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"i will only break your pretty things / i will only wring you dry of everything / but if you're fine with that / you can be mine like that"
- tongues & teeth, the crane wives
Izali never cared for the cold.
It's to do with a lifetime spent in the North, perhaps. You acclimate; you work with the situation granted to you, move forward, keep moving. There's little time to care for matters outside your control. You focus instead on what is.
Oxenfurt is cold at this hour. Dreary, as they often are here, but that's fine.
Rhiann's already gone where the witcher always does, and that's fine.
Ninarina is in her room in the inn, and that's fine.
Dainlath is in his room in the inn, and that's fine.
And Izali—
A single once-over is all she needs to know that she's alone, that no one will pass, and that everything is as still as they could be. It's not a reassurance, but when has anything been in her lifetime?
A hand lifts to clutch at her shoulder.
Izali takes a quiet breath as she leans against the nearest wall.
Izali exhales.
"Fuck."
All she's ever wanted was—
It's a simple, near trivial, thing, in truth: a life, hers and hers alone. Nothing more and nothing less, unguided by the hand of fate, absolutely her own to have. And she's long since accepted that there is a steep cost to pay in taking it; cheating magic greater than the sum of your parts often is, and that's fine.
Izali knows better than to believe there is never any fine print when you sign a contract.
Izali knows better than to put her fate in the hands of men who wield enough power to bend a world.
Izali knows better than to strike bargains with fairytales that double as cautionary stories.
And yet—
Something sings beneath her skin, and she doesn't know if it's the rise of a new phantom pain or an after-effect of the lucifuge.
How far must a person go to change the course of their story?
A bookend of a hundred and then some years, turned as easily as breathing.
If she succeeds, then—
What comes next?
A purpose in a Nilfgaardian court, protecting a noblewoman until she's finally decided her work is done?
An open road ahead of her, and the freedom to go wherever the winds lead, unshackled by the reality that whatever comes would never last?
A vineyard in Touissant with a boy who claims to love her, who always finds his way back against the whims of fate, as nice as he tells of it?
Izali has spent a lifetime focused on reaching the end of one chapter that she doesn't know what to do with the rest of the book.
It's still not a luxury she can afford to think of right now. Not when the lucifuge still marrs her skin and a curse still looms and a debtor still stands and the devil you know waits with the smile of a friend. ( She does wonder who wields the knife between them. )
What comes next?
Gaunter—Master Mirror, The Man of Glass—did tell her she was a tenacious woman. Izali prefers to think of it as unrelenting. What comes when you spend your existence demanding something of the world when they've given you nothing but a stacked deck of cards and a game of rigged dice. Working with the hand she's dealt is all she's ever known.
And now, what she knows is that The Man of Glass wants a debt paid, and he is willing to handwave a curse if its seen through.
( Izali doesn't like a deal where she doesn't call the stakes. Call it a need to be in control or distrust of anyone else who wields it. She hadn't agreed to any handwaving until she finds the full story and she'll clutch on to that semblance of control for as long as she can. )
He is willing to handwave the curse on Nina's father if she joins the matter.
He wants the mage beyond the borders of Nilfgaard, at least by one step.
Izali needs to think.
But in every avenue she explores, she returns to find her freedom in a cliff's edge and the only way forward is to jump.
Dain said this had been the first time he'd seen her so determined in a long while.
What would he say if she'd admitted the cost?
Izali bites down the part of her that wants to find him and apologize for leaving. For having to choose between her and a family. For everything and anything and the fact he was right, in the end, and they're both idiots that can't seem to do anything but stay.
She can save it for when this is all over.
If she can learn the clause, if she can find the mage, if she can do something to get the full story, then—
Izali takes another breath before she pushes herself off the wall.
Matters of the heart can wait until her work is done. She'll allow herself that luxury when her life is no longer a story she can barely pen.