hear me, father, I am the wild
Ciri stops dead in her tracks, a cold chill racing down her spine. Suddenly, she can't hear the footsteps of the four witchers in front of her, cannot smell the sweat they had produced from their morning training. She can't feel Eskel's hum of chaos in the air, cannot tug on the string of destiny that binds she and Geralt.
All she can feel is an invisible pressure thats mounting all over her body, as if ghostly hands are upon every inch of her, pushing down until there's no resistance left. A deep, humming sound with a high pitch ring invades her hearing, and she opens her mouth, but no words come out.
The pressure, the sound, it gets worse and worse and more intense, and she is trapped, silent and frozen, a bead of sweat dancing down the back of her neck despite the cold in the air.
Geralt is the first to notice, because of course he is. He stops, noticing the girl frozen in place, the way her eyes dart over to the corridor just in front of her. His hand absentmindedly curls into a fist, and he looks around too, scents the air for anything that could have disturbed her. What he does not do, however, is discount her intuition. If something had alarmed her, got her hackles up, then he would be on guard.
"Girl?" Lambert turns, looking over at her. The others stop, too, looking concerned. "What's wrong?"
Ciri doesn't answer. Her throat isn't closed, she can breathe and swallow, but her entire concentration is taken up by the pitch black corridor leading to the laboratories that Lambert and Vesemir have been using to dismantle the leshy Eskel had brought back weeks ago. She can speak, but she doesn't want to. A pull in her chest so tight thats begging her to walk into the darkness, a pull that would lead a compass to a magnet, to whatever is down there.
"There's something down there." Ciri whispers.
Geralt tenses, looking into the darkness. He swallows, scents the air, but finds nothing amiss.
"Girl," Esekel surges forward, but even he looks wearily towards the doorway. He reaches her and grabs her wrist gently in his larger hand "You know you're in a witcher keep, hmm? No monsters here for miles, not until the village down the mountain. No monsters here, girl. Everything's alright."
He goes to tug her away, but not only does Ciri not move, Eskel himself is tugged back.
"No." Both Vesemir and Geralt say at the same time. Lambert stifles a snort at the irony.
"If the girl says something's there, we need to investigate. I'm not in the habit of discounting a warning, boy. Wolf says she knows things, sees things, that she shouldn't. She's never been wrong, if she says she feels something, we need to look."
If this was any other moment, Ciri would have beamed at the praise from the old wolf. Even if he referenced her great and terrible power, albeit one of the less frightening parts about it. She had always worked to gain his approval, at times almost more than she wanted Geralt's. There was something about how imposing the eldest wolf was that reminded her of Calanthe, and if she could please him, maybe in another world, another life, she could have pleased her grandmother.
But not in this moment. This moment of pressure and both certainty and uncertainty is not the time for childish praise.
Eskel says nothing to their mentor, only swallows thickly and also looks towards the doorway.
"Boys." Vesemir walks forward and puts himself between the Princess and the witchers. He adresses the wolves he had raised and the griffin that he has unceremoniously adopted over the last couple decades of winters. "Get your swords, your armour. We need to see what's down there."
"No offence, Princess, old man, but why are you so sure there's something down here? Eskel's right, we're witchers. In a keep full of 'em. The medalions haven't gone off, it's nothing magical. Why would there be a monster lurking in the darkness?"
Ciri looks up from the darkness of the stairs, clinging tight to Geralt's hand in her left, pushing the right against the dirty stone wall. She meets his gaze, which is a hard thing considering she can't see in the darkness, focuses on where the sound had come from.
"I know what I felt, Lambert." She hisses. Geralt holds her hand a little tighter, but soon they bottom out in the laboratories and the wolves begin to circle.
"See?" Lambert quickly says. "Nothing here, Princess."
Ciri opens her mouth to argue, but she finds she doesn't have to, because almost immediately after the youngest wolf says it, all five medalions begin to rattle in sync.
"See?" She hisses. "I told you."
She's ignored, all of their attention taken by a deep creak in the ceiling. She looks up, too, and finds the silhouette of something. It looks like an extremely oversized spider, crawling along the walls.
She swallows thickly, pushing herself back further into the wall. A sign something's there, she can give them. But fighting a monster? That's better left to the four fully grown witchers.
"The fuck?" Lambert hisses. "The fuck is that?"
It's loud, it creeks with every movement, like it's somehow made of wood. Ciri's baffled by the prospect of a gigantic wooden spider crawling upon Vesemir's ceiling, but she can't think of anything closer to explain it as.
"It's going for the leshy hand." Geralt says, and just as he does, the thing begins to crawl down. Not slowly, lumbering down. No, it's as quick as a flash, clever and practiced.
And, as soon as it drops, everything goes to shit.
As soon as it touches the floor, it attacks.
What Ciri thought were eight legs were in fact a horrifying amount, too quick to count and too powerful for Coën to dodge as he's thrown backwards straight into the wall. Ciri stifles a cry, throwing herself behind a large barrel for what little safety it could provide.
"Fuck!" Lambert yells, running at it. All four wolves begin to hack at the legs that come at them from all angles, every direction. More and more legs appear from nowhere, throwing themselves through the walls and shelves, smashing jars and bottles and toppling shelf cases.
This monster, this thing, it throws the witchers from right to left as if magical mutated men all standing well over six feet and easily tripling her weight in muscle mass alone were nothing more than marionette dolls. She cries out as one of the vines sinks into Geralt's abdomen, another throwing Vesemir clean through his own shelves.
Eskel's igni fills the room with smoke, and she gags as it fills her throat. Not only can she not breathe, not only is she frightened, but the magic grows in the air, more and more and she trembles with it.
Ciri feels sick as she smells blood, smells ash and burning from the large bursts of flame that errupt from the bellowing witchers. That pressure that she felt in the upstairs coridoor comes back, more and more as she tastes an unfamiliar metallic tang that seems to be pure magic. That pressure, this taste, all she can decifer is that it's pure magic.
"Ciri, go!" Geralt snaps her out of her reverie, her fear of this magical wooden spider with a thousand legs, the fear she feels for the men she had come to love being in peril even if theh do work together to sever legs and burn this monster in tandem.
Ciri thinks fast and does as she's told, even if she hates being told what to do, and turns to sprint from her hiding spot. And that seems to be an awful mistake as her ankle is almost immediately wrapped in an iron tight grip and suddenly her balance is ripped away from her and she's weightless, in the air, until she's crashing back down, head striking something hard and everything turns black.
Geralt roars even louder than the monster upon seeing this, and he throws himself and his sword into the frey with the fury Vesemir has only seen once before in their lives.
"Fuck! What the fuck is this thing?!" Lambert bellows as he swings right to left, severing vines with his blade in one hand, reaching out to cast ignii with the other, feeling this fucking wierd thing scream in pain. His chest, this entire room, trembles with it.
"I don't know!" Eskel yells back as he throws another gust of fire as this monster. He glances over, throws flame at another vine that lifts Vesemit in the air until his mentor is dropped, and glances to the other side to see Geralt gather Ciri's limp body in one arm, pushing it until she's out of sight, hidden by the remains of some shelves and the crates the girl had been thrown into.
"Is she alright?" The eldest of the three younger wolves pants as he stands back to back with Geralt.
"Breathing. Unconscious. Hit her head. But she's breathing." He seems to be telling himself that more than Eskel by the way he says it, but the two of them quickly push off and throw themselves into the fight once more.
By some co ordinated attack, the five witchers manage to get the thing to scuttle back with five blasts of ignii cast at the same time. It scuttles up the ceiling, and Geralt barely gives it a second glance before hes running over to Ciri, turning her over and swallowing another bellow as he sees a large laceration on the girls forehead. Blood drips down her face and into her hair, the juxtaposition of the deep crimson and pale gold is like a kick to the gut. He drops the sword, pulls her into one arm, checking with the other hand on her pulse and the exhale of her breath.
Before he can say anything, he hears Eskel scream. The kind of scream only witchers have screamed in only one part of their lives.
He nearly vomits, quickly pushes his child surprise back into the best hiding place he can make for her. Getting up, the four of them see Eskel facing off against this fucking monster by himself, a large root sticking deep into his arm. He screams and screams, fights with the other arm, but it's useless.
Vesemir severs it, Lambert gets to work on trying to remove it, but Geralt can only focus on the sound of Eskel's voice, not what he says, as he and the Griffin face off side by side against this never ending monster who just comes and comes and comes.
Geralt yells as hes thrown straight through a wall, and lays dazed for several moments, brought back to life by the one sound Kaer Morhen swore that it would never hear again.
The pained scream of a child.
His head snaps up, and he forgets his own pain, his own injuries, the gushing of his own blood, forces himself upwards just to see a green vine snaking upwards to the sky, covered in blood.
He looks down in the direction where the vine looked to have come from and saw his child surprise writhing on the floor, arms wrapped tight around her middle, a large gash in her shirt. And, quickly pooling around her, the deep crimson of her own blood.
Geralt growls loudly, hearing the cries of his brother in arms and daughter of surprise, and hurls himself into the frey once more.
But the beast itself screams louder than all of them as it seems to take in Ciri's blood, the bloody vine folding in until it found its center point. But surprisingly, the vines begin to fold in odd directions, snapping in one place, facing one way, then into a vastly different. It screams, roars, but it doesn't attack them anymore.
Geralt staggers over to Eskel and Lambert, blindly trying to figure out why his brother is still crying out, only to realise with blatant horror that the vine within his arm, although has been ceased, is growing under the skin.
"Burn it out, burn it out of me!" Eskel begs, but Lambert shakes his head.
"I can't! Your whole fucking arm could go up!" He snaps, digging into his brothers skin with a grimace and a frankly green tinge to his own skin, and a thin dagger in hand, ripping into skin and muscle to get to the bark (or whatever the fuck it was, it looked like bark, but bark shouldn't grow so quickly on it's own), apologising in hushed whispers as Eskel's yells grow louder.
The damn beast roars again, and Geralt turns, readying for another round, before pausing and taking in the scene, because the beast isnt roaring in defiance, it's roaring in pain.
And who would have guessed the source of that pain would be a bleeding, pale young girl with her left hand out, fingers spread wide, curled as if in mockery of what the thing looks like.
And, much to his surprise, the damn thing began folding in on itself, loud snaps and cracks and groans and screams coming from it.
"That's it! That's it girl!" Lambert yells, and Geralt looks to see the bark and vines rushing out of Eskel's skin, leaving raw red, but human skin in its wake.
"It hurts." Ciri sobs, her arm trembling.
"I know, but just a few more seconds." Lambert grunts, watching with wide eyed amazement as the girls magic ushers the mutations to unwind, and Geralt is only dimly aware that Ciri may not know she's actually helping Eskel, for her eyes are strictly on the monster, twisting her fingers and the beast around so Coën can get a clean shot. Lighting his sword and plunging it deep into the monster. It screams again, louder, the magic in the air ripples, and it falls silent and still.
"That's it! That's it, let go!"
Ciri does, and her body collapses against the dirty, ash, glass and splinter covered floor. Geralt grunts and drags himself towards the girl, pulling her limp body to him once more. Nauseated by her blood, he is glad of the weak heartbeat in her chest, barely inking as Vesemir crawls over with something in a vial. Whatever it is, Geralt doesn't know, but her heartbeat speeds up, and he settles back on his haunches, finally feeling the sting of his own wounds.
"Come on." Vesemir rasps, placing a heavy hand on Geralt's shoulder, pushing blood stained white hair away absentmindedly. "Get you all to the infirmary, get you all healed up. We can deal with the clean up, the body tomorrow. No good to anyone bleeding out on this floor."
Geralt nods silently, goes to pick Ciri up but he finds he cannot, a pain in his abdomen stops him in his tracks. And when he looks down, he finds with surprise that there's a deep wound in his abdomen. Free of bark, it seems, but deep enough that he folds in onto his mentor, girl slipping onto the floor.
"Fuck," Vesemir rasps. "Coën, get Ciri out of here. Lambert, help Eskel. I've got Geralt."
"Come on, son." His voice is quieter, pulling a muscled arm over his shoulders, slowly helping the younger witcher to his feet, pushing the hiss of pain Geralt lets out. "Come on. I've got you. I've got you."
