.
Yennefer decides right then and there, in a room full of mages—some she can hardly stand, one she thought she once cared for—that she loves her beyond any words they can speak.
If something is so terrible, why keep going back? Standing here proves otherwise. She smiles at Tissaia with the first genuine expression she’s felt since she tore a whole countryside asunder.
//
Their reunion is one she’s dreamed of, manifested, created a thousand times inside of her mind. Yet after carving Yennefer’s name that very morning, Tissaia knows what she must say now that she has come back to her.
No, just back.
“I waited a month to carve it,” Tissaia says softly, to try and draw Yennefer’s eyes away from her previous work. But there must be something about seeing one’s name tucked into those of the dead.
“Mmm,” Yennefer hums. Tissaia finds she wants to touch her. “What was happening in there?”
Nothing that Tissaia wants to talk about much, not with Yennefer standing here finally. Politics have never been something Yennefer has shown any interest in, especially when the focus comes to diplomatic matters.
But this is not about diplomacy between countries. This is about the tattered relationship between the Brotherhood and a mage who’s light has always burned brighter than they ever wanted to acknowledge. Knowing the destruction Yennefer can wreak, Tissaia must make sure to keep her centered.
“I need to tell you something,” Yennefer brushes aside the speakings of seconds ago.
“Let me speak first,” Tissaia works to interrupt, to say the things that char her own heart to think about telling Yennefer. Because none of them will ever understand what Yennefer has done to save them all. “You are a hero to me…”
She would have surely died on that hill, they all would have, if Yennefer hadn’t done as she bid her to. To uncork the bottle and let everything go. The Brotherhood will never grasp the greatness of the woman before her now and for that reason, none of them deserve to be leading the mage that Yennefer is. That’s why it needs to be Tissaia. ( Them . She doesn’t even have to say it. Yennefer just knows, even in her silence—both in chaos and in words)
No longer can she go without the touch she wanted before. “It’s the time to be strong.” She walks to Yennefer and holds onto her arms. Wants to give her everything. “Just like you were at Sodden.You did what you had to do. And I, for one, will always be grateful for your sacrifice.”
Inside her embrace, breath and life. But something is sorely missing. Tissaia can’t bring herself to voice it and instead, holds Yennefer tighter. Hopes that all of their holes aren’t visible to the world.
//
After he attacks her mind, she breaks. Not as if she means to, no. The last thing she wants to do is show Tissaia that she is anything other than the woman who could let raw power flow from her fingers, all because it was asked of her.
Because whether she wants to admit it or not, Yennefer has done more to appease the requests Tissaia has made—or not. Come back to Aretuza, fight a battle in a brewing war, let someone else take the credit for a defeat you procured. This, however, is too tall an ask. This, Yennefer feels, is a sword’s edge at her throat, one she cannot escape.
“Is this Vilgefortz talking or you?” She tries to make sense of what she’s being asked to do. To come to terms with the role of executioner the Brotherhood seems fit to ask her to play.
“The hero kills the enemy,” Tissaia tries.
But I’m not the hero, am I? Because they’ve not let her be. And now they’re asking this of her? She wants to be angry, to scream. But all she feels is hollow. What’s any of this if she doesn’t have the one thing that makes her who she is?
“Which will prove what?”
Tissaia’s voice raises like she’s never heard it. Stern, sure, but this tone is frazzled, pared down to the bone. “To prove you are not a spy!”
“Or that I am a killer! I’d be gift-wrapping yet another reason for Stregobor to vilify me.”
“Then tell them the truth.”
The words wallop Yennefer. Because of course Tissaia can feel the absence of her Chaos. Of course she’s felt the missing coil of it between them. The Brotherhood wouldn’t because they’ve never known what her Chaos felt like. Which is why, she’s sure, they’ve been looking at ordinary people for years and trying to pull magic out of them. They’ve lost their touch and couldn’t identify pure Chaos if it bit them in the arse. They would much rather argue with each other about the world that’s leaving them behind.
“What?” It seems better to feign ignorance or she will never last whatever is coming. The tears on Tissaia’s face already don’t bode well for that.
“That you are not a threat because you’ve lost your magic.” And Yennefer can say nothing, only watch Tissaia stride forward, a warble in her voice and lips trembling. “I know you to your core. Your pain is my pain.”
Gods, who is this standing in front of her? Did Tissaia de Vries not escape Sodden either? This…this person in front of Yennefer is open and protective. Kind. Dare she think it? She’s already ripped someone out of Yennefer’s mind. Can Yennefer trust her to keep on saving her?
“For a month, I’ve searched the Continent, trying every herb, every potion, every spell, to get back what I had. What I deserve.” If they’re being honest…
She cannot help the tears that break forth nor the sob that escapes. Tissaia is looking at her in the softest way she ever has. Like she understands . And Yennefer wants to bleed. “Tell me how to save myself.”
“I cannot.”
“I don’t believe you!” She stands, truly falling apart now. This cannot be her lot in life, the hand she’s been dealt. Tissaia must know a way to save her, right? This isn’t how the story is supposed to end. The heroes always win.
…unless they don’t. Sometimes heroes die. Sometimes heroes fade. Yennefer gets to do neither because she used fire magic at Sodden to live and no one knows her name. It’s Vilgefortz the Savior of Sodden. This chapter is ready to cast her as the enemy when their hero, when this woman before her, would have been on a list too had she not. The Northern Fucking Kingdoms would be a swath of black Nilfgaard if not for her.
“I wanted to pierce Cahir’s mind. Punish him. Push him towards madness, all to find out what had happened to you. I would have done anything.”
Which sounds a lot like everything. That impossible everything Yennefer has somehow been chasing since Rinde.
“But what is lost is lost.”
At this, Yennefer turns around. “Without it, I am nothing.” Everything aches and aches and aches. “I’m stumbling through darkness.”
“From the moment we met, you’ve been trying to fill a void. Power couldn’t do it, even when you had it at your fingertips. What makes you think it’s the answer now?”
“Because it’s all I have left!”
If she had any Chaos, she’s sure it would be a taut cord by now, so consumed in her own grief and frustration that she doesn’t know what to do with it. But then, like a lute string being cut, she falls to her knees in front of Tissaia, dark gown fanning out around her. The tears threaten again, finally fall. Splatter on her hands that are twisted up in one another.
Above her, the whoosh of another gown and it floating to cover the hem and skirt of her own. Tissaia sinks with her, reaches out without permission, and brings Yennefer into her body. Her hold is tight, inescapable. Yennefer lets it consume her, idly wonders if this is how Cahir felt to be overtaken by all that is Tissaia.
She’s sure the effect was different. While he might have groaned and wailed and cried out, it had to have been in desperate agony at wanting to escape Tissaia’s nimble little hands. Now, Yennefer cannot ever imagine leaving them.
For how long she cries, she does not know. Everything seems to seep out of her, the things she has to let go of now because she’s so painfully mortal, so tragically separated from her magic with it possibly never returning.
“You do not see it,” Tissaia whispers against her hair as she holds her, gently rocking Yennefer in her arms. “Gods, you never see it.”
Yennefer clutches at Tissaia’s arm, burying her head as close to underneath as she can get. Her words are muffled from Tissaia’s body and her own darkness. “What’s left for me to see? How the world has been ripped away? How I’ve nothing and no one?” Part of it is callous to say when she’s simply crumbling in Tissaia’s arms. “How I must kill to somehow not be the villain?”
“Yennefer, all this time. All of it. I’ve been trying to assuage your deepest fear, the one I read so long ago. I’ve been trying to tell you what I feel with actions because I don’t have the words.” Tissaia’s hand dips and curves over Yennefer’s hair.
Yennefer stops the motion by raising her head. When she does this, their faces are close, so incredibly close. Closer than they’ve ever been before. Sure, she’d sunk into Tissaia after being pulled from Stregobor’s clutches but this? Oh, this is new.
New too is this tremble of Tissaia’s lip, her jaw. The way Yennefer can see the dimple in her chin move with those tiny imperceptions. The way she’s never once studied Tissaia’s hands until now, how she watches them until both are cupping her cheeks.
Yennefer surges forward, hugs Tissaia with all the light in her bones. Her knees scream in protest, her limbs begin to burn with the voracity with which she hugs the only constant in her life. The only person who has managed to be waiting, always waiting, in the wings. No matter what.
Just like crying, Yennefer isn’t sure how long she holds onto Tissaia. Minutes, hours. Soon, she cannot take it any longer and pulls them both to their feet.
She isn’t any more steady when she rises than she was when she fell, but Yennefer isn’t sure how to proceed when they’ve both shared so much more of their hearts than they ever have. When she says it, it even sounds unsure.
“I should go.”
Tissaia reaches out, runs the pad of her thumb along Yennefer’s cheek, across the bone, and smiles small. “Yes,” she agrees but the same unsure pierces that too.
Perhaps it’s everything all built up or all torn down. Yennefer sure doesn’t know. Whatever it is, she nods in Tissaia’s palms, leans forward, and connects her lips to her cheek.
The second the touch lands, she hears an intake of breath from Tissaia, feels her hands squeeze a bit on the planes of her cheeks.
So I’ve surprised her then.
She thinks of this while her lips remain on Tissaia’s skin. Another thought builds like the storm clouds outside, of how Yennefer wants to keep surprising Tissaia for the rest of their lives. How she doesn’t want the woman to go even a second expecting Yennefer to be anything than the wild mare she’s always been.
Yennefer finds she quite likes the feel of her lips on Tissaia, that maybe this is a place they can go now whenever the two of them are together. This makes her bold, as if she always hasn’t been.
Pulling back slightly, their eyes connect and Yennefer feels a pull-like magnetism between them. There should be hauntings of things that are grander than the two of them, but all that seems to matter is that they’ve made it and they’re here together.
Before she can think better of it, she dips again and brings Tissaia’s lips into hers. What should be the grandest mistake she’s ever made…
…isn’t. It isn’t because what socks Yennefer square in her chest, what touches the parts where the darkness of her magic does not exist, is like those bolts of lightning Tissaia tried to have Yennefer bottle from the sky all those years ago. All that time reaching for the heavens when it was here. Right here .
It’s a shock of goodness, a shock that Tissaia doesn’t back away. Shocking further still that after a few moments of immobility, Tissaia lips begin a gentle glide across Yennefer’s. A controlled, delicate kiss and yet Yennefer finds herself warming all over.
It’s slow in the way they move against one another, gentle in the momentum of it. But Yennefer feels that thing she’s always felt building in her: she wants more.
She dares to disconnect, to hold Tissaia’s head in her hands like she had done to Yennefer mere moments ago. Tissaia, the storm from before but Tissaia now, some kind of reprieve from whatever it is that they’ve been through. So few mages left to truly understand what they’ve lived, what they saw at Sodden and every second after. The fact is binding, ties them together in ways that Yennefer will never experience with another person again.
Yennefer leans forward and kisses again, revels that Tissaia responds in kind. Ignores the niggling at the back of her mind that even in this bliss, something is inevitably amiss.
Those small fingers seem everywhere and nowhere on Yennefer, passing with heat over places like the dip of her neck to her shoulder and then she can’t remember another place they touch until they’re somewhere again, like the curve on her bare back where the fabric dips low. Surely there must be a path between these touches, but Yennefer can’t keep up with them.
She finds herself pushing Tissaia’s collar back, away, trying to glide her lips away from hers and down her neck to latch onto where blood flows. Where life runs long and wonderous. Yennefer etches a trail of things she cannot say either along Tissaia’s skin before she’s pushed gently back.
There is a worrisome breath where Yennefer wonders if she’s made a grievous error even though Tissaia has kissed her so, touched her too as if there has been nothing to do but cling. But then Yennefer is being held by two hands on her hips while Tissaia leans forward. Yennefer knows just what to do.
Their foreheads connect and it’s deja vu almost, Sodden all over again except there is silence instead of screams. Her arms loop around Tissaia’s neck gently, fingers dancing across the nape where tendrils of brown trail.
“I don’t know if I can do this, Tissaia. What they’re asking me,” Yennefer whispers. She lifts her eyes, feels a lump forming in her throat. “What you’re asking of me.”
“I’ve watched you do the impossible all of your life. I’ve watched you do what you’ve always had to. This time is no different.” It’s all so matter of fact, so simply put as if all that is easy helped her to construct her words. Tissaia reaches again and holds Yennefer’s cheeks in her hands. “Do what you must and I shall be near, whatever you choose.”
Tissaia looks deeply into her eyes, mines down to that core she says she knows. Her eyes are ice, but Yennefer feels warm all over, the darkness not as painful when there’s someone else to shine a light along the way.
Welcome home , Yennefer wants to tell Tissaia. It seems only fair to admit to herself, even if the words won’t come out to the woman in front of her. That this core of Yennefer’s? Maybe Tissaia has been there the entire time.
//
In the end, Yennefer is sure she surprises neither of them.
What she does isn’t exactly what she intended to do as they walked toward the monolith with the etchings. She doesn’t spill the blood in front of those thirteen names that gave their lives against the man whose chains she is cutting.
It is that nod. That little nod that does it. The one that says, do what you must and I shall be near, whatever you choose. And so Yennefer does.
Oh, how she wants to look back to those blue eyes full of firelight! But there is little time to go through the process of freeing Cahir and creating a disruption for their exit before The Brotherhood of the world’s finest mages descends upon them. (Except for one. Never her, Yennefer knows.)
But they…simply let them flee. Somehow, Yennefer has to believe it’s because of the person she’s been forced by fate to leave behind again. If they belong together, it isn’t in this world, sadly.
This is the way of them, the unlikely love story of Tissaia de Vries and Yennefer of Vengerberg. There will be lifetimes of going away and coming back, stretches of years in between. This is how they will comfort one another, keep one another safe. This is the kind of love they will have to have. Because in the resolution of their story, one will always have to go away.
Tissaia watches the darkness swallow Yennefer and the man whose mind she could never fully penetrate. Watches a part of her heart disappear once more into another unknown night, the unkind world awaiting her.
A week she got this time, yet more than she’s ever had since Yennefer left Aretuza for Aedirn. Never did she expect to have her near so long. The invisible tug of life has always managed to pull Yennefer away before Tissaia has ever had a chance to get her fill.
There will never be enough, she realizes. Never a satiation to the yearning her heart does when they’re apart. Never any quiet amongst the space whenever together is simply not how they can be. This is the way they are destined to be, the way it must go forevermore. Yennefer leaving, Tissaia lying in wait until next comes around again.
“Well, Tissaia, there goes your pet,” Stregobor growls but continues on. He loves his self-righteous indignation, so he should be full up tonight. Perhaps his tower will be a better place to continue on his witherings.
Beside her, movement becomes stasis. She turns, looking into his brown eyes. Daring him to say something, anything. “Will you prattle too? Tell me how I’ve wasted my time, my efforts, on someone who sees fit to destroy the things she touches? Will you tell me my finest hours of watching her cast spells and defy expectations have been frivolous and do not attain the level of worth I give them?”
If her jaw juts a little harder, her teeth grind together a bit more, so be it. She lets ice coat the irises of her eyes as she looks at Vilgefortz’s face, the way his brow knits as he gazes toward the walls of where they stand. When he speaks, she’s surprised by his tone.
“You turned away.”
“What?” she asks, startled. She doesn’t breathe.
He squares his body to her, his look penetrating. Tissaia tries not to take a step back as he leans closer, dropping his voice so that it’s something between only the two of them. “When Yennefer was bringing the ax down, you were not watching. Only when you heard the clink of his chains did you turn back to what was happening.”
For only knowing him a while, Tissaia feels incredibly picked apart. Incredibly seen. Like Vilgefortz can see the very contents of her heart. She opens her mouth to speak but his leaning forward stops her, his mouth within inches of a kiss.
A kiss you shared with Yennefer.
She finds her eyes closing. Feels his breath on her chin in his leaning. Can he detect Yennefer there even though she had no Chaos to leave behind? Is there anything left of Yennefer where he hovers so close to?
“I would ask you if this is another instance in a developing line of times you will refuse to see me standing in front of you because of Yennefer.”
At this, Tissaia opens her eyes. Looks at him without guile. “Wherever Yennefer is, I will always see her. Be it a room crowded with people, a battlefield with choking gray smoke, a Conclave meeting. I’ve made it a point for the last seventy-five years to know where Yennefer of Vengerberg is at all times.”
This is where he leans, this is where he calls her bluff. This is where she knows she loses herself to everything. “Don’t let it end your chance to see all that’s left over too.”
On a breeze, he’s gone. She’s never been more thankful for that. Right now, Tissaia is as upheaved as she’s ever been. It’s like she’s been wearing the weight of Yennefer draped over her body and no one has bothered to look long enough to see it—until now.
In this story, she has no doubt that the two of them will meet again. To get to the last page though, the two of them will have so much more strife to get through. So much give and take before it ends the way it’s supposed to.
Leaning against the monolith, the names are cool against her back. The ghosts whisper as they always do. They beg her not to join them on the other side, to not rush to an end before it’s time. She has no idea what this means and tonight? Tonight she doesn’t have it in herself to ask.