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Geralt can no longer remember how or when they caught him. Or who they even were. The entire universe seems to have contracted down to this single moment in time, this one space. He is kneeling in the middle of a cave, wrists and ankles chained to the floor with iron so heavy that it is no use trying to break it, not with his Signs. Maybe Eskel would have a chance, but not him. He has been shivering mercilessly ever since he woke up here. The ceiling and walls of the cavern are ice, and his breath is forming plumes in the cold air. His knees are rubbed raw, and the cold makes the iron of the manacles stick to his skin, ripping new wounds every time he moves even a little. The blood forms frozen droplets on the floor, like a smattering of jewels.
All of this registers to him only remotely, although the pain will be substantial should he survive. Should. He is no longer sure that he will – Ciri should be safe, far away with Yennefer, and his agreed meeting with Jaskier is weeks away. The other Wolves won’t expect him until winter. Nobody will miss him for a while. He shudders again, distantly feeling the pain the movement causes.
They plied him with something before he lost consciousness and they dragged him down here. An elixir, some sort of magically infused potion that they made him swallow. He doesn’t know what it was, but he is sure he will soon find out.
As if on cue, something shifts at the edge of his perception. His sensitive hearing can pick up a small rustle, coming from the entrance to the cave behind him. Geralt resists the urge to try and turn around, knowing that the motion would only amplify the pain in his body. He tries to block out the agony, the cold, tries to concentrate on just his hearing. It sounds like steps. Small steps, like that of a-
A shape walks into his field of view, a young man, just short of twenty years.
“Mikael.” The name falls from Geralt’s lips, unbidden. The youth only stares at him, nothing of the lively boy Geralt once knew left in his expression. His eyes are entirely devoid of any colour, staring at him unblinking.
“You’re dead,” Geralt whispers through his frozen lips. Another set of shivers racks his body, ripping open the scabs that have formed over his wrists. “You cannot be here. You are dead.”
The young man, Mikael, nods and walks closer. Geralt twitches, instinctively tries to jerk backwards, but the chains that hold him in place do not allow for much movement. Mikael reaches out and as soon as his fingers touch Geralt’s cheek, his world explodes.
*
It takes him less than a second to know where he is. No matter how many years pass, no matter how many memories he tries to paint it over with, this is the place he will return to in his nightmares until the end of his life.
The air is thick with the smell of herbs and the stench of death, of fear and screams as the mutagens ravage through the boys that undergo the Trials. The smell alone is enough to send a shiver of remembered pain through Geralt, and he wants nothing more than to throw up, to cower in a corner and curl up into a small ball until this nightmare passes. Instead he finds that he is still bound, in the same position as before in the icy cave, unable to move.
Mikael stands in front of him, eyes still empty, even as wounds open all over his body, the traces of rope burns on his wrist and ankles, the shape of broken bones pressing against his skin. A scream rises around them, the scream of hundreds of boys who have perished in this very place before Lambert was the last to emerge alive.
“Do you remember, Geralt?” Mikael asks, his voice distorted and wrong, even as he dies in front of him again and again. “You promised we would both survive. That we would be stronger after the Trials.”
“I’m sorry,” Geralt whispers. “I didn’t know, I didn’t know.”
“You used to have red hair, do you remember?” Mikael reaches out with broken fingers, a distorted figure that is a caricature of the boy who Geralt used to chase up and down the walls of Kaer Morhen. “It would look like fire in the setting sun. Where is your red hair?”
“Gone.” Just like you. Just like Bren, like Yannis, like Nikolaj. Like the memories of innocence, the promises of a full life for all of us after surviving the Trials.
“Do you want to know how I died?” Mikael is so close that Geralt should be able to smell him now, but he cannot. All that his nose can pick up on is the stench of the rooms that they had dragged him and the other four into when they were not even twenty, telling them that they were specifically chosen as the most outstanding amongst their peers, the ones who had recovered the quickest from the Trial of the Grasses. ‘Chosen for what?’ Mikael had asked. ‘To become the best among us,’ they had been told and they all knew what it meant.
‘I promise we’ll survive’, Geralt had said and it had been a lie, the first of so many. Nobody had survived. Nobody but him. The ashes of the pyre had long been cold when he had regained enough of his senses to ask after Mikael and the others. Why him?
“No,” he whispers. “Please, no.”
“I died in pain,” Mikael continues, and even if he could stopper his ears, Geralt would still keep hearing his voice, reverberating in his head. “Broken, burning, screaming. Begging for it to stop. Still believing your promise even when my own heart began tearing its way out of my chest.”
“Stop.” Geralt squeezes his eyes together. But Mikael is as cold in death as he was warm in life, his broken, twisted fingers squeezing Geralt’s cheeks until the agony of the Trials rips through his body again and all he can do is scream.
The pain ebbs away from him slowly, leaving his head pounding and a knot of nausea sitting deep inside his chest. Geralt opens his eyes again, almost hoping he will see the icy cave again. At least, in it he can suffer alone and in peace, not reminded of his failures. He has never forgiven himself for being the one that survived.
Instead of the cave, however, he is faced with another familiar scenery – a burnt out field, the corpse of a wyvern not far, the ground stinking and drenched in blood and viscera, some of it his own. In front of him stands a shivering youth, eyes as empty as Mikael’s had been. He is lanky, his body still caught in one of the awkward growth spurts of youth where none of his limbs quite seem in proportion. Geralt doesn’t know his name, but he doesn’t have to. He would recognise him amongst an ocean of people.
The youth stares at him, a gaping wound of three parallel claw marks where his chest used to be. There is blood running down from his mouth, more coming up as he tries to speak.
“You should have saved me,” he whispers. “You promised you would save me.”
“I know.” Geralt draws an aching breath into his lungs, feel his eyes burning. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I know.”
“And you didn’t even die for it. They were going to kill you, you know? If it weren’t for your mentor, they would have killed you.” The stare from the youth’s eyes is unrelenting as the blood drips to the floor from his chin. Drip, drip, drip, red-black spots soaked up by the soil. Geralt wants to look away, but all he can do is stare at the drops of blood spreading on the ground.
“I know I should have.” As he says it, he can feel the slash opening up on his leg again, bleeding where the wyvern had caught him. His bones break once more under the onslaught of the angry townsfolk and he screams when he feels the touch of dimeritium again, setting his blood on fire. This time, there is no Vesemir to soothe away the pains, no hands that carry him out of this living hell. This time he is caught in it until he end, until he thinks he will just split apart at the seams, falling apart into nothing.
When he regains consciousness, he finds himself in a meadow full of flowers. It seems peaceful for the moment, before his senses pick up some rustling in the grasses around him and the metallic smell of blood fills his nose once more.
“You said we would be fine.” He is still chained to the ground and cannot turn around, but he knows this voice. He could never forget. Geralt closes his eyes, doesn’t want to see the ghost who has come to haunt him this time.
The scolopendromorphs had ripped her apart in the space of a thought. Geralt had thought he could keep her safe on this meadow of flowers, that his Witcher senses could point him towards the predator long before it could attack. He had been wrong. The girl hadn’t even had time to scream before the pincers had torn into her body, ended a life that had barely even begun.
She’s standing there now, a little girl of barely six summers, her cheerful dress drenched in blood, lower half a mess. Geralt thinks he is going to throw up, only the icy cold holding the bile back in his throat. The low keening sound that her mother had made when he brought her back will haunt him until the end of his days.
“You used me. You let me die.” The whispers are at odds with the high voice of shrieking delight that he remembers from her.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t want to. I didn’t mean to.” He begs forgiveness even though he knows he won’t find it. The blood from her body is drenching the ground, dyeing the flowers and grasses red. How can such a tiny body hold so much blood?
“It’s your fault. You could have saved me.” She comes closer now, raises her little arms, speckled with blood as if they were freckles. Her eyes are as empty as those of the others and it is somehow worse than the burning embers of revenge would have been. “It should have been you, dead in the meadow. Not me.”
“I would let it take me instead if I could do it again,” Geralt says. “I would save you. I’m sorry.”
“Too late.” The girl’s lips twist in a snarl that should be out of place in any young child’s face, but somehow isn’t. “Far too late.”
Her fingers touch his cheeks and again the pain explodes behind his eyes. He feels the stones that they pelted him with, back in the village, hears the screams of terror and pain from the villagers, feels his skin bruise where he hadn’t been fast enough to turn away. He doesn’t know how much longer he can take this, doesn’t want to close his eyes for fear that he will wake up in another nightmare, faced with yet more of his failures. All he wants is to wake up back in the cave, his life slowly being drained away by ice and pain. Anything, so that he doesn’t have to look at them anymore.
You cannot save them all, Vesemir had told him that the first year on the path, eyes brimming with sympathy born from his own failures and, perhaps, something more that Geralt was still too young to understand. But Geralt had tried anyway, hadn’t wanted to accept what his old mentor had told him. He was a Witcher. He’d had his humanity stripped from him so that he could save that of others. What good was he as a Witcher if he couldn’t even fulfil this most simple of purposes?
Eventually, the pain recedes back to lower levels, and Geralt opens his eyes once more. He almost breathes a sigh of relief when he sees the icy cave. Perhaps the effect of whatever they have done to him has lessened. Perhaps it is over. Perhaps he can at least die in peace.
“You will never find peace.” There is a figure standing in front of him that hadn’t been there before. A boy, perhaps ten summers old, one half of his body burnt almost beyond recognition.
“You should have saved us.” Another girl appears, this one with half her face an unrecognisable mass of rent flesh. Mikael is back, too, as is the baker’s boy from his first year on the Path. They keep appearing, one by one, all the children that he has failed to save, that have been haunting his nightmares for decades. Some of them he had only heard stories about because they died before he even took the contract. Some disappeared when he was working. Some he has seen dying, remembers holding in his arms until their bodies went cold. There are so many.
Geralt begins shaking, whether from the cold or from sheer grief, he doesn’t know. The manacles rub against his exposed skin, his blood pooling on the ground below, but he cannot stop.
“I’m sorry,” he says again, over and over, a mantra of sheer desperation. “Forgive me, please.”
“There is no forgiveness,” Mikael whispers.
“Just death”, another adds. They are walking around him now, a vortex of pain and guilt, with him at the centre, at the origin of all of it. Occasionally they touch him, jolt his body with pain both remembered and imagined until his panting, barely able to squeeze a single breath past his constricting lungs.
“Join us,” they murmur, quietly at first, then louder and louder as his own resolve to live begins to falter. He should join them, shouldn’t he? After all, it is the only thing he can do to atone for what he’s done. His blood for theirs. His life at their feet. His guilt…no more than a streak of red in an icy cave.
His breath begins to slow, and he can feel the shadows creeping in at the edges of his vision. He no longer feels the cold, or even the pain from the iron that is tying him down. All he feels is the piercing gazes of the dead children around him as he closes his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he says again, forces it past his frozen lips. There is blood on his tongue. “I failed you all.”
“Not all.” The voice is strong, loud and so full of life where there were only empty husks around him before. Two hands grab his face and gently lift it up. They are warm, their touch almost burning. He forces his eyelids to open again, to see who is standing in front of him, the last of these ghosts that will ultimately claim his life. Eyes of brilliant emerald green meet his, so unlike the dead stare of the children. Ashen hair, tied back so it is kept out of her eyes.
“Ciri,” he whispers. As brilliant as the first snow on the mountains, bright and warm. His beautiful wild child, linked to him by destiny. His daughter.
“I’m here,” she says. “I’m real.”
He can’t say anything else in reply, doesn’t dare blink, for fear that she’ll disappear, that this is one final cruel illusion that they have sent his way.
“Promise me you won’t die whilst I finish up here?” Her hands are still on his cheeks, warm and comforting. And alive, so alive.
“Will try,” he forces out and she just nods, presses a quick kiss to his forehead before turning around again. His eyelids fall closed again, but he clings to the warmth on his cheek and forehead, to Ciri’s presence so close by. Her heartbeat, strong and steady, the hum of her abilities in the air around her. He can’t see what she’s doing, but he can hear her shouting, followed by an explosion of brightness and warmth. It does more than quiet the whispers of the dead around him. Suddenly, the feeling of oppression, the heaviness that he hadn’t even noticed sitting on his mind and body, disappears, and he drags in a deep breath – only to cough it out again as his ribs and lungs constrict painfully.
“Easy, easy.” Ciri is there again, her hands flitting over his body, trying to assess the easiest way to get rid of the chains, trying to see how hurt he is. “They’re gone. We’ll get you out of here, and then you can rest.”
Rest. The word alone sounds wonderful, but the shadows of the dead are still there at the edges of his mind, still trying to claw their way in. He opens his eyes, almost afraid of what he’ll find, but there is no trace of them – just the cold walls of the icy cave, the ground slowly turning into a puddle of water where Ciri had worked her magic.
“They’re gone,” he whispers.
“They are,” she confirms. “They weren’t real ghosts. Some sort of illusion, drawn from your mind and given form by this place, feeding off your pain. They might not have been real, but they’d have killed you just as well.” She frowns, then evidently decides that this is a conversation they’ll have another day.
“We need to get you out of here. Come on.”
Geralt cannot see what she’s doing – one moment he is still held up by the chains, the next they are gone, together with the manacles, and he finds himself curled up on the icy ground, gritting his teeth against the pain shooting through him. He knows this won’t be the end, knows that he’ll heal if he can just get up and get out of here, find Roach and the potions in his saddlebag. Somehow, even getting up to his knees seems an insurmountable task, however. Ciri makes a low noise in her throat when she sees him fall to his hands again.
“Wait.” Within seconds, her warm hands are under his arm, helping him up. “Lean on me.” Geralt does so and she props him upright with only a small grunt of effort. Geralt tries to put as little weight on her as possible, but he cannot help the warm feeling that pools in his heart. When has his daughter gotten so strong?
“Missed you,” he mumbles. “How’d you find me?”
“I was in the area. Yen sent me, said she’d heard of some rogue mages conducting experiments with hallucinatory elixirs, that they’d taken people as their guinea pigs who all turned up dead a few days later. Wanted me to find out what was going on, confront them.”
Yennefer. The name sends another tendril of warmth shooting through him. He wishes Yen were here right now so that he could show her just how amazing their daughter has turned out to be. But then, she already knows. She was the one who sent her here, after all. Had she known that Geralt…? He shakes his head, chases the thought away. Unimportant now. All that counts is Ciri she was here and that he will be safe, thanks to her.
Fresh air finally hits his face, a relief after all the time spent inside the cave. He shudders and inhales deeply, trying to chase away the smell of blood and despair that still clings to his senses like a second skin. He can smell fresh rain and, hidden in it, a whiff of blood that isn’t his. Ciri answers his questioning glance with a little shrug.
“Caught them both off guard and killed them. Figured that they’ve done enough damage to you and the people living here.” Geralt grunts in reply. He is impressed that she has seemingly managed to defeat them so easily – but then, his daughter has always been more than capable, and they had known that he was coming, had set a trap for him that he’d had little chance to escape from.
“Come on, just a little further.” Ciri has noticed how his steps have begun to flag, the weight of his ordeal beginning to press down on him even more now that he knows there’s no immediate danger.
There is a soft nickering that echoes through the night and not long after Roach emerges from the darkness. Geralt clings gratefully to the mare, buries his face in her mane and breathes in her warm and grounding scent.
“She found me and led me here,” Ciri tells him. Geralt smiles and speaks softly to Roach, praising her for staying and not running away to greener pastures when he had been caught. “Give me a moment to get your gear, I’ll be right back.”
Geralt only nods, well aware that the only reason he is upright now is because he can cling to Roach. Ciri returns soon enough, carrying all of his belongings in her arms, much to his relief. It wouldn’t have done for him to have to go searching for new swords or brew an entirely new set of potions. As much as he wants to, he decides not to drink any Swallow just yet; he doesn’t know what sort of effects are still lingering in his system from the ordeal in the cave, and it would be a spectacularly bad idea for him to have gotten all this way only to fall over now because of a healing potion.
Somehow, he manages to manoeuvre himself on top of Roach. Ciri takes one single look at him and proceeds to tie Roach to her own mare, so that she’ll follow wherever she leads. Geralt would have objected if he hadn’t felt another round of weakness travel through him, leaving him barely strong enough to hold onto Roach’s saddle and keep him from falling off.
The next hours passed in a haze; he cannot quite recall how he had ended up here, safe and warm and all of his wounds looked after as well as Ciri is able to – which is quite well, given her training at Kaer Morhen, and by Nenneke and Yennefer both.
“Who were they?” Ciri finally asks, once she has convinced herself that Geralt is unlikely to die just now. He is propped up with his back against a tree, bandages covering the worst of his wounds, with warm food and water in his belly and wrapped in as many blankets as they have to chase the lingering chill from his bones.
“Hm?”
“The children. I saw them briefly but…” Her voice trails off, unsure of how to continue. Evidently, she has only seen the very end of the illusion that Geralt had been caught in. He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, disinclined to share the source of this particular bout of guilt perpetually lodged in his soul. But then, Ciri is his daughter. She saved him, cared for him. She is his destiny. An answer to the question is the least he owes her.
“They died,” he says, the words heavy on his tongue. “They all died, and I wasn’t there to save them when I should have been.”
Ciri looks at him with wide eyes and scoots closer, until she can snuggle up to Geralt’s side. He lifts the blankets and draws her close underneath, until she is pressed against him, like she used to be during all those nights when she woke up crying and screaming from her nightmares. Except, this time it is Geralt who is afraid, who is taking comfort from her being so close.
“Not all of them,” she finally says. “There are enough who survived, who are only alive because of you. Like me.”
Geralt wraps his arm around her in reply and presses his face into her hair, listening to her heartbeat which grounds him like nothing else.
“And to think there was a time when I was trying to run away from my destiny,” he says quietly. He has apologised for it in numerous ways, but he will never truly forgive himself for leaving Ciri to face the horrors of seeing her home destroyed and her grandmother dying on her own. She has told him that he has forgiven him just as often, but that doesn’t really lessen the pain. At least, she is alive, and she’s right beside him, where they can protect each other.
“You’re here now.” Ciri hums quietly. “Love you, da.”
“I love you too, little one.”