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Aug 16, 2023

whatifimacrowdeddesert-deactiva

Three Wishes

Or four, depending on how you count.

For Yenralt Appreciation: Volume 2, prompt consequence.

The consequences of wishes, in two alternate stories and a tag. Under the cut and on ao3.

He makes his final wish, and on the last word, Yennefer pulls taut her leash on the djinn. It thrashes and struggles, but she holds fast and when the creature flags, she offers it freedom in return for the fulfilment of her own wish: to regain what she lost. To have returned to her what she gave up when she didn’t know what it would mean to her.

Oh, says the djinn. But, are you certain, witch?

Yes, she says, her voice like basalt.

Very well, says the djinn, very well, and now it’s too late, even though she finally hears the glee in its voice. She is engulfed. For a long time she knows nothing. Only heat and pain, a deep sickening at her core, a pull into the very centre of herself, a scattering so far to the outer reaches of her consciousness that she forgets her name. She comes back to herself in fits and starts. And something is wrong, something is out of balance, something is different and it is supposed to be, of course, but she knows, somewhere, that it is different in the wrong way. When she stumbles to her feet, she finds she cannot straighten up, there is a pain in her chest and she doesn’t understand it, but only, of course, until the blissful confusion dispels and she does understand. Regain what you lost, whispers the djinn, loose what you gained.

No, she says and raises her hand to tighten her hold on it, in case it has ideas of slipping away now, before it has fixed this. But she has no hold. The tether is a rope slick with rot and algae in her hand, studded with barnacles that slice her palm as it slips away. No, she whispers.

Yennefer, says the witcher.

No, she says.

•

The first time her courses come, she cries. It is happiness, but tinged so dark with despair, she barely recognises it at such.

•

Years later, she still sits in front of a mirror sometimes, studying her face, cataloguing the differences. She was radiant, as a mage. Her cheekbones sharper, her skin a richer colour, her lips fuller, her lashes thicker, her hair glossier. As a druid, she is dull, and she is bent. She buys the things she used to, sometimes, with the money she makes healing. Perfume, makeup. She doesn't use them.

Her courses come, regular as clockwork, but the world looks too broken to her now, she feels too broken under every stare that lingers too long on her form. She does not think she has enough light inside her to sustain another person.

•

She does not think of the witcher again. Her time in Rinde, her last day in Rinde, is compressed into one moment, a single one that overlays all others. Very well, very well. Since then, all she has done is survive, and hate herself. Because: How can she be so unhappy now that her greatest desire is within reach? How can she have misjudged herself so? Has she? Was the beauty she possessed to precious that, without it, she is so little? The answer is: yes. Because: Her beauty was power, a power she no longer possesses. She does not wonder if it would be different, were it only the higher cheekbones, the shining hair, the straight back, that she lost. She doesn’t think it matters. It is part and parcel, the allure she has lost, and the Chaos the has lost. It is a modest, quiet thing now, the magic that is hers. Enough to make a little money. Enough to make a cough a little better, a fever a littler cooler, a conception a little easier, a pain a little gentler. A hundred and a thousand leagues from the raw, elemental power she called upon when she was barren and beautiful.

Sometimes, she sits by her fire at night, and plucks a flower from the bouquet on her table, and kills it to lift a stone. Then she thinks of Tissaia and of Aretuza, of her sisters whose names sometimes pass through the village she has made her home. Their splendour and her obscurity. Has she considered it? Going back to Tissaia and to Aretuza, to ask to do it all again, and trade her dearest wish in again? Of course she has. But she cannot decide to try. She is too scared: of losing again the chance of motherhood, frozen as it has become in some deep, silent place within her; of scorn, of derision, of rejection; of being told it is not possible: to undo the undoing. She is frozen, suspended in a place that seems like a pause in time, and she cannot go forward anymore.

She lets the dead flower fall into the flames in her hearth and watches the desiccated, brittle matter vanish without a sound. As the last speck of white ash crumbles, there is a knock at her door. Outside, with blue lips and crimson hands, is the witcher.

•

He stays with her three days. She cannot bear him longer. His eyes on her, his knowledge of her, his knowing of how she was and why she is what she is now. Her splendid hubris and her carelessness in uttering her wish. She cannot bear his quiet that gives her no notion of his thoughts. He asks her, as he is leaving, holding on to a strap on his saddle and purple shadows under his eyes, if he might visit her again. No, she says, and goes away into her garden.

There, she kneels among the herbs and buzzing insects with idle hands, wondering if he will come again anyway. If she could bear that, and if it would be enough to simply bar the door and hope he will understand No after that.

In the end, it doesn’t matter. War is brewing and a few weeks after the witcher stumbled to her door, knowing only that it was a druid’s and a healer’s, her village is burnt and abandoned.

•

But their paths cross anyway. Sometimes twice in the same year, sometimes not for three or four in a row. Sometimes, she hears that he has perished, the White Wolf, and a month later, she will find herself face to face with him. In a crowded street or a on a forest track, in a backwater town or on a jetty waiting for a ferry. She finds herself moving from place to place and he does that always, and their paths cross. Each time they part ways again, she is glad of it. His eyes on her, his knowing of her. He asks her: And how have you been, Yennefer?, and his voice is unbearable. She thinks he must wonder: if there is a child yet, and since there never is, why not? Were all her pride and her loss for nothing? Or perhaps he does not wonder that at all.

She never answers his question, but takes it, holds it for a moment she always, each time, hopes will be long enough to impress upon him that she does not want it, and then returns it to him.

Her silence never is long enough. Every time they meet, he asks. But, after some years, his answer to the question returned will always be the same, too. Not word by word, but in essence. He’ll tell her of some ailment, some injury he received, and complain of a lingering infection or pain, and has she not, perhaps, something for it? And he’ll show her and hold very still while she puts on some salve or bandage. Stitches him up, even, once or twice. His eyes tracing every movement, and it’s unbearable, until it becomes a little less so with each encounter. Sometimes, they talk a while before they come to a fork in the road and she goes one way and he the other.

She begins to think of the witcher, sometimes.

•

War is rolling over the Continent and she follows it here and there, to put what power she has to what use she may. She is in Temeria when she gets thoroughly sick of the suffering and thinks she will turn her back on it for a while. The road she is on at the time leads to the temple gates of Ellander and she stands in the shade of a tree in view of them for a long time, watching the harvest in the grain fields outside Melitele’s walls and wondering if she can bear Mother Nenneke’s eyes better and for longer than the witcher’s. But she is tired, dusty and footsore, and so she thinks a new bruise on her heart will not tip the balance by much.

That day is the first, and that year the first, of many she spends at the Temple of Miletele. Nenneke’s eyes are gentler than she thought they would be, her knowing much kinder than she expected. The magic Yennefer can still command is the same that the women and girls around her possess, and there is a belonging in this that soothes the pain of the wound in her that never closes. She sits in the orchard during sultry summer evenings and watches the youngest girls laugh and play, in the study during long winter afternoons and watches them whisper and giggle, and wonders if she has enough to give again, to a new person.

She discovers that she does, only that person is no one she ever expected.

It is spring and she is walking along the garden path: the path that, this time, is to be the one crossing the witcher’s. He has with him a girl who might be a novitiate, only she isn’t: Yennefer has never seen her before, and she is not in temple garb. She has green eyes and ashen hair. Her name is Cirilla.

That night, Yennefer and the witcher talk for a long time. She does not understand why he has come to her: her, whose power is turned quiet and modest. Nothing close to what she wielded in Rinde. Nothing close to what slumbers in the girl. Because, Geralt says, I trust you. She understands that least of all. But when she is alone, she opens the door to the room where Cirilla sleeps, and knows all her objections mean nothing.

•

They keep moving and they hide as best they can. Ciri learns to fight like a witcher and learns a little magic, a little of what Yennefer used to be able to do, and does not learn to control the vast Chaos she possesses. And so at long last, Yennefer resolves to make the journey she used to think about, and never undertook: back to Aretuza. The moment she makes this decision, she understands that her daughter has wrought a profound and great change in her. She is not afraid anymore to have the eyes of all her former peers on her. She cares nothing for their knowing, nothing for their judgement, their derision, their pity. It will all be easy to bear, because of Ciri.

That night, before the banquet, as she sits combing her hair and trying to gauge how it will feel to wear glamour again, albeit of the entirely mundane kind that is contained in powders and kohl and fine fabric, Geralt comes into her room, dressed in the finery she chose for him. It is the first time she laughs freely around him. He looks so desperately uncomfortable. Stop tugging your doublet and flattening your hair, she says. You wouldn't let me wear my headband, he complains. Your headband is pretentious. It is the first time she feels a true ease that she fully acknowledges with him. It is the first time they kiss.

Later, in the banqueting hall, he looks at her at times with burning eyes, as though there are words on the tip of his tongue he only barely keeps from saying.

•

After the coup, after the disaster, Triss finds her in the ruins. Yennefer is helplessly furious, her bones eaten hollow by resentment, by fear and grief. How was she ever becoming reconciled to the meek, small magic she has? How did she ever allow herself to accept it? When it means she is only resourceless, only powerless to find her daughter, to find Geralt. When she is reduced to crawling about in the dust, looking for signs. When it means she is only at the mercy of these mages who she once more than equalled, who now need not and do not spare her a glance or a thought. Who are embroiled in games of politics that are the stuff of a sphere of power she has shut herself out of.

Triss’s eyes are kind, full of a sympathy that is unbearable. Her eyes are red, too, and blurry with smudged makeup. I’ll take you, she says, her voice breaking around her words. As soon as I’m strong enough to open another portal, I’ll take you to Brokilon.

She learns things, there, from the dryads, in the weeks that follow. Things that make her a better healer, though she understands the knowledge is dangerous to accept. They offer her the Water. More than once, and they mutter when she declines. Although she considers it, every time. Every time she says yes to a lesson, she knows she is taking a step on a path upon which comes a point of no return. She expects each moment to find she has passed it. But they only mutter, and argue among themselves, and wait to see if she will drink from their cup before Geralt is recovered.

She lies beside him while he is too weak to get up. She soothes him when he wakes screaming. She does what she can to help him heal and then helps him walk the first few times as he adjust to the damage Djikstra did. They sleep together for the first time.

Afterwards, as the warm pulse in her subsides and the sweat dries on her skin, she feels something fold, an uncomfortable, alienating sinking. She says: That wish of yours … I heard what you wished for. What made you do it? His eyes trace the lines of her face. Don’t you know? She says: You’ve condemned yourself. Condemned yourself to me.

What sort of condemnation is this supposed to be, then? He waits for an answer, then continues: I’ve loved you from the moment I first saw you.

Yennefer smiles. She was someone else.

Really?

She was powerful.

Hm. And other things.

What things? She closes her eyes and listens to the trees whisper above them, night birds conversing, his steady breathing.

They fight with Eithné together, until she lets them both leave.

•

When it is all over, barely a year but a whole lifetime later, Yennefer asks: Will our paths keep crossing, do you think? Geralt has been standing by the window in the room they are sharing, in a tavern owned by a man called Wirsing. Holding the sihill given to him by a dwarf in his hands like he’s inspecting it for the first time. Now he looks away from it, at her. The silence before he speaks might prelude a hundred different answers. I suppose not. Now that Ciri is safe, Ciri, the reason destiny brought us together. Or: Yes. It seems that wish I made so long ago does that: remind us from time to time we are bound to someone. Or: Yes. We share a daughter in common, after all, who likes to bring the family together. Or anything at all in between. What he says is: Do they have to diverge at all?

She replies: What do you mean?

With his sheathed sword in his hands he turns to her and lifts it up a bit, as though to offer it to her. I tried, he says, with something of a wry smile, to give it back to Yarpen. But he told me a gift cannot be returned. I think, though, that I may still do as I wish with something that belong so me, so I will give it to Wirsing. He can put it in that empty spot over his mantle that you told him was such an eyesore last night.

Yennefer waits, and he lays the sword aside and goes on. I’ve been a witcher long enough. Look at me. I have old injuries that hamper me, just one sword made of Mahakam steel, and no medallion. I’ve had to give up several things that made me a witcher already. I’d like to give up the rest as well.

And what will you have instead?

He swallows. You, he says. If you will have me, too.

As they make love, she does not bear his gaze on her, she relishes it. She does not recoil from being known, she finds peace in it. They leave Rivia the next morning, on a day at the beginning of June that will become a tragedy later. But they only hear of that when they reach the next town.

•

Some nights, when she wakes and can’t find sleep again, she recalls the early days after Rinde, when she sought desperately to fix what she perceived as broken; when she scrabbled together all the small Chaos she possessed and exhausted it, trying to make it enough, trying to make it stretch and last her for the arcane, vaulting enchantment that caught her the djinn, for if she could only have one more wish granted— Then, she tried only more mundane magic, ever more mundane, one step lower at a time, and as she kept wearing herself out her anger and desperation became only resignation and found herself standing at a hard limit. The flower and the stone.

But now, years later, as she sits up nights and plays with her Chaos with an easier heart and a calmer mind, with the man she loves sleeping beside her and her daughter living a life all her own in a world catching its breath, she finds little pathways, little avenues that grow slowly wider and run further afield.

She feels her way along them, from familiar touch to familiar touch, until, one day in spring, a little while after Geralt and Ciri have both left, one for a month or so and the other for longer, Yennefer stands at the edge of a vastness, with a horizon so distant that it is almost vanishing, a breathless height and a bottomless depth. She understands that, perhaps, she might go further into it. That perhaps she has found the uncharted routes, the unknown waypoints that lead from a druid’s small magic to a mage’s staggering Chaos, off the map drawn at Aretzua. All those years ago, she wondered if she could tread that path a second time, and now she knows. For a moment, she dwells in this knowledge. So she might build herself back into who she was in Rinde, before her wish. She might straighten her back, heighten her cheekbones, gloss her hair, retake the power her hubris, her muddled wish, cost her.

It is tempting. In so many ways, it is. Almost merely for the very sake of it, for the sake of demonstrating that she can. That no derision, no schadenfreude, no pity were ever her due.

What she does, is only this: she follows the traces of the familiar to the other wish, Geralt’s third wish, and nullifies it.

The next time it is due, her blood does not come. This does not upset her much. Chaos is a transaction and nothing is for free. The flower and the stone. She has paid, but she knows the amount and it is not unlimited.

When Geralt returns some weeks later, he is barely off his horse before he’s kissing her. He is so impatient for her touch, for the feel of her, they nearly make love among her herbs and flowers, in plain view of everyone passing by their home in the next hour. Then, as they lay in bed and he traces idle patterns on her back and she rubs the rawness out of a new scar on his hip, she tells him about her new dealings with Chaos, and about the wish. He says: Mm. And yet. I’m still condemned, it would seem. His eyes are dancing and she replies: Yes. That must really be your fault and only yours after all, then. He kisses her nose. How foolish of me. Then, after a while, in a quiet key, he says: I can’t give you what you want. What you did it all for, back then. So, I won’t begrudge it if you go with someone else. Any hurt or jealousy I might feel over it would be very little in comparison to knowing I’m the only thing still standing in your way.

Her courses have come again, regular as clockwork. She has wondered, in the past, what he would say. If she put the question to him of her own accord. With his answer before her, she searches her heart once more, the tender places within her where her burning desire, and that long-banked light lived, that she carried with her through the years between Rinde and Ellander. She thinks of the day in the temple garden when he brought Ciri to her. And thinks: I have what I wanted. I’m a mother and I’m also a mage. I am important to you.

She smiles and moves her body over his. Is this your way of trying to get my permission, she purrs against his lips, to go with other women? Quid pro quo?

He exhales as she slips her hands between them. No, he breathes. Why would I ever want to go with anyone but you?

She stands in the ruined house and looks at the witcher. His clothes and face are dusty from the debris around them, and a scrape is on his cheek from their tumble from the ceiling, but otherwise, he might be quite unharmed. The unnatural pallor of his skin is its normal tone, she knows this. Witcher, she says, are you dead? He does not stir. Of course he does not stir. He is dead.

She sighs. A vibration passes through her left hand, reminding her of the djinn whose tether she still holds. A livid, chuntering, sparking ball of Chaos. Chivalry is such a waste, she says to the livid ball. And thankless. Although I’ll admit that it worked in my favour this time, and I would have thanked the witcher, had there been the chance.

The witcher made his third wish: to be taken instead of her. What possessed him, she will never know. Well, she concludes, and turns to the djinn. I believe it is my turn to make a wish.

The vibration of Chaos reaches a pitch with such suddenness and violence, it catches her utterly off guard. She is flung backwards, across the length of the room, and onto the floor. She hits it hard with her left shoulder first, and screams as the joint dislocates. Screams again, struggling despite the pain, despite tears welling fast and falling, but it is brief and pointless. The tether slips from her hand. Oh, she was fooled. She fooled herself. She didn’t stop to think, not enough, to wonder why it was easier to keep leashed the djinn after the last wish. It fooled her. It is cackling, it is roaring like a storm, blazing, tearing at the walls and the floor and the remains of the ceiling like a creature crazed with glee. Yennefer curls her good arm over her head as splinters of timber and fragments of stone rise into the air and being to whirl, shoot about and drop haphazardly. More tears stream down her cheeks as she blinks grit and dust away, trying to see the door, see if it’s unobstructed, as if physical distance might protect her. She turns onto her knees and begins to crawl, and then sees the djinn condense, like a hurricane sucking in clouds, spinning around one focal point. The witcher. Take me, it whispers, take me, and it plunges down towards his body and is gone. Yennefer blinks. The silence is like a headache. For a time, nothing happens, and her mind is blank. Then it begins to race.

A vessel. The djinn is inside a vessel. All it takes is a seal.

She scrambles to her feet, loses her balance and falls, tastes blood as she bites her tongue when she clamps her teeth around another scream. Heedless of sharp stone and glass, she stumbles forward and drops down next to the witcher’s body. She yanks his knife out of the sheath strapped to his thigh, and straddles him; cuts through the leather straps on his jerkin and tears the ties on his shirt until enough of his chest is free. With his knife she carves the runes into the flesh below his collarbones.

In a somewhat belated response to that, he does stir. Not dead. That makes things easier.

•

Their first conversation afterwards ends like this:

It’s your own fault, she says, impatient. Don’t you know you have to be precise when you make a wish to a creature like that? If you wanted it to kill you, you should have said that. But you asked it to take you, and so it did. I only sealed it in.

So unseal it.

And bring its undoubtedly exponentiated fury down upon myself? Certainly not.

He stares at her. So what then?

She doesn’t answer him. Because she has yet to determine the particulars herself. So she goes to have her shoulder reset and think on it.

•

I will free the djinn, she says, eventually. When I have found a better way to bend it to my will. You won’t have to carry it around with you forever. She has searched for so long for a way to undo the atrophy in her womb. Has tried every treatment, even the most obviously made-up ones. Has tried every magic, even the most tentatively related to the nature of what she needs. The power of a djinn is closer than she has ever come to a true chance and she’ll be damned if she gives it up.

And how will you free it?, asks Geralt, coolly. She looks at him. In truth, she never contemplated the how. Only the when seemed important. Now that he’s brought it up, she has to acknowledge that, of course, the manner of the freeing will matter to him. Seeing as the method that suggests itself most immediately and simply, is killing him. She shrugs. You heal easily. I’ll burn the runes away. He says nothing.

In another town, she makes him sit in front of her as she casts spells, makes him drink potions. It seems pertinent to know whether or not the nature of the vessel – sentient or not – has a bearing on the djinn contained in it. I’m grateful you consider me sentient, Geralt growls. She rolls her eyes and tells him to shut up. The vibrations of his voice upset her readings.

It is by chance that, halfway through her trials, that she finds out what she has made when she sealed an elemental trickster into a mutant. The local constabulary, of a regular mid-week night, bangs the door down and brings her a litany of well-worn complaints. She listens, bored, with not all of one ear, deciding how to resolve this matter, when she sees someone’s eyes flick to the witcher. The man behind her, scarred and sinewy, hulking, with strange eyes and a dark expression on his colourless face. She notes the discomfort his presence creates in this constable, and she’s put in mind of how he sorted out her problems in Rinde for her. She turns to him and contemplates it, and in the contemplating notices a reflection; an undulation or an impulse, a signal between her half-formed wish and the witcher with a djinn in him. Following an instinct, forms her wish fully and verbalises it. The witcher sorts out the constabulary for her.

And so she’s made a new leash. Braided through the seal that binds the djinn, and the djinn is in the witcher, so the leash is around his neck. She finds she can tug on it, and he must follow. And she thinks that this is not an inconvenient thing to have. A witcher to command, to do a little dirty work for her if she needs it, and not even an enchantment required to make him.

As side effects go, she says, this is remarkably useful.

•

As the years go by, he is with her when she wants him to be. Whenever it is necessary, at first. It does not matter where he is. She can yank him through a portal at a moment’s notice, and dispatch him to his task.

As the years go by, she notices the way he looks at her sometimes. The same way he did in Rinde when he refused to leave her to her fate. Interesting. Still so interesting. Regardless of it, she waits. She flirts with him, teases him. But she waits for him to kiss her first, waits for him to press himself against her first, the hard ridge of him against her belly. There are lines even she won’t cross. But once he has unlaced her clothes first, she has no compunctions in calling him to her when she wants to be loved. Or just fucked.

He is good at it. He wants her, she can feel it in every touch of his fingers, every brush of his lips, and that makes him good. It is worship. And that, she adores. He takes for himself, too, sometimes. When he is angry with her, and that sets her alight just as much as when he gives. But mostly, it is worship. He’ll do what she asks for, even though in bed, she never compels him. (Not even onto the unicorn.) That line, she won’t blur.

It is interesting. So interesting. She studies him, him and their djinn. The mechanics fascinate her endlessly and she would take him to Aretuza to dissect (only figuratively, of course), if she weren’t so jealous of him. The djinn proves dormant, as it would be in any other vessel. It causes him no discomfort, although he cannot wear his medallion anymore. It never stops vibrating when it is on him.

•

I used to be scared, he says one night. Of losing control. I’m a witcher. I can do a lot of damage because of what I am. The only protection against that is my self-control.

Is it one of those rumours? That you can go into frenzies?

No.

Hm. You used to be scared? Not anymore?

No, I still am. Only not of the if, but the when. The moment when you take control and I have none whatsoever, and all I can do is deal out violence and hope you will stop before I hurt someone innocent. And worse, the moment when the djinn takes me, and there is no rhyme or reason to the carnage anymore at all, and all I can do is hope you will come to yank on our leash in time.

This begun to happen, after a while. It does matter, it would appear, if the vessel is sentient. At first he would get sudden, sharp headaches that blacked out his vision. Then he started losing time, though never much. Then he lost a little more and found his saddle bags full of stolen things afterwards. Yennefer noticed it, a mild tingle down the back of her neck, when the djinn woke. She opened a portal when it happened, and whisked Geralt through to query him about it. The tales amused her. A pickpocket djinn, she said, that is almost useful. Geralt responded with grim silence and she teased him over worrying about his reputation. Then, one night, she woke to him writhing in the bed beside her, drenched in sweat, groaning as though in pain. It took her full minutes to wake him, and then she sat for minutes as he vomited, then yelled at her the things she didn’t grasp about the djinn in him because she didn’t care to look closely enough at that part of it all, only at the books and scrolls she consults in search of a way for her to capitalise on it all. The physical pain it causes him, the battles for control he fights and always loses, the horror of the blackout. That night, she frowned, and told him he was being dramatic and his worries unfounded, because she felt it when the djinn woke, and she had its leash.

Now, she doesn’t answer. It hasn’t only been pickpocketing, since. Poison in a well, a knife in a barmaid’s back, a torch in a haystack. What counts for fun to a trickster spirit. None of it came to fruition. She has always been in time. But another truth is that she never cared to grasp he was scared. Scared of himself. After a long pause, he goes on: It was the first thing you ever did to me. Put a spell on me and used me to ‘settle your accounts'. Like I was a mindless tool and nothing more. You made me into that. The very thing I’ve fought my entire life not to be.

So why did you help me? she asks. Why not simply leave me to my fate in Rinde? It would have been fine payback. That wish of yours … Why did you do it?

He closes his eyes. Don’t you know?

Taken by surprise, she laughs out loud. Love at first sight? His expression doesn’t change. He stares at the ceiling and when he blinks, there is a glint. Faint and silver at the corner of his eye. Her laughter dies. Is that true? she asks, with unfeigned tenderness.

It is the only thing that keeps me from falling on my damn sword, Yennefer. Because you haven’t found a way to protect yourself against the djinn if it gets free. His eyes close again. Quietly, almost in a whisper, he adds: And I don’t think you ever will.

•

Then there is Ciri. Geralt asks Triss for help first because he doesn’t trust Yennefer enough, and she is angry, hurt in a complicated way that she will examine at some later, unspecified time (perhaps never). For the time being, she manages to accept with sufficient grace that he has some cause to be wary of her, and to just be glad Triss wasn’t all that Ciri needed.

She loves the girl fiercely from the moment she meets her, and as the brightly burning want in her disappears into that love, she begins to look at Geralt and see only a man, who will do just as much as she will for his child surprise, which is everything; who is taciturn and tender, loyal and weary, stubborn and brave, sharp-tongued and sharply clever, sometimes self-absorbed and sulky, and always good. And she forgets about the leash around his neck.

But he never does. Not when they are together, in any case. When she looks at him, besides all else she sees now, she also sees him waiting for it. He’ll watch her, intently, as if trying to parse her intentions from the eyeshadow she’s chosen that day, and he won’t look away when she meets his gaze. She’ll smile, softly and privately, each time this happens. To say: I won't. Then he will look away, and not believe her. No matter how many times she keeps her word and doesn’t compel him, he won’t believe her. He only ever keeps waiting.

They lose sight of each other after Thanedd, and when she falls into Vilgefortz’s hands she screams with rage because he discovers the curious, curious link between her and her witcher, and he roots around in it with a scalpel and with forceps and the jealousy burns her. But more than that she’s consumed by fury because he uses it, he uses what is hers and he says, This is easier than scrying, my dear Yennefer, this is marvellous.

But then, at least she can also find Geralt again, following the braid of the leash, they all find each other, and keep fighting together until they win.

When it’s all done, they go their separate ways for a while, Geralt and Ciri along a far-flung, meandering path, and Yennefer along a shorter, straighter one. But her daughter spends the winters with her in Vengerberg and some weeks of the summers too. The third year, Geralt stays the winter as well. Since she locked the djinn in him, he has gone to Kaer Morhen once: with Ciri. Never since. He will not risk the consequences of the djinn taking him over when he is there. A portal cannot open into Kaer Morhen. The leash does not reach.

It takes her years. But one winter’s night, alone by the fire in her bedroom, Yennefer shuts the last book she will ever peruse in search of a solution. Geralt is right. She will never find a way to make the djinn harmless. But enough time has passed now that she has come to understand one thing: if the only way to save him is to die for him, she will.

He is in Oxenfurt this winter. At the end of the season, she writes to him and asks him to visit her in Vengerberg. It is early summer, the beginning of June, before he comes. She allows herself the first day, the first night with him. On the second night, she pours a sedative into his wine. When he is unconscious, she does again, with a strange feeling of unreality and self-consciousness, what she did that day, so many years ago now, in Rinde. Though, a little differently, too: she straddles him, but carefully; she opens his shirt, but she undoes the ties one by one; she looks at his face, and presses her hand to his chest, over his heart, counting three of his heartbeats to a dozen of hers. She breathes out and sends a rare prayer to Melitele.

It isn’t that she’s afraid of dying. But she would like to live a life with him and their daughter that is unencumbered by the past.

She pulls the blade she has hidden for this from under the bedlinen, fires it to a white heat with a whisper of Chaos, and puts it flat against the runes carved into his flesh, pressing down on it with her bare palm so she will be burnt, too.

•

She wakes on the floor, her head pounding and her nostrils filled with the stench of burning flesh. It makes her retch and she rolls onto her side, but only ends up in a coughing fit. There is a burning, unbearable pain somewhere, and she locates it at length in her left hand. The healing magic comes instinctively, and after some moments, the pain eases and cools and she sits blinking at her palm, watching the skin even out, turn smooth and shiny and bright red, then paler and finely creased. A dull ache remains, a blush as though from leaning to long on her hand, but it’ll do.

Slowly, her mind begins to ask: what happened? It is morning, late morning, the sunlight reaching far enough into the room to touch her foot where she is sitting. Outside, she hears a cart go by, and laughter, singing. She remembers that it is the day of the summer festival, always on the first Sunday in June in Vengerberg.

Again, she smells burnt skin. Everything crashes through her. She whips around to see Geralt, still on the bed where she laid him the night before. He hasn’t moved, not at all. She doesn’t know if the sedative was too strong, too strong after all, it had to be strong, much stronger than for someone else because he is a witcher, but did she give him an overdose, did she make his heart stop, did the djinn choose to take him at his word of years and years ago again, Take me, that it did, again, that it took his life, after years of slumbering inside of him did it understand how much Geralt means to her, did it make his death its vengeance rather than hers, but against the palm of her hand, when she reaches him, she feels his heart, three beats to three hundred of hers. She moves her hands to the ghastly burn below his collarbones. She whispers magic until it is not an open wound anymore, until it might be months old. She kneels beside him and watches his face. As calm and still as the night before. Witcher, she says, voice splintering. Are you dead?

She puts her warm, just healed palm against his cheek, and he tips his face towards it. No, he says, and opens his eyes. For a moment, he only looks at her, the way he does at times when the world has fallen away, is suspended in the brief unreality, the momentary non-existence, between sleep and waking; when there is nothing between them but love. Then his brow creases. What happened? he asks. His voice is croaky and slurred, as though her sedative still had him in its grip.

What did happen, she suddenly thinks. Both of us being alive, me being alive — did anything happen at all? But she looks and the room says something happened. Something like a rampaging djinn. A window is missing. Not only the glass, but all of it, including the casement and a wedge of roof above. The walls are spiderwebbed with cracked plaster, the ashes from the fireplace blown across the floor, and mostly everything breakable, broken.

Yennefer sits back, takes both his hands in hers, and then gets off the bed, pulling him upright with her. His legs slip over the edge of the bed and he stays there, beginning to notice the devastation in the room, too. As he studies the fireplace, the blown out window, splintered timber and fragmented brick, his hand goes to his neck, but absently. The newness of the scar, one bold brushstroke instead of manifold fine lines, doesn’t register yet. What happened? he asks again.

Get up, Yennefer tells him.

He turns back to her. After some moments, he says: I ... don't feel …

Get. Up.

Something in him stills. He recognizes it. Her tone, the compelling. And she sees on his face the moment he realises the djinn is gone. He looks at the room again, begins: How did you ...?

I didn't. I did nothing. It ... It left. Did it truly just leave? Fighting a laugh, she says: Perhaps it was simply glad to see the back of me. He does make to get up then, and decides against it mid-movement. She goes to him, takes his face in her hands again. But he’s all right. Just dazed. She is, too.

He says: You had no plan.

But I did, really. It was to free you of the djinn. That wish of yours … She trails off momentarily, and trails her fingers through his hair. You condemned yourself, when you made it. Condemned yourself to me. I only found I was prepared to condemn myself, too, if that’s what it took.

Yen, he whispers. Her fingertips on his neck, she feels his pulse. She cocks her head. Yen? No one’s ever called me that. Say it again.

You’ve condemned yourself, she said, when he wished for their fates to be forever bound together. Condemned yourself to me. He remembers this in the last moment before he slips away on the street in Rivia, on a hot day in early June. You’ve condemned yourself. He can smell her, lilac and gooseberries, as though she were there by his side. And he thinks, in that last moment, so much space in one last moment: I didn’t condemn myself. This was not condemnation. If this is what I was allowed, this life with you, no matter that I wanted more of it, that was no condemnation. The final blessing given the witcher, is that he does not know, in this last moment, that he condemned her too.

Although, if you were to ask her, she might say it is no doom to her, either, to die together with him.

#reblog #fanfic #yenralt appreciation

yenraltsource

Aug 16, 2023

infestissum

love me forever, a yenralt fanmix 23 songs, 1hr 53mins listen on spotify here tracklist and lyrics under the cut

YENRALT APPRECIATION, VOL 2. -> prompt: forever + two colors

poison, alice cooper

I wanna love you but I better not touch (don't touch) I wanna hold you, but my senses tell me to stop I wanna kiss you but I want it too much (too much) I wanna taste you but your lips are venomous poison

be my druidess, type o negative

Around the pyre, a circle of thirteen Throughout these woods, ecstatic screams I look deeply into your eyes I smell your hair, caress your thighs Now we'll make love by fire light

love is a fire, subvision

Baby, listen, I'm sellin' my soul to the devil in you So give me, give me the strength and I'll push it through Love is a fire, and it's ragin' out of control Love is a fire And it's burnin' up my soul

love walked in, thunder

So tired of waiting, I walked an empty land I was looking for something to help me understand But bad luck kept turning my dreams into sand I didn't want pity, I had my share of friends I wanted somebody more special than the rest I was aching inside like I was approaching the end Just about that moment the timing was so right You appeared like a vision sent down to my life I thought I was dreaming when I saw you that night

spell i'm under, winger

Woman, never before Without a word I hear so much Woman, under the spell Every sin holy in your touch It's all I feel, it's all I see And all I know it must be you You're the spell I'm under

prisoner of your eyes, judas priest

When I saw your face I became a prisoner of your eyes And I would do just anything To stay and be with you

love me forever, motörhead

Love me forever, or not at all End of our tether, backs to the wall You give me your hand, don't you ever ask why Promise me nothing, live 'til we die

hold on to my heart, W.A.S.P.

Take away the pain, inside my soul And I'm afraid, so all alone Take away the pain, that's burning in my soul Cause I'm afraid that I'll be all alone So just hold me, hold me, hold me

love you to death, type o negative

In her place one hundred candles burning As salty sweat drips from her breast Her hips move and I can feel what they're saying, swaying They say the beast inside of me is gonna get ya, get ya, get

dance macabre, ghost

How could it end like this? There's a sting in the way you kiss me Something within your eyes Said it could be the last time 'Fore it's over

sleeping (in the fire), W.A.S.P.

Touch, touch in the flame's desire Feeling the pain's denial And your finger's in the fire Look, look in the candlelight See in the flame of life And my spell is so alive

darling, mcc

Been on my way so many times I walked away so many times From you But in the end you held the key And as it seems the fate of me In you It's ashes and dust Where are you now? I need you now You're lost somehow Where are you now?

jasmine and rose, clan of xymox

The air tastes just like you, it's the smell of June A sensory shock that jolts my spirit, I slowly swallow you A spray of little droplets, a fragrance so refined The spirit of nostalgia is passing me by

darkness at the heart of my love, ghost

There's a darkness at the heart of my love That runs cold, runs deep The darkness at the heart of my love So bold, so sweet

one more fucking time, motörhead

Both your eyes wide open You see the shape I'm in It wasn't of my choosing It's only bones and skin And I will plead no contest If loving you's a crime So go on and find me guilty Just one more fucking time

hell is living without you, alice cooper

Try to walk away When I see the time I've wasted Starving at a feast And all this wine I've never tasted On my lips your memory has been stained Is it all in vain? Tell me who's to blame, yeah

mama i'm coming home, ozzy osbourne

You took me in and you drove me out Yeah, you had me hypnotized, yeah Lost and found and turned around By the fire in your eyes You made me cry, you told me lies But I can't stand to say goodbye Mama, I'm coming home I could be right, I could be wrong It hurts so bad, it's been so long Mama, I'm coming home

only my heart talkin', alice cooper

Anybody's dream can fall apart Anybody's mask can break Couldn't tell you how I wanted you Enough to make you want to stay I never said the words out loud I guess I couldn't get' em straight Baby, give me one more chance Before you walk away

this heart of mine (i pledge), pain of salvation

I lie awake watching your shoulders Move so softly as you breathe With every breath you're growing older But that is fine if you're with me I pledge to wake you with a smile I pledge to hold you when you cry I pledge to love you 'till I die 'Till I die

i don't want to live without you, sleeze beez

I find myself in a strange situation And I don't know how What seemed to be an infatuation Is so different now I can't get by if we're not together Ooh can't you see Girl, I want you now and forever Close to me I'm longing for the time I'm longing for the day Hoping that you will promise to be mine And never go away

save your love, great white

I wake in the night To find you on my mind Deep in a dream, You'll always be Until the end of time I look in your eyes They touch my soul My love is hard to hide I'm never alone when we're apart. I feel you by my side

angel, judas priest

Angel, put sad wings around me now Protect me from this world of sin so that we can rise again Oh, Angel, we can find our way somehow Escaping from the world we're in to a place where we began And I know we'll find a better place and peace of mind Just tell me that it's all you want, for you and me Angel, won't you set me free?

life eternal, ghost

Can you hear me say your name forever? Can you see me longing for you forever? Would you let me touch your soul forever? Can you feel me longing for you forever, forever?

#reblog #fanmix #yenralt appreciation

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