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Ciri dodges the fang coming her way, throwing her dagger at the beast’s eyes and drawing her sword, using the momentary distraction from monster flesh sizzling under silver to drive it through the beast’s mouth. There’s a strangled cry as she yanks it back out, covered in gore and viscera and blood that’s probably poisonous in its own right, and then the beast collapses.
She hacks at it until she has severed the head from the body just to be sure. Once it has rolled away, she stands there and tries to catch her breath and looks at the wreckage around her. She doesn’t cry.
There are bodies strewn liberally over the field, some of them unrecognisable, and the coppery stench of blood hangs in the air, cloying and suffocating. The carcass of the thing that looks like a cross between a basilisk and a griffin twitches in death and she stares at it hard to ascertain it won’t try to get up again even without a head. Some of them do.
The carcass remains lifeless.
She closes her eyes and buries her nose in the scarf around her neck. It doesn’t really smell like anything but unwashed human, at this point; and yet she can almost pretend it still carries the smell of lilacs and gooseberries it had when she was gifted it.
She doesn’t know when it all went so wrong. Or maybe she does — two years and change ago, maybe, when Geralt and Yen fought, viciously, not-quite quietly enough to escape her notice (they barely ever were) even though they clearly tried to keep their voices down. It had been a hard stretch on the road with little coin and even less hospitality. They’d all been on edge, and what little buffer Ciri sometimes was able to provide between them had evaporated at about the same time as their provisions had run out.
She doesn’t know what set them off — Ciri being upset at an earlier fight, maybe, or another argument that nothing but rabbit meat was not sufficient nutrition for any of them, or Yen not letting Geralt know she’d used up the last bit of soap because really, how was she supposed to know it was the last bit, or —
Well, it doesn’t really matter, does it? She knows, just as she knew then, that whatever set them off wasn’t really what all their fighting was about. Their fighting was borne of loss and guilt and hopelessness in the face of a war-torn and monster-ravaged landscape that maybe, at first, valued a witcher’s work when there still was grain and hope, when fighting off the necrophages promised to make things better. Before the White Flame burned that hope to ash as it did so many villages.
So Geralt and Yen fought, and then Geralt stormed off, and — well. Ciri hasn’t seen him since. She doesn’t think about what that means. She doesn’t think about the scrying attempts Yen made, either, that she picked up once Yen… once Yen was gone, too. Yen being gone is another page in the book of Things She Doesn’t Think About, because once she cracks that cover, she doesn’t know if she can go on.
So, maybe that was where it all began to go wrong, except that as far as beginnings went, it truly was not a beginning at all. It was more of an end. The beginning of the end, maybe.
Ciri wipes her blades on the pants of one of the bandits she hadn’t even had time to learn the names of and sheathes them, casts one last glance around. She has to get away before the necrophages show up, before the vultures bring swaths of scavengers with them to feast on the dead. Before other monsters show up, not all of them the kind that are slain with silver.
She searches through the bodies, careful to avoid the venom the monster spewed and the wreckage its head made of the ill-equipped fighters. Everything remotely of value — not that there’s much, not over a decade into a war without reason, slow attrition with nothing to gain for either side except more fodder for the monsters that appear to be multiplying — goes into her pockets. It doesn’t even fill them entirely; most of the stale bits of food are inedible from venom or gore or both. What has remained untouched she eats and puts into her pouch in equal portions, trying to make it last.
It’s not enough to sate her, but it takes the worst of the pangs off. She doesn’t know when she last had a full meal. Before she lost Yen, probably. Or maybe even before they lost Geralt. Because that hadn’t really been the beginning of the end, had it?
Her mental book of Thing She Doesn’t Think About had been filled decently already, then, some eleven years into this stupid war. Filled with people she will never see again, places lost to the armies or the mages or the monsters.
It’s tempting to think that things really went to shit when they lost Jaskier; jovial, cheerful Jaskier, who would fill silences and sooth tensions and let them rage at him until his smile turned brittle but never broke, who would make all the right noises and then hug them and didn’t pretend their tears weren’t there. No. ‘Tears are important,’ he would say, nose buried in the hair of whichever of them had broken down, ‘they are your body’s way of coping, and that’s the most important thing, dear heart. It’s not weakness, it’s strength.’ Even now, five years later, the memory brings tears to her eyes like nothing else, not even carnage and death and the ever-present hunger.
Losing him had broken them in a way the war hadn’t quite managed before, and they never really recovered. The fighting between Geralt and Yen had started, then, like they weren’t quite sure how they fit together anymore without him. Or how to deal with the guilt his loss had left all of them with, but worst of all Geralt, who’d always taken responsibility whether it was his to take or not, and had almost shattered under its weight. The first few months after — after losing Jaskier, she hadn’t been sure if they’d lose Geralt too, to his grief, to his guilt, to his own recklessness until Yen had managed to snap him out of it.
She swipes her hand over her eyes to dash the tears away. She misses Jaskier fiercely, just now; not like she misses Geralt and Yen — those wounds are fresh, still, not scabbed over because how could they, they left her, left her all alone — but she misses him with the ache of an old scar. If he were here, the loss of Geralt and Yen might be bearable.
But he isn’t, and neither are they, and Ciri is alone on a battlefield, exhausted and tired and monster bait, if she doesn’t get a move on. With one last look she tracks back to the forest they’d come from, just a few hours ago, and she can almost pretend there’s an echo of the laughter when they’d broken camp in the morning, finding hollow joy where they could.
She finds the mangy mare that the bandit leader rode half a mile into the forest, munching on some grass with one ear turned in her direction. She doesn’t look skittish, but there’s a wariness to her that comes from having survived to something a lot like the end of the world.
Ciri hesitates for a moment but — a horse is worth more than the pleasure of a single sugar cube, scavenged from a ransacked tavern a week or so ago. She’d been saving it for a special occasion. This might just count as such.
“Hello, Roach,” Ciri says even though the mare doesn’t much look like Geralt’s Roaches used to, her coat dapple grey and body too slight for a grown witcher. But she isn't a grown witcher, just a young woman on the edge of starvation. The name makes her voice catch and fresh tears spring to her eyes as the horse lips at her hand gently. She blinks desperately and bites her lip again. It’s those damned thoughts about the people she’s lost, on top of the senseless carnage just before. She’s not usually this maudlin (except that she is, whenever she is alone, because how can she not see the specters of all she has lost then?).
She goes through the saddle bags attached to the mare, finds the most recent spoils of the bandits — some flint she doesn’t need, a whetstone that sends an excited spark into her body, some jerky that almost looks edible — and adds her own scavenged treasures to it before leading the newly dubbed Roach to the path further into the forest. She doesn’t have anywhere to be, but it’s away from the battlesite, which is really all that matters.
The forest is gloomy even at noon, as much due to the overcast sky as the thick canopy. It does nothing for her mood, and the Book rattles in her mind like it wants to spew its pages at her. She tries to keep it shut, but it makes her think about Jaskier again — it had been him who’d taught her the trick of compartmentalising their losses in her mind, who’d helped her set up the Book — and yeah, maybe the shit they were in kicked up a notch when they lost him, but they’d been quite shit already.
Before Jaskier, they’d lost the other witchers, one by one, picked off by soldiers or mutant monsters or scared villagers. They’d all hidden in Kaer Morhen for a while, but with every one of them who didn’t return, the keep became less and less inhabitable, entropy doing its job with not enough hands to slow its inexorable march.
Maybe leaving the keep had been the real beginning of the end, the sign that they were prey on the run. She chokes on a sob, the image of the crumbling battlements in the stark mountains in her mind, and almost trips on a root.
“I want it to stop,” she whispers to Roach who snorts at her. There’s a buzzing in her ears, a low hum. “It’s not — it’s not fair. I want them back.” She feels young, all of a sudden, like the naive little girl she was when she ran away from Cintra. Maybe she never grew out of that girl at all, maybe she’s doomed to die the same person now as she had been then — an orphaned princess on the run, who had lost all her family and faced insurmountable hostility. It feels like giving up, but she’s tried, she’s tried so hard, and what is left to fight for?
Within a decade, kingdoms had splintered that had stood for centuries, cities and towns had collapsed, villages had been burned to the ground. And through it all, both monsters and men had sown destruction on a scale she never could have imagined, had torched fields irrevocably until whole swaths of land were uninhabitable, until the people who had survived the wrecking of their homes starved. It had not been pretty.
And yet she still treads on, deeper into the forest. It seems to get darker with every step, the buzzing in her ears intensifying. “I just. Want them back.” The tears are back and make it hard to see, and there’s a whisper in the trees that sounds almost like Geralt’s voice, a rustle that could be Jaskier’s, if she squints. The wind must waft over a patch of food — of actual food — because she suddenly smells the tartness of berries and the flowery sweetness of spring, even though first snow can’t be too far off — and she starts sobbing then because it’s home and it’s fake and she knows and yet she still hopes and despairs in equal measure.
“Give them back,” she screams, channeling all her feelings into the shout, and the buzzing reaches fever pitch and turns into a painful keening noise that slowly greys out her vision.
She has a second to start panicking, to scrabble for the horse or the floor or — something, hands closing around nothing at all, and then the noise swallows her whole.
Everything goes black.
*
She swims to wakefulness like clawing through the current of an icy river, sluggish and slow and like she’s running out of air.
“Cirilla?” a voice asks above her, not quite frantic by virtue of the utter shock of its bearer, and Ciri doesn’t want to open her eyes, wants to pretend a moment longer that this is really her, really Yen. She doesn’t know how often she’s been in this position, in the in-between state that is not quite sleep but not full awareness. It doesn’t get easier, no matter how often it happens.
But then someone pats her cheek like they’ve seen people do that to wake fainted maidens from their swoon without knowing how much strength to put in, and Ciri would laugh if she wasn’t hit with a whiff of a scent so much like the breeze in that forest except more real, genuine, and none of her dreams have included scent to this degree and —
“Yen?” she asks and her voice breaks as she pries her eyes open. It takes her a moment to focus in the dimly lit room but — she would know this figure anywhere, the loose dark hair, the beautiful dress she hasn’t seen in years, the eyes seeming to veritably glow purple in the room — and in the blink of an eye, she’s launched herself at the figure, heedless of the protests of her own body.
She’s crying, full-on heaving sobs, and Yen clearly didn’t expect her reaction because they go tumbling to the floor again, Ciri landing on top of her, forcing a soft grunt from Yen but it sounds like her, too, and maybe — maybe Ciri is dead, because there’s something wrong with her body that she can’t quite figure out. But if she is, she finds that she can’t care, that it doesn’t matter because Yen is here, and she thinks that’s Geralt’s voice coming in from somewhere behind her, and they’re — they’re here. Here with her.
“Cirilla?” Yen asks again, voice startled and uncertain, and Ciri levers herself up to actually look at her properly.
She looks — she looks young, for lack of a better word. Younger than she had, at the end, maybe even younger than she had when they left Kaer Morhen for the last time. Gone are the streaks of white in her hair from stress or strain on her chaos, gone are the lines of worry, gone is the scar carving down the side of her cheek, so reminiscent of Eskel’s that not even Yen could claim to hate it.
She ups the probability of her being dead by twenty percentage points.
But Yen’s eyes are confused and maybe a little scared and there’s something dark in them, her aura off, and Ciri has a moment of niggling doubt that maybe, it’s not Yen, that it’s a Doppler or a mage or something vile, when there’s a crash in the other room and a voice she still dreams about and hates says something she can’t make out.
It occurs to her then that this room is familiar — not from nightmares but from a memory so long gone it’s almost entirely buried. She looks around. There’s the barricade by the door, the dusty floor, the toy she’d been given in the temple of Melitele, and she knows her eyes must be wide when she looks back to Yen.
“Where’s your chaos?” she asks, voice shaky because it can’t be, it can’t because things like this don’t happen (except they do, sometimes, around her). But her hands, when she glances at them, are smaller than they used to be, and her ring finger is still there and her middle finger isn’t crooked, healed wrong and never set properly, and her clothes are clean and her belly is full, so maybe — maybe —
“I told you,” Yen says, looking at her like she’s lost her mind. Maybe she has. “It’s gone.” There’s a desperation behind her eyes Ciri has never seen like this, a hopeless determination to do whatever it takes, and she remembers not understanding it, being a little scared, except now she knows that feeling intimately in a way she never could have at thirteen, even while on the run and terrified for her life.
She feels the smile spread over her face even as something batters the door, and Yen’s eyes flit to it with something like fear.
“We need to go,” Yen says, suddenly urgent as she gets up to her knees, “you need to lend me your chaos so we can get out.”
Ciri doesn’t know what her face is doing, but whatever it is, it halts Yen in her tracks.
“No,” Ciri says, and turns towards the door and gathers her chaos. This body isn’t used to conducting it, but she remembers, and she manages to convince her body that it does know what needs to be done. “You can tell Voleth Meir that I will bring her home in a bit. But I have a fire fucker to deal with now.”
She wraps herself in her shield like a cloak, vanishes the door, and strides out.
Because all those deaths — they weren’t the point at which things had gone to shit. They were symptoms of things already having gone to shit, of the slow descent into futility that left her all alone and half-starved in a forest somewhere in Kaedwen. And maybe she wouldn’t have pin-pointed this moment as that linchpin, the point of no return, but it is, a little, isn’t it?
If she can get Rience here — if she can deal with the Deathless Mother before she’s at full strength — and the baby, she remembers suddenly, the broken words from an equally broken man coming to mind, who had used to haunt her nightmares until he was caught in his own. She adds it to the list of things she wants to try to rectify, growing rapidly — she tucks the list safely into a new book in her mind, imagines it with a vibrant burgundy cover made of shiny leather, and stuffs all the What Ifs into it, too.
One thing after the other.
Maybe she’s dead. Or maybe, strange as it seems, she’s gotten a second chance. And there’s no way in the Great Beyond that she is letting it go to waste. No way at all.