A dreadful scream tore out of the ribcage of its creator. Delving the light out of the tapestries and scaring the wind into howling through each window frame's cracks, whistles, that scream held its tone to the hump of a sudden fall. Aslan Korber's knees slid onto the ground of his chamber. The helmet he held bounced metal rings as if fell from his grip and tumbled away, across the stone.

Sorrowful cries continued beyond his control and he sat back, a subject to the only turn of fate he could not subjugate, no matter how old or wise, how fulfilled or experienced. For one seat besides him will now forever be cold and the caress of his wife or the smell of his children will only be witnesses of the family they too lost.

Before him, the pointed shoes of his squire trembled. They were young, but not fools, nor stupid as a stone to not have seen the horror on the faces of the search parties return. And the walls stared down on them both in a secretive posture of frozen faith. They've seen so many different kings bowing, so many Lords before their last days. Now, they looked over Aslan and his squire and they expected the sigh that undoubtedly came.

"No more of this silence," he ended the quietness with the sharpness of a tongue bleeding its lick on history's passive nerve. Tears numbly continued dripping down his old, wrinkled cheeks, gripping the tamed age to raise its hue back to the days where he would stand without the knees creaking. "No more of this loss and hidden terror which aims to have us bow our heads."

Spiteful, those words fell in the trails of saliva between his slightly yellowed teeth. Aslan moved his chin upwards, he raised one foot and stood on just one knee, but when his ankles faltered, the strength came from his reflection, contorted in the bloody mirror of his brother's helm. It made him see the youth, long passed and faded, glance back through time at the young lads Janus and Aslan were, running these halls with pathos, leading a League that everyone would fear.

He waved away the squire's try to aid his master into standing up and with the gentleness of his weaker bones, like a leaf in the wind, he shivered to straighten up on his own.

"If the enemies, whoever they are, however dark or vile or outworldly, wish to scare the North and send us back to our homes in the fullness winter..." His teeth creaked down, were they stones, they would have caused sparks by the strength of the clench in that jaw. "Let them learn how much the cold burns and how cruel are the people who live with it. We go to war."

His right heel kicked the ground then the tip bounced the helmet. It flew across the room, ragefully dropped and shattered into the wall like thunder which overtook as well as the primary symphony of soldiers' armours cackling their laughter while taking a deep rest.

No one knew the passes through the mines, the tunnels and the mountains quite like the true northeners of the Continent. These paths have shielded these hard bred people from many wars coming viciously from the south or from the dreadful times when the blood of elves had been a gore spill. Nilfgaard knew the true value of Sylvain's mad rule being supported and it was not just a strategic position, but instead a map laid under the young king's fingertips.

That old tainted papyrus held patches of different colors, thousands of lines overlapping named in letters written in the elderly dialacts long forgotten by those who have felt the warmest weather. The legend-less map of all the mountain trails, written in few originals and many copies sanctified in each keep as a mandatory knowledge for the future of the fortress to learn.

Sylvain was forced by his father that while his sister would have rather learnt a fair art as sewing or dancing, something which would have married her timely, he remained locked in the library, with the original Arcapan was proud to hold.

"It's written on skins," Sylvain muttered. They have found a cave, they set a fire, and inside the archway, on the biggest stone, under the shivering candlelight held by a soldier, he unwrapped the map and draped it over the rock. Then, much more familiar and confident with touching the macabre legacy the future of their campaign was counting on, a hint darker himself than the scared little boy that used to cry days by the river washing his hands from touching this desth, Sylvain grinned.

His fingertips found pleasure dancing on the letters inked. The legends he remembered watered his mouth without him even noticing as he spoke that, salivating, his chin was no longer dry. "The first three men to die from the generation that found the tunnels could save us from the war, agreed to be used to map the way for future generations."

Between the changes of color on the map were rough stitches whose thread was twisted from animal hairs. The soldier who was watching Sylvain and holding the light for him was a squire from Nilfgaard, a young boy, untrained in the long marches of wars and already so weary.

These stories turned his empty stomach in a twist, paled his face a thousand shaded to death. Every inch of his body shivered, just on the inside, where his thoughts found it so disturbing to see the stark contrast of the king's festures, bright and evergreen, as if it was yesterday they left Arcapan and the comfort of not sleeping on the road.

His knees buckled once and the candle's waxed dripped off the edge in a tear drop of heat.

"Careful." Sylvain's order stabbed the soldier's dizziness.

Weilder of a certain grip, Sylvain pressed his hand on the black metal plate, his eyes following that contact, feeling the vibration of a scared heartbeat skipping several beats and causing ruckus to the blood flow of the boy. Then he saw his own sleeve, ruined with the wax which otherwise would have destroyed the map.

The soldier gulped. Behind a curtain of black waves, Sylvain's cold eyes lifted, looked at him, counted already dead. The king sighed. "Do you know how much this shirt is worth?"

Fearful, he gulped.

A different shape of the same emotion followed the frozen village, lord-less and alone; the last shining light to the east was having its streets stomped on by two women trying to escape the blizzard, with the snow up their skirts to their knees, and join the whole town's gathering spot, the local restaurant which served just mead and hard boiled eggs.

This town smelled beyond what anything the winter may purify through ice and everyone still ate that cruel combination, because chicken were the only cheap thing they were willing to raise apart from vegetables they either way found too few under the white lands.

Watching his friend gulp vigorously, a man continued, hushed but expecting to be heard, "I'm telling you... 've seen it with me own two eyes. Nilfgaardian soldiers, marching in the night."

"There's a war brewing," an older man sniffed behind him, staring at a broken clock.

"A war?" The wench serving him another hard boiled egg gasped, from the youth that held her chest so full, her cheeks so red too.

"Worry not," her old man, behind the bar, preparing a fuller plate to carry, while a dirty towel rested on his shoulder from all the hardwork of wiping plates and glasses alike, and all the same, laughed. "War don't travel to us, my dear."

"Hengfors League is threatened," the initator of the gossip frowned. His friend got lost in his nightly meal, so lost that he did not listen, so the man simply had to turn around and continue, holding the back of his chair between his legs. "Kaedwen will surely answer if they call for aid. Redania too."

"Hold your horses in the stable, Markin," his friend threw a punch into one leg of his chair's, then laughed. "You ain't no fighter stock."

"None of us are," the lady's father confirmed, plump face shinning a greasy, toothy smile. "The wars are for the fools with kingdoms. To them, we don't even exist. Wars go on around us all, but never in our little town, and nothing will start changing now."

"You're thinking about it," Geralt pointed out.

Sometimes, hearing so well became a burden, especially in such loud places as that they have decided to stop into for the night, to rest their two horses and let Jaskier sleep, as if he hasn't been taking advantage of riding with Azaras and sleeping almost too often on the road. All annoyances aside, the storm begun as soon as they stepped foot in the dine, and now, at a compartment towards the western wall, they sat across from each other surrounded by an only increasing chatter.

And they heard it all.

From dirty mouths so disgusting that it boiled their veins, to romances and dramas, jokes and fights and finally, a conversation Geralt knew Azaras was eavesdropping on ever since she caught its scent. She stared blankly ahead, barely batted eyelash on eyelash over the gold of her eyes, leaning her head back on the wall behind her seat and keeping her back straighter than ever. Not too far behind her, at the bar, there were talks of war.

Between Geralt's statement, that has returned some presence to her stare to, now, notice him, the owner of the place strode over and place the plate they ordered, at last, on the table. Only once he left, Azaras leant away from the wall and forward.

Her elbows, bare, brushed the wood beneath and thoughtful, her concentration, unfazed, moved to the food she did not have yet the stomach to eat. "Lambert promised he'll be sending a raven if he finds anything in Arcapan that I'd need to know about...," she finally talked.

On the road until that village, there was no time to breathe and just acknowledge the truths, the roads and the importance of the choices she made on from there. But seated down, hearing people already spreading the world, so soon, alarmed her mind, forgotten into the passage of time, lost without direction, save for the weight of the medallion and the anchor to the present sitting across from her.

"Mhmm," Geralt nodded for her to continue, a gesture immediately mixed with the scrunch of his nose at the rather unsafe same those boiled eggs had. He decided he was not going to eat either, at least not yet.

"But everyone's talking, even as far away from it all already..."

"Don't trust what every drunk in a forgotten village says."

"Hengfors is going to war," like she didn't even hear him, Azaras insisted on whispering her underlined realization. "With who?" She still remembered clearly how the first time she met the man she was now helping Geralt find, she had joked that she was not a Witcher, that if asked, she would join the battles of kingdoms.

So much had changed since then.

"And if the Order of Blood Sorcerers is helping Nilfgaard take the North, then what is their gain from this? What did they even earn from experiments like I and campaigns of warfare?"

Geralt, bemused, tapped his finger on the table, from the right hand that rested there. He looked at it and played a little smile from the bow of his head, "For someone who holds very little talent for magic, you sure talk like a witch."

Under the table, her boot kicked his.

Instead of moving her foot away, Azaras held this change to melt a little in her seat, with her arms held across her chest tightly, so that under her elbows now, her hands pressed on her ribs in an embrace. "What's that supposed to mean?" she held her annoyance in check by glancing across the whole warm place once more. So many people were sweating in there, by the fire and away from the cold that the windows were thickly blurred with steam and apart from a thin wind coming through the walls, none could tell if the storm still raged on.

As for her annoyance, it was an irony it held: women were supposed to be more gifted in the arts of magic, yet Azaras could barely hold her sigils long enough so their did their job. Luckily enough, destiny made her a Witcher, not a witch.

"It means that you are asking questions that don't need answers and you are getting worried over things we don't need to know," Geralt sighed. He felt her foot between his and drew his own feet closer to hers. That way, their eyes met again, an identical color in two different frames: one of fire and one of ice.

With their gazes locked, Geralt spoke softer, because he knew she'd also read his lips, "The why does not matter. We just need to know how to kill them, so we do just that."

"And then what?" Azaras asked immediately, hungry for her own reply. They both loved the simplicity of a short-term goal: get revenge, find someone, hunt one monster today, earn coin. But there has been a question which haunt them from a festival, ages behind now, where colors light their sky and they could talk, unknowing of the future that threaded their lives together so that nothing will ever cut them apart.

"And what if there are no more monsters left to hunt, oh, great Witcher?" She had teased him then, so innocently and so lost in the beginning of a sleep, her hand moving gently on his pare chest, as gentle as it still moved these days, whenever she held any part of Geralt. He had been scared too many times to dare be anything else but the reminder, he could be loved too, not just hated or hurt.

Back then, he sighed, without hope, understanding beyond the facade of her question, that she was in fact asking something else, something that had made the arm around her hold her a bit closer. "I suppose there will be no purpose left for me to live for, no place where I would belong to that would have me... So when they decide to end my kind, that the world truly, no longer needs us, I'd just accept it, to die by a blade."

"There are no places you wish to travel to that you have never been...?" Azaras' question faded in her own realization that she had been foolish to even assume he wished to live another piece of life in total isolation. Witcher had sounded in stories so distant to her, but being held by one made all legends shed their skins and once again, be just the true dehumanizing filters. Saddened, she had snuggled closer, and their nakedness prevailed against the chill of the night.

"I wish I could say I'd hide you away from the blade when the time comes," she spoke then the words Geralt burned into his memory forever, "but I doubt I'll live that long anyhow."

The whole memory washed over him melancholy upon hearing almost the same question, once more. There they were, years later. He was unchanged, save for many scars she learned the map of once more each night; she has aged, as fine as a northerner woman would, strong and fair, belonging to the armour and the fight as much as she did to the gestures of a lady that sometimes slipped her without even noticing.

Destiny had laughed in the face of the worries they spoke the night of their fireworks and had made them meet again, had made them say vows and be, both with long lives ahead, as long as they wished to have them for.

Suddenly, the difficulty of answering her question changed. Geralt knew nothing more than being a Witcher for far too long to grasp the want for anything physical, more than that. He wanted to have her, forever, but what did that really mean, if it was more than just their vows and unwanted spells under a full moon? It's not like they could have children, their kind...

A sweet scent of fragrance oil mixed with a mass of boiled eggs, sweat and dirty peasants was the starker, more annoying smell Azaras never thought could almost make her barf, when Jaskier appeared at their table in a happy rush. "The bath was formidable and I have saved you both some soap and some warm water too. Consider this a very gentle reminder that you two smell of horse all the time and I have to deal with it."

"I'm starting to get it now," Azaras moved her grimace to Geralt.

"Told you, you'd want him dead before we reach the harbor," he mumbled back, just as disturbed by the smell, but far less kin on hiding it.

Jaskier just kept talking, unbeknownst the Witchers had their own talk, because one bath for him has given energy the nap they all will end up taking could not, "... and we should also try to wash our clothes at some point because this reak is most definitely sticking to this fabric..."

While the bard's voice was a thrill, compared to his scent, it was easy to get lost in the background of another line from the conversation Azaras was initially so focused to. She looked over her shoulder at the man and his gossip by the bar.

"... if I were at war these days, I would bring down the mountain passes to secure a win. They are not safe anymore."

chapter dedicated to Haileeh17