Who: Ciri & Stephen Strange What: Discussing the renovations at Kaer Morhen! When: After her post earlier this month Where: The Sanctum! Warnings: There's some discussion of Witcher canon horrors related to the Witchers themselves (child death, experimentation, torture).
Revealing all of Kaer Morhen’s secrets somehow felt like a betrayal of a secret she wasn’t exactly privy to in the first place - yes, she knew all about the dark and horrible past of the Kaer, but it hadn’t been something she specifically had lived through. She had seen it with her own eyes after one of her time travel training sessions, something that she hadn’t been supposed to do and yet had done on her own time against Vesemir’s wishes. In a sense, she wished she hadn’t and yet at the same time she was almost glad that she had because she knew. The history of any Witcher keep wasn’t something to be dabbled with lightly or given a fresh coat of paint and it wasn’t something that she planned on ignoring, either. It was just… difficult. Difficult to decide what was an appropriate memorial to hundreds of dead Witchers and a thousand more children who hadn’t made it through the Trials.
She gathered the books that she’d found into a satchel, something that the castle also had many of - old belongings. Tons of old belongings that had been shoved in unused rooms, something Vesemir couldn’t bear to part with and yet also couldn’t stomach looking at. She could understand the feeling, now, with the pit that grew in her stomach every time she stepped out into the wrecked courtyard. He had deserved a better ending.
Stephen’s place wasn’t difficult for her to find or get to, at least, endlessly glad that her magic had returned to her in full force and doubly glad that she wasn’t the only person who had this kind of magic here. She knocked on the door of the Sanctum and waited, opting for ‘polite’ as opposed to ‘portal into your living room and possibly knock over something priceless’.
When there was a knock upon the door, that sent the wards flickering - assessing, judging intent. All in this flash and shimmer of magic that resembled a thousand tiny diamonds, or dewdrops on grass - an untrained eye wouldn’t even notice, but a fellow sorcerer might. Still, in the span of those few seconds the test was passed - Ciri wasn’t bunged into a park pond, their newest goldish inhabitant. Instead, the doors creaked open and Stephen - who had been expecting her - floated down the staircase with the Cloak of Levitation rippling behind him, the color of a pool of blood.
It wasn’t blood though. He just enjoyed the creepy aesthetic, if nothing else.
“Hi Ciri,” he greeted her once she was in the entranceway. “Come on in. We’ll go sit in the kitchen, if that’s alright? I already have some water boiling in the kettle.” The kitchen was homey too, scented of spice and tea leaves and the comforts of food - plus they would have room to spread things out on the wooden table.
Ciri felt the unmistakable shimmer of magic - some kind of magic. It wasn’t the Chaos she knew inside out but it was something similar, like a strange cousin to what she was used to. That had been pretty much the standard since coming to Vallo and it had been odd, discovering which kinds of magic she could potentially replicate and learn from and which were so far removed from what she knew that it was impossible to use.
“Of course,” she stated, unconcerned with his dramatic entrance as she stepped inside and made sure to tap her toes on the ground so that she wouldn’t be tracking mud into the surprisingly beautiful building. “The kitchen’s fine. I could actually do with a drink, if that was an offer,” she shot him a smile as she followed Stephen and the cloak through the building, eyeing various artefacts as she walked past them. In a weird kind of way it reminded her of Kaer Morhen, although it was nothing alike in decor or style - but it felt like a museum of sorts. A homage, maybe, she wasn’t entirely sure and had no idea of the place’s history but Stephen definitely had the dramatic flair of Sorceresses and Witchers down, judging by his entrance.
“I brought the journals. They’re a little more weathered than I remember them being, honestly, but they’re readable enough. As for the history, I hope you have a strong disposition.”
“As someone who has literally died in a thousand different painful ways on a time loop, my disposition is pretty strong by now. So not to worry,” Stephen assured with a rueful chuckle - he’d been attending Death Club meetings and trying to talk about it, not just letting those old wounds fester, or continue to dig in like a tick because that wasn’t helping anything. He had people here he wanted to actually be present for - and while ‘not processing any of your trauma’ was the name of the game back home, it didn’t have to be like that now.
The torture at the hands of Ebony Maw, the whole Thanos situation - the weight which sat heavy as a tomb upon the ground strewn with funerary flowers - well, all of that would be unpacked too. Someday.
He headed into the kitchen and cleared off a space on the table for Ciri to set her things down. “And by ‘drink’ I assume you mean a shot of hard liquor? I can do that. What’s your preferred poison?” he wanted to know. Some things even went well with tea - he could just add a splash or two of that as well.
Ciri set down the books on the table that he’d cleared off, shrugging the satchel to the floor where she tugged out a few loose pages, too. “I was thinking tea, actually. But I’ll also take hard liquor,” a little smirk played on her lips as she pulled out one of the chairs and hung her sword over the back of it, settling down. Vallo was relatively safe but there were still enough monsters in the forest that she kept it with her at all times - it simply wouldn’t do for a Witcher to be without a sword, after all.
“Whisky, if you’ve got it? If not, whatever’s open. I’m not picky,” she sat down, trying to decide whether or not she should comment on or ignore the whole ‘thousand different ways to die’ thing. “There’s a lot of death in this story. History, I suppose. Child death, specifically.”
“Whiskey it is,” Stephen agreed, and it only took a couple seconds - he opened a portal (a small one, a sparking golden ring) and reached in to grab the bottle from the ether. It was a neat trick - he’d probably make a lot of tip money everynight if he was a bartender, but no. He had to stick with something like medical research.
He prepared two cups of comfort in a mug - that whiskey with strong black tea; it was a simple but effective concoction that made him think they should be enjoying a pot on a chilly night while acting as horse farm night watchmen or something. It just evoked that kind of vibe. “So tell me more about these journals? And the castle?” The Sorcerer Supreme would just attempt to brace himself for child death - a macabre subject to be sure.
It was probably best to start at the beginning, right? The journals were more of a curiosity and perhaps something to offer historical context with the sketches in them. She had been glad at the time that some Witchers hadn't felt the need to abandon everything they enjoyed for the Path, after all. "It's one of those things that sounds barbaric in somewhere like Vallo, but Witchers were- necessary, for my world. People died from monster attacks so regularly because they didn't belong in Temeria," neither did humans, but that was a story for another day. Probably. "Somebody decided a long time ago that something needed to be done about it, so mages banded together to create the perfect warrior. The issue was that those warriors had to be given mutagens that altered their very being in order to change their physiology into that of a monster hunter and to put it very simply and bluntly, not many survived the process. Those that did may not have survived in tact, either," she curled her fingers around the mug, looking somewhere off into the distance rather than at him.
"The castle was the home of one of the Witcher schools. Witchers were made and trained there until they were driven out and killed by humans who decided they no longer trusted or wanted them. They'd outgrown their use because they'd proven effective in clearing monsters from human settlements where they caused problems. I don't know a lot about that part because nobody really liked to talk about the sacking of Kaer Morhen, but it happened. There's a little in the diaries about it, but by the time I lived there, there were only four Witchers left of that school. Now there's three."
Yes, that was definitely depressing almost at the onslaught - careening down a wildly tragic path already, as morbid as buckets filled with blood and many handfuls of crushed orchids. Stephen settled at the table, sipping tea - he didn’t often drink, so spiking the hot beverage with the dark peat and woodsmoke of whiskey was just a bonus.
“You were trained as a Witcher?” he asked, curious because he realized that while he knew a bit about Ciri’s magic - what she could do now thanks to their similarities and how they got involved with things like Vallo Olympics together (hurrah to teamwork) - he wasn’t overly familiar with her past. Maybe that’s where these journals would come in, and using his time magic to help fix up the castle. “...but you’re not one.”
He was guessing, anyway. Stephen mostly thought she was a fellow sorcerer, like him.
“It’s difficult. Even if they had the mutagen recipes, I don’t think they would have given them to me by the time I got there,” she took her own cup of whisky-tea and took a sip, humming gently at the taste. It was delicious, especially how it was presented. “I had training as a lot of things. A sorceress, a Witcher, in many ways a leader. A multitude of people trying to protect me and a lot trying to use me, too,” she set the mug down, frowning a little.
“I’m the last one of my bloodline. The Elder Blood, it’s called. I had no idea I even had it for the longest time, but it just essentially makes me an incredibly powerful sorcerer. Not many people have the ability to travel through space and time as I do,” she traced the rim of the mug with her finger, frowning a little. “They don’t have access to the mutagens, but I don’t think they would have given me them if they did because of how they could have reacted with my blood. If nothing else, Geralt wouldn’t have allowed it, what with the pain all of the Witchers went through in receiving them. Is your magic not from a specific bloodline, then? Are sorcerers and mages not born?”
“It depends. Some sorcerers are natural-born, others require training,” Stephen said, hands wrapped around the mug he held - he knew Agatha had come from a coven of witches, and Wanda herself was a natural-born witch with powers drastically augmented by the mind stone. Other magic users from his world, that he was aware of, trained and studied for many years - in the Ancient One’s case, well, he couldn’t even fathom how long that had been; she had immortality spells stacked on top of immortality spells, drawing power and energy and life force from the Dark Dimension.
He sipped the spiked tea, listening to the rumble of the fridge demon, sounding like one of those window washing machines he remembered from high rise office glass in New York - he was surprised it was cooperating and not opening up and throwing things at him. Though it tended to quiet when someone it liked was in the vicinity - maybe it decided it liked Ciri (because it definitely didn’t like Stephen). “It also depends on where the energy source is, what a sorcerer uses to cast - personal energies or energies around them, someplace in the multiverse. In theory anyone could learn to do that, with enough practice. Eldritch magic - what I use - is all learned,” he went on. And he just so happened to have an inclination for it - something the Ancient One had known, and seen, before they even met. Sometimes it still boggled him.
“Time magic is also a whole other thing. The time stone itself has been with the Masters of the Mystic Arts for ages - those spells are difficult but after the ancient Vallo situation, I’ve sort of caught up to where I’m meant to be with it. I’ll do some research and devise a spell just for your castle.”
“The inherent magic around us is called Chaos in my world,” Ciri nodded a little. She could understand these terms, at least. “It feels… different here. Not necessarily bad different, just,” she waved the hand that wasn’t curled around the tea, “different? I don’t really know how to explain it. Maybe like getting into a bathtub you expect to be filled with warm water and instead it’s filled with warm jelly or something,” she pulled a face at the thought, but it was the only way she could think to describe it. It was like it had a different texture, somehow - a different feel. She couldn’t grasp it and mold it as she pleased like she could back home.
“In Temeria, most sorcerers are born with inherent magical abilities. I’m an extreme case, but many have them and some have very latent abilities that can be dragged out by the mutations. My- I suppose he’s sort of like an uncle? Eskel, he’s much better at using the Witcher Signs than any of his brothers are,” she made a movement with her hand and held it out with her palm flat, a golden, shimmering shield-like bubble appearing in front of her hand until she dropped it. “Signs are simple versions of magic just used by Witchers to get things done, but they’re not really considered sorcery. I never did understand why. So you can just restore the keep by moving only that backwards in time, somehow? Is that- teachable?”
Everything in Vallo did feel different, yes. Sometimes the magic flowed smoothly, sometimes it was like trying to jam a square peg into a round hole - but that was just the way of the world. Stephen knew that there were also some aspects they simply weren’t meant to understand - and not everything fit together easily either. “Chaos is a term for it too, back home,” he chuckled wryly. “Or - Chaos is one sect of magic, anyway. But we have the signs thing in common too, at least. I think you’ve seen it.”
He cast briefly, a little bit of a finger tut to call up an orange glow of geometric symbols - something that shimmered in the air and sank into his tea mug to reheat some of it; a simple spell (or a bit of computer code, as the Ancient One used to refer to such things - to save his delicate sensibilities). “And yes, that’s essentially what I’ll be doing with the time stone - I can try to teach it? We can see what happens.” Not like he’d ever tried to teach anyone time magic before, but he’d learned it from the bound books found on the Sorcerer Supreme’s shelves, in the Kamar-Taj library. They were kind of like an instructional manual for the infinity stone.
If he was determined enough to learn, he was certain Ciri could be too. Maybe she wouldn’t even need the time stone - again, it’d be trial and error.
“That looks a little more complicated than a Witcher’s signs,” she huffed a soft laugh as she watched the symbols with rapt attention, tilting her head a little. Time magic was one thing that was difficult to learn - Avallac’h had taught her how to control it to an extent, but learning while on the run was a difficult task for anybody, let alone somebody of a species that generally had no real abilities when it came to bending time and space to their will. She could control it enough, but he had always said that she held herself back and she knew somehow, instinctively, she hadn’t unlocked her true powers.
When she lost control, things were destroyed. Her screams could level a city and that much raw power wasn’t something she could risk Vallo experiencing, so she had been training. Alone. Doubly alone, now that Dandelion - Jaskier - had come and gone like a blip in Vallo’s history.
“Thank you, by the way. Vesemir would have liked to see the castle whole again, I think.”
The symbols did look a little complicated, Stephen would agree - but geometric patterns were simply that. Fractals and shapes, a mandala or two. Similar to Asgardian magic too, he supposed - Eldritch magic had a bit more of an extra dimensional aspect to it, where the Asgardian magic was more about advanced tech, science and magic merging as one.
Then Chaos was a whole other beast. One that had the potential to run wild and unchecked and could cause a lot of damage - but that was a story for another day.
“You’re welcome,” he replied, going back to his tea. It was almost finished, but he’d probably splash more into the cup as they poured over these journals Ciri had brought over. “Let me grab some books from the library and compare with what’s in the journals - we can come up with a spell from scratch and then head out to the castle whenever you’re ready to give it a try.”
It’d be the Book of Cagliostro, which was always fun because the warnings came after the incantations. However, he was well-versed by now and knew how those rules went. Besides, what did they say?
YOLO. Or maybe more than once in many circumstances but let’s not split hairs.
Ciri nodded a little at the plan, taking another sip from her tea. “Of course. And while I think you have most magical needs taken care of, please do just- tell me if there’s ever anything I can do to repay you. It might have taken years otherwise, if this works without- compromising anything,” she didn’t even know what Kaer Morhen looked like in its glory days. “I might leave the mural, though? While seeing them restored would be nice, I like the idea of people from Vallo putting their own mark on it, while it’s here. And I’d like to make it into a tribute, of sorts.”
That was a point, though. What could she do to repay him? It was still odd to her in this world that people were so willing to do things without the promise of a return of some kind in general, but repairing a whole castle - even via magic - would still be taxing. She tapped her fingers on the side of the teacup, making a mental note to check that out later and maybe snoop to see what his favourite teas seemed to be when he was out of the room.