"Talk." Geralt flatly demanded.
The drowsy atmosphere of the tavern's ground floor was a noisy evisceration of any form of privacy; the variation from the rule that proved hiding in plain sight, even in the case of words, was an adequate route to take. Between him and Azaras was a small table, with two ale filled mugs, bubbling in a chill that will numben their feverish bodies of adrenaline and perhaps even the woman's new bruised bottom lip.
A crack of red into her otherwise pale petals was a stark drop left on a blank canvas, proof that Geralt's hostility from the mines was reciprocated and she earned her current position by frivolously attempting to run away from him and his judgemental threats.
Now, across the table, his right hand held a chain wrapped around her left wrist, an extra measure, absolutely useless in the end, to create a certainty to the uncertain.
Azaras took her sweet time, a taunting despise bringing narrowed curiosity in the green glare she gaze Geralt. The mug's curved margin touched her lips and the ale rolled down her tongue. He was forced to watch and wait, but none of those things related to patience were counted on a short list of things he enjoyed.
His angered humph matched the click of the mug's bottom being seated on the wooden table once more. Azaras wiped her mouth with the back of her right hand, gingerly, as perhaps a very last feature of a life she couldn't even dream of ever returning to. "Right," she sighed. Her eyes finally gave Geralt a break from the teasing, instead staring out the only window, far across the room.
A candle flickered before it, and everything beyond the tavern, shaking with the laughter, chatter and the dancing of lively boots celebrating a monster defeat, was void. The window did not have a world to show, just a world to reflect.
Azaras head first bowed, a flinch away from seeing herself. "I suppose you'd like to know who did this to me," her gaze lifted with the daringly rise of her tone.
"That would be a wise start."
"Then I will make it short, Geralt. I don't remember their face." Instinct made Azaras try to sit back in her chair, attempt to cross her arms at her chest, but her pull was met with the unmovable grip of the Witcher on the chain.
"You'll have to do better than that." Another agonizing somber demand. It was the first time Geralt's voice managed to bring out annoyance in Azaras and she leant again forwards.
"I was drunk, alright?" She did not seem to proud fo the tale, nor too kin to share it, but a tiresome feeling was creeping in her bones. After weeks, she felt her muscles ache, after days, she felt the scents around her of food be pure torture.
Azaras pulled the mug to her again but just as it was under her nose, one glance into the liquid made her let it back down, disgusted. Her eyes avoided since then to stare down again, finding some anchoring at least in facing her cold interrogator.
"It wasn't too long after I left Arcapan," she gave in slowly, but the story started flowing and Geralt watched only as attentive as one would be to discern lies he expected. He has been proved by many instences that the woman before him was not the same Azaras he once knew and kept in his memory as a breath of life.
"Couldn't have been more than a couple of days and I encountered the first monsters. Killed my horse, the good old stallion I knew no one at home would miss." A hint of melancholy was trapped into the glimmer of her lost gaze. With the speed of a blink, the emotion got blurred and she returned to the true roots of the tale she tried to tell, "Almost lost my life there. I got lucky with a strike and left the monster half dead, next to the horse, while I pitifully dragged my feet away like a coward."
Her last word stopped as a dagger would stop for a second time in an open wound.
"And as all cowards do when they have guilt and realization that their life has just gone to total shit," Azaras hand held the mug once more, raising it for a toast, "I crashed into the nearest bar and drank away the sorrow." To examplify, she made Geralt watch as she finished the last gulps of ale with her eyes closed.
The mug was pounded back on the table and with a open-mouthed sigh, opening her eyes lost, Azaras continued, "I've realized I lost everything then, Geralt. I was a nobody, I wasn't even as strong as I believed myself to be for so long. And let me tell you this... this world? It does not care for women, especially those that aren't powerful. We are carpets, for which the embroidery's design weighs only a bit less than the material."
"You are not nobody," Geralt hoped to argue. "If your brother truly is a cripple, then you are, by law, the heir of Arcapan."
She laughed a tired music to his foolishly neutral words. "Yes," Azaras mocked her agreement, "the heir to a throne that has been built by men, for men. Had I stayed, I would have sooner reached the grave. Gods know what would have become of my name and what my father himself would have deceived the city to believe me for. No. When Sylvain lost his legs, I lost my home. Forever."
There was nothing Geralt thought was worth saying to those strong words. While Azaras may have found solidarity as the teacher of masking her emotions, her voice, a posh reminder of her roots, reminded him of the forestry feeling, the call of nature and its sensitivity to the world. As deceiving as her whole body was, her lips did not speak lies for her voice was built upon waves of truth.
"More importantly though, I was profoundly drunk when I was approached by...," Azaras hesitated, to think what was the least ominous way of presenting someone she did not fully recall, "this fellow..."
Remembering played before her eyes, in the space of her thoughts, the blur which had been the night where liters of ale have found their way into her bellows, pressing her numb body to melt on a hard seat, suddenly a luxurious pillow. The dirty, molded bar was swayed around her, it seemed more inviting, while the lights hurt her eyes; they begged to be closed and narrowed they remained as a middle ground between a need and a wish. She desired to drink some more and forget it all, find the finality in the bottom of a cheap bottle, right there, on the ground, for either way, her coins were not enough to pay all that has turned her in a pale ghost in danger.
Azaras' head had long been confused, in the most pleasant way of unbeknown statement, when she realized the dark cloaked person sitting beside her. Their hands were old, wrinkled, veined. In a distorted vision, she believed to have seen their blood itself, move slower due to age.
"How would you like to be more than this?" Whoever they wore, their voice stung her ears, echoed from side to side and made her shake her head, in order to even comprehend what was something tossed in the little reality between whisper and shout, that was neither normal, nor fictitious.
"What is it you want to become?"
"I want to powerful," words left her lips and rolled out sloppily. Her head was heavy and her eyes itched from some tears that understood the pain in her tone far more than her fogged brain could. "Than the door," she choked, "and... and monsters."
"I can make you more powerful than you could ever dream."
"And?" Geralt's question shook Azaras from the memory which played along the words of her tale. With her attention shivered back into place, the woman sighed.
"And what? I didn't ask anything, we didn't share another word and before I knew it, some lucidity shed light on my thoughts. I was tied to a bed, beginning to think that I have been fooled and would instead die by the deranged cock of a stranger, rather than claws or drinks. The bindings were not for that sort of thing though."
Azaras lifted her right hand and touched it over the side of her neck, rubbing a particular spot, "He pushed a needle in and when he pulled it out, I felt..." Her eyes widened and her hand dropped limp back on the table. A rather whimsical rise of her lips into half of smile tried to cover the fright, "Well, no amount of alcohol could have ever numbed that excruciating pain. Felt my veins exploding, my eyes were burning out from inside my skull, all the bones felt like ash and spikes at the same time. I think you would know what I am talking about."
Addressing Geralt directly, Azaras' finally looked at him again, truly focused, "Did it also hurt you that much, the turning?"
He nodded and she suddenly let go of their connected gaze, almost sorrowful to know such pain has been common for... Could she even call it their kind?
"It worked though," Azaras sighed away from the silence, before any more of the Witcher's hums could pester. "It was bloody torture, but it worked. When it was finished, I could move faster, sense more, lift more... be more. I started winning. And I know you must think of me so lowly right now, as if you are not a mutant too, but I would do it again Geralt. Double the pain and I would still do it if I had a choice."
She must have misunderstood him along the way. Geralt was cautious and intrusive because it was not him who would have loved to wrap his hand around her neck and crack it down, but older Witchers, who did not have even the gram of patience to hear a woman out, an outsider who threatened their carnal, bred thirst for coin. Witchers valued their pay a little more than Geralt did, he who carried his new pouch heavily and proudly by the belt.
"What was the price the person you don't remember asked in return for this power?" Geralt voiced the single question left to be able to put into simpler words and perhaps defend her, then let them both be on their ways. He owed it to the Azaras of his memories, the smile and the gentle caress, to at least make sure it would not be her own new kind that ends her life.
"Was the pain not enough?" Azaras reached out towards Geralt's mug as he has not touched a single drop of alcohol since they sat down to talk out the tension between them. He pulled it out of her reach, closer to himself, before lifting it off and drinking. He did not break eye contact, because the woman delivered a bemused sigh at last for his gaze to be entertained with defeat.
Azaras knew too though, that all seemed to have been built in her gain. But no one sane in this world works for the gain of others alone. "When I woke up, I was alone. And..."
Throughout the story, he understood the need for the loss transcendent in her gestures, in her features, in herself, but now, towards the end, when she was a miracle walking, that sadness seemed misplaced. Geralt knew what any other Witcher of his school did: women did not possess enough of the hormones which made men prone to surviving the test of the grass. There were no Witcher women, not because there weren't volunteers, but because creating them would take engineering a whole new mutation.
"And?" He insisted, now finally intrigued.
"And I was... alone," Azaras repeated, this time with an accent. Whatever she was shivering to say, still terrified her and while she explained, the images played back into her head.
The feeling of her bare feet, coming down into a deserted bar, habitat to only pools of blood, to splatters of red and swarms of flies as big as her little finger nails. A chilling draft blew on the skin covered by sweat drenched clothes and the floors creaked. There were no corpses until she stepped outside. A yard of mutilation laid before her, all across the splinters of some trees.
"It was a small village and all one hundred people of it were dead, in pieces and already so rotten that there were no crows in sight to attack the feast. I thought it had been the monster at first," Azaras admitted. Foolishly, she must have considered a mindless creature could hold a grudge and come for her, but instead murder a whole village on a spree, without no stopping it. "But I found it dead too, insides spread all over the forest, along with wildlife on a radius around the village."
What could have done that? Both of them asked voiceless.
"I didn't stay around to meet the master behind that dreadful nightmare," Azaras admitted quickly. "That is the story of how I became... Am I really one of you now?" Her head tilted to the side.
An emotionless Witcher, until his heart quenched at being able to tell how hopeful her stare really was. Behind the superiority, the facade of jokes and being alright with a banal purpose, Azaras missed home.
How could he tell her now that Kaer Morhen would never be that home for her?
Though an aspect on his features was an expensive tool he did not bare to bring, neither did Geralt feel the strength to make any sound. He was a statue, before which, Azaras had the only skill that might have made her less, or even more by some consideration, than a Witcher.
She smiled, "Doubt it."
"Why?"
His reasons had no chance of matching hers, but it was worth the try.
"My...," Azaras considered, "skills come and go. I'm not always ready to go like you. Sometimes my sword feels as heavy as a boulder, other times it's a feather. If I was supposed to be a Witcher, my creator didn't stick around because I am definitely broken."
"The others will be able to tell," Geralt's low voice used his larger vocabulary at last.
Curiously, it was also the only reply that ticked Azaras off the wrong way. A chain held goes both ways and she twisted her wrist, grabbing her end, pulling hard enough to yank the elbow of the Witcher further across the table between them.
"I'm not going to my death before I kill the beast that crippled by brother, do you hear me? If you wish to force me to Caer a'Muirehen, then you better kill me yourself here and now, because otherwise I will not move an inch towards meeting my doom without an eased soul."
"You will never find your peace," Geralt tsk'ed, rising his chin, then looking away.
"Excuse me?"
Her indignation triggered his response. He held the chain tighter and the tension grew because both pulled back on their own end. The hooks of metal lifted from the table and creaked.
"You can't find the monster you are looking for on your own," Geralt explain his previous statement though there were many undertones into it that he judged speaking would just infuriate the dark loomed feminine presence matching him. "You don't even know if it has already been killed-"
Azaras' eyes looked just a little closer to golden and her pull got just a little stronger, all under the influence of the hatred on her lips. "Don't say that." A decent warning. "It's out there and it is mine to kill. Heck, I will kill of its species if it means I will butcher the one who took away my brother's liveliness and my... my..."
Her voice started dying out and so did her strength. Geralt could have kept it going, but not wishing to hurt her, he eased his grip on the chain. "The Witchers have ways of tracking monsters." And they would like to hear about your existence and the way a new species has been born in some closed mines, though unlikely, Geralt thought. "They can help."
Fatigue heavies breaths and Azaras was almost gasping with her head bowed, "Unless they kill me first."
Geralt hesitated for a long moment of silence in which even Azaras had time to gather her strength and look up and the white wolf's posture. "I won't let that happen," he let go of the chain entirely, a deserted accessory laid across the table and now only connected to her wrist, loosely.
"I don't have money to pay you for your service," Azaras pursed her lips, suspicious of the good will, even with how they once used to be less coldness between them, less space and far more warmth. "Isn't that all Witchers care about? Coin."
It hit him as hard as the slap of being called emotionless wherever he went. Judgements followed him at each step, it followed his kind so loyally with the fear and loathing of the public that it has become a spiteful habit to prove them right.
Geralt smiled bitterly, "I am sure you will find a way to pay me." The bitterness was sharp, the gaze was soft and lost.
chapter dedicated to VRPond 💫💖