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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"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.

"I was one, too. Not long ago."

He moves back to his original position at the end of the bed.

"And you found your friend here," she remembers, holding up the side of her shirt and submitting to the doctor's ministrations. Her smile is rueful.

"Perhaps I will find some of mine, too."

"That happens a lot around here, I'll have you know," she advises, while she works.

Kim numbs the injury, cleans it, then opens her suture kit and starts sewing. Her stitches are neat and skilled. It's clear she's done this many, many times.

"Making new ones, too."

He nods agreement to both statements, then looks at Kim.

"You are more than a doctor," he observes.

Ciri lapses into silence as the doctor works, taking a step back from herself.

Not fully. Not like when...not like then. Bonhart. She doesn't totally dissociate, just allows her brain to gently float to a pause as she listens to Lan Wangji's question.

She seems to be a Seer, at the very least. Maybe not a full sorceress, since she is using mundane methods to clean, stitch, and bind Ciri's wound, but there is something of the magical about her for certain. It may be Elven blood, or it may be something else – but something in the other woman's clear gray eyes, deft hands, and kind smile remind her of Triss Merigold, and the months they spent together at Kaer Morhen.

"Mm-hm," she agrees. "I once was the Seer of Brennin, in Fionavar. I'm not that anymore, but I'm still a Seer. I was born one."

She sounds a little rueful.

"Sorry if I startled you. Sometimes it comes on me a little unexpectedly."

She finishes suturing and starts bandaging.

He is not familiar with Fionavar, and glances at Ciri to see if it has any meaning for her.

She sees Lan Wangji's silent question and shakes her head. Fionavar means nothing to her.

"I'm only sorry you saw what you did," she says, quietly. "The Wild Hunt is...not pleasant to look upon." She tips her head to indicate her wounded side. "This is their handiwork. They've been tracking me for months. Maybe years, now – time moves a little differently when you flee between worlds."

"When the wandering fire
Strikes the heart of stone
Will you follow?"

It has the cadence of a verse, and she recites it as one.

"Will you leave your home?
Will you leave your life?
Will you take the Longest Road?"

Kim shakes her head as she finishes bandaging Ciri's side.

"Don't be sorry. Your Hunt is different from the one I know, the one that-- well."

She breaks off there, and there's sorrow in her voice and in the clear gray eyes.

"But the relentlessness, that's very much the same."

He does not like the sound of any of this, and hopes that Ford-daifu is right and that this Wild Hunt, whatever it is, cannot find its way here.

He will have to tell Wei Ying. Perhaps they can do something with talismans or more advanced wards, as he had in the Burial Mounds, to give warning.

"You have a Hunt in your world? One led not by Eredin?"

She's startled but knows she shouldn't be; in all the worlds she has seen, the one constant is that many of them share a few – or more than a few – similarities.

She looks to Lan Wangji. "And you, do you know of the Wild Hunt as well? It sometimes appears as a pack of ghostly riders racing across the sky, with demonic hunting hounds at their heels."

"In Fionavar," Kim says. As she talks, she starts assembling a packet of medicine. "Eight kings, including Owein, who leads them, and a child--"

Her tone shifts into that of reciting once more.

"The flame will wake from sleep
The Kings the horn will call
But though they answer from the deep
You may never hold in thrall
Those who ride from Owein's Keep
With a child before them all."

She sighs.

"They can't be controlled, and they are extremely dangerous, but they aren't evil."

He shakes his head.

"No. I know of nothing like that where I am from."

"The Hunt that I know, they call themselves the Red Riders," she says, softly. "And they are not spectres, only drape themselves with the trappings to stir up superstitious fear wherever they ride. They have terrorized multiple worlds for an age, kidnapping and killing as they pleased.

"They found me when I was a child. They have been hunting me ever since."

Kim is quiet for several seconds while she finishes collecting the medicine.

"Yes," she says, finally. "Until the Paraiko bound the Wild Hunt in Fionavar to sleep until woken, by the terms of the verse I told you, they were much the same."

She hands the packet to Ciri, both pills and salve. "Take one of these morning and night to help with healing, for five days, and use the salve when you think you need it."

She hesitates, then, before saying - a little too casually --

"And if you happen to meet a young man here named Finn dan Shahar, you might want to talk to him. He was the child, with the Hunt in Fionavar, when I was there, and he is the reason its ride ended."

There's something of wry sympathy in his eyes as Ford-daifu turns over the medicines -- it has not been long at all since he was on the receiving end of similar instructions -- but it is replaced by shock at her last statement.

He glances at Ciri.

She takes the pills absently, frowning. "There's a child here who ended the Wild Hunt?" she says, amazed.

"Yes, I would very much like to speak with him."

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