How many deaths does one have to die before they become as strong as the creaking trees, climbing their rocks and rolling their roots through mountains?

The bells rang and the priest carried the ceremony through which for the first time in centuries, a Northern Kingdom declared its independence, even if just in secrecy. It was an uncanny whisper for the mountaineering corner to keep, a silent gathering and a heavy crown. It had no jewelry, it had no price before it caught this invaluable shape.

Sylvain had asked that the piece on his head to be a symbol of power, so he had it melted out of his father's old armour and the first sword he ever held as a gift from his sister. It was a simple circle, a band of strength, upon whose descent, Arcapan became, under the eyes of the Immortal Ones, a white dot in the sea of enemies that have been made out of the northerners.

And everyone agreed.

People rallied, they joined the ceremony solemnly carrying pride. A small rebellion as an act of revenge towards the ignorance they have been given, so many times before and cruelly when they needed it most too, seemed like the one true direction they could go into; the path earned their loyalty so a few disagreements no longer counted as beneficial for the homes they ought to protect.

Which is why the Lady Mother was locked in the second highest tower. Mad as she was, it was a merciful punishment for depleting Arcapan of coin. Outside their very praying grounds on a spike, not tall enough to see beyond the walls, was someone's head. Less important, less worthy of mercy. Rodkah disagreed and asked for a vote against allying with Nilfgaard, agaist even this coronation out of their duties to the vassal of the land.

Sylvain ordered the execution right before he took the crown, so that the crows may sing that morning, that his wheels would be painted red, for all the blood. And when he stood up, to take the crown, with each limb shaking in a stick, the red stained the ends fo his clothes too.

How many screams and wails should be voiced in nothingness and loneliness for one to become so silent that the very pits of the earth are jealous of this putrid peace?

Hoof after hoof, clamping on paths passed perhaps by foxes rather than people, Azaras learnt to enjoy the silence which Geralt sanctified into his life with time.

Habits built from loneliness act like walls built brick by brick and cemented in hours that melt into days, into years; before it could be noticed, it's been too long to see the top of the wall and it is building itself higher now still, that even when the climbing begins, it will feel lasting forever, that there is nothing beyond, just more of the same lonesome wall.

The wall stopped its ascension at some point for Geralt.

He stood for a second night on the road with Azaras, by a fire he made and once more he felt only an ounce of exhaustion, dropped in a sea of anxiety, of anticipation and patience running thin. It came as the consequence of standing in the opposite of loneliness at last.

Azaras listened to the trees. Though she hadn't felt worthy to lay down and look at the morning sky, feel the nature as she used to once, she could still enjoy the night. The night was where there was no danger. She would never see the night betray her with a door to close her on the ground, trap her in blood and dirt and weakness. She feared those brighter skies instead. The "silence" of the night was just promising a ghost, existing only to take pity on desolate souls.

Comforting sharp winds blew high. They whistled through leaves that in the night, were no longer distinguished colors of green or brown, but rather a blended outline of a whole darkness, a net thrown over naked trees to shade the ground. The grass beneath Azaras' feet was darker too. Were it not for the cracks and pops of a fire that Geralt had started, small and surrounded by rocks, just by a push of his fist into the air, the ground would have been a sea of nothingness.

Now it was a dark crystal, hooded with auburns turning a once green into sickening yellow.

Upside down, washing her hands in a water she poured cautiously, drop by drop, for herself from that very canister held between her legs, Azaras stroke her left hand's scar. It was a white spot, standing out on both sides of her palm and somehow also bridge of consideration. Had she been crested such a faulty Witcher that even sigils were beyond her capabilities?

Truth was hidden in part of her past too. Her thumbs rubbed harder on the sensitivity of skin tired of holding reins. Azaras had never considered herself out of the ordinary or talented enough to be capable of what mages do.

A painful wail crossed the forest from within and to the fire.

The winds got scared to silence. The nested birds scattered away.

The scream was over as soon as it started and it left Azaras dropping the canister and straightening up in an instant. The line of the forest before her, a shadow that was barely three steps from her reach, was subjected to long stares, cautious and full of suspicion.

Alert finally turned her around and she found herself with Geralt right beside her, her raising damp right hand almost clashing on his chest. She refrained and when her mouth opened, he spoke instead. "There are monsters who imitate voices to draw their prey out into a territory in which they have the advantage," he explained why, rather than being on the edge, as her, he came that way, watching the forest for movement, just to get her to return by the fire. Those same monsters he thought about were counting the scarlet ambers as a weakness.

He turned around first.

Azaras was took one step to follow and she had moved only half away from facing the looming stares of an omniscient nature. There wad no clearing they have settled in for the night, empty supplies bagged and wrapped in travel cloaks, to play pillows under their weary heads.

"Help!"

This time, it was a worded shout of plea. Through their silence it was violent perturbation of peace already, hard to be ignored, even without being followed by other waves of more dangerous sounds.

Steps, pounding, rustling of leaves, cracks of twigs.

Azaras turned her attention towards Geralt and without need of her directions, he had already handed her over the bow and arrows, while he, himself, retrieved one of his two swords. Geralt glanced over his shoulder, at Roach and Azaras' horse too, but to his surpirse, though attentive, neither were restless by the approaching screams. In fact, he did not feel his medallion react either.

He held his steel sword, meant to end humane monsters.

She pulled back her arrow when the sound escaped the forest hust Azaras couldn't let go of it. Little steps of a child trembled their run out of the darkness and towards the fire, towards her. A little boy crashed himself into her, hardly taller than where her knees stood. His little arms wrapped around her and held onto her pants while his bowed head went lower. The child fell to his knees before her and he was trembling, gasping and murmuring moaning pains, supposedly words.

The crack of the forest matched that of her heart. Azaras wished to lower a hand to the boy, see what he's whimpering about, but instead, her hands were busy, taking aim at another thing emerging from the trees.

Geralt touched her bow and guided it down, just in time for both of them to see another boy, barely pulling himself out of the forestry darkness to drag himself towards them and the light. He collapsed to his knees, a steo before them and the little yelp of a baby sounded from the cornucopia of cloths he held into his arms, by a band wrapped around his shoulder.

They were all catching their breaths and the newcommer, older than the first, articulated plea after plea, otherwise intelligible.

"What was following you?" Geralt demanded the right answers before deciding if he should act upon the pity he felt for the children.

Azaras finally put her arrow back and lowered her bow. She felt warmth on her knees, where the child's face was hidden away from her sight. With a breeze of a touch in the boy's golden hair, dirtied by a long run, she guided him to let go and let her lower to his line of sight.

His head was bowed and he was quiet. "What's your name?" she whispered another question to him and watched the big eyed child look up at her still. Spots of dirt covered his skin, but he did not seem to carry any visible wounds to make his little chest flutter up and down like butterflies have been trapped inside.

He opened his mouth hesitantly and crimson started pouring out, over his chin, over his chest, all over his clothes. Inside his mouth, behind waves of blood, a stump of a tongue dangled pointlessly, having been mostly ripped off.

Azaras lifted her hand. She had forgotten to blink, but not because the blood scared her - she'd seen enough in her life, instead rather because she couldn't help but wonder... what would do such a thing? Through drapes of warm dark blood, the tips of her fingers lifted the boy's chin, let him close his mouth and stopped trying to choke on words that will not speak.

Geralt did not cut his attention off the older boy, holding the youngest of what he found out were siblings. "Our parents....," his voice shivered, looking up at the stoic Witcher, into his animalistic eyes. "They are back at the house, they stayed behind as bait for those things, to help us escape."

"Where is the house?"

With Azaras question, she joined by Geralt's side and he gave her a warning, low grunt that she dismissed intentionally. She was, after all, holding the tongueless boy's hand.

"Can you save them?" The older boy asked hopeful. "Can you really kill those monsters?" He rocked his little sister in his arms rapidly, excited to feel a glimpse of hope twitch inside his chest, past the youth of mind tormented by fears.

And it was hard to say no, as it was hard for Geralt to understand why he was uneasy to help, when he was sick of having ask for money, of seeing no gratitude, just profit. It became just a little clearer when they reached the desolate farm in the woods, without incidents, without feeling any monsters present; that they had reached an empty home, on which the ground drank the slaughter of more than just the animals they held.

"We'll help you wait the night," Azaras took the lead of initative from Geralt as he was unusually quiet, even for his solitaire self. On the table was left a dough for a bread, that stood as a pillar of rejoice to her. She had just washed her hands, so in almost no time since getting there, Azaras took it upon herself to do the last steps of preparing the bread to bake.

Once slid into the stone oven, she smiled back at the children, tending to each other, looking pale and frail too. "We'll look for your parents in the morning," that was the last promise she made, for which Geralt walked to her claimed corner of the kitchen. Night was all about the farm, but the sun would be out soon.

"If you care so much about the coin they obviously do not have," she took a step closer, into the side of the Witcher staring out the window, "then you can go back to the horses and leave this to me."

"There are no monsters in the forest." Into their private conversation, he was the mumbling one. Displeasure mixed with an unhinged worry, long gone from payments alone.

Then his senses tingled and his gaze snapped down towards the little movement on his chest. Azaras carefullt lifted his medallion on two of her fingers, then slid them away again. "New monsters may not all be recognized by this thing. Have you considered that?"

Her two fingers trailed a little longer on his vest. They stroke on specks of armour, drawing silence from the Witcher, taming his heaving breath, until her hand dropped away and her sleeve got tucked on her attention, back and away by the tongueless boy.

As he smiled wordlessly up at Azaras, lips no longer showing signs of wanting to open, his brother voiced, "He wants to go get water from our well. But he's scared of going alone."

The same hand Geralt has been watching, now curled around her sword's hilt. Azaras bowed her head before the child, an agreement nod, "Then let me be your sword."

Their well stood at the end of a road which circled the farm on the right, where there were less flies swarming pools of blood left behind by animals. Bones were all that was left behind from whatever monster got to their home, and even those were splintered, shattered across the red soils. Azaras did not know children would make such a weak spot for her, nor did she anticipate just putting a ready dough to bake would make her smile such that even taking water from that deep well seemed an excellent idea to spend the first minutes of a sunrise.

It was the sky who brightened first, while the forest lingered to its nets, refusing to shed itself back into colors. Apart from the clicks of water and of wood of a bucket knocking on stone, there was silence all about. So much of it has endured that Azaras had ro deliberately force herself not to think of how the children might already be orphans, their monster too might have ran away like her own.

She held the bucket out, it was only half full, towards the boy, "Is this enough, you think?"

Azaras never liked looking at reflections of herself as she felt whatever would stare back at her would no longer be recognizable. So she didn't know if her eyes were as pretty as they once were, if her hair had need of brushing in the morning, if her skin was clean or her teeth yellowed out yet. 

When she looked down at the bucket's faint flickering reflection though, she did not expect to see a monster.

Bright white eyes stared at her from the child and the illusion it exuded broke with the emergence of light past the trees. Forest green surroundings watched as the once boy turned out to be a thing, drenched in blood of those who he ate, the family at that farm, whose aspects his kind has stolen. Chords like tentacles stood for arms, for legs and sightless, speechless, its mouth as big as a head opened full of teeth.

One of the ten tentacles caught the pucket of water Azaras threw at it to put some distance between them with a step back. The monster walked on tips of those chords, of spines and intestines together, in under a second it was again in front of the woman, salivating heavily to get a taste of the blood it has been smelling since the embrace, when its head laid on her knees and licked her trousers, caught her scent.

Instead of being met with the feast, approaching caught the thing in the dance of Azaras' sword. It cut off its head, turned in her grip and swiped down on its shoulder, taking away the speed, then came down across the torso, and detached it in half.

Three cuts. Three breaths.

Only one name breathed off her lips.

"Geralt."

The sword was heavy, but it couldn't hold her back as temples beat the rhythm of fear, of adrenaline. After a hellish run, she stopped on the porch and ducked her head under a tentacle, thinly coming out of one of the two monsters.

Barely even a glimpse at the scene revealed to her too little, but enough: two had Geralt. The door was smashed closed in her face and the impact knocked win through her black of hair, bursting a blow into her sack of memories.

They flowed before her eyes. The door. The blood. Her brother. His screams.

And this door suddenly became a foe. It was an insult to everything she had become.

Her sword was again lighter; her teeth bared and creaked down beneath each other. One kick and the door shattered. Merciless, its presence called carnage.

chapter dedicated to -WitchAlex

author's note:   i may have made a spotify playlist for this 👀👀 so if anyonr wants to listen to it, imma link you up in pm, just lemme know