{ pfsb } a letter and a meeting

[jaskoleczka]

Time is passing strangely for Ciri; it's difficult to tell if she has slept entire days or only a few hours. There is no way to mark the days aside from weather, and that changes quickly enough that it is wholly unreliable.

(The Bar, in her infinite kindness and usual sympathetic meddling, has in fact created a mild time loop in Ciri's room, giving her time to recover and somewhat ignoring the distressed flurry which has emanated out in ripples from her arrival.)

She comes downstairs, therefore, determined to more fully explore this strange place. There are stables she wishes to visit, and the woods remind her very slightly of those around Kaer Morhen...but her plans are abruptly canceled when, along with the strong hot tea she'd ordered, Lady Bar provides her also with a note.

Anyone watching would see Ciri rub at her forehead as if to quell a sudden headache, then lay a hand on the bartop and request something in a soft voice. Quill and pen appear, and she bends her head to write briskly and neatly:

Reverend Daughter,

I am terribly sorry for the distress I have caused. Please know it was not intentional.
I welcome your request for a meeting. I am at your disposal and shall visit Room 99 within the hour.

- Ciri

Folding the note, she looks for a waitrat to charge with its delivery and watches as the messenger scampers up the stairs before she turns with a sigh back to her tea.

Which she is now wishing was something a good deal stronger.

---

It's about half an hour later that she stands at the door of Room 99 with no idea of what to expect, knocking lightly with gloved knuckles.

Comments

[we_bring_hell]

"By all means," Harrow says calmly. As the other woman enters, she bows.

When she's arrayed in all her tarnished glory, it's easy to overlook how short Harrow is, and hard to see how painfully thin. Her hood is up, casting her painted face in shadow; within the black pits around her eyes are brilliant whites and even blacker blacks. Her expressions are blunted by the paint, but she's also poker-faced at the moment.

"Greetings. I am Harrowhark Nonagesimus. Thank you for the gift of your presence."

Her eyes are locked on Ciri's from the moment she enters; without a flicker of her abyssal gaze, she tells the red-haired woman, "Give us our privacy, Gideon. Guard the door."

[we_do_bones]

She stiffens and turns to argue, but at the look on Harrow's face she gives a terse nod and shoulders her way past Ciri and through the door.

She hates this. Shutting the door, and leaving the two of them in there alone...but Harrow is her necro, and Gideon is her cav. She has to obey when it matters.

Still, the only bit of grim pleasure she can hold onto is the knowledge that if this woman does turn out to be a threat...well, she's locked in a room with Harrowhark Nonagesimus.

There's no way that turns out well for her.

[jaskoleczka]

Ciri steps aside, but the guardswoman pushes roughly past her anyhow. She's left watching the door close and rubbing her shoulder where the red-haired woman had hit it with her own, and flicks a glance to the still stationary skeleton before turning her attention to the Reverend Daughter Nonagesimus.

It's difficult to parse much of anything past the skull make-up and the swampy black robes, but though Harrowhark appears to be a bit shorter than Ciri, she holds herself with all the majesty of a queen addressing her subjects.

That, at least, Ciri knows what to do with.

"Reverend Daughter." She sketches a low curtsy, bowing her head respectfully. "I apologize if I've made you wait."

[we_bring_hell]

"I have no authority to compel you to attend," Harrowhark says, in a voice that says she's sorry about that. "You do me a kindness. Please, sit."

There's only one other chair, and they are equally plain, but Harrowhark settles into hers as if it was a throne of skulls. "You introduced yourself as Ciri? Is that what you prefer?"

[jaskoleczka]

Ciri waits for the Reverend Daughter to be seated first before doing so herself, planting one gloved hand on the back of the chair and drawing it back enough that she can lower herself into it. "Yes," she says, easily. "You may also address me as Cirilla, if you prefer something a little more formal."

(It certainly is beginning to seem that way.)

Whatever titles she once had which might have commanded this woman's respect, Ciri gave them up long ago.

[we_bring_hell]

Harrowhark inclines her head. "You may call me Ninth, or the Ninth," she says, extending Ciri the courtesy of a peer. Not that she would know. But what's the point of ritual formality if you drop it just because no one understands?

"I can see that you have some power indeed," she says. "What a shame. It would've been so much easier if you'd just been a fraud."

[jaskoleczka]

"I have often thought so myself," says Ciri drily, after a moment's surprise.

(She sometimes – not often, but sometimes – wonders what became of the false Cirilla who became the luckless Empress of Nilfgaard.)

"I assume your red-haired companion out in the hallway is the one you mentioned in your note; she doesn't seem to care much for me."

[we_bring_hell]

"Gideon is my cavalier," Harrow says. "It's her job to protect me. Perhaps job is too casual; it is her sacred duty."

"Your prophecy, as it was related, seemed to refer to her, as well. But of course you could not see her eyes, when you entered."

[jaskoleczka]

"Her eyes?"

She leans forward, frowning slightly. "What would – oh, I see. Lan Wangji told me I'd mentioned golden eyes."

This is all making her head ache; she reaches up to rub her thumb into a temple. "Yes, I can see how that would make me somewhat unpopular."

[we_bring_hell]

Harrow stifles a smile; the action is so familiar to her.

"She takes offense at the idea that she would allow herself to outlive me," Harrowhark says.

"I do not dislike you, Ciri. In truth, you mean nothing to me. If I could avert your prophecy by killing you, I certainly would. But you are not my enemy for having information I do not."

"I am simply in no mood to pretend to be nice. I am not."

[jaskoleczka]

Ciri's returning smile is sharp. "You could try," she agrees, "but if nothing else it would make quite a large mess, and I don't think it would help. So I am glad you don't intend to kill me."

She sits back, spreads her hands. "But I don't know how much information I can give you. I have no recollection of prophesying anything, let alone the doom of someone I had never met."

[we_bring_hell]

"Yes, that is inconvenient," Harrow says.

"Is that typical for your prophecies? That you do not remember them?"

[jaskoleczka]

"Yes. I have been informed of its happening several times after the fact, but I have never been able to recall what I said."

Perhaps if she learned more, better control, she might be able to see as Doctor Ford had...but prophecy is a hard enough burden to bear without being able to remember it or do it purposely.

[we_bring_hell]

Harrow frowns. "There is much I would like clarity about," she says. "But if you only know what Lan Wangji has told you, you know nothing Gideon doesn't. Damn."

Her piercing black gaze goes past Ciri now, drilling into the door. "You addressed me--invoked the second death. But then seemed to change to speaking to Gideon--or at least someone with golden eyes."

"I find that discontinuity troubling."

[jaskoleczka]

She shakes her head, but not at the other woman. "If there were a way for me to control these auguries – to search for your answers – believe me, I would. I take no joy in delivering messages which cause pain and anguish and which I cannot remember speaking. I only know that in that state, I cannot lie."

Her mouth firms as she gazes at the other woman. "Was there anything – Gideon – mentioned which sounded familiar to you? Forgive me, I don't wish to be rude, but...Lan Wangji told me that patrons here are sometimes...newly arrived from their own afterlife. Could that be the first death?"

[we_bring_hell]

"Yes," she says. "That's exactly how I would interrupt the term Second Death; the extinction of the spirit."

"I am not dead," she adds, absently. "But I have certain experiments in mind which might consume my very soul if I fail... and Gideon would have no one to slay, nothing to fight again. But why address us both? Surely, then, the prophecy would be addressed entirely to her?"

She sounds remarkably off-hand about these experiments.

"Your prophecy warned Lan Wangji he would lose Wei Wuxian. That I would endure or witness a Second Death. That Gideon would weep and bury--her. If not for that pronoun I might think all three prophecies referred to a second death for Wei Wuxian. And since I did not hear the prophecy myself--"

She throws her hands in the air, growing more agitated. "What if you said dry her golden eyes and were misheard? Have I, Harrowhark, buried her? It is untenable."

[jaskoleczka]

Ciri reaches out, but does not touch the other woman – she curls her fingers into her palm and returns her hand to her knee.

"It's possible," she says. "You heard this information third-hand, and from someone who, in their distress, may not have remembered it accurately. Lan Wangji may have misheard, or Gideon may have misremembered."

[we_bring_hell]

She holds up the note Ciri wrote her. "This isn't the language of the Empire; it isn't the language Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian write, either. So whatever you said was magically translated twice."

She squeezes her hands closed. "Four people died in Canaan House, two sets of two. The second one who died was a woman both times. Gideon wept for both of them. Is there something significant about Abigail Pent or Jeannemary Chattur's death? But neither of them has been buried."

She shoves back her hood; her scalp gleams, and although her face is still obscured by the makeup, it's suddenly clear that she's very young. "Something is going to happen--something, sometime, to someone. It's untenable. What use is it?"

[jaskoleczka]

She is young; three or four or perhaps even five years younger than Ciri herself, seemingly. Her black eyes stare out from hollow pits of black paint and her scalp is shaved down to the skin. Without her hood, she suddenly looks quite frail, as if a strong wind would blow her over.

(There's something in her that's hard as steel, though – so perhaps not.)

She spreads her hands. "I'm sorry to hear about the loss of your friends. I don't know anything about Canaan House, or what it all could mean. I wish I could tell you what it all means."

Frustrated, she sits back in her chair and pushes a heavy breath through her nose. "As I see it, there are two options," she says, quietly. "The first is you forget the prophecy and live your life as you always would, and let what may come to pass, come to pass. The other is to use me as an oracle, and accept that what answers you find may not be either useful or relieving."

She doesn't pause as she lists her options, though she's tense as a wire as she does. "I will tell you now that the second choice carries with it the potential for even greater and much more immediate harm."

[we_bring_hell]

"Precisely my assessment," she says, without turning a hair.

"I know the odds of the path I walk. I am a genius." She says this as she always does; without pride or preening, a simple statement of fact. "But so was Abigail Pent. Gideon is brave, but so was Jeannemary Chattur."

"I don't need you to know that a shadow follows me. I continue forward because death is the only acceptable alternative to success in my endeavours. And I walk without fear because I have Gideon the Ninth beside me."

In a quiet voice, she says what lies at the core of all of this: "And you have frightened her terribly."

[jaskoleczka]

She leans forward to put her elbows on her knees and let her fingers tangle loosely together, casting her gaze to the floor. What is there to say? She nods quietly and does not try to shirk the blame: if she had never come, she would never have frightened Lan Wangji, or Gideon, or angered Harrowhark Nonagesimus.

And may what will come to pass, come to pass.

Her voice is as quiet as the Reverend Daughter's when her green eyes flick up to watch the other woman's face. "What would you have me do?"

[we_bring_hell]

"I do not know what there is to do," she says simply. "I thought you could give me more information, something to nail down this fog. If you cannot..."

"Tell me about this danger that comes of using your foreknowledge."

[jaskoleczka]

"It is two-fold," Ciri says.

(In her mind's eye she sees Geralt shaking his head, Yennefer watching her with an impenetrable expression. Caution, Zireael, warns Avallac'h's voice softly in her ear.

But what choice does she have? To leave these people in fear and misery?)

"First, there is the question of who – or what – you may contact through me. They may have a message of their own to relate.

"Secondly, I am not a true oracle. This power goes hand in hand with...others, equally beyond my control. And if they are accidentally triggered, they would level this entire building and everyone in it."

Her already fair skin is paler still as she looks up at Harrowhark Nonagesimus. "This is the power you seem to see in me, Reverend Daughter. Ninth. The Hen Ichaer, the Elder Blood. It does not build; it does not aid. It only destroys."

[we_bring_hell]

"Interesting," is what Harrow says. She looks like someone having an a lot of thoughts, but all she says is: "Interesting."

Another time perhaps they should discuss thanergy and pushing destructive magic uphill.

Then: "Incentive, I think, not to experiment with traumatic brain injury." Her voice is heavy with irony.

But she totally means it.

[jaskoleczka]

Ciri gives her a close look. "That is what I have been given to understand," she says, dry.

(Traumatic brain injury, however, being one of two ways the descendants of Lara Dorren have historically been managed.

The other is a good deal more decisive...and fatal.)