~ I Left You in the Garden of Time ~
He reached for her, a towering nightmare of a man with black wings on his helm, and the goddess Melitele herself gave her a sign that she should trust him.
Ciri reached out for him, and his gauntleted hand closed over hers in a bruising grip as he swung her up onto the saddle in front of him. Their escape was an uncomfortable ride, his arm a vise around her waist, but they passed through the throng of Nilfgaardian soldiers without being challenged.
She wakes gasping for breath, with tears streaming down her cheeks.
It's been years since the fall of Cintra. So much has happened since then. Yet still the nightmares of her erstwhile soulmate are fresh in her mind. If there's one thing she wishes the waters of Brokilon would have erased from her mind, it would be her memories of him.
"Falka?" a sleep-slurred voice whispers beside her in the dark. "Are you crying?"
"Nightmare," Ciri whispers back, and runs her hand along the arm that circles her waist until her fingers twine with Mistle's where they rest lightly against Ciri's stomach.
Leaves and petals rustle softly as Mistle nuzzles the back of Ciri's neck comfortingly.
Their crown is one of the most unusual Ciri has ever seen, adorned with clusters of berries between the sharp leaves and in the centers of the bright red flowers.
In another world, long after the crown has crumbled and fallen from her brow, the leaves and petals and berries that she treasured so much raining down upon the corpse of her beloved as Ciri screamed... in another world, where the two plants that made up their crown have a special significance in relation to the winter holidays, she finally learns their names: poinsettia and mistletoe.
After the way she'd lost her previous soulmate, Ciri had never hoped, wished, or expected to find a third. For that matter, she hadn't expected to return to this world at all after beginning her journey across dimensions, and had discovered that soulmates did not exist in most other realities at all, which had come as both a shock and a relief.
And so she is taken entirely by surprise when, during her harried flight from the Wild Hunt, she catches sight of a striking young woman around her own age, and feels a familiar weight settle upon her brow. The crown itself looks stunning set against her soulmate's red hair - blue and purple morning glories interspersed with stark white cereus flowers.
"I can't stay," Ciri says, clinging to Cerys's hand until the last possible moment.
"I can't go with you," her soulmate replies as their fingers slide over each other's palms, fingertips curling and catching against each other, both of them wanting to hold on as long as they can.
Cerys is a queen now. She has a responsibility to her people, which her soulmate understands in a way that most people do not.
I'll come back to you, I promise. The words are on the tip of Ciri's tongue, but she promised that once before and it did not turn out the way she'd hoped.
She swallows them down and says instead, "I don't know if I shall ever return."
I'll wait for you, Cerys swears silently, but aloud she says only, "Stay safe."
~end~