The Devil & The Daughter / Once Upon a Time ¹

You were raised by wolves and voices.

────────Neptune, Sleeping At Last

        The Law of Surprise is a silver gossamer thread that connects Princess Cirilla of Cintra to Geralt of Rivia. She is Geralt's Child Surprise. She is that which her father already had but did not know. Destiny had been kind to Geralt, giving him the child that he had wanted, but when six years pass, he turns away from his Child Surprise because the blood on his hands that has seeped through his skin and stained his very bones and rotted in his core scares him to death. But Destiny has a way of bringing them together anyway. Ciri is eight when she meets Geralt for the first time in the Brokilon Forest. He teaches her how to clear her nose directly onto the ground and carries her on his back because she had done something to her leg and tells her a story to get her to fall asleep and lets her cuddle close to him when she gets too cold and lets her lead him through the forest. He turns his back on her a second time and she watches, screaming after him and begging him not to leaver her behind as his figure disappears over the horizon. For months after she meets him for the first time, she dreams only of Geralt because he is her Destiny and he is who she wants to be with. She felt more at home with Geralt than she had felt anywhere else—not at court and not at Skellige.

The girl in the woods will be with you always, Renfri tells Geralt just after he slays her in the streets of Blaviken, she is your Destiny. But Geralt does not look Destiny in the eyes because he does not believe in it. He knows that in order to unite two people, Destiny alone is insufficient—after all, he'd turned his back on his Child Surprise, his Destiny twice before. People are not brought together because they have to be brought together, but because they allow themselves to be brought together because Destiny alone is not enough. So when Destiny brings Geralt and Ciri together for a second time, Geralt chooses to let it, and this time, he promises that he will not turn his back on Ciri again. He cannot let his own fear and self-hatred consume him as he had all those years ago when he'd turned his back on her. The blood on his hands had soaked and stained his very bones and had rotted in his core scares him to death sometimes, but it's all that he's ever known, but that doesn't have to be the case for Cirilla. Youth is fragile and Geralt does not want to taint Cirilla's, not even if he's meant to protect her. But she needs him now more than ever. He is all that she has left now. But just as he's about to embrace Crilla as his Destiny, something far greater than either of them tears them apart—for what might be the final time—and not even that thread of Destiny that connects them can stop it.