@mic-check-smile replied to you in a post “"Is it too late to op-out of the whole deer thing?...”:
@angelichooves "I WOULD LIKE MY AFTERLIFE NOT TO COME WITH A MANDATORY GAMBLE FOR SEXUAL TENDENCIES-"
✥✧∘* "But it's amusing when you men suffer. Whimpering and pathetic to the point where they hide in their rooms, thinking nobody can smell them beyond the door. And if they don't hide? They whine and twitch to the simplest touches. Simply adorable. It'll be a good look on you."
a post-tw3, pre-tw4 witcher ciri origins fic with healthy hints of avallac'h/ciri
Several years after disappearing through a portal to the heart of the White Frost, Avallac'h finds Ciri on the brink of death and must choose to act to save her.
He discovers her body in the grey wash of a downpour, the rain pooling on tiled stone in the courtyard, lightning cracking above the shadow of the old keep that clings to the mountains.
The rain does not touch him as he strides ahead, his footsteps loud in the puddled water, and when he reaches her and stoops, the rain leaps away from her body as well. Not enough to dry her but enough that when he turns her to her back, the pelting raindrops do not sting her pale, familiar face.
It’s her. Of course it is. It could be no other.
She’s been outside the Spiral for years, alive or dead, unreachable even by his probing magic, and then as suddenly as she’d vanished as she stepped boldly into the portal, he had felt her exist again. Like a breath long-held, her resurfacing is a painful sort of relief.
To see her body, to confirm what he’s feared, is anything but.
The soot darkening her eye sockets has run down her cheeks, black tears interrupted on the left by the grooves of scar tissue. He had watched her apply it that morning on Undvik, tallow and soot, ignoring his offer of more sophisticated cosmetics. She wanted to make an impression, gruesome and wraith-like and deadly.
She had, but he hadn’t told her so. He’d told her such foolish theater was unnecessary. Pitted against Eredin and against more substantial threats, intimidation alone would not suffice for her survival. Wild-eyed and furious, she had never looked more like Lara.
She resembles her now in another sense, cold as a marble statue.
He touches his gloved hand to her chin, parts her lips to lean close enough to feel puffs of breath against his ear. Her heart rate is ponderously slow, her skin like ice. If the rain had not melted it before he arrived, her body would have been limned in frost.
Why here?, he does not need to ask, the thin windows of the vacant Witcher keep seeming to squint to watch the events in the courtyard below. Kaer Morhen is unchanged since he last was here, the marks of Eredin’s assault left unrepaired. The remaining Wolves have not returned since, leaving the place to go fallow.
Instinct has dropped her here– a place she once felt safe. Or, he reminds himself, there’s the more grim possibility that she has come here to bury herself among Witchers, to let the elements weather her bones to the same scattered rest as the others here.
There was a time he may have carried her from this place against her wishes, lay her somewhere more worthy, spent an age carving a grave marker, but all that marble in memoriam and even the Aen Seidhe have forgotten Lara Dorren’s sacrifice. And Cirilla is not her, never has been, falls short of her, exceeds her.
Avallac’h will grant her the end she wishes. Turn aside and forget.
Cart before the horse, he thinks, as her eyes move behind the lids. There’s a sound from the back of her throat, and she wakes, or the approximation of waking, weak gaze tracking across the bruised sky.
“Zireael,” he whispers, and her brow furrows. She looks without seeing him. Her lips are blue, and sighs of fogged breath rise from them. It’s some time before she seems to recognize him.
“I closed the doors,” she manages, her voice a ruin.
“I know,” says Avallac’h.
He had guessed as much after the chill ceased its spread, and though he slipped through dozens of worlds, he found no new sign of the White Frost. No sign of her either nor any indication that she lived. It’s been years of wandering since then.
“Of course you know,” she sighs. “You know most everything.”
She’s teasing him with her last breath, the absolute child. He wants to shake her by the shoulders, reprimand her, force her to be serious. There’s nothing to be done to save her. He does not have to whisper a diagnostic spell to know that she’s burnt herself close to nothing, sapped every ounce of Source energy that holds her atomic structure together.
She must see it on his face.
“This it, then?” she asks. “It's just as well. No Witcher ever died in his bed, they say.”
Her eyes close, like maybe she can hasten the end. Declare those last, trite words and leave him gripping a corpse. He had waited too long to sit at Lara's side, the humans having discovered her body first, taken the babe, and not lingered over her burial.
His pride had blinded him. He had thought let her know what her choice has wrought. The cold she has doomed the world to. A petty, shameful desire. She had died alone, but he was left to live in chilled loneliness and regret. If he had only stepped in sooner, forbid her from visiting Cregnannan, made demands, done one thing differently, then maybe–
In the years since she vanished, he's doubted the choice to let Zireael go to her death, rather than giving in and letting the Frost consume it all. Why shouldn’t every world end the way his did?
The girl in his arms still breathes, though her lungs sound full of water.
There’s nothing to be done now, except perhaps–
Somewhere beneath this crumbling fortress lies a series of chambers, long locked away and dusty with disuse. There’s a cobwebbed laboratory still equipped with forgotten instruments and mutagenic substances. It’s primitive and ugly and beneath him, but if by some chance, he could find what he needed there, then there may still be a small hope for the girl. WIth her genetic material close to unraveling, further mutation may just stabilize her.
Why did you come here, Zireael? Avallac’h does not ask. To hide somewhere safe or to die in peace, it does not matter. Something has led her here, and by proxy, it’s led him. Perhaps Fate has intervened yet again.
“There is something we can try. Given where we are,” he says, rousing the girl with a touch to her cheek. She blinks into the rain, seeming to finally notice where she lies, the silhouette of the keep’s towers lit by streaks of lightning. “It may kill you either way. They say it killed three in ten.”
Even sluggish on the brink of death, Cirilla’s quick mind catches on his meaning.
“You aim to…”
“Give you what you want, yes. What you begged for as a child.”
She’s not one any longer, he knows. She hasn’t been for a long while.
“I don’t want that anymore,” she says weakly. “I just wanted it all to mean something.”
“Would you rather I allow you to die?” He feels he must offer her the choice. If she nods her head, he may deny her anyway.
She turns her face against his arm as though to shield herself from rain that does not touch her. He wants to press his fingers back through her damp hair but doesn’t.
“Fine,” she says. He’s not sure that she knows what she’s agreeing to.
She groans as he lifts her in his arms. It’s a marvel how light she is, how someone who has weighed on his mind so heavily could feel like nothing.
Of course, Avallac’h does not know the recipe or the process. What use could he have for some dh'oine mage's monstrous formulae? If he did, he’d find a more elegant means of mutation. He doesn’t have the time.
Places hold memory the same as the mind does, and he follows the impressions of Kaer Morhen's grisly past deep into the bowels of its laboratory.
As he lays her on a stone plinth and binds her arms and legs with metal cuffs, he thinks of ancient, ritual sacrifices. How she had taken a deep breath, terrified, and turned toward the swirling portal that would take her to the heart of the Frost.
He leans to kiss her hair and knows she may hate him afterward. More than she already does.
And when she next wakes with a sudden gasp, for better or for worse, Cirilla no longer looks at him with Lara's eyes.
arguing about where to put surviving civilians, post-dragon
Kerrek: If you were a dragon, what would you do?
Percy: I would hit the city where all the refugees are going, because it would hurt more. I would not hit the city that’s going to take 200 years to be a shadow of its former self, that has nothing to plunder.
Keyleth: Yes, but you’re also not a vain dragon who just had one of its allies taken out in this very city. These dragons are going to have a huge vendetta against Westruun now.
Percy, aside to her as the conversation continues: I may not have lost an ally, but I am a vain dragon. :3c
