"And this is yours." A thin medallion fell tangled on the inner curve of Azaras' palm, bearing its farewells to its craftsman's hand, from Eskel's crooked talent to melting and carving a symbol worthy of the newest member to their "family".
He couldn't have just taken one from the many souls hanging by the tree's branches, for each carried a story and a ghost, each bore marks leaving almost no room for Azaras too to pitch her own tale to the enchantment of a metal.
"Mine?" She seemed, as he expected, to watch the piece with a strangely familiar joy. Only children got this happy, holding in their very hands perhaps the first and only toy their childhood may ever brighten up for.
With care, she took the thin chain off the stamped mark of the Witchers, grazed her thumb over the head of the wolf and the prominent circle. Ultimately, Azaras found herself in a swirl without distinction, forgetting about the coldness of the courtyard, the exhaustion of the day she spent away getting the very bare minimum out of the magic skill she was supposed to have and was expected to conquer.
"All yours," Eskel confirmed with a generous nod. For someone brazed by so many scars carrying such deeply agreen upon ugliness, amongst all the Witchers she met there, Azaras felt Eskel was the one who did not deserve half of the cruelty of the emotionless rumor, nor anything less than the beauty his heart effortlessly still beat to the rhythm of.
But she haven't met that many Witchers from Geralt's entourage to begin with; to compare the four Witchers she knew amongst themselves was almost as impossible as ranking fish and cats by same criteria.
Azaras was starting to feel quite lucky, closing her hand first on the circular medallion, to feel the rough edges of imperfection and call them to her chest, around her neck, as the most she's ever received. Because all honors in her family, no matter how liked she was by commoners, went to her brother. For once, she had something to call her own, something that she felt it had been earned.
With her medallion rested beside the purple pebble hidden under her belt and pressed to her blouse, Azaras thanked the man hy embracing the brotherhood, quite literally. Azaras' may have been a lot less bulky than the usual Witchers, but the tightness and strength of her arms wrapping around Eskel all of a sudden, proved to him the story Geralt told about her ripping a monster open with just her hands may as well have been true.
The hug kicked out air from his lungs in an unexpected gasp. Eskel skillfully turned that surprise into a chuckle and much quicker to react to the rather fast embrace, holding his elbows tight to both sides of his body, a position highly unfamiliar to him, he reached only his right hand to pat the small of Azaras' back in return.
This medallion laid a cold feeling over the scar still brightly breezing the side of her neck, right over her collarbone. There, a sacramental obscurity made Eskel shiver from one glance, remembering what he ought to ask. He had asked Geralt the same thing only earlier in the morning. Now, snow was following gentle patterns, through a grey sunset on a horizon of rolling coal clouds. Darkness was seething in as generously as the scent of monster filth and blood, from all the piles of heads brought back from local hunts by Lambert and Geralt.
There would be a good fire of those poisons, warming their beds soon.
"You and Geralt," Eskel started, separation from Azaras making him clear his throat. The beginning of a curiosity tremored a little peak of attention in the woman, so she tamed her urge to go inside and rest at last. "You two seem very different since the last time he brought you here."
Her confusion, divulged into the frown of her eyebrows, was very much adequate. Of course, many things have changed, because times tend to do that to people and souls, both versatile and flexible, unless close to death. Heck, Azaras even died in the process of these inevitable changes. Eskel had to be more specific unless he was expecting them to sit down and talk for an entire night about just how much has happened.
"You seem much closer to him," he tried to explain further, nearing the very concept he tried to touch upon without rising any defenses.
Azaras looked around, one glance to the emptiness of the courtyard drowned in white and deep ocean blue, before, bemused, returning a half smile to Eskel. Her hands hid away their big thumbs under her waistband. "We fuck more often, if that's what you mean?"
Eskel straightened up, unsurprisingly embarrassed by the take Azaras abruptly took with the talk. He had no interest interfering with fellow Witchers' "sleeping" patterns; that was a problem each could solve for themselves. It was the attachments which worried him and ultimately, he knew would worry Vesemir as well, were he there instead.
"No, not that," he finally shook his head to Azaras. "I meant that you and Geralt seemed to have formed a special bond, magical perhaps..."
What Eskel did not know and Azaras was not gonna slip past her passive opening towards the subject was that Geralt asked of her, after being questioned on the same thing, to keep quite about their vows, at least for a while. He didn't explain why, nor did she need further information to know she will respect his choice.
Before Eskel now, Azaras shrugged naturally, "Do I look like I can do fancy spells, Eskel? Please... I don't even know what you mean by that. Is this bond something bad?"
"In theory, no," unsuspecting, Eskel sighed, "it's quite beautiful really. But it can turn bad."
"Everything has the potential to turn to something worse, rather than better," Azaras was dismissive and carefree enough to smile. Speaking of such things only solidified what she was trying to ignore: her own fear of Sylvain's choices, away from her.
Reading her on that thought perfectly, with a last breath turned to steam in the air around Eskel's deformed face, his amber eyes worried, "How are you holding up on the news about your home?"
A knife-like pain twisted in her heart and Azaras' smile quickly became as bitter as a lemon. It's a test, she convinced herself, just to avoid it and worry everyone, to see if I am loyal to the Witchers now. "Sylvain is his own person and I am apparently dead to Arcapan."
"That doesn't answer-"
"Heard you're taking the night watch," Azaras interrupted. "I'll go sneak in a sleep while I can so I can cover for you after midnight and towards the morning, alright?" With a hand clasping his shoulder in a fugitive pat, she did not linger any longer, no matter how needed Eskel felt their conversation to have been.
Steps threaded away from foul scents and into molded hallways, lost amongst many chambers, some so desolate, their roofs have given in and snow had taken refuge inside, risking to collapse in were the cold to ever leave Kaer Morhen to the mercy of melting mountains. By what she learnt from the ones patient enough to answer curiosities, Witchers hardly ever remained in the fortress for too long between hunts, hence, their hay beds have been improvised by the ingenious Lambert.
He did not take into consideration how each two bedded room will be smelling of stable. Indeed, through the silence of the almost eternal night of winter cold, Azaras and Geralt slept in separate beds, his further inside the room, making him face the wall and dig his head into a false pillow towards the carving of a ventilation window, always open.
Geralt has been hunting all morning, all the way into the late afternoon, when he dragged the corpses of several monsters from the roads he had roamed around the fortress with Lambert, cleaning the land of the filth sent for them. In the courtyard, he barely glimpsed at a small moment of seeing Azaras sparring with Eskel, using her speed as he many times wished he could see her do, without grave danger around them.
Weary, he had been sleeping since his head hit the hay and when Azaras returned to the room, she was met by his scent, by his light snore, by the comforting ambiance which made sleeping away from him a bit easier.
Closing her eyes though did not prove to be as easy though, once her mind pestered her with reminders of wolves and doors and a hunch she could not explain, just like when she asked Geralt to take another road to his home, just as when from death itself, she returned and followed blindly an illusion.
Geralt called it an omen. Azaras felt it more as an impartial guide.
Currently, that guide was trying to put her on a not necessarily fair way, keeping her awake and thinking of entering a room which she did not see anyone go into. With the weight of that new medallion, cold on her bare skin, through her open blouse, for neither her, nor Geralt ever found it comfortable sleeping with their full plates equipped and all belts tied, Azaras decided to do the unspeakable lesser evil.
She climbed off her hay bed and walked beside Geralt's. He was a light sleeper and she was aware, the second her hand came in contact with any part of him, he'd wake up ready to retaliate out of instinct. None of those pieces of knowledge stopped Azaras from laying her hand gently on the big man's arm.
Geralt jolted awake and turned around, half sitting up, while one hand grasped, loudly, Azaras' wrist. The smallness of what he grasped, followed by the scent he inhaled made him ease the roughness she never even flinched at.
"What's wrong?" A dry throat tempered his tone lowered even than the raspy whisper he let out. From holding her wrist, his hand laid on top of hers, then under her, supporting it. "What happened?"
Azaras looked at him lovingly apologetic for having to end his peaceful sleep with her bothersome dreams. "It's the wolf again."
From his pale eyelashes, sleep lingered, until the mention of Azaras' haunting shook every single moment of hesistant softness off of him. Before Geralt could do more than growl annoyance, Azaras continued, gentle as the single ray of moonlight piercing through infinte clouds right over their side of the fortress, where the open ventilation filtered cold inside.
"It wants me to go in a room here, but since I don't know my way around as well as you, I wouldn't even be able to tell what I am seeing inside for a meaning."
"I'll go with you," Geralt nodded immediately. He despised, with each second, how that vision of Azaras' assumed she will always be following blind directions, a false idol into the most bizarre places. This time, the blindness led them, unarmoured and only taking along the presence of Geralt's silver song, to the door which led to a place Vesemir could call his personal home.
Objects, treasures, trinkets, memories and even documents. Behind that door, Vesemir spent most his time while not away.
"And Eskel did not think of checking here for clues of where he had gone to?"
"He did," Geralt answered, truthfully, hesitant himself to enter that place. "He found nothing relevant."
Azaras reached for the doorknob and the door opened with an easy creak, unwelcoming but hardly resisting the entrance of these strangers. The room, however, was far less brighter than what her daydream painted for her. The auburn warmth was nowhere around the grey and dark chamber, topped with neatly arranged objects of all sorts, from a proper bed to a desk and several posters piled and stacked, beside a library with dried trophies and coffers.
All of which seemed dead in the obscurity created by the lack of windows and light. It unsettled Azaras deeply so with an instinct, after so many tough classes with Eskel, she conjured one sigil in her left hand and flashes a try of a flame to brighten the place.
The flame died out fast though.
A tired chuckle came from behind her and Geralt stepped inside with his own lit flame, shedding more detail onto the blurred picture of this chamber. It revealed many more items Vesemir had withhold over the years, as maps and books that Geralt recognized. What caught Azaras' eyes immediately though, was a pin.
"This is new," she pointed out.
Geralt glanced over her shoulder at the pin she rolled between her fingers. It was the blazon of a house, by the looks of it. "How do you know?"
"It's cleaner than the rest and it's not rusted either."
By the way she studied it, picking it out from the cluster, Geralt knew there was something special about the pin. He was right to wait, because as soon as she turned around Azaras smiled to him, one of the smiles filled with more fire than he could ever conjure in signs, a smile he wished to be around of as much as possible, unafraid of being burned by.
"This is a pin of honor given to elected heroes of Hengfors League," she explained. "My father received a pin one year before the incident, though I am not sure for what. If Vesemir received one too, he may have done a great service to..." She hesitated for a while, trying to regain a faint knowledge engraved into her old self's very being. "To the Korber brothers. They are the chiefs of the captial of the League right now, right?"
"Don't look at me," Geralt shook his head lightly, for her impressive tackling of politics left him in a sleepy awe. "I don't bother remembering these things about Lords."
"I didn't think I would remember so much," Azaras admitted. "But I suppose once you learn it, it's hard to forget it."
The flame died out at last from Geralt's hand too and his palm, now warmer, felt the need to rest on her shoulder. Though his focus came silently on how sad Azaras seemed with ever fragment of remembering Arcapan, a silver glint caught his eyes and his hand trailed to her chest, twisting one finger under the chain and lifting her new medallion.
"Eskel," she explained.
Geralt's heart felt warm. His whole being warmed. In the darkness surrounding them, being with a designed night vision worth the envy of mortals, he dared smile the true smile of happiness it evoked into him to see Azaras wear their marks, be one of them, at last. A last symbol to belonging by his side, from where no one would be able to take her, nor anyone would be able to judge him for so foolishly protecting her life.
Exactly under his caress, the medallion around Azaras' neck vibrated. Immediately, Geralt's answered as well.
But shouldn't they only do that when a monster is close? Azaras wondered innerly, for the look she shared with Geralt was loud enough to silence their lips shut. That quietness left room for a more accurate sense taking over, listening to all which encapsulated the fortress' halls.
A thud came from the courtyard, the winds fell still outside. Something was out there and it was big.
chapter dedicated to SoniczurcX