jaskoleczka | { pfsb } a test

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{ pfsb } a test

Avallac'h was meant to follow me, but something went awry...

It's a quiet night, and the Scottish skies at the end of the universe are filled with to the brim with soft gray clouds. The waters of the little inlet and around the lake lap lazily at the shore. Deep in the lake, the giant squid cruises idly for food, trailing its tentacles like smoke through the water. In the stables, the horses whicker quietly to each other. All is peaceful, and perfect.

Until some of those soft, contented sounds turn sharp, and anxious. Wood rattles as nervous horses begin pawing and kicking at their stalls, tossing their heads, wide-eyed and alarmed.

And then a flash of light splits the clouds with a horrible sound as of a great deal of air being displaced all at once, and then: nothing.

The horses calm. And somewhere, far out in the lake, there is a splash.

***

Ciri surfaces with a splutter and gasps for air as she turns her head, taking stock of the situation.

This is...not Velen. At least, it's nowhere in Velen she recognizes. "Avallac'h?" she calls, her voice echoing strangely over the water, but just inflating her ribcage to project her voice has her wincing. The water is too dark to see through, but she knows what she would find if she could: a faint dark cloud that is seeping from the wound in her side and the tear in her shirt.

"Wonderful," she says to herself, and eyes the distance to shore. It isn't far – fifty yards, perhaps – but she's exhausted from the ambush, the flight, the portal, and she's already lost a lot of blood.

But there's nothing for it: she grits her teeth and strikes out for shore, hoping against hope that this lake is not home to drowners...or worse.

In the end, she almost makes it. There's the shore, only twenty yards, ten. A few feet. Everything goes black, and when she comes to, she's washed onto a sandy beach that makes no sense with the cold lake water she's just escaped – but that's all she has time to determine before exhaustion and pain told firm hold of her reins, and she collapses into a heap on the shore at the end of the universe.

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She puts the glass tube under her tongue and makes a face at Lan Wangji to try and calm her nerves. The instrument Dr. Ford is using is cold even through her shirt, and she shivers a little but submits without complaint.

Aside from her injury, she is in the peak of health: her pulse is a little rapid and thready from a mix of anxiety, adrenaline, and pain, but she calms her breathing and focuses instead on the person at the end of the bed, watching calmly.

It helps. He's very soothing.

He nods to her, and stays still where he is.

"Everything looks good," Kim tells her, reclaiming her equipment.

"Next up, let me take a look at that wound, and see if you have any other injuries from the fall. It'll just be a brief physical exam, checking range of motion and the like--"

She goes on to demonstrate the movements she wants Ciri to imitate, and concludes with,

"When you're done, pull up the shirt over the wound."

She watches, then follows Kim's instructions. She's sore all over from her long fall into the water, and she's certain she'll be covered in bruises, but that isn't what she's worried about.

That is the wound in her side, courtesy of the Wild Hunt. As she moves her arms and twists her torso, she winces and catches her breath: it certainly feels like a cracked rib or two, and the wound that had closed thanks to Lan Wangji's assistance begins bleeding freely again.

But it isn't life-threatening. It wouldn't be. Eredin doesn't want her dead, he only wants to hobble her so he can imprison her for her powers.

(Just like so many have before him.)

He slants a look at Ford-daifu as Ciri's wound begins to bleed again, but bites his tongue. He has reason to know and trust her skill, after all.

Otherwise, he keeps his expression calm.

"Okay," she says again.

Friendly and cheerful she may be, but Kim Ford is also used to getting straight to the point when it matters.

"I'm going to give you a salve for bruises and sore spots. Use it liberally. I think you have at least one broken rib, maybe a couple, but there was nothing wrong with your breathing so you shouldn't need serious intervention there. I could bandage them, but I'd rather you didn't overstrain yourself and did deep breathing to make sure you don't get pneumonia - lung disease," she adds, just in case.

"The more serious issue is the wound. That's going to need to be cleaned and stitched. I'll use a local anesthetic for the pain, so it won't hurt, and it won't take long, either."

It may be that someone -- since Ciri arrived with Lan Wangji -- is expecting resistance.

She absorbs the information with rapidly dwindling patience, but underneath the kind manner there's a steel core in Kim Ford that she recognizes, and she knows there's nothing to do but submit to these ministrations.

"Thank you," she says instead, even as she glances to the door. The longer she stays here... "Please – be as quick as you can. It's not safe for me to stay here long."

She looks at Lan Wangji, imagines him dead on the ground, struck down by Imlerith or mauled by a Hound, and her mouth tightens. "Not for anyone."

Edited 2020-11-03 15:48 (UTC)

The wariness in that glance, in the way her expression shifts--

"I will guard."

Out of seemingly nowhere, Bichen flashes into existence in his hand, gleaming, and he turns to keep an eye on the door as well as on what is going on in the room.

She jumps a little as Lan Wangji pulls a sword from thin air, but most of her attention stays focused on her patient.

"Why wouldn't it be s--"

That is as far as she gets, for Kimberly Ford, for all that she is no longer the Seer of Brennin in Fionavar, is still a Seer born, compelled by her gift to see beyond what is said, to look through the spaces between words and understand the deeper truths hidden amid the loops and whorls made by the Weaver's loom.

Clear gray eyes widen suddenly, fixed on something beyond the room.

"Ithilinne," she says, clear and carrying, and the strange timbre to her words now is that of a Seer deep in her vision. "The White Frost and the Wolf's Blizzard. The storm will howl, the Hunt rides--"

Images flash through her mind, of unnatural Hounds and a shadowy figure with burning eyes in dark armor behind them, a wild and deadly snowstorm, killing cold--

--a shield held against something she cannot see, power crackling from the fingertips of a black haired sorceress standing behind a man with cat's eyes, golden and feral, with white hair and whirling swords as he fights his way free of monsters--

Kim gasps in a breath, surprised to find it is not frozen, then chokes out,

"But not here."

With that, the vision releases her, and she is able to breathe normally again.

"Aen Ithlinnespeath," she gasps, too shocked to pull away, her emerald eyes gone huge and terrified, "Tedd Deireádh."

(Speak, Oracle!)

"You saw it...if you saw, then you know, I cannot stay here, the Hunt tracks me across Time and Space itself, you must let me leave!"

Her voice has gone loud and desperate and edged with panic. In this moment she is not the self-assured young woman who walked in only moments before, but a lost and terrified child trying to stand up to the nightmare that would reduce anyone to hysterical gibbering.

He spins, searching the room for any sign of threat, prepared to strike instantly on finding it --

--but there is nothing, not yet, nothing but the doctor, who is evidently more than a doctor, and Ciri herself.

"Ciri." Low and urgent, as he continues to monitor for danger. "We will find a way."

Overlapping with Lan Wangji, Kim says,

"Not here."

She drops the gauze she was holding and clutches at Ciri's hands.

"Not here. The Hunt cannot follow you here. You have fallen into a place outside Time and Space. No time passes on the other side of the portal that brought you while you are here. And you are alive, Ciri. I saw it. You live."

Not here. You are alive, Ciri. I saw it. You live.

There is only so much any person can undergo in one day without being overwhelmed, and Ciri is exhausted, hurt, traumatized, lonely, afraid. She has been hunted for months. Years. She has not felt safe in longer than she can remember.

She clutches the doctor's hands mindlessly, pushes her face into Kim Ford's shoulder, and weeps.

Not here. A place outside Time and Space. Geralt...

After the initial storm has passed, she raises her head and looks to Lan Wangji, her face tearstained but her eyes clear. He had leapt to protect her without even knowing what he might face; she has no idea how to thank him for it. She settles for offering him a watery smile, and turning back to Kim, releasing her hand so she can drag a sleeve across her nose.

"What did you See?" she asks. "Did you See Avallac'h, my friend?"

Edited 2020-11-03 17:44 (UTC)

He has relaxed enough to sheathe Bichen, but still holds it at his side rather than having returned it to hidden storage.

He nods back at Ciri, in response to her smile, and listens quietly to what she and Ford-daifu are saying.

Her eyes are wet as well, having cried in response to Ciri's own weeping, for Kim Ford has always had tears come easily to her.

"I don't know. I saw -- does he have hair like mine? And eyes like a cat?"

Edited 2020-11-03 18:01 (UTC)

Ciri's eyes are red, but they light up at Kim's words. "Geralt!"

Fierce joy bubbles up in her like water from a spring. "That isn't Avallac'h, that's Geralt, the Witcher."

Her mind helpfully supplies a flashes of memories: him, smiling slightly at Lambert's jokes, sitting near the fire with Eskel, deep in quiet conversation with Vesemir in the cold great hall of Kaer Morhen, dappled in shadow riding Roach along a forest path. The last time she felt safe. She heaves a breath. "If he is alive, I am relieved."

(She'd managed to free him from the Hunt, but...after that, his steps were a mystery to her.)

Edited 2020-11-03 18:07 (UTC)

Kim nods, smiling.

"I saw him fighting, but he is alive. He was with a woman, a mage, I think, with black hair."

"Yes," she says, smiling even as she scrubs her cuff over her eyes, "he would be. So he found her...I'm glad. I'm so glad."

She takes a deep, shaky breath, even though it sends a sharp pain through her side. "And...you're sure? There is no chance the Hunt can trail me here?" She glances at Lan Wangji, silent and watchful at the end of the bed, Bichen sheathed in his hands.

"Lan Wangji said that if I couldn't see the door, I might be...stuck here. If that's true and the Hunt can find me after all –"

She breaks off and shakes her head. If Dr. Ford saw, then she knows. It isn't worth saying aloud.

"Oh," Kim says. "Oh. You're Bound. Stuck here - it's called Bound."

There's real sympathy in the clear gray eyes now, in the way her smile gentles.

"I have been, too. It's an awful feeling, especially when there's something you have to do. But sometimes it's what has to be."

She glances at Lan Wangji as well, then back to Ciri, looking at her very, very carefully, trying to See.

The strange timbre is back in her voice when she speaks. "They rage like the winter winds, howling through the spaces between, but here -- they cannot reach. They cannot cross. Until your door returns, Cirilla, you have shelter here."

"How do you undo it? This binding?"

If she can see these other things, perhaps she will know this as well.

Tears nearly spring to her eyes again at the sound of her name on the doctor's lips: who last called her Cirilla? It seems an age. Her grandmother, perhaps. Her mother. Lady Yennefer. It's a name she has not claimed for her own in a very long time.

After a day of shocks, one more in the form of being Bound to this time and place can hardly touch her; she feels utterly numb from exhausted reaction. "If the Hunt cannot reach me here," she says on a sigh, "this is the safest place for me to be. But I must go eventually; I have to find my friend. Lan Wangji is right: is there a way to undo this...spell?"

She shakes her head.

"I'm sorry. Truly. If there is, no one I've met knows it. My friend and I, when we were - we weren't able to find a way. Just one day, the door opened again for us."

He looks at Ciri.

"I am glad you are safe," he says, simply.

"If you wish, I will help you get settled here, for as long as it may be."

She nods, mouth tight. "You have already done more than required for a stranger, and it seems I must trespass on your good will once again," she tells him. "I only hope one day I might be able to return the favor."

She looks back to the doctor with a sigh and a small smile. "Well, it seems I'll be forced to convalesce after all. I am at least glad not to immediately ruin your work."

"In that case," Kim says, smiling, "sit still, and I'll get started taking care of that wound."

She picks up fresh gauze, and prepares to suit actions to words.

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