Chapter Text
The first time I felt Yennefer’s chaos was during her conduit moment. The power and force of it brought me to my knees in the middle of teaching a lesson. Had it not been for my podium in front of me, I’m not sure I would have remained standing at all. Not only could I feel the unbottled power of her chaos but I felt her fear so strongly that for a brief moment I forgot it was not my own. I had never and doubt I ever will feel a girl’s transformative moment the way that I felt Yennefer of Vengerberg that day.
The first time I felt that fear again was the night I brought Yennefer back to Aretuza. I knew it was going to be a hard evening for her to begin with. When I locked her in her room it was as though the strings of her chaos were reaching out to me through her anger and fear. I backed away from the door and found that I was breathing heavily from the blocks I’d had to put up in my own mind to keep her unbridled chaos from intruding there. Yennefer had no idea she was reaching out to me in that way, but I found it exhilarating to think of what this girl could already do without any training at all.
I was at my desk, writing a letter to an old friend–praying that she had an answer to why this girl was affecting me so–when suddenly I felt weak and as though my next few breaths could be my last. Underneath though, all I felt was a cold, heart-clenching fear that was paralyzing. Pushing out in my mind to find where Yennefer was because I knew it had to be her, I opened a portal directly into her chambers. I worked for hours to bring that poor girl back from the brink of death. She had no clue what her value in this world was and I had done nothing but call her a piglet and throw her in a room without any explanation. I would not be the reason this world lost a truly powerful mage before she even had a chance to show them that she was here. A few pieces of broken mirror pressed through her flesh was not to be her end. For that I was sure of. By the time I was convinced that she would pull through, I was spent. My brow was covered with sweat, my hands and arms covered in blood, and my chaos dwindling down further than it had in decades. I left her for a few hours, in need of my own recovery, but all the while I could still feel her breathing. I found comfort in knowing that we had this connection but also terrified because never in my long existence had I felt this sort of… bond. There was no other word for it really because without any sort of spell or enchantment, it seemed as though my chaos had bonded with hers. Where before I had only seen a slight tint of blue in my own strings, I now saw it mingling all around us with fiery red strings too.