{ 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

[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.)

[we_bring_hell]

"I know something about blood," she muses. "Not, I am finding, as much as I should. I have concentrated on things more... solid."

The silvery-grey skeleton that has been lurking on the periphery takes a bow.

"Damn," she says under her breath.

[jaskoleczka]

"I don't think I would lose control," Ciri says. "I never have – in this type of situation – before. And there may be a way...I have been learning to control my powers, enough that I can sometimes use them to my advantage.

"I would very much like to help, if I can."

[we_bring_hell]

"I know the risks of what I am doing," she says. "And the Second Death is one of them."

"You should help Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian. They have no ambitions but happiness. They do not--"

Deserve is not in the vocabulary of the Ninth, but she feels.... something. "Concentrate on them."

"I am sorry to have imposed on you."

[jaskoleczka]

She waves a hand to dismiss the apology. "You haven't. I only wish I could offer more."

It feels like a dismissal. She moves to stand, but hesitates to say her farewells. Instead: "If Lan Wangji asks, I will try to help him find more answers. You – and Gideon – would be welcome. If I can undo even a small part of the distress I've caused, I will."

[we_bring_hell]

Harrow rises to let her out. "Do this one thing for me - do not speak of what we discussed to anyone. I have learned, painfully, to offer candor if I expect it in return, but I am a private person."

[jaskoleczka]

"You have my word," she promises.

"And I must ask the same of you. Lan Wangji and Doctor Ford know something of my powers, but it must not become public knowledge."

[we_bring_hell]

"You have my word, and I will impress it on Gideon," she says.

She says this as she opens the door, so it's partially for Gideon's benefit, too.

[jaskoleczka]

"Thank you," she says, at the same time as the red-haired woman in the hallway startles and says "What? My what?"

Once outside the room, Ciri bows her head to the other woman, and tries not to pay attention to the daggers her bodyguard is staring at her.

"It was a pleasure, Reverend Daughter," she says. "I hope the next time we meet is under better circumstances."

And with a nod to the cavalier, she turns and walks back the way she'd come.

[we_do_bones]

Gideon wastes no time in pushing her way back into the room, only making sure Harrow is there too before she closes the door with a little more aggression than is probably strictly necessary.

"Why does she have your word?" she asks bluntly, watching Harrow like she thinks the floor might open up and swallow her necromancer whole. "What the fuck was that all about? Can she help, or not?"

[we_bring_hell]

Harrow lets out a sigh of breath and turns back into the room. "She does not wish for people to hear about her abilities," she says to Gideon. "Which apparently extend beyond foretelling."

At some point in the conversation, the skeleton surreptitiously covered Gideon's weights with a sheet.

"We discussed her prophecy in more detail, somewhat. Her ability to recall what was said is poor."

[we_do_bones]

There's a sheet over her weights for some reason; she'll come back to that later.

"Okay, well, who gives a shit about her other abilities?" says the girl with the unexplained ability to stay alive. "If she can't remember it, we should just put her under again. Or, I don't know, maybe Lan Wangji remembers more than he told me."

[we_bring_hell]

"I do not believe she has any more to tell us," she says, sinking onto the edge of her bed, and trying to decide how much to lie to Gideon.

"What she saw is just one possibility, Griddle. And it is one I have anticipated myself, if I fail."

[we_do_bones]

"Harrow –"

Her cavalier strides across the floor, unbuckling the rapier and knuckles to drop them along with her sunglasses on her unused bed as she passes it, then crouches in front of her adept to take her hands and look up at her, beseeching. "Harrow, don't you think it's worth finding out more? Even if it's just to avoid that one possibility?"

(She isn't ready for a world in which Harrowhark Nonagesimus has a contingency plan, a world in which Harrow has failed at anything, anything at all she's ever wanted to do.)

[we_bring_hell]

Harrow looks down into her cavalier's face. "The Second Death," she says.

"I know what it is, Griddle," she says, discarding a great deal of ambiguity and uncertainty and projecting convinction. "It is the destruction of the soul; the consumption of the spirit."

"I know you do not care to understand my necromantic preoccupations, but it is relevant now. If I fail in the Lyctoral process--at least, as I currently understand it--I could destroy myself. There is no enemy hiding in her words but me."

[we_do_bones]

"I don't understand," she says, plaintive.

It's not quite true. She understands enough to have a very fuzzy picture of what Harrow is saying and she understands more than enough to know she doesn't like it one bit. "What are you talking about, consumption?"

[we_bring_hell]

"One of the theorems Palamedes shared with me in exchange for our cooperation deals with the fission of thanergy. In combination with the other theorems, and done properly, I believe it will allow a necromancer to turn their own soul into a power cell--a furnace of necromantic energy." She squeezes Gideon's hands.

"But a power source that runs out of control is a bomb, Griddle. Constructed improperly, the furnace consumes itself."

[we_do_bones]

"And you think she meant you blowing yourself up."

Harrow's hands are so hot in hers, but she can hardly feel them. "How am I supposed to fight that, Harrow? What the fuck good is a sword against any of that?"

Why do cavaliers even exist if their single function is sidelined right when it would matter most?

[we_bring_hell]

"You don't fight it, Griddle. It's not about fighting. At least... not that part."

There is still, like, a bone monster.

"But you were right. I think this process requires perfect trust between the necromancer and the cavalier."

She swallows. She's theorizing way out ahead of her facts, articulating untested hypotheses that have been gradually accumulating unspoken. And she's not even sure--not entirely--that the second death of the prophecy is what she's describing. But Gideon needs certainty, and she can give her that, if she fakes it well enough. She's been doing it all her life.

"The test with the construct--seeing through your eyes. I think I need you as a secure point from which to complete the work. I need you to hold me steady."