Geralt hit the ground hard, boots sinking into soft, impossibly green grass, and rolled once out of old instinct before coming up into a crouch, blade half-drawn before his mind had even caught up to the fact that no immediate threat awaited him. He straightened slowly, sword lowering by degrees, and looked around and for a long moment, the old Witcher simply stood there, silent, taking it in.
The meadow stretched out around him in every direction, grass so vividly green it seemed almost to glow from within, dotted with flowers in colors he had no name for blues too deep, golds too bright, petals that seemed to shift hue faintly with the breeze like the surface of oil on water. The sky above hung in a soft, perpetual twilight, neither dusk nor dawn but something suspended between the two and somewhere distant, birds sang a song unlike any he'd heard in the North, layered and strange, almost musical in a way, as though the creatures themselves understood harmony.
Geralt turned in a slow circle, scanning the treeline, the horizon, every fold of the impossibly beautiful land around him and found no sign of Seb anywhere. No footprints disturbing the grass beside his own. No scorch mark, no drifting smoke, nothing.
"Damn it," he muttered under his breath, low and rough. The portal had never been stable Ermion had all but said as much and now the price of that instability sat plain before him: they'd been thrown apart, scattered across this world, with no way of knowing how far or in what direction. He closed his eyes briefly, jaw working, and allowed himself one single flicker of worry not for himself, but for Seb. 'Just be here. Just be somewhere in this world, and not scattered to the void between them..'
There was no use standing still. Geralt's eyes caught movement of a different kind far off across the meadow, a city rising in the distance beyond a line of trees, towers thin and impossibly tall. It was beautiful and elegant.
He didn't hesitate. Sword sheathed, Geralt broke into a run across the meadow toward the distant city, grass whispering against his boots, once again, straight into unknown danger for the sake of someone he loved.
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.
Seb hit solid ground with a grunt, rolling once through drifts of pale, luminous leaves before coming to a stop against the base of a tree and it was the tree that made him go still, made him forget, for one full moment, to even check his surroundings for danger.
The trunk beneath his palm was silver. Not painted, not merely pale, it was genuinely silver in color, its bark smooth and cool as polished metal, and above him the canopy stretched in a cascade of leaves that glowed faintly. An entire forest of them surrounded him, trunk after trunk of silver, their leaves glowing softly against one another in a breeze that smelled of nothing he could name.
Seb rose slowly to his feet, turning in place, his hand falling away from his sword hilt as the wariness in him gave slow ground to something closer to wonder. "I was starting to doubt," he said, mostly to himself, his voice hushed, almost reverent. "But yes. This is Tir na Lia. There is no doubt about it." He reached out and let his fingers trail along the cool bark, shaking his head faintly. "We don't have anything like this back home. Not the Blue Mountains, not the deepest reaches of Brokilon. I knew their world was beautiful, but this.." He exhaled slowly, some of the tension in his shoulders finally loosening despite everything. "It makes it hard for you to believe that such a world produces heartless monsters such as Eredin."
Then the wonder gave way, gently, to worry, and he glanced around at the empty forest, at the absence of any second set of footprints, any second presence at all. "Geralt," he said quietly, and felt the absence of his friend and mentor settle uncomfortably in his chest. But he shook his head after a moment. "No. I shouldn't worry about him. He's survived worse than an unstable portal, he'll know what to do."
With that settled, Seb turned his attention outward, to the problem in front of him a world he knew little about, and no way yet to find his bearings in it. He planted his feet, closed his eyes for a moment, and let the fire answer his call, gathering beneath him in a controlled column that lifted him smoothly off the forest floor, silver leaves scattering in the sudden gust of heat beneath his boots. He rose above the canopy, higher, until the entire silver forest spread out below him like a sea of quicksilver, and beyond it, the land of Tir na Lia opened up in full.
It stole the breath from him. Waterfalls cascaded down distant cliffs, catching the strange twilight in threads of gold and violet, rivers through valleys of green. And far, far in the distance, past hills and forests and shimmering water, he saw it a city, its spires thin and soaring, catching the last light in pale, gleaming lines, and crowning it all, set high above the rest, a castle vast enough to be seen even from this impossible distance, its silhouette dwarfing everything around it.
Seb's breath caught, and slowly, despite everything, a smile spread across his face. "There it is," he said softly.
He didn't wait another moment. Flame roared to life around his legs, consuming him from the knee down without ever touching cloth or skin, and with a single sharp intake of breath he launched himself forward through the open sky, fire trailing behind him like a comet's tail, the wind screaming past his ears as the silver forest fell away beneath him and the distant city grew steadily larger on the horizon.
'Hang in there, Ciri,' he thought, the words steady and fierce beneath the roar of wind and flame alike. 'We're coming.'
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THE Royal Palace of Tir Na Lia -
The second day of the feast dawned in that same strange, suspended twilight that seemed never to fully become morning nor fully release the night before it, and Ciri sat alone at the edge of a fountain in the palace's outer courtyard, watching light ripple across water that moved far too slowly, as though even the water here obeyed different laws than the water back home.
Avallac'h found her there. "You haven't spoken since yesterday," he said, settling nearby, though not too close. "What did the king say to you?"
Ciri didn't look up from the water. "Don't act like you don't already know what he asked of me."
"Ah." Something in Avallac'h's voice shifted, quiet and careful.
"He tried his manipulation tactics on me, what he little he could." Ciri said, and now she did look up, and her eyes were hard, glittering with something between fury and betrayal. "And he said the exact same absurd thing you suggested, days after you kidnapped me and dragged me here to this world."
Avallac'h's expression didn't change. "That."
"Yes." Ciri's voice was flat, cold. "That."
"And you rejected his offer."
"What do you think?" she snapped, rising from the fountain's edge, arms crossing tight over her chest as though to hold something in.
Avallac'h was quiet a moment, and then he spoke again. "I think it is the correct choice, that suggestion. It is the only path by which either of our worlds might yet be saved, Cirilla. You know that as well as I do."
"No, I don't," Ciri said, sharp enough that a pair of distant courtiers glanced their way before politely looking elsewhere. "And don't bring it up again!"
She fell silent after that, staring out over the pale, glowing gardens beyond the courtyard walls, her jaw tight, her shoulders drawn in on themselves in a way that made her look, for a moment, far younger. "I'm going to be a prisoner here," she said finally, quieter now, almost to herself. "Aren't I. I can already tell."
"You are not a prisoner," Avallac'h said. "You the king's guest."
Ciri let out a short, humorless breath, turning to look at him fully. "Yes. That's exactly what a prisoner is told, isn't it."
Something crossed Avallac'h's face. "The feast continues for two more days," he said at last, rising to his feet, smoothing the front of his robes with a care that seemed, just then, more like a way of avoiding her eyes than any real need for tidiness. "I had hoped that by now you might be calmer. It's plain that you are not." He inclined his head. "I'll leave you be, then, Cirilla."
And he withdrew, leaving Ciri alone once more beside the slow, glimmering water alone with her anger, her fear, and the growing, gnawing certainty that whatever walls surrounded this beautiful world, they had already begun closing in around her.
/-\
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