The freshly laid snow burned the back of her neck and bruised the bridges of her palms, as they collapsed on the ground with her. There was nothing out to reddening the skin harder than the utmost cold of young winters. It embraced Azaras' let out breath with a touch of steam, evolving it in faded smoke, which blurred Geralt's figure, standing somewhat over her.

"Get up," he ordered. Azaras immediately groaned.

Whatever dreams the night threaded, their mornings wiped the slate clean, similar to how the snows have covered lands of dirt and faked away their cleanness to the eyes of crying birds roaming the highest skies. They had to remain in the town from which Azaras was told Jaskier departed in the very first hours of the morning; they were waiting for some acquaintance of the Witcher, to have a say over the intricate birth of the heads they bought.

It was behind the stables, where a couple of coins bought their horses roofs over their heads and hay, that Geralt decided it was high time to polish Azaras' skills of planking, of fighting, maybe even figure out how come her abilities were as uncertain as the winds.

Fall after fall taken, this time around, when her back hit the ground again, Azaras sighed into it and refused to grab hold of her sword. It laid beside her right hand as tired as herself, "I don't know which part of me telling you I am not feeling a fight right now is beyond your understanding."

Even when she gripped the hilt of her sword, the heaviness of the blade pinned her on the ground with more than she could ever lift. When Geralt stroke down, expecting to trigger a self defense, Azaras rolled to the side to avert her head of a pretty heavy blow, then let her back laid down again.

"Yes," she cut off the beginning of another long low talk from him, before it even rolled off his tongue. "I know what you are going to say... that monsters don't wait for my instincts to trigger. But I made it this far without your little training. Like Vesemir said-"

Geralt grabbed hold of Azaras's collar and pulled her off the ground and back on her feet beside him. Though his hand remained put, right there, holding onto the hem which had her thin armour meet a breezy shirt. "Vesemir doesn't know you."

"That implies just how," stating the obvious of him knowing some part of her few got to meet was a waste of breath, so Azaras tilted her head and changed her perspective with a smile, "desperate you are, for me to be like you."

Geralt let go of her in an instant. Truth startled him, but something else unsettled the peaceful horses. The beam of noise and the creak of the door into this yard, has Azaras lift her sword with ease to turn around.

Fear, Geralt made a mental note.

"Oh," their visitor stopped. The threatening aspects hidden in the little yellows of Azaras' eyes, shining brighter in a reflection of the white snow's light, stopped this odd creature at the verge of turning around and running. He was odd looking, but not in the sense of the rugged cloak he wore, yet instead due to his bigger forehead, goulish eyes and grey-dotted skin.

Though behind the hood, everything was shadowed, Azaras took a sniff of the hallowed ice of the air and she knew it was an elf who Geralt conversed with and was waiting for.

Azaras did not know the big picture of many things that happened on the continent, but she knew this much. When Nilfgaard attacked the North, it was elves who almost destroyed Arcapan completely. Had it not been for her father's grandfather and his intelligence in battle to evacuate the keep through tunnels, into the mountains, she would have never been born to this world.

Little picture by little picture get put together, blurred and blended, before the truth comes out. Right then, a smaller sequence captured her not breaking her guard, not even as Geralt's hand pressed on top her sword to lay it down. The blade cut his palm from rigidly she was holding on.

The elf took the first step back. Full of disbelief he was hateful in his final stare towards the Witcher, "You set me up!"

"Terdaich, I did not," Geralt approach and were it not for how conveniently Terdaich's cloak got trapped in a nail sicking out of the fence, he wouldn't have reached him in time.

"You sided with the evil witch, Geralt," the elf cried out. "You promised I won't get mixed up in any messes that will endanger the little ones."

"Witch? What witch?"

"The monsters, Geralt," Terdaich pulled his louder voice, back down to the whispers tainted in the fear of being so close to danger. Ever so often he looked back at Azaras, who didn't seem even close to peaceful yet. "The monsters were made through old blood magic," he voiced the final conclusion. Terdaich's right hand came out and pointed back at Azarad "And she is made by that blasphemy too."

Azaras heard the words, she read his lips and fixed the truth, but a general worry was not what she felt allowed to exude. Something else happened behind her eyes, another imagine played in her mind, something she didn't remember before. From the nights she was tied to a bed...

The first flash of a world painted red had her stumble back. She no longer heard what Geralt was trying ro convince Terdaich about, she couldn't even see them properly outside of the compelling touch she remembered. It smelled of iron, this hand that pressed down on her forehead.

"Never let them find me," it echoed in her mind. Hue of red turned deadly yellow and for the first time, the entirety of her green fell to the maddening stare of an angered wolf.

Geralt barely just took hold of Terdaich when he heard the beginning of what he could not control. It did not make sense. It was unfair. But being torn between a choice forced him to act fast. He let go of the elf and turned around.

His hands captured Azaras' right wrist and held out a barrier between her sword and the elf's head. For the first time, he looked into her eyes and saw the terror which he once saw in Vesemir's, back when he was still too young to understand what he will become and what he will endure to look just as close to a monster as him.

Azaras did not hold back, not even for his sake, which was a shock Geralt barely escaped with his hands in place. She put on brute force, in an imaginable rage, as if Terdaich, nothing but a harmless commoner, was the monster she had been so vengeful in hunting.

It hurt him almost as much as it hurt her that after he ducked under her hit, he came so close, his hand was able to wrap around her neck and tighten out the air. Even with that, she didn't calm down, so Geralt lifted Azaras off the ground and pinned her back down with the force necessary to knock that sword from her hand.

She now started clawing away, absolutely insane, not even looking at him, but just at the elf. Obviously, the latter, frightened, backed away to run, but in a last moment of desperation, holding her down and not understanding... or just not wanting to, Geralt looked back at his acquaintance.

"Terdaich, what's happening to her?"

The elf stopped, at a somewhat safe distance. , "You think I will help you after she tried to kill me?"

"Tell me what do I do, damn it!"

"Kill the monster," Terdaich yelled back.

And Geralt had her. One knee was on her right wrist, his hands were around her neck and just a little tighter, he would feel her spine. A single decision away from breaking her and not even a nerve of his body allowed him to make that reasonable call.

Black magic were the words Terdaich used, but Geralt only thought of the last of it, which left room for the obvious: any spell has a loophole.

"Just tell me what's happening to her and how I can fix it," he asked again, a nuance more desperate. "I'm holding her down, just get closer...," Geralt hesitated for a moment. He had to look down, into the unrecognizable rage of the one he cared for, into the heartbreaking grip he had on her, imagining what bruises it would leave and seeing how his cut was bleeding on her neck. "Please, Terdaich."

He never heard Geralt beg.

That news alone was enough of an imbold to make the elf cautiously thread a step forward. Little snowlflakes began falling from the sky and the snow creaked under his boot. "Blood magic must have tied her to her creator during the making... they used the Witcher for blueprint and left the trails of darkness. Those monsters had it too, but not as prominent as her. The creator left orders behind."

And there's the gain, Geralt sighed at his thought.

"How do I stop it?"

"Kill her," Terdaich insisted. One glare from the Witcher was enough to understand wordlessly that was not a true option, so he sighed out the second way he knew, "Or kill the creator."

High above a raven screamed. Amongst thousands of snowflakes its dark wings carried, only one melted down on its beak and the drop of ice, it turned back into water as it fell down, entire miles away, closer to Arcapan and to the party Jaskier has been hired to sing at in highest of night.

Only Sylvain's party has been a misplaced calculation. He did not attend it either way, requesting to remain in the council's tower and await the new allies from Nilfgaard. He had made high hopes, while he stared out on the window from his wheeled chair. The snow could have brought him a great honor over the scents of a last good meal for the winter and the last played songs in merry halls brought to life by their customery dances, now indoors. He hopes the streets gradually catching whiteness would bring him a significant presence from Nilfgaard.

Great was his disappointment when turning around had him facing the rest of his remaining council, escorting nothing but a squire. Sylvain was so upset he paled; even the noise of the party became an irritating whimper of disrespect, while he had to wait for everyone to take a seat, for the squire to dwell in his prideful smile. He must have noticed the displeasure, because he addressed it at once.

"Nilfgaard does not require small assets like youe keep to be added to our enormous power."

"Our positioning on the continent could prove to be an advantage in-"

"However," the squire interrupted Sylvain, leaving him feel like the crown on his head was capturing rust. "We are willing to recognize your importance to the cause if you but prove your worth first."

"What do you want more?" Sylvain tightened his fist over the table, decisively not hearing the stares pleaing him for attention on the rest of the council.

"Take Hołopole," the squire named the city across the mountains to their left. "Conquer it with your own army in our name, as silent as possible and you would have proved your worth and our friendship. That is Nilfgaard's off-"

"Deal," Sylvain did not await the honeyed words to linger or to mock him longer than needed. Even if their army was little, he'll find a way or die trying, because while he aimed to be powerful, despite his lacking state, he felt the people he grew up with would agree, an ending in battle was far more fitted than starvation and passage onto graves not to be discovered until the long winter's gone and the spring unfreezes their corpses.

Below the tower, Jaskier took a breather from the party that stiffened his vocal chords and reddened his face. One too many drinks and Arcapan's tradition of dancing had him heated up in such a way that his glass of wine had to be taken for a tangled waltz of steps outside. Only after wandering the wrong halls, he ended up feeling the night air and the shine of the moon over a graveyard.

Chilled to the bone, the atmosphere was just as fitted. In a haze of spirits, Jaskier thought if he walked just a little further, he'd make it out of the oddity and into the tightly knit houses of the streets. Wrongly so, he hoped.

But the graveyard was built on a hill and in the darkness, over which not even the full moon had a considerable power, a grave stood against Jaskier's left thigh. He spun him around the stone and his trousers got caught in spines of a nasty bush on the verge of leaving it's strength to the death of the grave it rose behind.

"Come on," Jaskier cried, hearing the tear in his pants and as he turned, the tear went higher and all the wine in his cup spilled down on the gravestone.

"That is our Lady's grave you stained," full in offense, a strong voice warned Jaskier into straightening up. All drunkenness washed away halfway, just enough to see the knight coming closer, and then look down at the damage he'd done. The gravestone, grey and covered in moss, now bled over the engraved name.

"Azaras?" Jaskier remembered clearly, having heard that name so recently still. So he looked uo and realized the knight was beside him now, staring at the grave with sorrow and an absence of thought all the same, like at the end of the night, he'll snatch the brown cloth trapped in the bush behind, far older than Jaskier's pants, and wipe the red off the stone himself.

"Quite an uncommon name, right? And you said she is...," Jaskier tempered his words carefully, in hesitant breaks, "... was your Lady?"

"She was named after Azar, her great grandfather, who saved Arcapan from damnation. Our greatest ruler. Such a shame she died."

"Died?" Jaskier gulped. "How did she... die?"

"A monster."

"Now," with the beginning of a laugh, Jaskier was lucky the next words he was about to let out were interrupted by a shout from the tower lurking over the graves.

"Geoffrey!"

The knight beside him sighed. It was his name being called and the sadness of his smile had Jaskier forget all about Geralt and his new companion, oddly named after Arcapan's dead lady. "I must go," Geoffrey apologized to Jaskier sprinkling just as much sugar as he could muster to cover up the bitterness of the goodbye. "I won't tell anyone about the stain though. Count it as a favor for the songs you sang for us tonight."

Empty blew the wind, from the forest, up the hill, slithering into the tore pants of the singer. He felt like crying, a lump in his throat from the sadness he breathed from the air. It was the moon, hiding in a cloud above, leaving his glass empty, dripping the last drop of wine into the solid ground of Azaras' grave.

She remembered being in a town, but she woke up on the road, in the middle of the night on Geralt's horse. A chain dangled again by her wrist and it scared her at first, until she heard Geralt's breath behind her ear.

Whatever happened, it couldn't be good, that much she knew. So though she straightened up her back against his chest, for a long time, she was silent, and he respected that.

There was only one good reason why she wouldn't remember so much time, so many seconds and it did not make sense. Azaras' voice shivered through the snowflakes in the night, falling rapidly on the road, and over them, cold tears of the sky. "Why didn't you kill me?"

Geralt's hands gripped the reins tighter. His leather gloves creaked, but his voice was an absentee.

Azaras back curved forward and her head bowed. Geralt stopped the horse in panic, before he even realized she was shaking. Azaras was crying.

A monster, she thought, cursing the spite life had in for her.

"I didn't kill you, because you are not a monster, Azaras," Geralt's voice was a white ghost. The wind took it for one of its own, a cry from the snow storms heading for the continent's land, and if his lips were not so close to touching her hair, her ear, then she would not have heard what stopped her gasping tears.

"The monster is who made you like this, who made you to be controlled," he found echo to his judgement. The unjustified mercy sounded fair now that it built a bridge between two hearts. "If we find them and kill them, you'll be free. And then the choices you conciously make will define you, not theirs."

"I chose to take the power and what you're saying... it's a big if," Azaras sniffed in. She considered, in the moment, the forest they were in was not such a bad place to die, nor would it be to look into Geralt's eyes one last time. Somehow, she was certain he'd kill the beast which ruined her life for her, so maybe her soul will not stay there forever, but instead, it will move on to pay for its sins.

It was the lesser evil.

Geralt wouldn't have it though. He won't kill Azaras, he won't let her go either. He will make sure she is no longer a weapon to be wielded by dark forces, but instead someone who can chose whether or not she wants to fight certain people or not.

And there was faith in there too, when he stirred Roach to keep on the road again; Geralt had a blind trust that Azaras was not a bad person.

"I'm ready to take that if's risk with you."

Further away from North's beginning of a war, they rode.

chapter dedicated to capmxrvel