The Witcher: Heir Of Fire

The fire in the great hall burned low and steady, casting long shadows across faces still marked with soot and dried blood. Lambert’s forearm was freshly bandaged, the linen already showing a faint red bloom through the wrapping. Eskel sat with a shallow gash along his collarbone that he kept absently touching, as though checking it hadn’t somehow worsened in the last five minutes. Vesemir occupied his usual chair near the hearth, arms crossed, watching Seb with a careful look.

“I’m glad you are awake Seb,” Vesemir said, breaking the quiet at last. “But this awakening of yours.. Tell us plainly what that actually means, going forward. I watched stone turn to fire tonight without so much as a spark to explain it. That’s not a small thing to simply shrug off.”

Seb shifted where he sat, Ciri tucked close against his side, her shoulder pressed firm to his as though she intended never to put distance between them again tonight. “My power’s changed,” he said. “Properly changed, not just gotten stronger. The flame doesn’t just come from me anymore, it can reach into whatever’s around me too. Stone, wood, even the ground itself, apparently, given what you all just watched.” He exhaled slowly. “If I go all out.. properly all out, no holding back at all, it doesn’t just burn things. It can alter them. Permanently. The land itself, I mean. Not just scorch marks that fade come spring.”

Lambert’s eyebrows shot up. “It’s that serious? Holy.. ” He glanced toward the courtyard doors, as though half-expecting to see the stones outside still glowing. “You turned half our yard into a furnace without trying all that hard, and you’re telling me that wasn’t even you cutting loose fully?”

“Wasn’t fully, no,” Seb admitted. “Didn’t need to turn our keep into a hellhole tonight.”

Eskel’s eyes flicked briefly to Ciri, pressed in close against Seb’s side, and he couldn’t quite help himself. “Easy there,” he said, mild and teasing despite the exhaustion written across his face. “He just woke up from a week-long curse-coma. Man’s not going anywhere. You can give him an inch of space.”

“Oh, shut it, Eskel,” Ciri shot back, not moving an inch closer or further.

Geralt, leaning against the mantel with his arms crossed, let the moment pass without comment before turning the conversation somewhere more practical. “Good work burning the corpses, by the way,” he said to Seb. “Otherwise we’d have woken up to a courtyard full of necrophages crawling out of all that blood. There was enough of it spilled tonight to draw every ghoul and drowner within five miles.”

“Didn’t even think about that, honestly,” Seb admitted. “Just seemed like the thing to do, burn it all down to ash before it had the chance to rot properly.. And I don’t think monsters will risk attacking us again after what happened to the vampires.”

“Instinct well spent, either way,” Vesemir said.

“I’ll admit,” Seb went on, shaking his head slightly, “I didn’t expect Bonhart to actually storm the keep. In winter, no less. Bringing a higher vampire along with him, on top of everything else. That’s not the move of a man just chasing coin.”

“The vampire said he was here for the scarred witcher,” Geralt said, glancing around the room with a faint, dry edge. “Which, admittedly, describes most of us sitting in this hall right now.”

Eskel straightened slightly, something uneasy crossing his face. “I think he meant me, actually.” He rubbed a hand over his jaw. “I killed a bruxa a few months back, on contract. Don’t tell me that thing was her lover, or whatever vampires call it.”

“Did you not look into her properly before taking the job?” Lambert asked, incredulous. “Because if I’d known a contract target had a higher vampire pining after her, I promise you I would’ve charged triple, or just quietly let someone else handle it.”

“I can’t exactly read a bruxa’s romantic history off a contract paper, Lambert,” Eskel said, exasperated. “Didn’t have the faintest idea. Just rotten luck, far as I can tell.”

“Glad we had Seb here regardless,” Vesemir said, cutting through the bickering. “This could have gone very differently without him. Though I’ll admit.. I never expected those fire elementals of yours to actually prov e useful. Thought they were more a curiosity than a proper line of defense.”

“Made them with Yen with exactly this kind of night in mind,” Seb said. “Figured someday, somehow, someone might come after this place, since it happened in the past and it fell to armed peasants. Wanted something standing between the gate and all of you that didn’t need sleep, didn’t tire, and didn’t particularly mind dying more than once.”

“Good thinking, though I admit I was against this long ago…” Vesemir said.

“You were great out there,” Ciri said quietly, leaning her head briefly against his shoulder.

“Just great?” Lambert said, sitting forward suddenly, grinning wide. “No, no.. I need to properly commend the delivery, here. ‘Then tell me what exactly is this shadow I see falling over you right now, if not death itself, come to collect what it’s owed.'” He said it with exaggerated, theatrical gravity, clutching a hand to his chest. “Gods below, that was something, Seb.”

Seb’s ears went faintly red. “You remember that word for word…”

“Of course I do,” Lambert said, delighted. “Burned it straight into memory, right alongside the actual fire.”

Even Eskel was laughing now, shaking his head. “In your defense, it did land. Properly menacing. Very witcher of you.”

“It just came out natural,” Seb muttered, mortified.

“Of course it did,” Lambert said, entirely too pleased with himself. He reached over and set a hand flat atop Leo Bonhart’s severed head, which someone, Lambert, almost certainly had deposited unceremoniously in the center of the table like some grim centerpiece. “Isn’t that right, Bonhart? That was a fire line. Our boy here’s turning into a mini Geralt, I swear it.”

“Get that off the table,” Vesemir said, without much real heat behind it.

“In a minute, I mean Seb wanted to keep it for some reason..” Lambert said, patting the severed head once more for good measure before finally turning to Ciri instead who said to him “How’s the wound situation over there, Junior? Funny thing, rest of us walked away nearly unscathed tonight. You’re the only one who actually got torn up.”

“I was holding off three lesser vampires at once,” Lambert protested, mock-wounded. “With no powers of time and space to bail me out, might I remind you.”

“Sure, sure,” Ciri said, grinning now despite herself.

The whole table dissolved briefly into laughter, even Seb joining in, something in his chest finally loosening after the tension of the entire night.

“Good thing we got rid of him, at least,” Seb said eventually, sobering. “Though I never got the chance to properly ask who actually hired him. Could’ve been Emhyr. Could’ve been someone else entirely.” He frowned, turning the thought over. “He was a strange one, honestly coin clearly wasn’t his real motivation, not the way he talked. And after what Yen told us, about someone else wanting Ciri for her power specifically rather than her bloodline, I can’t help thinking there’s more behind this than just Nilfgaard’s reach.”

“Would you stop worrying about me for one single second,” Ciri said, nudging him lightly.

“We still have Eredin and the Hunt to deal with too,” Seb added. “Should’ve found a way to finish them off properly while we had the chance.”

“Next time, we won’t let them escape,” Ciri said, firmer now.

“We escaped Ciri not them, and it was because of that unicorn,” Geralt pointed out. “Wasn’t exactly our doing.”

Vesemir’s brow furrowed. “Did that creature ever contact you again, Ciri? Since that day?”

“No,” Ciri said, shaking her head. “Not once, since it got us out. It only told me it was an enemy of the Aen Elle, and that I should never let myself fall into their hands again.”

“They need her to unlock gates, gates that are sealed since the Conjunction of the Spheres,” Seb said. “To migrate their whole people into a new world, since the White Frost is real, and it’s slowly killing their own.”

“It’s all true,” Ciri confirmed quietly. “Avallac’h showed me as much himself. That, at least, was the one honest thing he ever told me the entire time.”

“You mentioned you visited a world destroyed by that frost,” Geralt said, studying Seb carefully. “How did you survive something like that?”

“I did survive it,” Seb said. “Only because of what I am, somehow. My fire countered it, for reasons I still don’t fully understand. I used to think Ciri’s power was the only thing capable of standing against something like the White Frost. Now I think mine does too, in its own way. If I could ever scale that up properly, do it on a large enough scale and I think I could actually beat it. Permanently.”

“Now hold your horses,” Vesemir cut in sharply, sitting forward. “An apocalyptic force out of old elven prophecy is not something you go toying with on theories and what-ifs, boy. You’re staying put this winter, and that’s final.”

Seb held up both hands, managing a tired smile. “I’m not saying I’m riding off to fight the end of the world tomorrow, Uncle Vesemir. We’ve still got Triss to find, and Philippa to deal with, and the whole mess with Emhyr hanging over us besides.”

“Do we have to deal with all of that,” Ciri said, only half-joking, dropping her head back against the chair.

“I’ve been thinking about it a lot,” Seb said, turning to look at her properly now. “And I think you and I should go to Nilfgaard ourselves. Settle things properly, once and for all. After winter’s passed, obviously, not before.”

Geralt’s eyes narrowed slightly. “You trust the Emperor?”

“No,” Seb said, without hesitation. “Not even slightly. But he trusted my father once, a great deal, and I don’t believe he’d risk harming his own daughter outright, not with everything currently at stake for him. Besides..” Seb smiled, “…I’ve already got a plan for how we approach this.”

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If you Like this story! Check out my other stories! Shadow Monarch: In One Piece / Shadow Monarch in DC