Work Text:
Sylvie gave the shadowy, silent house a critical look before turning to the villager fidgeting next to her. “This is the one the woodsprite has been haunting?”
He blinked his drooping, watery eyes at her and nodded. “Yes, yes. It kills anyone who tries to enter. Please, Witcher, rid us of it, we are poor folk who can’t afford to lose the shelter of a well built house. Not when winter comes.”
She turned in a slow circle to take in the village around her a second time. He had a point: she’d seen poorer spots in her countless decades hunting beasts across the Continent, but not many. She watched a pair of villagers unload their meager farming haul from a skinny donkey, and wondered where they scraped up the money to pay her.
Desperation finds a way.
Sylvie turned back to the man. “Your description should serve me well enough. I’ll come back after nightfall to hunt it. Make sure everyone is inside and behind a sturdy, locked door. I’ll have the beast’s head for you by daybreak.”
He seemed to contemplate her small stature for a moment, as if he was tempted to voice some doubt, but she rolled her shoulders under her armor, readjusting the two swords on her back and drawing his eyes to them, and he kept his thoughts to himself.
Sylvie readied herself with the ritualistic deliberation she always did before a hunt: tightening her armor clasps, checking her weapons and potions were in order, tying back her hair. The moon was full enough to see fairly well, but she didn’t have the mutation-altered eyes of her fellow Witchers, so she downed a sense augmentation potion—this might be far from the worst job she’d faced, but she’d seen the dismembered bodies of the residents who had encountered the beast, and had no wish to test her luck. She contemplated her stash; quickened reflexes never hurt, either.
She pulled her silver sword from her back as the world brightened, pulsated, and grew loud around her, and took a few silent steps toward the house. The structure was clear as daylight to her now pitch-black, dilated eyes, and she was betting on the sprite underestimating many things about her, her vision among them.
The moon hung low in an inky sky above the house, casting silver shadows among the eaves and the slow swaying trees that bordered it. She spotted the creature on the roof almost immediately. It appeared to be masking itself against the roofing tiles, skin gone the same rough texture of the wood; the outlines of its bent limbs peeked up just enough to show against the moonlit sky, betraying its location. Sylvie pretended she hadn’t seen it, continuing her path around the house and making a show of peering into darkened windows as she tracked it from the corner of her eye.
The beast stalked her progress around the building with fluid, soundless movements, freezing still as stone each time she paused or lifted her gaze. Its flesh altered to match the textures it rested against, much like a woodsprite, but something in her gut told Sylvie this was a different type of monster—it felt both more deliberate and malevolent than a simple sprite. And its eyes: a near glowing emerald green, out of place on such a creature, that caused a knot to form in her throat.
Perhaps it was time to coax it to strike and see what, exactly, she was dealing with.
Sylive stepped up to the back door of the house, tightening her grip on her silver sword at the same time she twisted the doorknob, faking her intent to enter the dwelling. In her periphery she tracked the creature as it hunched down on the roof above her, coiled to strike, then lept. It was fast, but she was faster. She pivoted out of its path, yanking her hand from the knob to aim a green tinted blast of energy at it with her palm. Other Witchers would have needed both hands to form the sign of ard to create such a blast, but Sylvie’s magic had never worked the same as theirs. Her blow hit the monster square in its chest as it descended, knocking it back. Back, but not as far as she’d expected; long animal talons erupted from its fingers, digging into the dirt and killing its momentum in seconds.
“Fuck,” Sylvie grumbled as the thing shifted to look more like a werewolf, or perhaps some sort of big, grotesque cat—certainly no woodsprite. It snarled at her, exposing long, wicked fangs.
Her mind flicked through her encyclopedic knowledge of the Continent's monsters, trying for a fit. Some kind of shapeshifter, but what? She had little time to think; its flesh transformed back to camouflage as it charged her. She sank into her hips and took a full force swing of her sword at the thing, but it was damn quick, twisting away and raking its half nail half wood talons across her armor, leaving furrows. She snapped her left arm up and punched it in its equivalent of a face, and the blow rattled its entire body, its teeth clacking, sending it into a convulsion of changing patterns and shapes.
Sylvie was sweeping her sword in to relieve it of its head when it flickered into a humanoid form for barely a blink of an eye, but long enough to give her pause. There was something, something about it, and she stilled her blow millimeters from its neck. She wasn't there to kill a person; she'd given that up centuries ago.
Hesitation never came without a price. It flung itself onto her with an animal growl, knocking her to the dirt forcefully enough to jar the air from her lungs. It went straight for her sword arm, and she felt its monstrous teeth lengthening as it bit down on her wrist, fangs puncturing gauntlet and flesh alike. Pain blossomed down her arm, muddled and distant under the effects of the potions. The weapon slipped from her nerveless hand and landed with a soft thud, and Sylvie churned the earth with her heels, trying to get purchase under the thing. She screamed and cursed as she landed a left handed punch on the side of its head, but pinned as she was, there was little force behind it.
The beast leaned close to her face, its slavoring jaws snapping, its eyes bright and its breath hot on her skin. Through the haze of her adrenaline, the scent of its breath registered in her mind as not unpleasant—familiar, in fact. Familiar? She was losing her mind. Was it using psychoactive powers against her? Shit. The green of its eyes was so very vivid now. Sylive managed to tuck her free hand between them and hit the thing point blank with another mage blast.
She leapt after it as it was thrown off her with a whumph of expelled breath, kneeling on its chest the moment it landed on its back in a thicket of tall grass. She pinned both clawed hands to the ground as it writhed under her, shapeshifting rapidly in an attempt to break free. Blood oozed from her injured wrist, but she refused to let go.
All at once it took the form of a great snake, its limbs vanishing, and she pitched forward onto her suddenly empty hands. It bent back to strike, fangs bared, and Sylvie did the only thing she could think to do in that moment: she clutched its massive head with both hands, falling back onto her oldest, most instinctual power, and enchanted its mind.
Her vision blurred out, and she was thrust back into memory as their minds connected, rather than hers simply overriding the creature’s. Sylvie fell centuries back in time as the moments rushed out of her, to the earliest and darkest days she could recall, wandering around a land she didn’t recognize and knowing not how she got there, having nothing but her name. She was one of countless beings dumped onto the Continent during what they referred to as the Conjunction of the Spheres, when numerous realities had collided. Of how she’d used her unusual strength and durability to acquire the only work she could manage, as a hired killer. A pirate, mercenary, an assassin; it blended together into decades of endless violence.
That is, until the day she’d been fatally wounded on the job, and found herself, upon awakening by some miracle, in the company of a pair of Witchers. The two hunters explained they and other Witchers had kept an eye on her over the decades, realizing like them she wasn’t easily killed, nor aged, like a human. So when they had found her dying, they tried their Witcher healing potions on her, deadly to a mere human, and lo and behold she’d survived. As if that wasn't enough, they toted her back to their keep and slowly nursed her back to her full strength.
Sylvie never understood why, precisely, but they took her into their number soon after—perhaps it was simply that, if they didn't wish to kill her and weren't sure what she was, it was better to have her on their side.
She was the same as them in some ways, but different in so many others. Not a mutant Witcher, nor a trained Mage, nor even a combo of both, but as far as any could guess, unique amongst the various being dumped together to stew and to fight thanks to the Conjunctional. Unique, but hard to kill, and good with a sword, and well suited for hunting monsters. Sylvie had lived amongst them, and the members of various other keeps, for century after century, watching even Witchers grow old and die while she changed little, slowly relearning her strange, green tinted magic, and honing her mind enchanting technique.
Sylvie’s eyes flew open. She was kneeling above the prone, naked form of a man, her hands still pressed to the sides of a face. It was no longer a snake’s face, but one of sharp angles not unlike a viper’s: high cheekbones and forehead, and piercing, emerald green eyes looking up into hers. He was dirty and bruised, his wavy black hair tangled with twigs and leaves.
Something deep, primal, and ancient twisted inside of her and then, all at once, snapped.
“Loki?” Sylvie breathed. She hadn't known she knew the name until she spoke it.
“Sylvie.” He replied, a statement, not a question, eyes wide and searching.
They stared at each other for a long moment, chests heaving, breathless from fighting, breathless with shock.
“I know you,” She said.
“I know you,” Loki echoed, and set his hands over hers.
Sylvie turned her palms to his and their fingers entwined, long and short, and she stayed still as a deer as he pressed their joined hands against her temples. The world blotted out once more, but this time it was his memories: of being lost and alone in the violence and bedlam after the Conjunction, of his instinctually falling back on his shapeshifting abilities to survive when he had forgotten all else. How that only caused him to be ostracized and hunted, until he forgot even his name or how to turn back, wandering that cursed world for century after century, reduced to a haunting beast.
She gasped and let herself crumple off of him and onto her side, panic and tears welling in her. A pressure grew in her chest at the sight of him, that there was so, so much buried in her mind: flickers of a twin agonized, hunted loneliness of her own, that stretched on, and on. Before…what? Before they had first found one another? Were they simply both born to lose?
Sylvie felt cool fingers wipe tears from her cheeks, and realized only then she’d begun to cry. Loki took her hands once more, squeezed her fingers, and pressed her gloved knuckles to his cheek. She could feel the warmth of his skin through the thin leather. Every touch sent a tremor through her, swelling the pressure inside until she was sure she would burst.
“Do you remember?” Loki whispered, scooting close in the grass and dirt, so their foreheads touched. It was ridiculous, lying there on the ground with a creature she had just tried to behead, now humanoid and naked and touching her. Sylvie had no energy left to care.
“I think so,” She whispered back. “We…we had gone to some cold place. A frozen place, but I didn’t feel cold. And then–”
“–the ground broke apart around us, up became down and we were falling, falling into a land that appeared in the sky–”
“–and into this place. And…” Sylvie’s throat constricted, and for a moment she couldn’t breathe. “...and I lost you in the chaos. I forgot. Loki, I am so sorry. I’m sorry for what happened to you, all these centuries…” She'd borne her own wounds and scars, but the thought of his centuries of hunted isolation prodded that terrible, familiar pain in her again.
“Hush,” He said, pulling her against him so their limbs intertwined. “It wasn’t your fault, I forgot, too. We're survivors, moving forward is what we do.”
Sylvie took a deep breath, burying her face into his neck and the scent of him. An honest, clean musk like an animal’s, familiar to her. “Do you remember a golden palace with a many colored bridge leading from it? A sea that fell off the edges of the world? I’ve always dreamed of it, but I thought I was mad.”
“You aren't mad, I remember it, too.”
“Do you think we can ever go back?”
Loki was quiet for a moment. “No. I think our universe was destroyed when it crashed into this one.”
Sylvie shuddered in his arms at those words, but steadied herself. She pulled her head back to look him in those eyes, dulled from their magic glow and now, she realized, the exact same shade of blue-green as her own. “I think you’re right. But as long as we’re together, we’ll be ok.”
Loki smiled a thin, wan smile, then leaned in to kiss her softly on the lips. A million memories felt contained in that one kiss, jostling to break free. She gave herself over to it.
A rustling sound off to Sylvie's right caught her ears, still the slightest bit enhanced by the waning potion. She leapt to her feet and into a combat stance, dragging Loki up by one arm and shoving his naked form protectively behind her.
The villager with the watery eyes was standing a number of meters off, slack jawed in surprise. “Who in Melitele's milk is that? And what happened with the monster?”
Sylvie cursed under her breath. The sky around them was lightening with sunrise–how much time had passed lost in each other’s memories? She’d promised a head at daybreak, and without it, she’d have no pay to feed or clothe herself, much less Loki. She could enchant him into handing it over, but historically that had resulted in wielded pitchforks as often as pay.
“You mean this monster?” Loki said behind her, extending one long arm over her shoulder to hold out the dripping, severed head of a woodsprite.
Or, an illusory one, at least. Sylvie recalled what kind of magic he had, now. And that in their world, they had called it seidr.
