The monster wielded a tail to act as a crossbow spitting at least five spikes at a time. Azaras slid off the rather tall bed and while her left hand grabbed her sword from the bedstand, she concentrated first on tucking her right shoulder under the margin of the bed. While she stood up, averting her face from the dreadful attack, her force flipped the bed over with all who were on it. Geralt fell limply and Jaskier, on top of him yelped, scared.
Five spikes indeed pierced the turned mattress. By some sort of luck, Azaras did not get scrapped, scratched or wounded, which turned to be enough of a shock to the monster, sure in its lack of consciousness that his strength rivaled that of everyone; one hit and they'd be dead, for who would survive this creature? Half scorpion, half a beast with permanently open mouth, rounded and filled with twelve rows of teeth, as a mutation between that which dwells on filth and sewers, growing the more it eats, and the terrors of the desert, Azaras never dreamt to see.
Now she'd get to kill.
As soon as she realized she wasn't dead already, no matter how little sense she made of everything, the instincts instructed into her very being by her own mutations had her knelt, sliding across the room and unleashing her sword in a lounge that cut off the monster's leg first.
She widened her knees to the side, leant back and the tail went right over her body flattened to the ground, exposing the thing's back. From her own back leaning she turned to lay on her front, raised herself from the ground and no struggle later, the monster's tail was cut off.
Black blood spilled, the monster erupted burning saliva from its round mouth and all his teeth started shivering like razors. Though it lost is tail, the main weapon, that mouth was the very next danger. While Azaras was barely standing up, trying not to slip on that poisoned liquid death, the monster turned around and its scream numbed into the floor.
He smashed his head wide mouth down trying to catch Azaras in the razors, eat her whole. Without its tail, the monster had no balance, no sense of space, so it missed. Infuriated, it raised its head again, confused, but this time, when it came down, it met a sword.
And its screech only got louder as that silver blade stuck through its throat, immune to the teeth clapping and flinching.
Holding her sword in a reversed grip, Azaras was the back of the monster she had placed herself under the attack of on purpose. When she shoved her sword in, she dug deeper until she felt the dark blood starting to drip, meaning that she hit something vital.
Only then, she stood up from one knee to standing straight and raised her right arm, shoulder high, in a light step to her left. The sword cut flatly through the monster's face, skull, minuscule brain. Loud enough to wake the dead, it fell dead beside her.
Yet she didn't ponder. She did not dwell in victory either, even though she wished she could have flaunted her pride of having fought so well after such a dizzying deep sleep. Prudent, she shook the sword of blood only once and ran around the turned bed to see Jaskier in a corner and Geralt still sleeping.
Blood raised to her temples, pumped loudly. Her heart, however, still beat slow. "What are you doing, Jaskier?"
"Geralt's not waking up," he whispered.
Noises were getting louder, more monsters, sounding the same or even worse, caused a ruckus outside their walls.
"Then start slapping him!" Azaras became alert too. Out of her and Jaskier, she was the one most capable of fighting, but also the only one with the physical strength of carrying Geralt out if he didn't wake up. However... she couldn't do both.
That was the choice she didn't want to take, so to avoid it, she started gathering her gear, putting on her armour with dexterity and full advantage of a slowed heartbeat. She was calm, but panicking, and it showed only in how much Azaras had quickened the way she retrieved each of her weapons.
It wasn't even her medallion's faded vibration that warned her, but a scent trapped in her nose of filth. She spun around and shot the first arrow of the night, right through the head of something she did not wish to stare at twice. The contact with silver exploded the monster into an echo of wails and waves of blood that stuck to the walls of the hall their room was exposed towards, now that it head no door.
I could move the bed to cover it, Azaras thought in the midst of making a plan. The sound of three solid slaps turned her around, hopeful to see Geralt's amber stare on her, to feel some safety amongst the tremors of a stress. Instead, she returned to Jaskier and was greeted by his disappointment. Geralt was still sleeping, dreaming, so far away from them.
"So be it," Azaras' thin lips flattened over each other, encapsulating her sigh within, because just then, Jaskier had to be reassured and a frown was not going to do it. "You can't carry Geralt, can you?" she assured herself with a question at which Jaskier's wordless reaction was enough of a confirmation. "Then you stay here with him."
"Why isn't he waking up?"
"He's dreaming."
"What sort of dream does that?"
Azaras glanced down at Geralt, aware beyond her liking of just how many flaws were in the plan she conceived, but at least seeing him there, him and Jaskier, both vulnerable, both valuable to her heart's peace, enhanced reason above wonders she too held. "Don't worry over questions that don't need answers," she repeated to Jaskier what she was told too.
There was no time for hesitation, so promptly, Azaras continued, inhaling away any sort of further doubt she too held for a second in the grasp of her understanding. Prying her attention away from Geralt, she stared at the bard, "You're going to stay here and keep trying to wake Geralt up."
"Where are you going?" Jaskier interrupted. He wasn't stupid enough not to admit the awake Witcher was his only hope to stay alive through this carnage happening to the town which complained to the destiny of how ignored it had been. Now, darkness saw it and it would die out alone, for no one would have known who had lived here before.
"Things are going to get messy," Azaras answered calmly, sliding her bow around her shoulder, then moving her left hand into her pouch. First she touched the pebble, picture that prune color of clarity. "You can't carry Geralt and I can't carry him and fight at the same time. To wait the storm out here is stupid too. So I am going out there and will clear the village."
"No-"
"Now, listen here, Jaskier," she spoke regardless of his disagreement, "I will move the bed and block the entrance on my way out and I will also try my best to draw all monsters away from here, but I don't know how many are out there. If any slip through from me and get here, you are gonna take Geralt's sword... nod that you understand!"
At her command, the bard nodded from inertia.
Azaras mirrored, slower, that same nod and continued, "Scream as loud as you can with those singer lungs of yours and try to buy some time by swinging the sword in an X shape. But be loud so I can get back here and help alright?" She waited for Jaskier's second nod, then took one step back. Then, she turned around, fighting off the urge of another glance down at Geralt, "Try to wake him up and do stay alive."
"How are you going to fight them all?" Jaskier asked. He too heard but a glimpse of all the death which sounded outside in an orchestra of bloodshed. The thrills and horrors quivered in face of none and though it was hard to believe such coordination was possible, the sounds gave away an army, to say at least, of creatures.
That was exactly why Azaras' hand left her pouch holding something. Jaskier heard the pop of a lid, the fall of the little thing on the ground, bouncing away, then a hasty gulp. Azaras cleared her throat in a strong cough.
It was hard to describe how it felt normal to pinch that sort of pain again through her veins, running rivers of poison; an exhilaration revealed more and more to her and with a final hiss to the taste she no longer remembered beyond the wave of power, she unsheathed her sword.
When she looked back over her shoulder, Jaskier watched pitch black eyes stare at him, surrounded by greyness on a much paler skin. "I'll be back," she mumbled the last words they'd share for a while.
Halved were her words pinned against the immersed succumbs of the storm of noise by which Sylvain stomped through the much more rigid camps that have sprung over night from the earth for his army's rest. That was the utmost relevance to the swarm of emotions and thoughts beginning to blur in his mind the more his knees started aching, cramping and popping every once in a while.
He took that fiery action into his mage's cave, the one Yulis requested, amongst the caverns he had shown to his army, for his nightly rites. Inconsiderate of bothering, owning the valley as much as he owned his posture, Sylvain burst into the room and noticed the perfect, filled circle of red drawn on the ground, at the edge of which he stopped, before entering. One sniff of the air revealed to him that it was blood.
Then he focused on the back of the Sorcerer and straightened up through all the rage, "Why is my army not ready to leave?"
"Because we are no longer needed to make it on the other end of the mountains, my Lord," Yulis answered, undoubtedly intentional in the length of the words which had changed.
"Your king," Sylvain corrected him with a snarl. "And what of this change...?"
"Nilfgaard reevaluated the plan since your indiscretion of murdering some of Hengfors' forces outside Creyden," Yulis continued to face his king with the back, dismissive of whatever importance he tried to delude the boy thus far to believe he had. "Our orders come from the Nilfgaardian Empire and they wish for us to stand down-"
Desperation had Sylvain hold his hands tightly into fists. He had neglected his nails so they grew enough to sting underneath that pressure. "And I wish for us to continue our march and burn the entire Poviss province!"
"Don't you mean eat?" Yulis teased him, earning a little gasp from the boy. Sylvain was young in Yulis' eyes, a mere, new pawn to a game as old as time. "You didn't honestly think I wouldn't know of the great suffering your poor assigned soldier had to endure before he passed away into the night, limbs torn, flesh missing, for the sake of your insatiable desire, to be touched and loved, worshipped, seen and most of all, sanctified with a filled belly-"
"Watch your tongue!"
Sylvain threatened by stepping forward but the second his step spoiled the circle and took some of the color into his infected being, Yulis sparked the interest of turning around and showing the cruelty of his glowed red eyes, of his scarlet hands which held a power, malevolent as his smile. Yulis was holding the map of skins.
"No," Yulis' smile widened unnaturally, "you will watch your tongue before your creator." The spell in which Sylvain had stepped had been broken by his ignorance, yet the punishment for that will be satisfyingly grave. A pain burst through his designed legs and to his throat, as a spear impaling him unseen. It brought the so-called king to the ground.
"Guards...!" Guttural, Sylvain's voice shivered its last capable shout of power, crumbling right before his eyes, for when the stomps of metal arrived in the room, it was for Yulis' nod. He watched. Suffocated first by the help which never came, a wrap of metal tightened around his neck.
"You seem confused, Sylvain," Yulis laughed. "Let me enlighten you... This is not your army. These are not your people. Your people are in those legs you carry yourself with proudly, the people who you have banished in the mountains to clear the city for us. Your value was a map, which I now have and I have learnt to read. Because of your disobedience, your recklessness, you may now discover the true nature of what you have become."
He held the chain attached to Sylvain like a leash and pulled once, just to see him weaver to the ground, weak. "Let me tell you a secret... Monsters are consumed by being utterly alone."
That was part of the reason why seeing so many monster at once, attacking almost organized the same village, became a clear proof of oddity that this was a Blood Sorcerer's doing. Though Azaras' focus was on not dying, it became impossible not to acknowledge the fact that this was most definitely a proof the enemy did not wish for them to reach the harbors. Any harbors at all, for that matter.
Cockatrice, Striga, Ghouls and Golems. They have feasted on the townspeople and would have continued to wipe all of them out were it not for Azaras to have drawn all attention to herself. She cleared the restaurant, upper floors and ground, but instead of exiting into the street and risking coming heads on with something perhaps too big for her to enter the territory of, she swung out on the window, climbed the furnace on the outside and jumped on the roof of the building near.
They have spotted it her and she had only a window of shooting five arrows, a point-blank kill of three monsters, action which had saved the last people still trying to run out of the town and into the empty fields of white, be it that it meant fighting through the blizzard unprepared. After those arrows though, a hand burst through the roof from below and Azaras was grounded to continue the fight without her bow and rather with just her sword.
Which she did just fine, for what felt like hours. Then, the effect of the potion started wearing off and her eyes returned to a tired amber. Azaras collected hits and felt the impact harder. One gash on her back, several bruises from all the falls she could not avoid... One monster was still standing, while she was certain many others have scattered as soon as the snow storm too had stopped around them as of recently.
Whatever snow remained in that village, trojan dunes of white, have long shed their purity to hold instead the graves of all the young souls which died. Children and elders were those more frequent deformed faces whose corpses clogged the air in a toxic fume.
Furnace to hell was where they were standing, yet a mad drive kept Azaras from letting the tiredness rule over her body. She forced the single cut further open and deflected this monsters blow by the cost of her sword getting trapped in its shoulder, too deep for her to successfully pull it back in time.
Instead, she took the one arrow she still had and without a bow, used it to stab out the thing's single eye. A blow to the side sent her through the snow before the silver tip could reach anything vital in the head of that atrocity scaling a corpse's appearance, young and old all the same, with inhuman strength that its muscles could be considered mountains of its own.
Azaras didn't allow herself to lay too long, no matter how tempting it felt to just let the snow be her final bed. When her eyes tried to close, for a second, anticipate the pain, she saw a glimse of Geralt, a memory of Sylvain...
It had her getting up, facing the monster half knelt, in the realization that she did not have any more weapons but her own hands. Her red knuckles cooled off in the dirty snow and with her head bowed, Azaras breathed out a cloud of steam. She cleared her mind of anything but the count of the monster's steps, running for her.
Instead of finishing her approximated count and then attacking, her eyes opened to an unexpected intrusion, a single breath before the impact. Below her gaze the monster's head looked with emptying rolled-back eyes, separated from its body.
Looking up reminded her heart there was a possibility to feel the need to beat faster too. "Geralt," she breathed out, standing up as fast her weary body allowed, because he too looked like he grew tired from whatever dreams tormented him paralyzed and away from her.
He lowered his sword stepped over the body of the monster in an instant and with the memories of the nightmare still fresh into his mind, Geralt's relief doubled over. So much that he dropped the sword and he uttered the one thing Azaras could not know why was said.
"I'm sorry." Geralt's arms wrapped around her and he held her close to his chest, the position where he felt he belonged to most. "I love you," he breathed in her scent, a curious beauty he had missed, only to notice she was bleeding.
Azaras assumed he apologized for what was out of his control, the way he slept through this massacre, so she paid no mind to his worries; they were water under a bridge, much like her wound. No matter how lovely it was to embrace him and hear Jaskier's puffs behind, bringing their horses, Azaras' hands moved to Geralt's waist and pushed back from the embrace.
"We need to get to Novigrad," she named the clear name of a capital, port city. It was not anything close to what they speculated Vesemir might have chosen for a route to find passage across the sea. Which was why Geralt leant back too, somehow guessing this had something to do with her wolf.
Suddenly, the need turned to a visible must.
"And we have to find a way to cross the sea too. That's how we find Vesemir and no, I don't think I can explain to you the way I know this," Azaras sniffed. "I just need you to believe me."
All Geralt could think about was fate and its pending guillotine. He remembered the dream's air of a boat, but then again, the more prominent detial was the absolute disappointment Azaras' eyes held beneath the tears to look at him with. He may not have been great with words, he may not have been the best she deserved, but he did love her and perhaps trust was a good way to prove it to her and prevent the sadness from ever happening.
"I belive you."