A Scholar's travels with a Witcher

by Spike368

Sent out to gather the knowledge of the real world. A young scholar from the University of Oxenfurt finds a wounded Witcher on the steps to the inn where he was staying. So he starts gathering the material for his journals. Rated T for language I will be publishing this story on Royal Road /profile/349358

118. Chapter 118

(A/N the first: Warning. Scenes of a sexual nature. It's NOT rape so don't worry about that, but it does get into some angry violent sex. I don't think it's particularly explicit but I understand that people's opinions on that may vary. Also, horse care is not something I know about so if I've got that wrong, I'm very sorry.)

(A/N the second: Freddie does some things and behaves in a way that way that horrifies himself and may upset others. All that I can say is that he was being messed with by a Goddess. There will be fallout and explanations down the road.)

(A/N the third: We go quite far down the philosophy hole here. Be warned, but it is worth saying that some of the things and sentiments expressed in this chapter do not align with my own thoughts and feelings. Just as a disclaimer)

(A/N the fourth. This is somewhat longer A/N which addresses the inspiration and identity of Kerrass' Goddess. Several people have asked me whether or not the woman described is Scáthach, originally from the Ulster cycle of Celtic Myth and also (it turns out) from the Type-Moon collection of assorted media. So let's take this on.

There is a short answer and a long answer for this. The Long answer may involve spoilers for my story and maybe even for the Ulster Cycle itself and the Type-Moon stuff including Fate/Grand order games although I haven't played or read any of them, so if you don't want that answer then just read the short answer and move on to the body of the story later.

So, Short answer first. No it's not Scáthach. It really is who Kerrass said it is. She is The Morrigan in one of her many forms. Although, I can see why you might have been confused.

*SPOILERS*

The long answer now. Buckle up.

I have, at best, a layman's knowledge of Celtic myth. I know who Nuadha Silverhand is. I know who the Tuatha de Danan are. I know about Lugh, Danu, Dannan, Medb, Dagda (My personal favourite.). I know about the Fomori, the Fianna and I know who Cú Chulainn was.

But I had never heard of Scáthach until someone mentioned it. Upon looking up the name after the third person had contacted me about whether or not the Goddess involved was Scáthach I discovered that she was one of the people that trained Cú Chulainn in his abilities to fight. She did this along with Domnall who sent Cú Chulainn to her in the first place.

Domnall was training Cú Chulainn in Scotland (Or France depending on your preference of translation of the word Alpae) but sent our hero to Dún Scáith which is generally translated as the Fortress of Shadows. Our hero got into various shenanigans, several of them sexual in nature along with his friends and against the sister and rival of Scáthach named Aife. But I've gotten off topic now.

Scáthach gave our hero her spear the Gae Bulg (Gáe Bulga, Gáe Bolg, Gáe Bolga) and sent him on his way. That's cutting a long story short but that's the gist of it. There are several variations of this story though, same as there often are with Irish mythology. So if you know more, different or otherwise then that is not to say that you are wrong and I am right or vice versa. It is well within the scope of the mythology that we are both right, or both wrong AT THE SAME TIME.

For example, depending on which version you read, Scáthach lived on the Island of Shadows rather than in the Fortress of Shadows. All of which comes down to the translation used as well as which version of events you believe.

However, the figure Scáthach was definitely a mortal woman and I wanted a Goddess. I know that Type-Moon says that she has become God-like but it was only in their versions of the story (from the wiki. I have time for research, but not that much time, or money) that this was case. The rest seemed to specify that she was a mortal woman that was involved, but not solely responsible for the training of Cú Chulainn.

And I wanted there to be an actual Goddess. I wanted it to be someone that both Kerrass could have historically interacted with and Freddie could meet, ask questions of and make his mistakes with. Taking it further than that, I found what I was looking for in the figure of one of the aspects of the Morrigan.

I keep stressing that it's only one of the aspects of The Morrigan because this is true. The Morrigan has many forms and many names. She is one of those semi-traditional Goddesses that have three aspects although the Maiden, Mother and Crone does not fall into her version of tripple Goddesses.

According to the legends, The Morrigan, is often a battle Goddess, but also concerned with Leadership (in one of her guises. Specifically Macha) and the protection of the land. I have expanded the term "Battle" to mean other things, closer to what some modern practitioners see the Morrigan as. But that would be spoiling the story outright so I'm leaving that there. She does often take the form of a Crow and also, apparently, a black cat.

But here is why they can get confused. Both Scáthach and the Morrigan are known to be beautiful (except when the Morrigan chooses to appear as a crone). Both wield spears, both wear black and both are terrible in their anger and supportive of those close to them. They also both have sisters who they have love/hate relationships with. The Morrigan is a bit more fickle in her affections to go with the fact that she is a Goddess of battle and conflict. The Morrigan is regularly known to play both sides off against the middle in order to keep the battle going, as well as having a fondness for the underdog.

But I'm getting distracted again.

I did even find an argument that said that The Morrigan IS actually Scáthach in another form as she tutors Cú Chulainn before she then throws loads of obstacles in his way because... she felt like it. But like so much of Irish and Celtic mythology in general. So much of it is open to interpretation, as well as the translation that you choose to follow, that it throws everything out of the window. The perils of having an aural tradition I suppose.

So it's entirely possible that you will read this chapter and say "That's Scáthach that is. Spike is bullshitting me." or you might change your mind. One of the joys of mythology (and the world of the Witcher for that matter) is that so much of the history and myth is open to interpretation. This figure that helped Kerrass to find the strength needed to fight through his madness claims to be one of the aspects of the Goddess Morrigan. But who is to say that she is not Scathach in disguise and using a false name?

Not me.

Have at it.

**END SPOILERS**

Here ends the Author's note. As always, thanks for taking the time to read.)

I've never liked books or stories that start with the phrase "It was a dark and stormy night." I always think that it is unneeded addition of drama. But sometimes, when you are recording history and real events, you run up against the fact that it really is a dark and stormy night.

The rain fell heavily but was showing absolutely no signs of turning the ground into mud. Some might argue that the heat from the fires had so thoroughly dried out the ground around us that the rain had some distance to go before it would turn that same ground into mud.

I wouldn't know the answer to that I admit. I don't know what the nominal falling water to ground saturation level is. All I knew was that the rain fell, but I felt relatively warm and comfortable. Certainly not soaked to the skin. Nor did the water get into my eyes or blow into my ears. There was little to no wind that I could feel or otherwise be certain of. All there was was that rolling thunder, the odd flash of lightening and the constant rain fall.

It was the kind of rainfall that farmers pray for at certain times of the year. Enough rain to nurture crops but not to drown those same crops out or flood the farmer out.

Kerrass had stood and I stood with him. It seemed only fitting to stand and greet a Goddess after all and then we continued to wait.

"What was the cat about?" I wondered.

"Hmmm?" Kerrass shook himself from whatever he was thinking about.

"The cat." I said. "I've never seen an animal behave like that around you. Let alone a Cat. I thought Cats hated you on sight."

"They do." Kerrass agreed. "Except when they are the servants of the Goddess. You remember the one up north with the Herb-woman?'

I had forgotten.

"Yes." I said. "Well also this one. The Goddess sees through the eyes of some cats. Most often black ones. But also Crows and Crows are her messengers. Another of her followers claimed that the Goddess once appeared to him in the form of a Crow so..." Kerrass shrugged.

I considered this for a moment. "So if the Goddess can see through the eyes of a cat and the eyes of a Crow, then she pretty much knows everything right."

Kerrass chuckled. "That's if she cares to look Freddie. Remember that she is not a power like the Eternal Fire, Kreve or Melitele. She often manifests as a person. Or is looking at something or someone else. Or she is helping another. Or she might not care to look. All of these things are possible. Probable even. But she is always heralded by the thunder, the storm and finally, a small black cat. You can ask her why if you like although if you get an answer, I will be astonished."

He tilted his head to one side and listened. "Here she comes. Now remember what I said Freddie. She will be predisposed to like you anyway but remember. Do not resist. If you make this, any of this, into a struggle then she will want to beat you. On the one hand, she wants you to fight her. But on the other hand, some contests are best left unfought and un won and..." Suddenly his voice vanished. He realised instantly as he tried various things to make the words come out but nothing worked. He coughed, spat and tried again but still no words came out.

Then he sighed and clapped me on the shoulder before shrugging. He gestured into the night outside the fire.

There were the sounds of hoof-beats with the odd splashing of puddles. It sounded like a big horse and the ground seemed to shake. When the lighening flashed I saw a horsewoman riding towards us but then the darkness descended again. The hoofbeats slowed and she came into the firelight.

The horse was indeed huge. Not a black horse, or a grey, it more seemed like some kind of chestnut horse that had white socks and a white forehead. The woman riding on the back seemed to be more of a black, formless, hooded and cloaked shape on the back. The cloak was huge and came well down the sides of the horse, hanging limp with the water cascading off it. The rider slid off the side and staked the horse down.

She was hooded although I could see bare flesh in her arms.

The horse had bulky saddlebags and the saddle was a simple one with high stirrups of leather. As I say, there wasn't anything particularly unusual in the form of the horse or in the form of the saddle or the bags. If I hadn't seem all the ritual and Kerrass' behaviour, I would have assumed that she was just another traveller, seeking a place by the fire.

After the horse had been staked out, the saddle and the bags were taken off and I found some energy.

"Can I offer some help?" I wondered, walking closer.

"It's alright." Came a woman's voice. "It's important to do these things yourself after all."

Again, I was struck by just how normal it all seemed.

The saddle was removed and the saddlebags with it and she carried them both easily over to where we had camped and she ensured that they were both under the cover. A nose bag was produced and a blanket which were tied around the horses face and draped over the back of the steed when it was done.

Then she picked up her spear, slung her shield over her back and nimbly jumped over the fire before tugging the hood from the back of her head and sighed happily.

"Well. Here we are." She said with a smile and right there and right then I thought that there had been a mistake.

This woman looked perfectly normal. Startlingly attractive to be sure, but there was nothing Godly about her. She was not beautiful in the way that Ariadne is beautiful. Nor in the way that any of the Sorceresses of the continent would be described as beautiful. If you went by classical terms then she would be described as being handsome rather than beautiful. Her chin was too strong for classic beauty, as described by the poets and the painters, and it was clear that she had done none of the normal kinds of beauty routines that modern society seems to expect from it's women.

By which I mean that she wore no makeup that I could see and her eyebrows were large and bushy. But despite the fact that she was not classicly beautiful, she was ridiculously attractive. There was something about her that just drew my gaze. I automatically found myself looking away so that I wasn't looking at the way the water had caused her cloak and under dress to lie against her frame.

She was tall, the same way that Kerrass had described her. Athletically built and muscled. She reminded me of a Shield-maiden of Skellige in her body and the way that she held herself. There was little doubt in my mind that this woman would be more than a match for most warriors on the continent. She moved with an easy grace that was, at the same time, absolutely deadly and heavily sexy.

She wore the same clothing that Kerrass had described. Simple black leather boots, woolen trousers although a bit tighter than I had imagined from Kerrass' description. She was wearing a loose upper layer that might once have been a dress or some kind of shift that hung from the shoulders only that had been cut off at just below the waist. This was then held down and together by a thick, leather belt of similar dark colours and her arms were bare.

There was a pouch and long fighting knife at her belt. Despite the looseness of her clothing, it was clear that there was no corset underneath. She had taken some cloth and strapped down her breasts in the way that some villagers and farmers wives do when they need to keep their breasts out of the way while working, but can't afford proper undergarments. Her clothes looked... old. Or maybe old was not the right word.

Utilitarean might be better. Simple as well, crude even. They were, as Kerrass had said, the kinds of clothes that you could imagine our ancestors wearing when they first landed in the Pontar delta. Or those earlier humans had worn before they had died out. The humans who we still find the remains of, with their obelisks and Necropolices. They were the kinds of clothes where you can imagine that someone must have told her. "You need to wear clothes." And she said "Why?" They explained and she went out and found the most basic, quickly assembled and simple clothes that she could find.

Her shield was unremarkable save that it was an odd shape. I have seen rectangle shapes and round shapes but this was a kind of oval shape that seemed... Strange to me. It had a leather cover that was tied on crudely with leather thonging. Like the rest of her clothing the shield appeared crude and simple...

That's it. That's a better description. It was like I was looking at a proto-shield. It was like how I would imagine the conversation went, when men were still fighting with clubs and spears that had been used to hunt, and someone had thought, "Hang on. If I have a large piece of wood to put in the way of the other guy who was trying to kill me, then that would make life easier." Then you can imagine some woodworker going. "Yeah, that sounds like an excellent idea. I will make you one." It was easy for me to imagine that the first shield would have looked like this.

"Now Kerrass. That was very naughty of you." She was chiding him while I made my imspection. She set the shield aside and spun the spear round and plunged it into a puddle that hadn't been there a moment before. The water in the puddle hissed and steam rose from it. "Giving the game away like that. That was most unfair of you."

Kerrass tried to say something before realising that he still couldn't speak. So he shrugged and grinned at the woman. Once again, that image of the man waiting for his crush to arrive in the tavern or to the party was clear in my head.

She stood with her hands on her hips and wearing an expression of exasperated scolding before laughing and throwing her hands extravagently in the air. "Oh, but I can't stay angry with you. Not for long anway. Come here and give us a kiss."

She grabbed him by the tunic and hauled him to his feet for a hungry kiss. I have seen, and have been lucky enough to take part in many kisses now over the years and this was the most... I want to say "Combative" kiss that I've ever seen. They came together bruisingly, teeth clashed, tongues wrestled, they pulled at each other's hair and spun each other round as both sought for dominance.

I turned away as the display rather made me feel uncomfortable and took a few steps away to leave them to it. The only real thing to look at was the woman's spear.

And I've never seen, or heard of, a more unpleasant and evil looking weapon in my time on the road or reading books at the university. Nor could this have been a spear that I imagined from any of the many myths and legends that I have read about, or been told about as a child.

The closest thing that I could think of was... The Scoia'tael occasionally use these kinds of arrows that are designed to mess people up. The head of the arrow comes in three points that splinter into three parts as it enters the body. They're well known to be utterly useless against anything that is even remotely armoured so, at best, it's a terror weapon. You can only use it on unarmoured common folk, but the horror that such an arrow would cause to a person's body is...

For some reason, this spear was worse.

It was not a long spear, a bit longer than a javelin but certainly nothing like a pike or lance. It was... Fuck... It was a lot like my spear actually. A little longer than six foot long but where my spear is more of a two foot blade on the end of a pole, the head of this spear was something of a horror.

It was pointed like a spear but after that it was barbed in the same way that an arrow would be. Huge, grotesque hooks were up the side of the spear and on all axis of the spear, so that even if you used it as a bladed weapon, like I use mine, then you could swing the blade into the body of your opponent before pulling it backwards, raking your opponent with the hooks, blades and barbs.

But if you actually plunged it into the body of a man. Even just the head of the spear. Then I could see no way that that man would survive. No way at all. The spear would need to be cut out of the body of it's victim.

As I looked at it, it was still hissing in the rain water with the heat that seemed to be embedded in the metal of the spear.

"What do you think of my spear?" The woman said. She had come up behind me. Far too close for comfort and she said it right into my ear. There was an tone to her voice that I had never heard before or if I had, it was because a woman had been paid to use that tone. Saffron had used that tone as well when she whispered lewd suggestions in my ear. It was the kind of voice that ripped straight past my brain and sent my heart racing.

I staggered backwards and to one side and then stopped as I saw her.

Kerrass looked shaken, the same way that I imagine that I looked after I had kissed Ariadne that first time. He was breathless, sucking down air, eyes hooded and he was fighting for control. As I watched, he wiped a small trickle of blood from the corner of his mouth.

I looked from Kerrass back to the woman that was stood in front of me grinning and I realised that I was being tested in some way.

I carefully looked back down at the spear. "I think." I began carefully. "That I have never seen a nastier or more evil looking weapon in all of my life."

She laughed. I saw what Kerrass meant about how her laugh reminded me of unpleasant things. It was not a nasty laugh, nor was it filled with Evil. It was a laugh of genuine amusement. It was also the kind of laugh that sits well on the face. When you see someone laughing and then you find yourself thinking that it has made the person look more attractive. It also reminded me of a smith's hammer striking metal. I have no idea why.

"They call it a Gae Bolg." She told me. "The killing spear or a Belly Spear. It is not the original weapon though. That weapon was, itself, modeled after the Sun spear of Legend and in turn the original was given to a legendary hero from my home-land by a friend of mine." She had the attitude of someone who was telling a story.

"Later," she went on, "landless noblemen would form bands of righteous warriors who would roam the land wielding spears copied from the idea of the original. They referred to those spears as Gae Bolg, named after the original but always lesser than that spear of legend. One of those bands of warriors was dedicated to my name and they gave me their best attempt at copying the original as a gift."

She plucked the spear from the ground and sent it spinning in the air. The end glistening and the rain spattered and steamed when it struck the metal.

"Some would later claim that they had given me the original spear but I doubt it. They say that once cast, the Gae Bolg is deadly as it does more damage when removed from a man's body than it does going in. It is also said that there is no death more painful on that world or any other world than a death by the hands of a Belly Spear."

She looked at me then and I felt myself being measured.

Then she moved, thrusting the spear towards my belly. The move was lightening fast and I responded with instinctive speed. I stepped to the side so that the spear went wide and I grabbed the haft of the wood below the many barbs of wicked looking metal and I tugged, just as Letho had taught me. With the same movement, I pulled my dagger out of it's sheath across my belly and had it at her neck.

I realised that I was taller than her.

Then I realised just how close the two of us were and that I was looking down at her and that her lips were glistening. There was suddenly a desire in me to kiss those lips.

I pulled away, just as quickly.

The woman grinned and the firelight flickered in her eyes before she turned back to Kerrass who had sat down during the moment. "I like him." She said with another laugh that reminded me of the sound that a house makes when it is on fire. "Introduce me Kerrass."

Kerrass rose to his feet and cleared his throat, surreptitiously checking that he could speak again.

"Lord Frederick von Coulthard it is my distinct honour to present to you Macha, Goddess of Battle, patron of magic and soldiers. The Horsewoman of war. Badb, the battle-Crow. Nemain, Queen of death and protector of the land. The Morrigan."

She nodded. "Thank you Kerrass."

"Before you start in on playing with your new toy Goddess." Kerrass went on. I felt an irrational surge of anger for just a moment. "But I have a gift for you."

She clapped her hands together in childish excitement. "Ooh I do so like presents. What is it?"

"I have woven you a cloak of Crows." He presented the thing that he had been making and she took it was an expression something like a look of awe.

"Oh it's beautiful Kerrass thank you so much." And I blinked as suddenly, rather than a loose, ragged bundle of feathers, it was a beautiful, full cloak that seemed to ripple in the night. Far larger than what Kerrass had worked and far richer in appearance to. Try as you might, it is impossible to make a cloak of feathers look pretty without it all going wrong and looking a bit... well... foolish. But now it looked beautiful and luxurient. Worth every bit of praise that this woman was heaping upon it.

"And what would you like in return?" She asked of him. "You know that I cannot accept a gift like that without giving you something back." She smiled a little wickedly and licked her lips.

"The gift of your presence is enough for me." Kerrass' answering smile was wicked and challenging but it had an odd kind of effect on the woman. Normally, in my experience anway, when a woman is fed so awful a line as that they tend to groan before smiling, laughing and enjoying the implied compliment. This woman did not.

"Kerrass." She snarled. "I am not to be trifled with here. Nor will I be in your debt." Her spear, that hadn't left her hand, was pointing at his throat. I started to wonder if I needed to fetch my own spear.

"Yes," She said to me without taking her eyes off Kerrass. "Fetch your spear. You have admired my weapon and now it is time for me to admire yours.

Kerrass held his hands up in surrender after drawing the scene out a bit further. " I bring you my friend." He said. "He has questions that I would ask that you answer. That is all."

She subsided. "Knowledge for a cloak." She mused. "I have heard of worse trades in my time and made more than a few of those trials myself. Besides, I am inclined to help your friend anyway. He is well known to me and I like him."

She turned, Kerrass forgotten and smiled at me radiently. The warm glow of a burning village.

"Now lets have a look at you." She said walking round me. "Strong, tall, training in the martial forms only really beginning later in life but a veteran of many battlefields for a lot longer than that."

I felt myself frown and opened my mouth to object to being inspected the way a rider would inspect a horse.

"And a spear boy as well." She crowed. "I do like this one Kerrass, Well done."

She stopped in front of me and leant on her spear with her other hand resting on her hip.

"Well young man? Have you come to be one of my Fianna. I have many warriors in many forms but I could always do with another?" Her expression was challenging. As though I was being dared into doing something that I wouldn't like. The words echoed in my skull strangely and I felt a childish rage climbing up my throat. The same rage that you feel when a parent teases you and you know that you cannot strike back.

"Ok." I began. "First of all, What's a Fianna? Second of all. Who the fuck are you to make comments like that? And Lastly. I have fought in only one battle really and that wasn't really that much of one. Fights? Yes. Skirmishes? Almost certainly, but Battlefields?"

I shook my head.

"Freddie?" Kerrass warned.

"Oh shut up Kerrass." The woman snapped angrily and Kerrass fell backwards as though she had hit him. "I think that this conversation is between me and the man you have brought me. Do not speak again until I invite you."

Kerrass glowered. His own anger clear in his face. I was expecting something. Some outburst of violence or... I don't know. Something. But instead, he turned and sat down a little way off.

"Do you have more to say?" Her temper seemed a quick thing. Sudden surges of rage to go with equally sudden surges of humour.

"As a matter of fact I do." I told her. "What kind of Goddess treats her followers, like that?" I gestured at Kerrass. "What kind of Goddess rides a horse to the summoning circle. Who wears a cloak made from the feathers of Crows and... Are you even really a God?"

She laughed in my face.

Flame forgive me but I nearly struck her I was so angry and wound up by this point.

"I knew I liked you." She told me. "From the first moment that you crossed his path, I knew that I would like you. When I put some time and effort into finding out as much as I could about you, I found that I liked you even more."

She stared at me, tilting her head to one side. She suddenly reminded me of the cat that we had seen before. Only she was looking at me the way that a cat looks at a mouse or a morsel of food.

"Now fetch your spear." She said. "I would like to see what we're working with here." She turned and plunged her own spear back into the ground. There was another hiss of hot water turning into steam.

My own weapons were near at hand and I handed them over. I had no idea why I did that. I was angry, frustrated and much to my own astonishment, I was also astonished to find that I was incredibly attracted to the woman in front of me.

She took the spear first and gave it an experimental spin. "Good balance." She said. "Nice and heavy on the blade to help with the cutting when it came up to it, but if I had the choice I would say that that would make the thrust a little ungainly."

"I was told that I would be better off with the cutting edge as some monsters would simply ignore a thrust from a spear."

She laughed at that. "It depends on what kind of spear we are talking about." She tossed the spear back to me as she inspected the dagger that Letho had once given me. "You do prefer your slashing weapons don't you." She commented. "Don't get me wrong, it will stand you in good stead when you take up the axe later but at the same time, a good stab and rip would do just as much damage in the long run."

"The axe," I retorted. "Is back at home. I will never use it. It is far too heavy for me to wield."

"Of course it is." She told me, tossing the dagger back to me. "Because you are afraid of it. Afraid of what it represents. But there will come a time when you no longer have any choice."

"So you can see the future then?" I demanded.

She laughed again. "Only when it comes to death. And I am not so cruel as to tell you when you are going to die. Nor do I generally perform prophesies. Or answer other quesitons on that nature."

"Is my sister dead?"

"Ah." She shook her finger in my face. "Why would I tell you that? That is the fuel for your current struggle. It would be a waste of a perfectly good fight. Both internal and external." She licked her lips hungrily and a look that was as close to being one of lust as you could imagine came over her face.

"Damn you." I snarled. I was astonished at how angry I was and I tried to fight it back to think clearly.

"Many have tried before." She said calmly, sitting down. "But cursing me is like cursing yourself. I suggest you sit down. Later, we will see how well you do with your weapons." She grinned and a shot of desire raced through me again.

When I had become engaged to Ariadne, it was as though I had flipped a switch in my head. I already considered myself a single man, I was committed to Ariadne and as such, I had found that I no longer desired other women. I certainly found women attractive, but it was as though there was an invisible barrier between me and them that I would not be able to overcome. I was self-aware enough to realise that the barrier was self-imposed and I had even suspected that Ariadne and I would still need to work up to physical intimacy when the time came. I had spent too long erecting walls of self-control that they were now, much thicker than I had ever conceived of.

I had even met other women that, if it were not for Ariadne, I would have pursued. I am thinking of the Herb-woman that I met for a start.

But here. There was a desire here that I had not felt in a long time, if ever, because there was an edge to it. I wanted this woman. The closest to it in my history was when I had been with Saffron all those years ago. When I had gotten over my initial fear of the Succubus I had wanted her so badly and then felt the joy of having that feeling reciprocated. But it was a conscious feeling. Something that I knew I could turn off should I wish to.

Here, that desire was becoming harder and harder to resist.

I swallowed and fought it back as best I could.

"But before we get into too much. You had other questions." She told me. She had picked up her spear again as she sat down and almost leant against it, as her hair blew in the breeze. I almost felt myself grin. Hair heavy enough to not be weighed down by the water coming from the sky, but light enough to be blowing in the breeze.

"So who wears a cloak made out of Crow's feathers?" She repeated. "The answer to that is that I do. Why? Because I choose to. In many ways, I am a crow. I follow battlefields in the same way. I live off battlefields in the same way. I've known crows that are more intelligent than some people for that matter.

"Why do I ride a horse to the summoning circle? Because she deserves to be ridden. She is a good horse. I found her on a battlefield, sides raked with a knight's spurs, foaming at the mouth with how thirsty she was. It made me angry so I gutted the fucker that sat on her back, hauled him and all his stupid, pointless armour from her back, and have used her as a mount ever since when I need to travel anywhere. I like her. She has spirit and when I'm not in need of her. She spends her time in a paddock in Northern Temeria where she eats the grass, drinks the water and lets children ride on her back. Some horses need to be ridden. Some horses are born to pull a plough, others are born to sire other horses or to race or to do any number of other things. This horse was meant to be ridden by a fighter into battle.

"So I ride her.

"Now lets see. There were other questions as well. I want to ask the most simple ones first so that we don't get drawn into extended debates. I know we will at some point and I am looking forward to that when we get there. It's been ages since I've had a good fight and you will do well."

I felt myself pale and she laughed at my face.

"There is more than one kind of battle. But you asked what a Fianna was. A Fianna is a band of landless warriors dedicated to the preservation of the land and the people. They are often sworn to the ideals of some God, Goddess or other ideal. Mostly made up of Landless noblemen and women. People who have no obligation to others, no other service or goal in mind which is why they are often Landless noblemen as they are sworn to no lord, have no harvests to bring in ro anything of that nature. It was part of their nature to swear themselves to others. They would often choose me as a Goddess of battle and Death without realising that my blessing is a double edged sword. Because I would bring them battle, and I would bring them death."

Her smile was nasty and her eyes seemed to glow crimson for a moment but I told myself that that might have been a trick of the firelight.

"What other questions did you ask?" She wondered. "Ah yes. You asked what kind of Goddess treats her followers the way I treated Kerrass. Again, the short answer is this kind of Goddess. Am I not beautiful?"

She gestured at herself before laughing and I was forced to admit, even if it was only in my own head, that she was indeed beautiful.

Flame but I wanted this woman.

She was not helping by leering at me, as though she knew exactly what was going on in my mind.

"Kerrass is dear to me." She told me, "as are all of my followers, but I am the Goddess of Battle. I want my followers to be strong and how do they become stronger? They fight. As their Goddess it is my duty to make them stronger and to challenge them."

"Not a believer in improvement through education, learning and collaboration then?" I retorted angrily.

But my anger slid off her and, if anything, seemed to make her even happier.

"Education?" she asked. "How did you learn to fight? Did you learn in the careful confines of the dueling academy with blunted tips on wooden swords. Or did you learn to fight from a man who has killed over and over and over again. Did you learn in all the times that you had to use your weapon in anger, or defend yourself from men that wanted to end your life.

"If I took your spear from you know and handed you a sword. Would you be more inclined to use it or would you still consider it a waste of time as you did back when you were first learning to use it. Would you look at all those teachers that were training you with it and think "They are training me how to win a sport, not how to kill." And when you find a real teacher. Would you concentrate that much the harder because you know that your life depends on it."

I had no answer for her.

"Learning. Did you learn more about the monsters by reading from them in the books, or going out there and finding yourself in their territory so that you must defend yourself from them. Did you learn about how politics works from your time in a library or from when you went to a courtroom where a loose word could cause irreprable damage to your family and your reputation. Did you learn more about war from being in a fight, or reading the romantic views of men who watched from a distance while armies clashed with the flags waving in the air."

Her gaze skewered me to the floor.

"Did you learn more about what your world calls heresy by reading about it in a book, listening to the sermons in the pulpits, or from when you were there, in the mud with the cultists coming for you and that awful sick feeling that you felt when you watched them perform their rites.

"Learning. Battle is learning you fool." She sneered. "Collaberation?

"Collaberation. Nothing drives people towards working together than when their lives are in danger or when they are getting ready for a fight. Ask yourself this, would you and Kerrass have ever truly been friends if you hadn't fought the monsters together. Would he have accepted you if he hadn't seen that you were willing to risk your own life to help rescue a child, or that you were more than willing to help destroy the nekker's nest?"

I had no answer for that and she knew it. That was what I had done and there was no way of knowing how things would have worked out the other way.

"Battle is the great teacher." She told me. "And it brings people together in a way that nothing else ever does. More medical advances have been made after battle than at any other time, as Doctors, surgeons and alchemists frantically try to save lives. More has been learnt about engineering as men try to figure out better and more efficient ways to defend themselves while killing as many of the other side as possible. Chemistry as well. And even more importantly, battle teaches us more about ourselves both as individuals and as a people. How far will we go. What is our limit. It goes on and on and on."

"I have heard that argument." I told her. "And you are right that those improvements have been made. I've even heard more arguments that say that war can reduce excess population and is good for the economy. But war divides nations. War has caused the Elves to hate humans and the humans to hate each other. There have been three separate continental wars in my lifetime and I'm only just into my twenties."

"But that's war. Not battle." She grinned, like the light shining off the headsman's axe.

"Are the two different?" I retorted.

"Of course they are. War is a tool of politics. War is most often a way that politicians, no matter whether they wear a crown, a chain of office or have some kind of warrant of control, control their people. It's an excuse that these people use for increased taxes, why their food has been taken and so that the people can be told who to hate rather than letting them make their own minds up. War is an extension of politics.

"But battle? Oh Freddie. Battle is what happens down here, in the mud, in the minds of the generals trying to out think each other. But only if those same men are not being political. There is more politics in the minds of those generals than I should like."

"But that suggests that battle is only a by-product of war." I retorted

She sighed, subsiding. "If I did not like you so much, I would get angry at that. Furthermore, I know that you are not that stupid. You just pretend to be, in order to make a point and to keep things going. You are being deliberately ignorant and narrow-minded in order to challenge me. But unlike many of the beings that you have spoken to and people that you have questioned, I will not be tricked into thinking the same way."

I snorted with amusement, feeling my own anger subside just as suddenly. "You like me?"

"Of course I like you." She leered at me and shifted her position so that her trouser legs were pulled tight and it became easy to see the shape of her legs. Again, I forced myself to look away.

"Why?" I asked.

She smiled at me. This time the smile reminded me of the comedown after a fight. That joy of knowing that you had survived. I got the feeling that I was being let off the hook in some way.

"Two reasons. One reason goes back to why I think you have been in many battlefields. The other? You saved his life." She gestured back at Kerrass.

"He has saved mine many more times. Many more indeed."

"You are not listening." She chided. "I am going to pose you a riddle. You have been following Kerrass around now for what three years?"

"A little less if we are being precise."

She shrugged. "But how many times have you seen him seriously wounded?"

"Not many. He is sometimes hurt but the use of potions and things helps to prevent and lessen those injuries. Or at least that's what I've thought. I'm the one that keeps getting injured."

"Correct. And that's because mortals like you are not supposed to go through all the things that you go through. But that's a discussion for another time."

"Wait, what?" I wondered. There were things there that I wanted to explore but she overrode me. She didn't even notice that I had tried to interrupt her.

"So now ask yourself this question. On the day that you found Kerrass bleeding to death outside an inn in South Eastern Redania. The beast on the horses back was a what?"

"I have no idea, it was in a sack."

"Not a very big sack was it?"

"No."

"So ask yourself this, if Kerrass has potions and decoctions and things that he can take in advance of a fight to help prevent, or lessen injury. Why was his injury so bad from a relatively small monster. Furthermore, if he had the strength and the coordination to get on his horse, get the monster carcass back to the inn, why didn't he treat his own injuries first in order to prevent himself from bleeding to death."

I turned to look at Kerrass who I found was ignoring the pair of us. Staring into the firelight.

"All Witchers are caught unprepared sometimes." I argued.

"Yes they are. But that doesn't explain why he got on his horse."

"The injury was worse than he first thought."

"Possible, but we both know that proper witcher training would allow you to be aware of just how badly you had been hurt. You saved his life that night. The shock of compassion from a stranger meant that he went through the motions of healing himself in order for him to find out what your game was. Then he tried to drive you away."

"He regretted the deal." I argued. "I was a nuisance back then. He might even argue that I am still a nuisance even now and I would not blame him for thinking that. But I remember who I was and what I was like at the time and I wouldn't want to travel with me."

"Maybe. Or was he looking for a way to die. Was he on the verge of "giving up" as he calls it?" She shrugged. "There is no easy answer to that. No easy answer at all and I doubt that he even knows the answer himself. But to me, his Goddess, he was as close as he has ever been to allowing his despair to overcome him then and it was you that brought him out of that pit without either of you knowing it. So all in all, I was already inclined to help you. I shall have to think of some other way to reward you."

"You could always tell me where my sister is."

She laughed. The edge of mockery that she had put back into her voice cut me sharper than any blade.

"I mean it." I was wounded and pulling back.

"And so do I." She snapped. "I like you, but just because I like you does not mean that I will deprive you of the battle that you need in order to become the man that you need to be. That is the way of things. Do not ask again or I shall grow angry."

"Are you not already angry?" I wondered.

"Ah Freddie." She subsided again, just as quickly as she had grown angry. "That is the other reason that I like you. You never give up."

"I don't know." I joked. She was leaning back on the ground on two elbows. The posture had the unfortunate effect of pushing her chest into the air. "I rather think that I have given up several times."

"Not quite." She said. "Your association with one of mine means that I have been watching you. But I was aware fo you since long before that. You have been fighting all your life. All your life."

"Some would say that I have had it fairly easy. Kerrass, for instance has had a far worse life than I with the trials, the loss of loved ones and the constant battles and persection."

"Easy is relative to the observer." She told me, waving her hand dismissively. "There is no way of knowing how any single person would react in any single instance. If we put you into Kerrass' life, would you have accepted the mutations that much better. Would your physiology have made life and acceptance easier. And vice versa, would Kerrass have coped with the bullying that you have suffered at the hands of your older brothers and father, along with the negligence of your mother, that much the easier. Would he have ignored it and moved on with his life while those self-same things still haunt you to this day."

"My parents were good people..." I protested. "And I will..."

"Even good people hurt their children." She told me, waving her hand dismissively. "Even good people get angry and snap so that they lash out. Even good people leave their children's care to others and even good people fail to understand the children under their care. Which of your siblings are you closest to?"

"Emma, and if you are going to..."

"When did Emma ever raise her voice to her father in order to defend you from his wrath. When did she ever try and divert your father's attention away from you and onto herself. She might have bandaged your hurts afterwards and held you while you wept with the injustices of it all. She might even have believed what she was saying. But when did she ever actually risk anything on your behalf?"

"She was constrained. She was a daughter and in training to be a lady."

"Fuck off." The woman snarled. "When did her training as a lady or her duty as a daughter ever stop your sister from doing exactly what she wanted at any given time?"

My rage was collossal. It was like a pressure behind the eyes, building and building until a white hot explosion came forth. I was up and on my feet in seconds and storming towards her. She was on her feet to meet me and I grabbed her by the throat with one hand and by the shoulder with the other...

I am so sorry. I didn't... I was not in control of my... I was so angry. She made me so...

"Don't talk about my sister that way." I snarled into the woman's face. A woman who did not even blink. She was certainly not startled or afraid. Instead her eyes shone and her lips parted.

"There you are." She said. "There's the Freddie I know."

Then she threw my arms off as though my strength was nothing, grabbed my head and kissed me, hard. Arousal ripped through me. But so did confusion and horror at what was happening. I pushed her back with all the strength I could muster, although in doing so I did not move her. I only moved myself. I staggered and fell backwards. Breathing hard with the emotion of it and... yes... I must admit it... the stymied arousal.

"I'm sorry." I didn't dare look at her. "I've never done anything like that. I didn't mean..."

"Do not be sorry." She told me. Her voice having that ring of command that you can hear if you ever listen to the Empress speak. "Never be sorry for righteous anger and defence of those that you love and care about is always righteous."

I looked up at her then from where I lay on my back. The horror of what I had done receded. I could never have hurt this woman, not that I didn't want to, but because I was incapable. She stood over me, domineering and terrible in her imperiousness of it. If anything, my desire for her grew. She grinned at me knowingly.

"Stand up." She demanded after a long moment.

"What?"

"Stand up. After being knocked down, the first thing you should always do is to stand up."

There was a crack of command to her voice. The same air of command that Kerrass has when he's training me in something. Some movement or technique that I need to learn to master. There is a tone that he uses that is impossible to disobey. She had the same sense about her and I was struck by it.

I climbed to my feet and looked at her.

"Good." She said. "Always stand up. If you are physically incapable of standing due to injury then you wait until you are healed and your doctor or Surgeon tells you that you are capable again. Then you should stand up and fight back to recovery. If you are sick or your injury means that you will never be able to do so physically, then the battle to rise to your feet is in your head. It is the most basic form of the fight. Stand up. If you cannot stand then you cannot fight. Even if that standing up is in your head."

I nodded.

Then she hit me again across the face. "Don't you look at me with your lying face." She snarled, her lip curling in disdain, which made her look even more attractive, but she calmed just as quickly. "You hear the words but you do not understand. That is alright. Some people never understand but you are closer than most. You do it automatically. Your life has been a series of times where you have been knocked off your feet, followed by a moment of self-pity and then a struggle to get back to your feet. And that is why you are so close to being mine."

I took a deep breath to try and calm myself and when I opened my eyes, she was smiling at me approvingly.

"But you said that I am a veteran of many battles. As I say, there are veterans of armies all over the continent that would be insulted if I tried to claim that I had fought in a battle."

She laughed, "And their arrogance shows their lack of understanding. It doesn't matter about the size of the armies, how many men and women show up or how many siege engines are arrayed against each other. That is what War is about and that is the difference. Battle is the struggle, the moment when the armies meet. War is the extension of politics whereas Battle is the extension of War. But only in that form."

"Even so, I have only really been fighting over the last few years."

"Really?" She smiled and the firelight reflected off her teeth in the same way that it does from a blade. "What about all the times at the dinner table when your father was shouting at you about knowing your place. What about all the times when your Elder Brothers would use you as a way to make themselves feel powerful. Whether that was Edmund driving off your friends so that you would grow up lonely and without the social skills to move on in the world. Skills that you had to learn later. Mark giving you harsh penances so that he could prove to his own tutors and your parents that he was a proper churchman in the making. Or Sam, taking the opportunity to beat up his younger brother so that he could feel better about the fact that you were far cleverer than he was.

"It goes further. Your battles for your mother's attention and affection that you lost. That because she was too self-pitying as a result of what happened to her to properly realise that she driving away her children and making them miserable. Your battles for your father's affection, even when you were just trying to avoid angering him. Trying so hard to avoid making him angry when it should have been clear to him, the adult, that you were different to how he was and that he should not punish you for that difference.

"I've talked about the battles with your elder sister. But what about your battles with Francesca?"

"Hey," My mind rebelled and I felt the anger in the hollow of my chest again. "I loved..."

"Of course you loved them. You loved them all, you still love them all, even the ones that are dead or have changed beyond recognition. But that, in and of itself, can be a battle. And with Francesca? You spent all of your time trying not to be jealous. She was so perfect, so clever, charming, wonderful and beautiful that everyone loved her. Family, suitors, friends and social circles. Including you and you were jealous. Do not try to deny it and you knew that it was wrong because your chosen morals told you so. So you fought those feelings down. You fought, telling yourself that you were wrong to feel that way."

The woman stared at me.

"You have fought at every stage. Small battles, large battles. When you realised that you could not be what your father wanted you to be, you fought to find what you wanted to be. When you heard that your father had died, you fought your family again to make sure that the proper killers were brought to justice. Even now, you fight to make sure that what happened to your sister is properly dealt with. You are a fighter Freddie. You have always been a fighter."

"You make that sound like something I should be proud of." I retorted.

"Is it something you should be ashamed of?"

"I had all the priviliges in the world." I responded. "I was backed up by wealth, education, prestige and noble birth. Compared to the average person born in a village..."

"You are being stupid again and I will not stand for it." She snapped. "We have already discussed this. It is not the size of the fight, but the fight itself. Some people find it easy to live in a village and produce crops, get married, raise half a dozen kids and then die. Some people are content with their lot as a noble. They enjoy their lives, collect the taxes, play in silly little political games, marry who they are told to and then move on.

"Those people that fight for something different are actually much rarer than you think and they are always always remarked upon by their fellows. "You want examples? Kerrass had to fight his way clear of madness, I helped a little, but no more than the drugs that he took, I just propped him up a little when he wobbled. Your sister, Emma, fought to be the head of your families merchant endeavours. Luckily, your father did recognise that in time and took steps."

She grinned at me again. "Your betrothed fights every day to assimilate into human culture. There are exmples all around you. You are drawn to each other and you help each other. You are the best examples around to show what mankind is capable of."

I saw a way in. "Ah, but constant battle could also be harmful. Ciri has fought all her life, fought to survive, always running, always fighting and then, when that battle was taken away from her, she floundered and began to lose herself as she looked for someone, or something else to fight."

The woman laughed. "Ah Ciri, I do love that girl. Her struggle is bigger than anyone elses and it is not over yet. But you are wrong. She was still fighting, she just resented the fact that one kind of fight had turned into another kind of fight. The change was shocking to her system and she rebelled against it. You too will have this fight ahead of you."

"What do you mean?"

"You don't think it will be easy to just stop your travels at the end of your journey do you. When everything is said and done, do you really think you will be able to set aside your spear, take your dagger out of your belt and just sit still for a while. Come to that, how will you feel when you have nothing else to write about. When the day comes that you must take up the responsibilities of a feudal lord and husband. Where reading and scholarly pursuits become hobbies that you must set aside in the face of duty. How will you find that particular struggle I wonder?"

"I am not looking forward to it." I admitted. "But I will have Ariadne there to help."

"You see." She crowed in triumph. "Battle brings people together as well."

I laughed and she laughed with me. It felt good.

"It is also a mistake to believe that battle only happens with weapons or fisticuffs. You have just done it with me now. You do it regularly. You know that I am right or that I have, at least, a different point of view, so you automatically take the opposite. You regularly pretend to be stupid in order to draw people into telling you their point of view so that you can stand there and do your best to poke holes in it."

"That's how you test theories." I told her. "You ask questions, even stupid questions and then you can tell what is going on based on the person's response. How can you see whether or not a person's opinion or theory is correct unless you test it rigorously. Alchemists do it all the time. They mix this together with that and see what happens. Then when they've got stuff, they test it over and over and over again. Give the medicine to someone else. Give it to more than one person. Give it to a woman, a halfling, a dwarf and an elf. Fuck, give it to a troll if you can. Give it to someone old. Give it to a baby. It's as though they're always trying to prove themselves wrong. To prove to themselves that they made a mistake."

"And that is a battle too. Battles of ideologies. Battles of philosophies and religions and scientific method. Which is the best way to forge a blade. What is the best medicine or method to treat the plague? It's all a struggle, it's all a competition to see who is better. Who is right."

I stared at her for a long time.

"You were a fighter long before you met a Witcher." She told me. "Your weapons are words and questions, ideas, theories and evidence. You have tested these things in the battlefields of the lecture halls, libraries and seminar rooms. You have even used these skills in your day to day life as you fought your parents, your siblings and the rest. It is still a weakness of this world that they only think of battle as being something that results in blood and death. There will come a time when your skills and your weapons will become the primary driving force for change and then the world will tremble indeed."

She turned her head on one side. "Think of it another way. Who is in charge of things when you are heading off to fight a monster?"

"Kerrass." I told her.

"That's correct and you are right to do so. He is more skilled at that than you would be. But now answer this. Who is in charge when the two of you have to sit down to a dinner, or attend a reception. Now that you are more experienced, who talks to nobles, craftsmen and merchants in order to get the information that you need. Is it you, or is it Kerrass?"

"It's me." I admitted.

"That's because he recognised your skills. In the same way that you would never challenge him to a fight on his battleground, with swords and magic. He would never challenge you to a fight on your battleground, with dances, comments and insults. He would lose and he knows it too. It is in your nature to admit who is better than ourselves. But for those of us who are fighters. We would also work to make ourselves better."

Silence fell between us for a little while.

"I think you're being a little harsh on those people that do not fight." I told her. "Those people that are content with their lives and do as they're told. I have been enormously fortunate in that I have had the freedom to pursue my passions. To marry the woman that I love and to do what I want to do. But not everyone has that privilege."

She waved her hands dismissively. "Those people are not my concern."

"But they are the ones that mean that I can do what I want. I could not without the farmers that work on my fields and trade with my family. Also, what about those people that follow their passions and their drives into less savoury things. What about those people that struggle so hard to rape and murder anyone that they want. What if my struggle is to keep the little person down so that I can be on the top. If I struggle to hold onto as much of the money as I can in order to to keep it out of the hands of those people who, I think, don't deserve it. What about those struggles?"

She laughed. "I said that I like you and I meant it. You are struggling to argue that evil exists. You are trying to say that some desires are bad and some desires are good. That some people struggle for their own ends rather than the struggle for the better. This is true and I acknowledge it. But there is always, always, a reaction to that. The evil and tyrannical ruler is always overthrown eventually. It might take time, years, decades or even generations before the tyranny is destroyed and or corrected.

"There is always a small group of committed people that will stand up and say "This is wrong." If they say that often enough and loudly enough then people will always pay attention. Always. Because they have to. The truth inside those words will reach down inside something feral and primitive and that will start the revolution. It is sometimes a slow process. But it always happens.

"So yes. I like tyrants as well. Because no-one creates struggles quite as often or as surely as tyrants do. There is always an equal and opposite reaction to those extreme personalities and tyrannical rulers and you would be surprised as to just how often, the reaction turns out to be worse than the initial tyranny.

"But the struggle is eternal. Sooner or later a man will stand up and say "no more" and then the struggle begins again, the battle starts anew.

"You might say that some people don't fight, that they are content with their lot. That is true, but a lot of them had to fight to get there. Even if they didn't have to fight particularly hard."

"But in all fights, there must be a loser. What about them?" I was fascinated. I didn't like the philosophy but it was... enchanting.

She smiled at me, almost gently, it was the first time that I found any softness in her. In that moment, she reminded me of the woman on the back of the Skeleton Ship. I don't know why.

"In any fight, there are always losers and there is no shame at all in losing. Life is a battle and at the end of that battle, everyone loses. No-one gets out of the battle alive. No-one. It is no shame to have no strength to fight. Kerrass should not be ashamed if he had not had the strength to summon me, to take the potions, and monitor his own thought processes enough to keep himself on the path as long as he needs to. And on the day that he no longer has the strength to do all of that, then I will be there to catch him.

"It would not have been a shame if, at your father's dinner table on the last day when he told you to give up your studies and marry who you were told to marry and serve the family... You would have had no need to feel shame if you had done as you were told. If you had gone to your room, thrown your books away and packed to go and court the next unsuitable match. There would have been no shame in that as your Father would have already beaten you and taken away your strength. But he had not yet, not yet and you still had that small amount of fight in you. In the tears that you shed at the thought of giving up. You came so close to giving up but then you found your strength and got back on with it. I was proud of you that day but I would not have been ashamed if you had given up.

"It is no shame to run out of strength and let yourself die. Never claim differently and anyone that does claim differently has never experienced the awful pressures that are involved in either your fight or Kerrass' fight."

"So what does deserve shame, in your mind?" It was the obvious question and I rather thought that I already knew the answer. She smiled at me, that challenge was back in her eyes now. That goading sense of her as though she was pushing me into something.

"You see? You know the answer to that. Of course you do, but you ask it anyway. It's just one of those tools, one of your weapons in the arsenal of a scholar. And to beat you here, all I have to do is to not answer it. All I have to do is walk away."

"But you won't." I told her and I saw that I was right. "You will answer. Everyone always answers because it makes them feel better than the questioner. They see that the answer is obvious because to them it is obvious and in so doing, they prove that they are better than the person asking the question."

"But you know that. So you also know that you are better than your subject." She smiled and appraised me again. "Oh, if only I had time, I would debate with you on subjects far reaching, obscure and miniscule."

I smiled. "But I notice that you haven't ansered my question."

"Which is the other way to not answer the question. Divert the questioner."

"By complimenting them. I know this. Answer the question."

She smiled and licked her lips and a hooded look came into her eyes. "Shame comes, shame is deserved when there is a fight, you know that you have the tools to fight it, you know that you have the ability to fight it, you might have the duty to fight it and that the fight is worth fighting. But you choose not to. That is shame. These are the people that deserve no pity when their destruction eventually comes. They are the weak, the worms and the men who should be spat upon on the streets. Even if the fight will be lost, even if you know that you cannot win. If you see that fight, and know that you should fight it. But don't?"

She hawked and spat.

"Some people have reasons to stay behind." I said after a while. "Family and so on."

"You are thinking in terms of battle as only being done with swords again." She chided me. "But alright, I will engage with that. In that instance, the man should stay behind. Because in that instnace, the presence of his family that he has to protect robs him of his ability to fight. Then it becomes a question of, does he have to fight to protect his family, flee to protect his family, entrench to protect his family. All are struggles, all are fights. The weak man would just run away and abandon his family to the... whatever. You have mistaken not fighting for choosing your battle. And..."

She tilted her head to one side and considered, the fire highlighing the line of her neck.

"Sometimes, choosing not to fight is the hardest battle of all. Battlers are my children. All of them. It's just that in this world, a lot of them are warriors. Your World has not moved on enough that the term "fighters" has not progressed to include all kinds of other things such as people struggling with illness, injury, political fighters and so on and so on."

I nodded and let things subside. I realised something then. This was not a debate. Arguing with this woman was like arguing with a fanatic. I would never be able to get her to see any other point of view. I would never get her to see that certain aspects of her philosophy was flawed. She would never understand that if you view everything as a battle, then you see everyone as an adversary to be confounded and defeated. I saw my thought process race ahead of me like a runaway horse, chasing off into the distance. She would argue that not everyone was an adversary, that all battle's need allies, but I could counter that there are battles within battles within battles. And that some battles are more harmful than others and that some battles can become subverted into something that is evil. That a battle against poverty can sometimes be a battle against poor people. That a battle against sickness can be a battle against sick people.

That some battles can never be won. That a battle against crime is something that can never be won because there are always people that want the thing that we cannot have.

"The most important battle of all." She was grinning at me wickedly. "The battle in your own head when challenged with ideas that you don't like."

My anger crept back. I felt that she was laughing at me. Not entirely unfair because she was really laughing at me. "Fuck you." I told her.

"Maybe later if you earn it." She told me. "So, how does it feel to question a Goddess. To ask higher questions of philosophy of a Goddess?"

"Are you a Goddess?" I accused. Some part in the back of my head noting that the conversation had become antagonistic again. "So far I have seen a woman, a beautiful woman admittedly."

"You think I'm beautiful?" She ran her hand down her body in an aggressively lewd way that I found distasteful.

"Not when you do that I don't." I told her. "Of course you are beautiful and you know it too. You are using it as a weapon to make me feel uncomfortable."

"Not entirely the thing that I was going for." she teased.

"Oh fuck off." I snarled back in disgust. Both at her for using such blatant and offensively clumsy actions but also at my own body for falling for it. I realised that I had been staring at the way that the cloth that she was wearing had highlighted her breasts and I tore my eyes away.

She laughed.

"You're a beautiful woman who claims to know Kerrass. But to him, his Goddess is blonde. So how do I know that you are a Goddess. To me, you just seem like a rather arrogant fanatic with a kind of warped philosophy of life."

She laughed again. It was as irritating a laugh as I'd ever heard. It reminded me of gravel being crunched underfoot by booted feet.

"And yet," She said with a smile. "When I was summoned, I came."

"Oh come on." I replied. "You could be anyone that passed and came down to look at two lunatics that were building a big fire. You could be a Sorceress of some kind."

She laughed, a little more derisively. "A Sorceress? Please. No Sorceress would carry a spear like mine. Sodden taught Sorceresses what happens when magic users fight in battles and now they are too afraid. They claim that they know the right thing to do but you watch, when it actually comes to be time to put their own life on the line for a cause, or a flag or some other case then you look around. Where are they?"

"Persecuted into the ground." I replied.

"Please." She sneered. "Are you telling me that if Phillipa Eilhart wanted to she couldn't rain down fire onto Radovid's head and install a friendly ruler."

"But then all Magic users would be persecuted." I grinned. I felt like I was back in the game somehow. I had found a pressure point in her and made her angry. It was exactly the same feeling that I got when I had seen a weakness in an opponent's guard during a fight.

"But they didn't did they." She retorted. "They fled. When the going got tough, the Magic users ran from it. They were used to their own little niche of power and guarded it jealously. Instead of working with the church, instead of helping the common folk. The Eternal Fire, Radovid and the rest would not have dared to persecute magic users so much if people had been able to show, conclusively that Magic users had been helping society for years. But even you, student of history knows the answer to why that was."

"I do." I responded. "I am interested as to why it makes you so angry."

"The mages guarded their knowledge and became arrogant with it. They hoarded their power and their information and told people that magic made them better than they were. Radovid hated Eilhart because of the way she treated him as a child. So it was a correction. One of those that I talked about. The mages tried to hold onto too much too tightly and it slipped through their fingers. Disgusting. They could have been allies to the North but they drove the rulers, the nobles, the priests and the common folk away from themselves. Everything that they gained at Sodden was lost. But without them, the North was doomed."

There is a certain kind of woman that looks exponentially more beautiful when they are angry. This woman was one of them. But I am a proffessional now and my instinct was that I needed to keep poking this particular sore spot for her.

"All of that is lovely." I told her. "And I can think of several different scholars who would be interested in that point of view. Not least of which would be several Magic users themselves but none of what you are saying is particularly convincing. The fact reminas that, you could just be some slightly magical person of some kind. I chose Sorceress because it seems to be that much more likely. Why should I believe that you are a Goddess?"

"Why shouldn't you?"

"And that's not going to work either." I retorted. "It's the oldest trick in the book to answer a question with a question. If we're fighting, if we're "battling" and this debate is my version of a battle as you suggest. Then that would be the equivalent of you trying to turn my attacks back on me. In asking you a question that you don't want to answer you are responding by asking me a question that I have already answered."

"And yet there is a certain part of that question in the answer." She responded, her anger smouldering in her eyes a little. "Why shouldn't you believe that I am a Goddess?"

"Because Gods are powers, you might be possessed of a God or a Goddess it is true but in the event of anything else, the truth is nearly always much simpler than that. Why should I accept your suggestion that you are not a Sorceress. Or a spirit of some kind, or some other creature with the power of illusion. But why shouldn't I believe that you are a Sorceress? You carry all the characteristics of being one. You are beautiful, opinionated, arrogant and you have undeniable power."

"So, knowing my power, you choose to insult me?"

"If the only way that you can prove your Godhead is by being petty and incinerating me then that doesn't make you a God. They just makes you a bitch."

She laughed at that and her anger dissipated. I felt my own frustration grow to replace that.

"I haven't had this much fun in years." She told me with a slight sneer. "The truth, Freddie dearest, is that the reason you deny any potential divinity in me is due to the fact that I don't behave like any God that you have experience of. The Eternal Fire, Kreve, Melitele, Freya and the rest are all names given by humans to existing powers. Does that make them Gods?

"Whereas, here I am. A living breathing woman as far as you can tell. Admit it. You would have more faith in the possibility of my being a Goddess if you couldn't see me. If you couldn't reach out with your hand and touch me as you are so desperate to do. Because you do want to touch me don't you Freddie."

She licked her lips.

"This is my battleground now." I told her. "And you are not going to distract me by appealing to my libido. You are arguing that Gods here are figures of faith. This is true. But you are not are you. You are not a figure of faith. From everything that Kerrass tells me, there are relatively few people that even acknowledge your existence here, let alone worship you. But you claim to be a Goddess. So, again, why would I believe you?"

"Because I don't need faith to exist." She told me. " I was born, I live in the fires of combat no matter what form of combat that might be. My gifts are strength and the release of pain. No-one following me will ever have power to confound their enemies, they will never wave their hands and perform miracles, my followers will never heal the sick or raise the dead. All that I can give and all that I would give is what the person has already has in their hearts and in their arms and in their minds."

"Some would argue that that makes you a fairly weak Goddess." I realise that I was insulting her but I was doing it deliberately. I wanted her on her back foot. She seemed to show me more when she was angry and that was what I was going for.

But she had an answer.

"Or does that make me stronger. I have no need of followers. I am not so insecure that I feel the need to give of my power to other people in order to prove my existence. I am not so weak in myself that I need to pay people for their worship in peace, miracles or safety. Following my most influential of followers around and showering them with gifts and miracles like some kind of love-sick child chasing after the crush that doesn't even know that I exist. I am the Goddess of battle. You must fight for my approval. It is not there for the asking. And in fighting for my approval you would often find that you already have it. So does that make me a weak Goddess? Or a strong one?"

She leant back.

"There is no answer of course. The only way that we can define who is strong and who is weak would be to have a fight over it. That kind of thing never works among Gods because how do you fight? I have met Kreve several times. I thought he was rather arrogant myself, but that wouldn't be a surprise given that his guise is one of rulership and Lordship as well as a God of War. Who is stronger, me or him? If we fought, he would be winning when the two of us were not actually clashing but every time my forces met him then I would be the stronger. Myths and Legends always talk about Wars of Gods but that makes no sense. How would the God or Goddess of Love actually fight?"

She shuddered theatrically.

It was an interesting question and one that I will take up with Mark the next time I see him. Both that question and the question about what makes a God or Goddess stronger and more powerful than the others.

"I'm going to ask you another question now." She told me. "You suggest that I am just some powerful woman and not actually a Goddess. But what is the difference between a Goddess and a woman? Is it the presence of followers, worship, faith. Or is it a matter of perspective. Is it an uncomfortable truth that we are all Gods. All of us, and the only reason that some of us lead such miserable lives is because those of us that realise the truth, know that in order to keep their power, they must keep the rest of you down and convince you that they are better than you?"

"That is an impossible question to answer."

"It's not supposed to be answerable. It is supposed to spark thinking and consideration."

"But you still... STILL haven't answered my question. Why should I believe that you are a Goddess? What have you done other than make claims to powers and circumstances that could belong to anyone. That could have been made by anyone in order to get what you want. What you have done could be done by anyone with a bit of power so why should we believe that you are more divine than the next guy or gal that comes this way and attempts to tell us that they are a God."

She smiled nastily. "But that's my point Freddie. And I've explained this before. There is nothing that I could do, nothing that anyone can do, to say that I am a Goddess, or God, that would satisfy you. There is nothing on this continent that I could claim as proof of divinity that you could not poke holes in. The same with any God or Goddess that you claim to mention on this world or any other world for that matter.

"Miracles of healing that might turn out to be fraud is the most common of course. Other's report miracles of plenty which could easily be explained by the pressures of others. The eternal flame that could merely be the use of magic that Elves understood more than the primitive humans that first came there. Divine miracles cast by priests that actually turn out to be the channeling of magical forces that a Sorcerer or Sorceress would access and use in a different way. What makes me divine and the other person not?

"Other people. People like Kerrass and numerous others that call me divine. They call me Goddess and so I am one. I answer their prayers and so I become divine. So I become a Goddess. Shall I tell you how I came to be? It is valid for you and to answer the questions that you were supposed to ask me but have since forgotten about."

"Please." I snapped. I was being challenged and parts of my brain were fighting back.

"I came to another land once. There were many of us back then and we came to an island, far far away from here. There were a people there that were being oppressed by strange creatures and so we liberated them. We had no interest in rulership or Lordship and much to our surprise and amusement, we found those primitive people who were not dissimilar from yourself, were worshipping us.

"That is what made me a Goddess. I have power over Battle which is my main remit. I can feel the push and pull of conflict, no matter the form it takes, the size of it or the power of it. From the smallest tavern brawl to the larges battles using forces and sciences beyond your capability. I have seen stars fighting each other as to who could shine the brightest in order to dominate their particular patch of space. I have seem tiny tiny beings struggling to survive in harsh environments that they have just entered and I was there too. I have fought in wars and battles using weapons and powers that you cannot even dream of except in your worst nightmares. Just as I have also fought alongside people that fought off predators with nothing more than a jawbone taken from the last beast that was slain during the struggle to survive.

"I am the Goddess of battle and so long as there is a living creature that will struggle against something, in this plain of existence or the next one, then I will be there and I will be cheering them on to fight harder, fight further and fight longer."

Her little speech floored me a little. It seemed powerful and passionate. She had risen from her seated position at the time and was now stood, her arms outstretched and there was a look on her face of reflected ecstasy.

And I wanted her. I fought it every step of the way. I fought it so hard. I looked away, I tried to imagine Ariadne's face. I tried to imagine lovers past and lovers that I would never know. But this woman was getting through that. I gritted my teeth as I realised that I had closed my eyes and I forced my eyes to open. She was smiling at me and as I looked at her. I could see what she would look like naked.

"I have other remits though," She said as she walked towards me. "I am a Goddess of Magic... I don't know why but many people ascribe those things to me."

She was getting closer to me now and I found myself needing to stand and back away. I was nervous, even terrified. "But you have such disdain for Sorceresses."

"I do." The shadows from the flickering flames shaded her features and those shadows seemed to dance around, deepening the eye sockets and giving her a kind of sinister look. I wanted her badly. "Magic is raw and unstoppable. I know that some magic users here call it a force while others call it a chaos. Both are true. But it is raw and powerful and alive in a way that your petty little Sorceresses cannot hope to comprehend. They are like children standing up before their angry parents and shouting, screaming and being disobedient to attract their parent's attention. Do you know what you do to disobedient children Freddie?" She took another step towards me and again she licked her lips.

"You pay attention to them?" I took another step backwards.

"You hit them Freddie. You teach them that playing with fire is dangerous and you put them in the fear of you. I so look forward to the day when the magic users of your little continent go too far and Magic as a force slaps them back down to punish them for their arrogance." Her smile was predatory. From somewhere it occurred to me to notice that the storm was getting worse. That last flash of lightening was closer and the rain was falling heavier.

"I am also a Goddess of Death." She went on, her smile broadening. "Not that that should surprise you. I am the Goddess of battle after all. And sooner or later, there comes a point where a warrior can fight no more. The sufferer can take no more pain, the sick have no more strength to keep drawing breath. Sooner or later, everyone loses that fight and there is no shame in that loss. People don't tend to pray for my gift of death though. They pray for the strength to die a good death and do you know what I do then Freddie?"

"I cannot imagine." I replied taking another step back. She was terrifying in her sexuality. They tell stories of Sabrina Glevissig and about how she used to wear revealing dresses with all of her feminine curves on display while, at the same time, being utterly intimidating with it. I've met people that knew her and talked to her and they tell me that she used her sexuality in the same way that a Griffin would use it's claws. So that no-one would dare approach or proposition her. I remembered that story then as I took another step back.

Not just scared at this creature coming towards me. This woman that I was beginning to believe really was a Goddess of some kind.

She stepped towards me and reflexively I took another step back. Too late, I felt the heat on the back of my legs and realised that I was about to step into the rign of fire that had surrounded us. I staggered, nearly fell, one of those arms pinwheeling everywhere kind of falls. Lightening fast, her hand whipped forward and caught me by the front of my shirt and yanked me forward so that I would not fall backwards into the flame.

She pulled so hard that my shirt tore and I heard that sound of cloth tearing. I do not know why but this time it sounded like a whetstone being run along the edge of a blade.

But in pulling me, I was now close to her. Far too close for my own comfort. I could feel the heat from her and smell her breath even though we did not touch. I was breathing heavily and I could see her eyes, glowing slightly with the reflected firelight. Her eyes darted around my face and her lips parted slightly. It can't have been for very long. A couple of heartbeats at most. I felt like I was standing on the edge of a cliff and dangerously close to falling.

"When a man prays to me for the strength to die a Good death?" She repeated, almost breathing the words and my arousal spiked again. I wanted this woman so badly I felt my lips curl into a snarl as I fought the feelings coming over me with every fibre of my being. "I give it to them."

Mercifully, she stepped backwards and turned away. I felt like I was being let off the hook. She looked over her shoulder at me as she moved off and smiled. "I let them fight off the enemy until they can no longer stand and then I let them die. I let them cover the retreat of their comrades or the people that they love and then I let them die. I let them stand on a mountain of bodies that they have slain with their own two hands and then I have an archer step out from behind a tree and shoot them dead. I give them a hero's death." Her smile became a little more predatory. "I wonder Freddie, when your time comes, will you pray to me for the death of a hero?"

I was not off the hook. I was being played with. And I wondered if, in nature, when a cat is chasing a mouse or an eagle dives for the rabbit, whether the prey ever longs to be caught. I had no idea how much longer I could keep up my self-control.

That moment, on the edge of the fire, it had taken everything I had not to grab her and kiss her before tearing at my clothes and at hers. It took everything that I had and I wondered if I would be able to resist next time. A small part of me thought that I wouldn't and part of me. A part that I hated, didn't want to resist.

I swallowed, realising that I had started looking at the floor again and I raised my eyes to look at her. She was standing a short distance off with her hands on her hips and she was looking at me with a thoughtful glint in her eye. Not for the first time in our little debate and dance, I thought she was appraising me.

I thought that I was being weighed, measured and found wanting and part of me was angry about that.

I was also astonished to realise that she was still fully clothed. That there was nothing tittillating about her appearance. No cleavage was on display, relatively little flesh, other than her arms, was on display, but I had had such a sense of her as a sexual creature and I was disturbed by that.

I thought of Saffron for a moment and as I always do whenever I remember those three people that lived on the hill, I had a little surge of sadness. But I remember a similar feeling with Saffron. When Saffron decided that she was going to have me, there was nothing that I could do about it but there was no... aggression to it. She did not... She just let it happen until an overwhelmed Freddie gave into her charms and let her take me.

Then I thought of hunters. There are two kinds of hunters and unfortunately they seem to fall into two categories. This is not an exhaustive list and it is also a generalisation so don't get too angry at me for this.

But there are those people that hunt for food and those people that hunt for sport. The people that hunt for food do it carefully, they might lay their traps, stake out the water holes and the tracks that the animals use to get to the water before they wait. They wait until they have the perfect shot so that they can kill the animal in one stroke. This is because a tensed animal, a scared or frightened animal is all tense which toughens up the meat.

Those people that hunt for sport will chase the animal down until they can get what the hunter considers a perfect kill. The meat is still used but it tends to need other preparations. But there the animal gets cornered, and turns at bay to sell itself dearly.

Saffron was the first of these kinds of hunters. She allowed me to fall into her, entirely gentle and benign, affections. Where as this woman, I still could not think of her with her name, was hunting me down.

These thoughts shot through my head with a speed that I could not easily comprehend. I had enough time to register them, listen to them and realise them. But the woman was standing there looking at me.

"I am also a woman's Goddess." She said when she realised that she had my full attention. "Men can have their war and their rulership and supposed control over everything. But they don't understand it, not really. They cannot even begin to comprehend the true nature of how the world, how eixtence works. But women do."

I blinked at her, trying desperately to recover my compsure as she carried on talking. "Women understand that the world doesn't work like that. That no matter how hard you try to control the things that you have, the tighter you hold onto things, the faster they will slip through your fingers. So all you can do is hold on to the world and ride the chaos and see where it takes you. That is how the world works and men cannot accept that."

I took a deep breath. I could not, could not let it lie. "So I take that you don't approve of the standard triumverate of the female Goddess then. The Maiden, mother and crone aspect?"

She laughed and I felt myself get caught up in it all again. I was part of the world, back in the fight and she was back to toying with me.

The thunder rolled and the firelight seemed to get brighter, sucking all the other light out of the rest of existence, all there was was the fire, the storm, the night and this small patch of land.

Those things and this woman who stood before me. I no longer doubted that she was a Goddess of some kind. I don't know what it was that tipped me over the edge into belief but there it was.

"That outlook on womanhood is so typically male." She snarled at me. "So male to try and define women by our reproductive cycle. They call it the maiden, that point where women are at their most fertile but also most demure, the mother when men no longer find us attractive and all that we are good for is raising the children that you have forced us to bear and then the crone. When even the children that we gave birth to have no interest in us any further. Or put even simpler than that. Who a man wants to fuck, who a man has fucked and who he has no interest in fucking.

"Why not think of us in terms of age? Early, middle and fucking ancient."

There is nothing more perfect than a beautiful woman swearing as though she is tasting every letter in the word. I shuddered as she said it.

"But even then, we are being defined by how men see us. I bet, that if you look back far enough, the person that thought of this whole maiden mother crone bullshit. I bet that that was a man, standing on the outside looking in and wondering why his religion is all about mourning the fact that he worships. Where he will never be good enough, never be holy enough for the church hierarchy. Whereas the women dance around naked, enjoying themselves and each other. I bet you that was it."

She laughed. The image that she painted took lodge in my brain. I was already caught and I could not see it. I tried for strength to keep fighting and as I did so I saw her smile. I did not see the connection then but now I wonder.

"Why not talk about us as women. Why not the three faces of the Goddess where we are calm, where we are gentle and when we are fucking furious. How about when we rule, the same way that we rule our households. Our fury when we fight to protect it and then again our care when we love what's ours without reservation and without holding anything back.

"Why not think of women like that. That is what it means to be a woman in my eyes. To rule, to fight and to love without shame, without deceit and without reservation. Why are we not portrayed like that? But no, it has to be maiden, mother and crone. Put us in boxes according to our age and appearance. Rule us by the names that you call us and the labels that you give us."

"Why are you a Goddess?" I whimpered the question. Desperately trying to draw the tattered shreds of myself together. Then, out of nowhere, I rallied.

"Why am I not a Goddess?" She asked me as my head cleared and I found my second wind from somewhere. Everyone has that moment whether it's in a fight or in some other kind of circumstance where they feel as though they are done and that they have nothing else to give and then out of nowhere, they feel the strength flow back into their limbs.

"Where is my sister?" I demanded. It didn't come out as strong as I would like so I repeated the question. "Where is my sister? I asked again. "WHERE IS MY SISTER?"

She smirked and suddenly she seemed less terrifying and more of a woman again. "Finally," She said, almost quietly. "Finally you ask the questions that you want."

"As I recall, you claimed that you would get angry if I asked again." I straightened up as I realised that I had been cowering from her.

The thunder rolled again.

"And you give up so easily?" She grinned. "I am the Goddess of Battle Freddie and the tides of battle change swiftly. Faster than a lover's mood."

"Where is my sister?" I risked a step towards her.

"I'm not telling you Freddie."

"Where is my sister?" I was angry and I tried to put that rage into my voice.

"I'm not telling you. If I told you then you would not have the fight, the struggle would be over and that would do no good to anyone."

"Fuck me." I took a breath and tried to think.

"In a bit, maybe." She said again, but I did my best to ignore her as I turned away and tried to collect my thoughts.

"Awww." She mocked. "Is widdle Freddie gonna cry?" She was goading me. The fact that she used exactly the same tone of voice that Sam used to use on the practise field after he had failed at a poetry lesson that I had found easy and he was taking it out on me afterwords. That fact didn't help.

"You say that you're a Goddess of battle." I said after a while.

"I am."

"Then here is the thing. When we set off to come south, Kerrass and I sat in my families chamber and talked about what we were going to do next. Where we could go and who we could talk to. A simple fact of the matter is that we are flying blind. We have no idea what to do next."

She said nothing. Just gazing at me. Her eyes were cloaked in shadow again.

"I agree with you." I told her. "I don't want the answer. I want to figure it out for myself. I want to be the one to find her and I want to be the one to rescue her, or avenge her. I want that so badly that I could taste that. But I have no idea what to do or where to go or who to talk to next. I've got nothing left. You are the Goddess of battle? Then help me fight. I don't want the answer so don't give me the answer. But tell me where to look. That's all I want. I want a clue, somewhere to look and hunt to find what I need to know. I want a way in, a direction, something to hang onto."

I stared at her, doing my best to meet her gaze.

"Help me fight."

"If I give you what you seek. How will that be helping you fight?"

"Because at the moment, I am lost. I am losing and there is no hope that I will get what I need and what I want. Help me. Give me a chance. That's all I'm asking."

She smiled.

"You are right of course." She told me after a while. Settling back down on the ground and crossing her legs. She seemed to diminish in some way. Some small way so that she no longer looked otherworldly and terrifying. She was a woman again, the kind that you might meet in a tavern or on the street. Beautiful, in a predatory kind of way, to be sure but nothing that would draw the eye enough to make you stop in your tracks.

"Define a God for me." She went on. "If you did so then you would soon find the task remarkably different. A God has power, lots of people have power. A God can see everything. Oh yeah? Prove it. A God is unknowable. Ask a rich person what it's like to live in true and abject poverty versues a poor person living in profound richest. Or even more profound than that. What is life like as a beetle?"

"I have heard this train of thought before." I said, remarkable calmly considering everything that had been said and that had happened over the last few hours. "A tutor of mine once took Sam and I out into the Garden and found a flower. He pointed to an insect on the plant and asked us what it was. We told him that it was an ant before asking what that had to do with the possibility of God and how that would have an effect. I remember that he looked at the pair of us for several moments before asking. "And what are we to Gods?" Then he carefully picked the ant off the flower and held it in his hand before moving it to the much larger flowers elsewhere in the Gardan.

""Imagine that you are the ant," he said. "What is he thinking of me now? He has just been moved by something that he has no power over, no control over at all. He has been moved from a small flower, relatively sickly, one amongst many others. Moved onto a much larger, richer, more unique flower. Is he cursing me for taking him away from his family and his friends? Or is he thanking me for the bounty that I have just given him. Either way, does he worship me as I have displayed a power that he could not comprehend. Whether as a way to still my wrath so that I will not move him again, or is he giving thanks to this huge being that scooped him up from his poor start and has now given him all this bounty.""

"As I remember, Sam and I looked at him as though he had grown antlers and the tutor smiled.

""We know that Gods exist." He told us. "The miracles that we have seen seem to be guided by a single cause. A single purpose. Therefore it follows that the miracles are controlled by someone or something. But just as the ant is to me, we are to the Gods. We cannot know their purpose and they might not even know that we exist. We have only two choices in the matter." He went back to the rose and scooped the ant back off the larger rose. "We can worship," he said as he placed the ant on to one of the cobbled parts of the path. "Or not," he carefully brushed the ant onto the ground and made sure that it was still moving about. "And we must always be careful in case the Gods decide that they no longer have need of us.""

The woman smiled at me gently. "He stamped on the ant didn't he."

"He did. Gave me nightmares for weeks and I never prayed harder than I did in the days that followed."

She laughed. "And the man claims that he has never had to fight." She seemed gentler somehow. "It is a common lesson and taught in a similar way on worlds and universes and realities far from here. Also, often involving an ant. Food for thought maybe.

"Your tutor was right of course. Godhood is not something we ever take on as ourselves. It is something that other people give to us. You will have seem men joust or fight... It happens often in my sphere of influence. A man stands on the battlefield swinging his sword, axe or whatever and none can even come close to being able to take the man down.

"Or maybe it is a knight on the jousting field. Men who everyone knows are better than he come and are unhorsed with seeming ease and the onlookers to both say, "he was a God that day and none could touch him." She picked up a piece of grass that was seeding and started to strip the seeds from the stalk. "I always find it rather insulting. To say that a man is a God rather than to say that he was being particularly exceptional. That he fought harder, moved faster and killed more efficiently than the next man. That he raised his skills and his talents to new levels that none had thought him capable of. It's easier to call someone a God than it is to call someone exceptional.

"You keep asking me if I'm a God." She said, looking up at me from where she was sat. She was leaning backwards, knees drawn up against her chest and the line of her trousers was pulled so that it showed the shape of her thigh.

"I am one." She told me. "I know this because people keep telling me that I am one. I can hear prayers and I give people power according to my remit. But I couldn't tell you who gave me my remit.

"As I said earlier, my earliest memory is of landing on an island. It was long ago and far from here. And before you start, I am not one of the Aen Aelle. That group of beings who are becoming so arrogant that they are breeding themselves to death when they could help all the other Elves of this world and others to survive. Elitism is it's own defeat."

"Another group of people that you don't like."

She laughed and the sharpness had crept back into it. ""We must fight." They say and they beat their chests. "We must fight or we will die out." Then they argue about where to go. When they have a place to go they discover that the people there do not want them and will refuse to serve them like the Gods that they think themselves to be. They refuse to trade with others, they refuse to learn. They think of themselves as the pinnacle of existence without realising that they are stagnating themselves into extinction.

"Individually they are more powerful than most flesh and blood creatures of this world or any others. But if they turned up here and started ordering the other Elves around, let alone the humans, then suddenly the entire continent, Elves, Dwarves and Humans will have a common enemy and the Aen Aelle will be wiped out. They know it too, which is why they hide and tell each other how superior they are. Ooohhh I get so angry. " She shook her fists together before smiling at herself and the ridiculousness of the gesture

"I would never have guessed." I joked.

She snorted in derision but I thought I could see an appreciation of the joke in the sidelong look she gave me.

"But I am getting off topic." She told me. "We landed on an island, a long way from here. I have no idea how far but it was worlds away, planes of existence away and it was long ago. Where we came from I have no idea but the primitive people there that looked a lot like you, were enslaved by others. Cutting a long story short, we helped those primitives to throw off the shackles of their enslavers, taught them how to defend themselves and then we moved on.

"We started off united, some of us died, some of us intermarried with the... people. Lets call them people. Some of us ascended to what you would consider to be Gods and some of us just... continued. We did so according to our nature. Some faded into obscurity and did so willingly because that was the natural order of things. For things to have a purpose then sooner or later they need to end.

"But then something else happened."

Her eyes shone in the firelight. It had never occurred to me before but she reminded me of Kerrass. The way she spoke, held herself or behaved. Some of her body language was very like Kerrass. The way she moved, walked... I don't know but that was the first time that I really noticed it. I guess that I had been aware of it for some time and just... It hadn't clicked into place.

But now that she was sat there in the middle of the ring of fire, staring into the memories and the similarity was startling.

"Oh Freddie but it was glorious." Her eyes lit up with joy. "The greatest battle of existence. I can easily imagine that it was the greatest battle since the dawn of things. The greatest battle since the Universe and all of creation struggled to be born. I can absolutely believe that.

"Your people call it the Conjunction of the Spheres. A rather fancy name for what happens when existences crash against each other but that was what happened. And for all I know, it might have been the first time that it took place. It was the first time that I ever saw it happen and our enemies poured forth. And they were enemies. Even to the point where I, the Goddess of Battle, must be forced to admit that there is such a thing as "wrong".

"My universe was very similar to this one in many ways. Close enough that travel between the two was fairly easy but the things that came through to attack us... They would have torn at your sanity. They tore at mine and... after all... I am a Goddess."

If I didn't know better, I would have said that she was haunted by something. Haunted by what she had seen.

"I saw a great eye." She told me, almost breathing the words as though to say them too loud was bring that attention down onto us. "An eye as big as existence and it looked at me and through me as though I didn't exist. I saw a thing covered in hair that breathed in pain and breathed out pleasure. But even that doesn't entirely work as even the language that I use to describe it to you does not fit. Because there isn't a language invented that can properly convey the horror of the things that we fought against."

She seemed to shudder in fear and I wondered at that. There were two possibilities that were shaking me. The first was that she was not a Goddess and that her fear in the face of these unknowable things was real and justified. Or that she was indeed a Goddess and that these were things that even made a Goddess afraid.

Becuase she was afraid.

"They hated us. With such an all consuming passion that they wanted us gone. Our very existence caused them pain, or caused whatever it was that equated to pain for them. The closest that I can think of to the way that we would describe emotions was that they were jealous of us. They hated us and they wanted us gone. They resented that our existence defined theirs I think.

"Some of our magicians and scientists suggested that they were the creatures and beings that existed before existence. And that they resented the new found reality of worlds. I cannot answer for that. Because I am a Goddess of battle and I fought with my brothers and sisters on the front line of that war. I fought alongside the primal humans, Elves, Dwarves, Halflings and all the other beings that you have no name for. And we came so close to losing.

"There is even an argument to say that we lost but I do not agree. There is a more compelling argument to be made that the fight is not over yet.

"But the reason that we are sat here today, in relative comfort and ease rather than fighting in some unimaginable war that we have no control over. The reason for that is because these beings could not cross into our realities. They were too big, too... too different to be able to survive. So they used slave races. The things that you would call monsters were among them although so far removed that it doesn't really count any more. These beings took creatures and corrupted them, turning them into something that they were not and in reality it was them that we were fighting against."

She paused as she waited for a particularly violent peal of thunder to pass us by. She looked up at the sky and smiled as the rain spilled over her face. I was once again struck by her beauty. The edge seemed to have been worn away from her in some way. Sitting there and letting the rain wash over her, she seemed almost innocent. I found myself moving towards her.

"Ah those were good times." She grinned at me as I sat next to her, scooting along a little bit to make room. What she was making room on I never knew but I remember the gesture.

"Try," She began after a short pause as we both got comfortable again, "Try and imagine the forefather of the forefathers of the Ghouls and you might have some idea of what we were up against. It was amazing. A truly righteous battle which is so rare that every time that it arrives, every time that it takes place, we must all give thanks that it happens and just get in there.

"Some of the servants of those powers were able to break free and joined our side and still others of our side would be corrupted and would join the opposition. It went on and on and on for time beyond time until the worlds themselves began to crack asunder."

She sighed.

"That was why the war was not won or lost. We did not win it, neither did they, but the war had to come to an end otherwise everything was going to be destroyed. Just as they could not exist in our realities, we could not exist in theirs and that was the problem. The more they sent their servants through the holes between worlds in order to ambush them, the weaker the walls between worlds became. The more we went through the holes to ambush our enemies then the wider the holes grew and on and on and on it went. And in doing so we were guarenteeing our own doom.

"Our own doom, their own doom because the walls between realities, the walls between worlds if you prefer, were breaking down. Our worlds, our reality was bleeding into theirs and vice versa and when we came into contact with those remnants of their world. We would be annhialated. But that was no comfort to their side because whenever they got into our reality with one of their tentacles or something then that tentacle would be, likewise, annhialated.

"There was no truce. There was no "coming to terms" or anything like that. There was no table where our representatives sat down with their ambassadors. But the battle just stopped."

"You must have been really angry with that." I commented.

"A little," she admitted with a certain amount of self-deprecation. "But it was that petty part of my nature. I was much... purer then. I was battle fury pure and unsullied. Badb to be true. You would not have recognised me then. I was the battle crow and I swept over battlefields in all the realms of existence. I had to be, it was the only way that we could survive. The parts of me that governed Lordship, guarding of lands and family, guarding of magic. They had long since been left behind and in the hands of others to myself. Allies that had taken up the fight alongside us."

"What allies?" I wondered and she chuckled.

"Ah Freddie, always fighting to learn. That's one of the things I like about you. Allies? If I told you about all that fought on our side during those wars then we would still be here in a centuries time. You have met some of our allies. Just as you have met some of those that fought on behalf of our enemies and still, to this day, struggle to free themselves from that influence."

I blinked at her. I thought she nodded then. It might be my looking back at the events with the glorious benefit of hindsight and seeing things that weren't really there at the time.

"But the fighting just sort of petered out. We would defend, but not attack just as they would defend but not attack and both sides just retreated from each other. Our experts on the nature of reality spent a bit of time trying to shore up reality in the same way that a man might use a large beam to prop a wall in place and prevent it from falling over. Or that they might place planks, or branches into the bank of earh to halt or arrest slippage.

"And then we waited. It was clear that our enemies had also recognised the danger in their own twisted way and were doing the same from their end. So now we watch and we wait and until the stalemate shifts," She shrugged and said nothing for a while.

"Occasionally one side or another tries something. You hear about mortals being able to contact the other side and are given powers in return for doing foolish things like making the mortal plane or planes more hospitable for the enemy's to come through. The mortals don't care. They get rich, become incredibly powerful, both in the literal sense, the physical sense, the political sense, the magical sense or some combination of all of them. They sometimes do it for a reason as well. They see it as a shortcut which, obviously, I do not approve of.

"If you have a battle to fight then you should fight the damn battle, don't seek for ways to try and get round it or cut corners. If a fight's worth fighting then it's worth doing it properly.

"But a desperate man might need a way to be able to defeat his enemies. Then they might meet someone that appears to share their goals who offers the ability to cast a spell that gives them everything. They just need to do something unspeakable. The desperate man takes them up on this and naturally... The price of going utterly insane and eventually destroying oneself seems a small price to pay. I once heard of a mortal that wanted to be the most beautiful man around. He was tired of being ugly and he wanted the women, all of the women all of the time. He was given precisely that."

"What happened to him?" It was one of those cues that a man like me finds impossible to resist. You can't be set up for something like that and then not ask the follow up question.

She laughed because of course she laughed, and gave me little push on the shoulder causing me to rock away from her.

"He was murdered. Some said that it was because one lover got jealous over another taking her place. Another said that all the jealous and angry husbands, boyfriends, lovers and fathers got together and lynched him. I even heard one story where he killed himself after realising that in becoming irresistable to all women, he was raping them. But afterwards, he had left many beautiful children behind him that were then servants of the... Do you know, we never thought of names for them? Something to think about there. How do you name the indefinable?"

She considered this for a moment and shrugged. "But never the less. These creatures always go mad. Always. They sell themselves to these beings for vengeance, for a cause and it is these people that last the longest before they descend towards madness. Being too far into a cause is practically madness in and of itself. But that other madness seems to be a shield. If you are doing something awful for a cause then that is alright, versus doing something awful to fill your coffers with money is... petty and childish really.

"The enemy never succeeds but they can afford to play the long game. Same as we can. They choose their servants and then those servants spread evil, destruction and darkness which, in turn, spreads more. One man uses dark powers to get what they want, goes mad and has to be put down like the mad dog that they are. Then the next guy says. "Oh but I would be more careful. I am cleverer than he is and I would never sink so far into evil.""

She snorted with a sad kind of gallows humour.

"These men are always wrong and they always, always sink into madness."

She considered the flames for a bit longer and there seemed to be a sadness in her eyes. A sadness that I wanted to take away for her. An urge that I hadn't felt in a long time as I have mostly trained myself out of the urge to condescendingly try and protect the women around me. Expecially given that most of those women could kick my ass harder than it's ever been kicked before. But I felt it again there and fought it, and the urge to put my arm around this woman, down into the depths of my psyche.

"We are no better of course. We have worked to undermine their position on many occasions. We worked and were able to tear a group of their followers away from them and although they are not on our side... yet." For some reason she looked at me sidelong as she said this. "Those of us that plan for the future are hopeful that they may yet be brought over to serve the... for want of a better word... the light. But there will come a time, as there always will be, when the war will start again. I both look forward to that moment, and dread that moment in equal measure. Look forward to it because there is no purer fight than the battle for survival, but I dread that fight because this time we might lose." She sighed and tilted her head back to look at the night's sky.

"So when will this battle take place?" I wondered, trying to ignore the outline of her neck. I dont know what it is with my obsession with a woman's neck and collar bone. But it's there and that part of a woman's anatomy fascinates me more than any other parts that are popularly considered to be more erotic in nature.

"Wanting to prepare yourself Freddie?" She looked at me a little sidelong with a wink and a smirk.

"Is that bad?"

She laughed, the warmest laugh that I had ever heard from her. Like the camp fire over which you are cooking the night's dinner. "I don't think you will need to worry about it. The fight will not start until this planet and everyone and everything on it is destroyed, eons after your death. This existence will have collapsed on itself before we have the strength to take the battle to them and if that is true then it is an equally long time for the other side to be prepared for another go around at the war."

She turned her head onto one side and considered the flames for a long moment. "Nope," She said abruptly, stretching her legs out in front of her and rubbing them as though she was rubbing feeling back into them. "I think that's everything." She stood.

"What?" I wondered. "Wait..."

"That's as much as I'm going to tell you." She told me stretching her arms high in the air, not for the first time that she had drawn my attention to her chest as she did so. I did not look at her face but I did wonder if she was looking at me to guage my reaction. With the benefit of distance I am also left wondering if she was, again, using her appearance and her sexuality to throw me off balance. "Time for me to be on my way I think."

"Fuck that." I protested. "You haven't told me anything."

"I have told you everything. I have literally given you the key to the entire mystery but you will not see it." I might be imagining her off hand nature but I am not imagining the disdain in her voice."

"But that gives me nothing."

"Does it not?" She turned to look at me and her gaze pierced me like a dagger. "And here I was thinking that I don't actually work for you."

But my own anger rose to meet hers as I pulled away from her. "We summoned you here. We brought you here to get your help and that's all that you give me."

"Just to be clear, mortal," she made the word an insult. "Kerrass summoned me here. You work for a pissant little fire religion that lies to you about what it delivers. Do not even begin to think that you have any rights at all to my help, my person or what I have to say."

I turned to Kerrass. Who was sat, still, where the woman had left him as he stared into space.

"I don't believe this." I surged to my feet and walked a few paces away before spinning back towards her to confront her. It is a truism that sometimes proper rage needs space to breathe. "After all of that you come here and you claim to be a Goddess, then you claim that you're not. Then you talk about some war that no-one has ever heard of and then you tell me that you're done? Tell me what I want to know. TELL ME WHERE MY SISTER IS."

She stared at me for a long time from her seated position.

"Or what?" She asked me while her eyes blazed. The thunder rolled and she was no longer a woman, her lips peeled backward from her teeth until she snarled at me. "You forget yourself Freddie. I am not some Goddess of fire and light. I am not a life-giving sun. Nor am I a God of Kings, Generals and warlords. I am not the female Goddess of healing, childbirth and fertility. I am a Goddess of woman defending her home with blade, teeth and claw. I am the Goddess of women who rule their household and I am the Goddess of so much more than that. I am a Goddess of magic and death. I am the last respite of the warrior and the first call of the berzerker. I am the winged omen of battle and I am the woman that will wash your bloody clothes after you are dead."

She stalked towards me as she spoke and my voice froze in my throat, the thunder seemed to be coming back, the lightening getting closer and the flames seemed to rise higher into the night. She stalked towards me and again, same as it had last time. Her rage struck me in the face as though it was some kind of physical force. It came back like a hammer blow and I staggered back from her.

"You question me?" She continued. "I have killed men for less than that. I have fought in lands that you would never dream of. I have gouged the eyes of tyrants and I have torn the entrails from the lowest common man. You, a male, who stands there, demanding things from me that you have no right to ask, let alone demand and when I give you a gift of those things, you demand more. What do I get? I do not even have your respect you worthless piece of drivel?"

I was retreating from her rage and I was terrified.

"What do I get?" She demanded again. "What am I worth to you?"

The thunder rolled, the lightening flashed and a bold of lightening struck the central pillar of flame that Kerrass and I had built, shattering it so that burning debris exploded all around us. I blinked and the woman was standing there in front of me and once again the warmth of her body could be felt.

I have been face to face with two other powerful women in this manner. Women who could have destroyed me with a thought or a gesture. Ariadne and Maleficent both grabbed me and lifted me up by the throat.

This woman grabbed me by the balls and she held me there. And I was helpless as she considered me with a sneer on her face.

"Not even worth the effort that it would take to kill you." She decided, throwing me aside.

I rolled automatically. The cold night air snuck through the hole in my shirt and I rolled to my feet in time to see her walking away from me. Fire was everywhere and I saw her striding there. Tall, majestic, walking with her spear at her side like a walking cane.

I knew two things then. Two facts drove themselves into my brain. The first one was that I was angry. Angry beyond reason, angry beyond thought. And the second reason was that I wanted this woman. I wanted her so badly and I would not stand by and allow her to dismiss me so easily after everything that we had been through, Kerrass and I.

"Damn you no." I got my feet under me and looked around to find my spear a little way off. Glittering in the firelight. I raced towards it, scooping it up as I went and leapt at the woman, my spear reaching me just before she reached the fire.

She twisted, my lunge skittering across her shield that was strapped to her back. She laughed, the sound like the clash of metal. She grabbed my spear as she twisted, in the same way that Letho had done before and she pulled. But I have practised that move since Letho defeated me with it and as I went forwards, my dagger cleared it's sheath and reached for her throat.

She caught my hand and we stood there for a moment as I strained against her. Was I imagining the small tremors of struggle in her arms.

"Excellent." She said. "Finally showing some balls."

She kissed me again. Like last time it was not the kiss of lovers. It was a surge of desire. Lips, tongues and teeth clashed, wrestling for dominance and then it was over as she pushed me back. Laughing. She had let go of her spear to catch the dagger and she flicked it up into her hand with her foot and came after me, shrugging the cloak of clothes feathers off and to the ground, spear-head flickering forwards and I had to parry. All I could see was her grin.

I don't remember that much of the early part of the fight. I was so angry and so... This does not portray me in a good light and I hate myself for it. But that earlier desire was in me as well. I was angry that I had been stymied. Angry that I had been diverted and angry that I had... I felt as though I had been made a fool of. I felt used and ….

I wanted and I couldn't have. That primal feeling that we know purest when we are children. That moment when we want something from our parents and our authority figures and the parent or authority figure refuses us the piece of cake. Or the treat or refuses to take us home. That small part of us that sometimes just wants to retreat into a dark hole, wrap ourselves up in a blanket and sulk for hours on end.

I was that person and I was furious.

I wanted so badly. I wanted the answers to the riddles that I had been asking myself for months. She had drawn me in with her stories about this ancient war against beings that would have seen to the destruction of exitence as we know it. I was there, in the thick of it. It she had been a bard then I would have been following the story with bated breath. I would have been, as I know performers like to say, in the palm of her hand and it suddenly seemed true that I was going to get everything that I wanted from her.

And then she said no and even worse than that. She had laughed and my fury had spilled forwards. But there was more to it than that. The story and my... lust for answers was not the only thing that had been unleashed.

All the way through since she had first dismounted from her horse I had been attracted to this woman. I mean it was hard not to she was undeniably beautiful. And although there was nothing sexual about her appearance other than being a beautiful woman. My desire had grown.

This is not a new situation. I have known and met many beautiful woman but since meeting and committing myself to Ariande, I have not felt that... desire for another woman.

So I fought that feeling off and moved my head, my heart and my body into a situation where I was trying to get the thing that I wanted off this woman. But then, by degrees, she had torn that self-control away. I had become angry and that sudden rage and frustrated lust had been unleashed along with my anger.

And I wanted her. I wanted her so badly that I make myself sick with it now. But I am supposed to report facts and report what happened, whether to my deserved disgrace or not.

I do know that I have never fought harder in my life. Nor have I ever fought quite as well as that. Not on the shores of Skellige, not in the throne room of Angraal or on the streets of Toussaint. I have never been that good before and I suspect that I will never be that good again. But I have never fought anyone quite as good as her before either.

She was just so fast. So very fast that trying to strike out at her was like trying to stike out at the flames that were still falling in the embers around us. At first, my fury was such that I attacked without thinking. Just letting my body do the work for me. She was retreating from me, spinning and twirling as she went, hair whipping through the air as she moved. And as she retreated I went after her.

She was laughing. She had never stopped laughing as I attacked. Laughing in the sheer joy of it all and as that laughter made me angrier, so her laughing seemed to increase in volume to the point where it was amazing that she could still stand up straight, let alone continue to avoid my attacks.

For my part, energy flowed through me in a way that it had never done before. I moved faster, struck harder and continued long after I would normally have given up and collapsed into an exhausted heap. I tried things that I would never have dreamed of trying if I had been training with Kerrass. I leapt high into the air in an effort to bring my spear down on her to force her to her knees.

But she wasn't there.

I leapt forward into a high, one-handed stab.

She ducked under it, hair flying around her head like a storm-cloud.

I tried to use the blade of the spear like a halbard and brought it across in a mighty horizontal strike. Two of them as I spun in place. One high and the other low.

She ducked the first and jumped over the second.

And then the tide of things changed. She had still not brought her own spear into play despite that she carried it in her hands. Nor did she unsling her shield. She just leapt and twirled, ducked and spun and avoided my spear with an ease that only served to make me angrier.

Then she parried one of my blows with her foot and pushed the spear to the ground, trapping it. I tugged, pulled, twisted and fought to get the spear free. To no avail of course. Then I could see that she was grinning.

"You are doing well." She told me as I growled with the effort to free my spear. "Not better than I expected." She didn't break eye contact as she reached down and tugged her boots loose. Including the one that was resting on my spear. "But not worse either" She reached down and grasped the spear, heedless of the edge and pushed so that I staggered backwards.

As I staggered, she stepped out of the boots so that she was barefoot on the ground. Kicking the boots to one side, she unslung the shield from her back and settled it into place. Tossing the strap away with her boots. Then she flicked up her spear, holding it around the mid point and resting it over the top of her shield so that it pointed towards me.

"My turn now." She hissed with relish and then, on she came and now I was fighting just to survive.

She was jabbing forward, short, hard, powerful thrusts with her spear and the fearsome name of it, the look of it, everything else that was goin on with it came to mind. I defended desperately, not even trying to formulate a counter attack, just blocking and moving, blocking and moving.

And I thought I saw a look of disappointment on her face and that look blew away the fog that was settling over my brain so that I was angry again. I was being too cautious and I knew it. I looked for the opening and I thought I saw it. It wasn't much. I couldn't get round her spear one way to get at her unprotected right hand side, but I could go the other way. If I struck at her shield, it wouldn't do anything to her but it might put her on to the defensive so that I could take back the initiative.

It wasn't much of a hope though. She jabbed and I blocked and hurled myself into a roll. I swung with everything that I had and I closed my eyes, expecting the pain as her spear drove into my flesh.

Instead I heard the solid sound of my own spear striking wood. I continued to move as to stay still in a fight is to accept death.

I didn't get away completely unscathed. My leather s had taken a gouge down my back and part of it was flapping free. I thought I could feel a hot wetness running down my back, but it didn't hurt and as I came to my feet, some distance away from her, I rolled my shoulders to see if I was impaired.

I was not.

I had taken a gouge out of her shield, it looked damaged and there was a bit of splintering going on. Maybe that was the answer. If I attacked to go for that bit over and above any of the other bits then maybe...

She was laughing at me as she came on and I felt my own grin of rage rise to answer as I moved to meet her. She lunged forward and I spun, using the spear like a quarterstaff I knocked the spear away and drove another powerful blow into her shield from the but of my spear to the joyous sound of more splintering wood.

That blow was followed by another. I rained strikes down on her shield while she jabbed forwards. We moved in a circle, always I was moving to her left to stay away from her spear and so I could keep striking the shield. Splinters flew from her wood as I attacked, but I had fallen into a pattern and she exploited that.

She feinted to where I was but actually attacked where I was going to be. Her blade caught in some of the ties that kept my leather armour together and the hook from the spear caught and cut through the knots and buckles like they were nothing.

Another part of my armour was now flapping free.

She laughed as she spun away.

I was angry again and I attacked frantically, always aiming for her shield but she used that against me. Two strikes later and another strike cut the belt that held my leather armour in place and it fell free. She attacked back and I had to retreat.

The problem was that I couldn't get inside her spear, past the point. The barbs meant that her spear was just as dangerous as she pulled it back from the lunge as it was going forwards. So the old Letho trick wouldn't work here. Even if I was stronger than her which I rather suspected that I wasn't.

The thought that she was toying with me finally pierced the almost berzerker fog that had possessed my brain and I started to become afraid and back off. Fatigue flooded through me and I backed off. Trying to breathe, trying to think.

Trying to ignore the fact that my shirt was sticking to my back.

But she wouldn't let me go. She prowled around me in a circle, her movements lithe and sinuous like a cat circling it's prey. Exactly like a cat circling it's prey.

"Getting tired Freddie?" She taunted. "Perhaps while you are there, struggling for breath you might think about the foolishness of trying to challenge a Goddess.

She sped up into a jog and then into a run as she ran round me in ever decreasing circles. I have seen Kerrass use this trick before though and I resolved not to fall for it. Most famously it was used by the famed Witcher, Geralt of Rivia when he earned the sobriquet "The Butcher of Blavikan". It is a tactic designed for one person to be able to take on a greater number. The idea is to apply pressure to the group until one of the people in the group loses their nerve and attacks the lone assailant head on. Then the group can be picked apart.

She wanted me to attack. She was goading me. It was tricky and I will not deny that I was struggling with it. Trying to keep her in my eyeline as she moved around me, getting to that point where I had to whip my head round as she passed being me. The realisation that I was also running the risk of getting dizzy.

Then she changed the rhythm of her movement. Step, run run step, step, steeeeepppppp. Run Leap.

And then she changed direction. Again, another movement that I have seen Kerrass practised and I knew that she had made a mistake. I knew this move and as a result of knowing the move I also knew the counter to it.

I stepped back to avoid the strike and she left herself open to my strike. I lunged. She dodged aside but not completely. My spear blade got entangled in the baggy parts of her trousers and I heard cloth tear.

She danced away. I tried to follow but I was still struggling to breathe properly and she was well out of reach when I realised that pursuit was pointless.

She looked down at the flapping cloth. "That was a close one," She told me before quickly cutting the loose cloth free so that now she had one leg bare.

I tried not to look at the newly naked flesh as I knew that it was a distraction. But in not looking I had left myself open when she ran up and leapt.

I ducked under the first blow and spun to the side, catching her second blow with the blade of my spear and pushing it aside. Not quite fast enough though. Just not quite. The blade of her spear caught me on the shoulder. The leather there did it's job and protected me from the worst of it. I shudder to think what would have happened if there was no leather. As it was the leather tore along with more of my shirt and still more blood started to spill into the evening air.

But there was still no pain.

"Cloth for cloth." She told me.

My armour was now flapping free in a way that it was hindering my movements. I was outclassed and I knew it. I should have given up and I knew that too. I should have thrown myself at her feet and asked for whatever mercy she had to give me even though I knew that that wouldn't be much. But I was too far gone. I was determined. The world had fallen away during the fight. Kerrass, Ariadne, Ciri, Helfdan, Rickard, Mark, Sammy. All of it had fallen away. All there was was this woman, her spear, my spear and the sure knowledge that she knew something I didn't and that I wanted her.

I wanted her to at least know that she had been in a fight. I wanted, even if I couldn't beat her. I wanted to show her not to be too cocky.

I also wanted to know what she knew about Francesca's dissappearance.

I also... Flame forgive me... I wanted her. There was no denying it. I wanted her. Her now bare right leg played on my mind. I wanted more.

She had backed off after that so I took that opportunity to divest myself of the tattered remnants of my leather coat and hurl it aside. It was actually a relief. Leather does not weigh as much as a coat of plate and or chain, but it does have weight. It is stuffy and constraining and I felt strangely freed by it's lack. I had two injuries, a small cut on my shoulder and another one on my back. But I felt pretty good considering. If I was going to die then it would be here and this woman, this thing, would know that she had been in a fight by the time that I was done.

I brought my own spear up into the ready position with my own version of a show off, grandstanding twirl and I advanced on her.

"Now we're getting somewhere." She told me as she came on too.

She was protecting herself behind her shield again. Jabbing forward with her spear but that meant that she was also limiting her methods of attacking. She could only jab forwards, there were no arcs to her movements. Those kinds of jabs would be effective while jabbing from a shield wall into a mass of men but here, when I was free to move and parry, it was limiting herself.

I wondered why I hadn't noticed it before.

I parried her first strike, turning it aside. Then her second and third strike before I spun to avoid a fourth. I used the spin to build momentum and hammered the spear home into the shield with as much force as I could manage.

I was rewarded with the sounds of wood splintering as she pun away and past me. I turned after her to see her still moving away.

She was laughing. "Ah Freddie." She chuckled as she tossed the remaining wood and leather aside. "In taking away my shield you have just made me more dangerous.

I frowned at the thought. Not quite seeing it and then she was on me and Iwas back to defending and parrying for my life. It was so fast. So fast. I didn't see moves until after they were over. I didn't see lunges until after I had already avoided them. It was so fast. I don't think I made contact throughout the entire few heartbeats of that flurry. I was just desperately trying to stay out of her way.

I did not succeed. More small cuts started to open up all over my body. Small gashes in my shirt. My greave on my left leg was torn away and flapped from my ankle. My left arm was running with blood from where she had cut deep into my bracer. The impossibly sharp barbs on her spear were doing the damage. There was no flat of her blade. No easy route through and even if I got past the point then I would still be done for. I had no time to think any of that though. Instead, all there was was this woman, her spinning spear and my desperate attempts to defend myself.

I tripped, on the flapping greave I think and fell backwards into some smouldering embers. I howled as I certainly felt that pain and rolled as she stabbed the ground where I had fallen. From my back I swung wildly at her and I caught her other trouser leg with my blade. Rewarded with more cloth tearing as she tugged away.

It just goes to show. This is why the best swordsman in the world fears the worst fighter rather than the second best. It's because we will try things that the best man wouldn't even think of.

She quickly tore the cloth away and came after me again and, still on my back... Kerrass was going to be so angry with me... I tried the same tactic. She jumped over it, bringing her legs up. Her beautiful, now naked legs with hard muscles rising and falling and then I shook my head as I realised I was distracted.

I rolled again. I didn't see it but she pinned me to the ground. The Haft of her spear across my chest, keeping me to the ground. Keeping me from drawing breath and she leant across me and stared into my eyes.

Her eyes were wild. We were both dirty now, covered in ash from the fire, sweat, my blood although I don't think she had been injured. But her face shone. Beneath the grime and the sheen of sweat, her eyes stared, her mouth grinned in savage enjoyment and her teeth were white.

She was finally breathing hard. I could feel her chest rising and falling against my own despite the two spears that were between us as her eyes searched my face.

"Getting there." Was her opinion. He reached behind her and grabbed me in the crotch again before laughing once more. "Definitely getting there." Then she leant down and kissed me again. There was nothing flirtatious about that kiss. She kissed me hard, again with the wrestling, again with the teeth clashing but this time she sucked my lip into her mouth and bit down hard.

I tasted blood. My own blood and it seemed to fuel my fire.

"Damn you." I growled and got my legs under me to heave her off. She was pinning me awkwardly trying to kiss me, keep me flat and grab me by the... dammit, got to stop using the word crotch. So let's say what she was doing. She had grabbed me by the balls. But her stance was wrong and she wasn't anchored to me or the ground given what she was trying to do and as such it was fairly easy to lever her off me and hurl her away.

She didn't let go of me though the movement lessened her grip so that she wasn't holding onto flesh any more. But she still had me by the trousers which tore under the combined smaller cuts.

Not all of my trews came away. But most of them did and as I came to my feet I realised that parts of me were cold that had not been cold before. I looked over at her and she was grinning, the blood from where she had bit me running down her chin. She turned and spat some of it out. "Only fair." She said as she held up a significant portion of the rags that my trousers had become. "Come on." She said. "Let's see if I can get at a bit more of you." She levelled her spear at me and charged.

I decided to change my game. I was outclassed spear on spear but maybe I could do better with a Quarterstaff. There was no thought that went into those movements. I was tired now. My rage had fallen back into a sullen, banked flame that I could use to feed off and to give me a focus that I had been lacking earlier in the fight.

And for the first time since the entire thing started. I began to feel as though I was on more of an even footing. I was no longer completely outclassed. She was still better than me but I began to feel that if I took my time, was careful and worked things through... If I took advantage of any mistake that she made properly then I might have a chance.

We struck, blocked, parried, lunged and all the rest of it. I was by far the more defensive of the two. Doing my best to have what my old tutors would have called "a healthy respect for my own body" while also not allowing her to have all the initiative. Reminding her that I was still there and in the fight.

Even then, she never stopped smiling. Grinning with the joy of it. The joy of battle.

I have no idea what I looked like. The rain was falling heavily now and the ground was turning into muck. We went backwards and forwards, round in a circle, the fire in the ring was still burning and there was still cracks of thunder and flashes of lightening.

We fought like that for a long time. I have no idea how long it actually was but it was a long time. A brief flurry of blows followed by me backing off. I was trying to make her frustrated. Trying to goad her into a mistake. But also trying to keep my breath. I was tired and although I didn't feel it particularly, I could tell that my own movements were that little bit slower, that little bit clumsier than they should be.

The thought of giving up was impossible. It didn't even begin to cross my mind. Instead, I frowned in concentration. Forcing her to be the aggressor. Something that she was more than happy to be doing anyway.

The wind had picked up a little and so I was also struggling with the cold. The tattered remnants of my trousers which barely deserved the name "clothes" still hung off me. There was a trail of cloth that hung from one of my boots and some of the seams around my belt had stuck as well which made the trousers closer to being what we would think of as a loincloth more than a set of trousers.

My shirt was in similar tatters although at least that still hung off me. Again, it was a strange feeling. I was cold, I knew that I was cold and I knew that that was affecting me in small ways as the wind blew across wet skin. Wet with rain water and my own blood. But I didn't feel cold.

Nor was I feeling weak from the blood loss. Not that I had taken particularly serious injuries. The one from the back of my shoulder was probably the worst of the lot but even that wasn't bad. There were lots of small nicks, small gashes that would not be a problem to clean up presuming I survived the confrontation. I was having to turn my head to the side so that I could spit blood from where she had bitten my lip. Mouth wounds, like head wounds, bleed like a bastard.

She came on again, spinning like a whirlwind and as she did, the thought that occurred to me was that I was thinking like a practice field fighter. I wasn't thinking like a killer. When I couldn't use my spear I should use other things and that thought finally came as she spun in towards me, laughing and screaming and hissing like a cat as she did so. I parried her first two strikes and then I pushed one of the blows aside, using my own spear like a quarterstaff. I pushed and pushed until it was well clear of my body as I slid down her spear towards her. I saw surprise in her face for the first time in a while. Surprise and a certain kind of delight.

I didn't have time for anything fancy or creative. I grabbed her by the dress and pulled her close into a raised knee.

She jerked backwards but I still had her dress in my fist. I tugged her towards me. I felt, rather than saw, her stagger. All I had was her face in front of me and I used my favourite trick. The trick that I had first used in a village with a nekker nest. I had used it again several times against human opponents. Never against monster opponents as that's a recipe for getting your face chewed off. But against humans, elves and halflings. It works wonders.

Never dwarves either. They aren't even going to blink if you headbut them in the face.

I drove my head forwards. It connected. Not as firmly as I would have liked but there was definitely a connection there.

Then she pulled away from me again. A much harder and more forceful tug but I was determined and I kept a firm grip of her dress.

After all, it seemed only fair to me. She had taken my trousers so why shouldn't I have her dress.

Cloth tore and I had a handful of it. I would have had more but I was holding on with my left hand which had the weaker grip and I had to let go as she came on for the attack again.

It was my turn to laugh into her furious face this time as she struck out at me time and time again. I was parrying desperately for a while until another thought occurred. I was, rightly, terrified of the barbs on her spear that seemed to travel up half the length of that spear. But what if that was a problem for her as much as it was for me.

I didn't stop to think about it. I hooked my own blade behind one of the barbs and tugged. She came forward with the spear having read some part of my intention but she hadn't read the rest. I was in close and I made a grab for the rest of the material

We were close again. I had time to feel her body against mine. Time to feel her muscles moving beneath the skin and to feel the raw, ferociousness of her. I realised how I was positioned and took another measure of vengeance and kissed her back.

It was violent, it was aggressive. I tasted my own blood on her tongue and on mine and it seemed to last for a long time. Longer than the previous times. I felt her grab my hair with her off hand and pull my head back and away from her.

Kerrass' lesson was still in my muscle memory. I had refused to let go of my spear and I still had the remains of her dress in my other hand as she pulled my head back, otherwise I might have done something about that. But she grinned at me. All teeth and like I occasionally think I can see fangs in the corner of Kerrass' mouth. I thought I could see flames in her eyes. Flames that were not the reflections of the fire around us.

She held me there and I was trapped against her body. Unable to move really. I felt the heat of her skin

"I like a man to show some initiative." She gasped, seeming breathless. "But you take too many liberties."

Then she showed me how you are supposed to headbutt someone. Twice, the first time causing blood to explode all over my face as she broke my nose. Her second one went into my cheek.

I had three thoughts then. They came one after another. The first was a realisation that in the position that she was in, she could kill me at any time. The second was the thought that this was probably it, because she was laughing to be sure, but there was an anger there also. So this was probably where I was going to die.

The third thought was that I still had some fight in me yet.

I kicked out at her, aiming for the side of her leg and she had to dance to avoid my blow. But that meant that she had to choose what to let go of. Me, or her spear.

And I kept hold of her dress. All things told, it came away astonishingly easily.

I had been wrong. I thought she was angry before. She still had her chest wraps on and a loincloth but her rage spilled over.

"Is this what you wanna see?" She demanded as I staggered upright from where I had fallen. "Is this what you want? You fucking wretch. Then here."

She plunged her spear into the ground that hissed, steam rose again and it smelled foul, before she tore at the chest wraps so that her breasts spilled free. They were not large. Not really, Some might even call them on the small side. She was muscled as well which affected what I was looking at. Then she tore her loincloth off too and stood before me naked.

Some readers will want all the salacious details of what she looked like naked. They will want to know whether she was beautiful and on and on and on. Don't write me to ask as I will destroy your message in disgust. If you approach me in the street, in Oxenfurt or in any other place and ask me then I shall do my level best to knock the shit out of you so that I can expose you for the pig that you are.

Was she beautiful? Of course she was. Have you not been paying attention? She was a fighter and that lends a certain physique to her. She was hard. Unbelievably so and there was no comfort in her. None whatsoever. There was no solace, no softness and no compromise in anything that she was.

She stood there in the rain. Covered in water, soot, blood, sweat and ash. An angry half-smile, half snarl on her face. Barefoot in the muck as she took up her spear again and levelled it at me.

"Is this what you want you fuck?" She screamed over the now howling wind and crashing, almost constant thunder. "Is it? I stand here now in the same form that I came into existence. Spear in hand and open to the elements. Proud in everything that I am. Is this what you wanted? I could destroy you as easily as breathing because I am the Goddess of Battle and Death and I am absolute. Is this what you wanted to see? Is this what you came for?" She bellowed, the words beating me down as though they were solid weights that she was throwing at me.

"I am going to kill you Frederick." She snarled. "Know that. Know that your death waits for you at the end of my spear. Know that I am going to plunge the belly spear, the spear of agony, the spear whose death is the most painful one that has ever been imagined by God or man and you are going to die in that way. Know that truth. Feel that truth.

The rain fell like a hammer. It was not made up of drops any more. It was like standing under a waterfall and all the time, the wind buffetted me, the lightening flashed throwing her shape and her figure into stark relief as the water tumbled off her frame. The thunder rolled, threatening to deafen me but doing nothing to drown out her voice.

And the fires kept on burning.

I was leaning on my spear. Fighting for breath as the water ran down my face and off my limbs. I looked at her for a long time and she was so beautiful. Proud, terrible and utterly without compromise.

I glanced over at Kerrass, all but obscured in the rain. He was still sat where he had last been, staring at a point in the ground a short distance from where he was sitting. He didn't look as though he had moved from where he sat.

"Don't look at him." She shrieked. "Look at me. See me. See me for the death that I am."

I looked at her, as I leant on my spear. I rested my head against the metal haft and I sucked in the air which tasted so good.

"What I want to know now?" Her voice seemed to stab at me like a blade. "Is how you are going to come and meet me. How are you going to come and meet your death?"

I looked up at the night sky for a long moment before the falling rain forced me to close my eyes as I let the water wash over my face.

I felt oddly peaceful.

I let my gaze fall and opened my eyes again to look at her. Proud, terrible, awful and so beautiful.

My lips curled back from my teeth in an answering half snarl, half smile. I pulled up one foot and tugged my boot off, sending the remains of my trousers along with it, and hurled it into the rain and past the fire. The other boot soon followed it.

The wet mud on the floor was not cold. If anything, it was rather soothing. I rather thought I could hear her laughing.

The remants of my shirt followed the boots and I felt the cold water on the many small cuts and injuries that I suffered. I shivered for the first time. She was definitely laughing now

I hesitated at the loincloth. Fear of exposure and ridicule is that most basic of male fears. Or one of them at least. But then I moved before I could change my mind and the loincloth followed the rest of what remained of my clothes. Her laughter seemed to echo in the thunder.

Then I took a breath as I stood, naked before the flames. I planted my right foot and then my left foot. Slowly, as my spear seemed heavy, I brought it up into the ready position with the blade aimed at my opponent's eyes.

And she was no longer laughing.

"It takes a brave man to face his death naked." She told me, then a slight smile teased me. "Although I notice that at least part of you is excited at the prospect." She gested at my crotch.

My manhood was erect and proud. I had known that for some time. Since she had first kissed me in the fight I think but it hadn't seemed important up until that point.

"So." She said as she twirled her spear into the ready position. "Are you ready to die?"

I laughed at her. It was the first time I found outright humour in the entire fight. There was still anger there but also some humour. "No." I told her. "I may die, the same as is ever the case. And you might make it agony. But I will fight you for it and I will not go easy."

Her smile was suddenly radient. Without a hint of mocking or teasing. "Come then." She said and started to run towards me.

I ran to meet her. Not for any tactical reason. More because it seemed the right thing to do given the circumstances.

The distance closed far too quickly for my liking. There was no thought there. I planted my feet early and thrust towards her face. She brought her spear across to knock my blow aside before reversing her stroke with a blow over the top of my spear towards my head. I had to bend backwards so that the head of her spear passed over and in front of my face by a hair's breadth. Not just close enough for me to hear it's passing. Nor even close enough that I could feel the movement of the air as it went. But close enough that I could feel the heat of the metal.

One of the barbs even caught my cheek as I frantically turned away and hot wetness started to run down my face.

She continued the stroke round in a circle and brought it crashing down towards me in a vertical strike. I couldn't avoid it. I knew what I was supposed to do. You're supposed to spin away from it using the turn to bring your own weapon back into play. But the mud and whatever other factors that were going on meant that I did not have the mobility to try that.

Instead I lifted my spear up and blocked it. Holding the spear like my old quarterstaff she drove the spear in and that's where we froze. She didn't lift her spear for another strike. Nor did I have anything else to try.

Things occurred. If she was using a sword or an ordinary spear then I could let go with one hand and push the weapon away with my hand hitting the flat part of her spear.

But that wasn't what was happening here. Her spear was barbed so that any attempt of the kind on my part would result in my losing a hand.

I did think about tilting the staff to one side so that her blade would slide off. But again, that would result in my losing a hand and I didn't like, or want, that prospect. I rather thought I needed both of them. So I had nothing else to try.

But neither did she try anything else. She could have struck again or feinted to come back with a lunge. But she didn't. It rather seemed as though this was it. This was the moment where things came to a head. Her straining to bring her spear down on my head while I strained to keep the deadly spearhead away from me.

She stepped closer and tried to kick at me legs around the side of the knees to bring me down.

The blows hurt, but she didn't have the leverage to get me behind the leg to force the bend, nor properly on the side of the knee with enough force.

I retaliated, it only seemed fair but I might as well have been kicking a tree.

We both grunted with it. I was gasping for breath, lips curled with the effort of keeping that spear away from me.

She twisted her hips and kicked me in the side, driving the air from me but that only meant that she lost some of her strength in getting the spear down. So I grunted and just held on.

"Where is my sister?" I hissed. I didn't think I had the strength to question any more. Or why it came back now. I don't think I was really asking. I certainly didn't expect an answer. But the words were there and I couldn't help but ask.

She wasn't close enough for me to risk letting go and hitting her. Nor close enough for me to head-butt her. I tried kicking her again. There was little or no strength to it but I needed to try something. I needed to try...

The blows were weak. There was nothing to them really.

Her return blows finally landed on the one leg that I was still standing on and this time she got enough leverage and I was down on one knee.

The pressure was intense and she drove me down with her weight and strength. There were more kicks to my side but I was just so fixated on keeping that spear away from me that I didn't notice.

She tried to bring her knee up to strike my face and here was my risk. I finally let go of my spear, seized the leg as it rose and lifted. Her spear fell towards me but then the loss of balance robbed the blow of strength and it gouged into my naked back instead.

She staggered and I hurled myself at her, from my knees it wasn't much but I managed to grab her otherleg and lift with that too and finally, mercifully, she fell and I went for it, trying to get on top of her and bring my, supposedly, superior weight to bear.

But the mud and the water and the Flame knows what else conspired against me. Also the speed and skill of the woman. She came round my side and wrapped her arm round my throat in a stranglehold with her round against my back.

I tried not to think of the fact that she was naked and that I could feel her nakeness pressed against my back.

But she wasn't quite square to my back, the stranglehold was not quite tight enough and I got a hand underneath and inside the hold.

I bent and twisted and she came over my shoulder to land in front of me again. And again, I tried to fall on her to pin her, but as I fell, she punched me in the jaw and I fell back dazed.

She slithered on top of me. The muck and everything conspired to turn everything into slime. I was dazed from the blow. Not helped when she hit me again. I fell limp and shook my head trying to clear it.

Have you ever shaken your head after you have been knocked senseless. I have. It made me feel awful. She was on top of me now and I blinked up at her as she rose above me, the lightening and the flames all around her. She helf a hand to my throat and squeezed.

But something was different. During my daze she was no astride me, I was at her mercy and there was nothing I could do.

Then she rolled her hips and both of us gasped at the same time as I found myself inside her. She rolled her hips again and again before she leant down to kiss me, using her lips and her head to push me further down. I tried to push her off. Or at least, that was the intention but my body and instinct betrayed me.

I kissed her back and I lifted my hips to meet hers. As hard and as violently as I could given the earlier kicks to my legs.

She moaned with it and it occurred to me that the fight was still not over. My hands were free and I reached up to hold her hard body to mine and tried to roll on top so that I could take a bit more control. The part of me that was still conscious tried to think that I should get off her and get away.

But that was a small part of me now. I was instinct diluted to a simple form and I was still fighting for survival here.

Some of you may scoff at that and ridicule me. Enough people have ridiculed me for how scared I was of falling in love with Ariadne. When people called me less of a man for being afraid of her. Well I can't answer for that. But you weren't there. Inside that circle of fire with the thunder rolling and lightening flashing while this primal woman decided that she was going to have me. And the primal part of me decided that this was wrong, and that I should have her instead.

I tried to roll on top.

She accepted this for a moment and even seemed to enjoy it for a couple of heartbeats. But then she grinned at me. Not the smile that a lover shares with another lover in the throes of love. But the same smile that she had used while she was fighting. She wrapped her legs round my hips and lifted herself up towards me, wrapping one arm round me.

"You didn't think it would be that easy did you?" She hissed into my ear.

Now I was kneeling and she sat atop me. And I couldn't move as she licked my face.

I gave way and found myself lying prone again, my leg, the one that she had kicked, had twisted beneath me and the agony ripped through me along with the sheer physical pleasure of what else was happening.

It was not lovemaking. That suggests some kind of emotional connection between two people. There was none of that here. I don't know what it was. It was not pleasant and I hope to never experience that again. But there was pleasure there. Flame help me but there was pleasure.

I still fought. She was alternating between squating above me and kneeling above me. She held me down by the throat, batting my arms away when I tried to resist or exert some measure of control before she would hit me, leaving me dazed and unable to react.

Then, as she approached her end she took my right arm, held my wrist and jarred the side of my elbow, numbing the arm. Then she did the same with my other arm so that they hung limp. My legs were agony and were occasionally spasming, and I was dazed from the blows to the jaw and cheek. I tasted blood and I looked up into the face of the woman that was riding me to seek her own completion.

It never occurred to me that mine wouldn't come at the same time and I looked up at her. Primal, terrifying and beautiful in an otherworldly way. Covered in sweat, my blood, rain, mud and slime. Her hair matted with that same liquid that tossed about as she moved. The firelight and the flashes of thunder reflected in her eyes as she looked down at me. I no longer doubted that this woman was a Goddess. No longer doubted that she was a primal being of ancient power and she grinned as she saw that realisation in me. As she grinned, I knew that I had lost. I was beaten. Dominated, whatever you want to call it and I had lost.

And I was afraid. Then she leant back and howled. Before her entire body shuddered and went into some kind of spasm before she reared back again. She shrieked to the heavens and the thunder rolled one last time and I groaned through the pain as I joined her.

As she calmed, the thunder and the rain seemed to lessen and she looked down at me. She no longer seemed a Goddess, just a powerful woman. She climbed off me, still naked and left me there in the muc. I was in so much pain and I couldn't move with it. Pins and needles crept up my arms and legs as nerve-endings and circulation returned. I knew that I would need to straighten my legs and that they would possibly even need strapping up.

But I couldn't move. Exhaustion was in me now and all the pain that I seemed to have deferred from the cuts that she had given me, great and small, all came in at the same time. The rain was still falling, gently now it seemed and it felt like a cool bath on a hot day.

I groaned with it all and she laughed, not unkindly but certainly a little mockingly.

"Ah Freddie." She said. "Not bad. Entirely satisfactory even. Especially for your first time. I like your fiancee." She grinned and the first stirrings of guilt hit me in the chest. "If she wasn't who and what she was, I might even consider stealing you from her. But the two of you have enough struggles ahead of you I think. There is enough fight there to keep things interesting for many years to come."

I couldn't speak. After the blows to my jaw, my face felt thick and numb, rendering me unagle to speak. My brain was wrapped in wool and thought seemed impossible.

"Where is your sister?" She was looking around herself, visibly having an "Aha" moment when she found what she was looking for. Pulling her spear from the mulch where the water was steaming. "I have told you where your sister is. As is going to be a running theme for you until you open your damn eyes, you already know where your sister is. You either don't have the wit to see it, or you cannot bear to see it."

She was wiping the spear clean of muck in a puddle using a scrap of her dress.

"The first is inexcusable. The second is understandable and I wonder whether the veil will be torn from your eyes before the end comes."

She put the spear down and was braiding her long hair, rubbing ash and mud into the braid to keep it still and stiff. It was a huge braid, easily a handspan around and I dreaded to think what happened if you were struck by it while it flailed.

"Now." She scooped up her spear again. "So there is the truth for you." She told me as she looked down at me. "You know everything you need to know. And you have all the weapons you need. Now fight."

She reared back, aimed carefully and drove her spear towards my belly.

And Kerrass struck her in the side with his shoulder and the two went tumbling away from me.

I couldn't have moved. I lay there and I was left tired and numb and in pain. Sounds of combat drifted over to me from where I managed to pull myself round so that I could straighten my legs and heaved myself ino a position where I could watch Kerrass worship his Goddess.

It was crushing. Absolutely crushing and I felt myself curling into a ball as what remained of my character came back to me. As the rage and the arousal and the fear retreated into the corner of my mind that it normally lived, I was left with Self-realisation and Self-loathing. Those feelings would divide into sub-categories later but for now there were several realisations.

The first was a crushing blow that hammered me flat. It came in so hard that my mind and soul retreated from it so profoundly that my mind literally took the thought and locked it away behind a wall. It was just too big a thought. Too... awesome and terrifying.

I had betrayed Ariadne and I wanted to vomit.

But I wouldn't let myself think about that. It wasn't a choice, it never occurred to me that I would try and keep it from her. I just hadn't decided how I was going to deal with that yet but some instinctual part of me decided that I was not prepared to deal with the emotional and psychological damage that had been done there, and simply shut it down.

Then the next thought occurred as I watched Kerrass and the woman fight. It came to me in the echo of the previous realisation and left me gasping.

If this woman had wanted to kill me then she could have taken me any time that she wanted to. I still, even now, just think of her as "the woman" as none of her given names seem to fit in my head with what I saw and who I spoke to. I can't think of her as a, or "the", Goddess. Even though I can no longer deny that she is one.

Again, my mind shears off that thought process. The debate of her divinity can go either way and, I have no doubt, can be debated by wiser people than me in the months and years to come.

But I will not be taking part in those conversations.

But what had happened between us was not a fight. As I watched her and Kerrass fight it was clear that this woman was on another level.

I have seen Kerrass fight more times than I care to remember. I have seen him fight against his peers and those knights and warriors that "fancied a go". Men and women who have wanted to see how they would measure up against a Witcher's blade. I have seen him fight against those men and one woman that he considers his superior with the blade. All of them people trained at Kaer Morhen in swordsmanship. And numerous men and women that he has later admitted that, if he was having a bad day and they were having a good day, then he would lose.

But there was never a feeling of him being outclassed in those moments. His opponents, even the White Wolf himself, would often find themselves being forced onto the defensive when fighting Kerrass. Kerrass' sheer mobility and range of movement means that he can pull things out of his little bag of tricks that can surprise even the most skilled and self-possessed swordsman.

But he was outclassed here. I've never seen anything like it. I've never seen Kerrass struggle. Ever.

His face was a mask of concentration and determination. His teeth were gritted and he wore a slight frown and he fought as well as he ever had or ever could.

On the other hand, the woman, her long braid whipping about her head in the frenzy of movement, was laughing and smiling. I would even say that she was enjoying herself. She was not toying with Kerrass. You can always tell when that kind of thing is happening. But nor was she always pressing things home. Kerrass was fighting her but she was...

It took me a long time to see what was going on here. A long time as it was still taking time for my mind to return to a rational place of thought and logic. And I got to the realisation by elimination.

It was not a fight. I think Kerrass was fighting her. I think he was putting everything into it and knowing what I do about her and the way she thinks, he was probably doing so to avoid insulting her. But she was... She was not killing him. She would occasionally cut his clothing, the same as she had with mine although I noticed, only then, that Kerrass had taken his armour off. But it seemed more playful on her part. It was a sign of enjoyment. Just trying to remind Kerrass that she was still in the game and that he should take it seriously.

But they weren't playing either. This was not the meeting of two friends like I had seen with Kerrass and Letho at Kaer Morhen. Kerrass was deathly serious. Nor was it a play fight.

It was not a conversation. Some people have claimed that you learn more about each other during a fight than you ever would with hours worth of conversation. I have heard that before but it always struck me as a little strange. If the desire is to kill the other guy then why would you be getting to know them. And if the desire is to not kill them. Then why are you having a fight in the first place.

It was not a dance. I have heard this being said about fighting before where people argue that there is a rhythm to a fight. This can be true but mostly that can tend to be a gambit. Where one person is trying to lull the other person down a particular path. They are trying to draw them in before switching things up so that the other fighter can be taken off guard or taken by surprise. The only other way that someone would think that there was a rhythm to a fight is if you had only ever seen stage fighting.

Or rehearsed movements I suppose. The kind of thing that soldiers are taught when they are first being put into the battle line and they are learning the proper and described strokes of the blade, mace, pike or halberd that their unit is going to be fighting with in the coming battle.

But then it occurred to me what was happening here. Kerrass was worhsiping this woman. As a Goddess of battle, that was how you worship her. He was fighting her, trying to kill her and in doing so, he was never going to succeed as he was utterly outclassed. There was no way that he was going to win as she was far better than he was. But in doing so, he was worshiping her.

And she was accepting that worhsip and loving him for it as well. Their fight was not as... not as violent as mine was with her. Kerrass knew that he was not going to win here. He knew that she was the better fighter so there was no desire to dominate. No desire to get one over on her or to force her to divulge any kind of information.

Then it occurred to wonder whether or not he had saved my life when tackling her away from me when she was stood over me with the spear. Was she really going to kill me? There was no answer to that.

Feeling crept back into my limbs and with it, it brought an agony that I could not think about. Could not conceive about and as I watched the pair of them, I started to massage feeling back in. It took an enormous amount of effort but I managed to straighten my legs out. The agony increased briefly from the dull throbbing but then it started to lessen slowly. The prospect of any kind of further movement was... Ridiculous though and I didn't even bother trying.

Kerrass and the woman fought all the way round the ring of fire and as they did so, the fire grew but the thunder and the rain seemed to lessen. There was a red glow in the east now and I rather thought that dawn could not be a long way off.

Like me, Kerrass was forced to remove his shirt and I noticed that she stood back to let him do that.

Then they fought on. And now the fight had become something else. An edge of enjoyment had crept into Kerrass' face. He was no longer concentrating quite as hard and she began to laugh. It did not take nearly as long for me to realise what was happening now.

This was foreplay. Sure enough, as ths sun just started to come over the horizon. She did this thing with her spear that caused Kerrass' sword to spin out of his hands and fly a short distance to land on the ground. Then she stood back and looked at him. Kerrass was breathing hard and wringing his hand. Then she nodded, set her spear aside and threw her arms wide.

"Come to me Kerrass." She told him.

And he did.

I turned away then. I didn't want to watch that because, flame and Ariadne forgive me. I was jealous.

But I could not stop myself from hearing it. It went on a long time. There was laughter and lust and the sounds of physical exertion. And the sounds of two people in the throes of passion. Something that should be beautiful, became the sound of my failure and I tried desperately to block it out.

Gradually, mercifully it came to an end and I opened my eyes to find her looking down at me. Kerrass was a little way off, working to overcome his own exhaustion and small injuries. It would seem that no-one escapes worshipping this Goddess without some form of injury.

But she stood there, graceful, beautiful and flawless in her self. She was still naked and still beautiful but there was nothing arousing by the sight. Nothing erotic about it. She was also clean which surprised me, no mud, no blood or ash. Her long dark hair tied back in an easy pony-tail rather than loose as it had been when she fought me, or in the braid as it had been when she fought Kerrass.

She spent a bit of time looking down at me.

"I like you Freddie." She told me after considering a while. "I don't think that my worship is for you though so don't try it. I think it would kill you."

I tried to form words but I had no idea what to say and my swelling mouth prohibited too much communication. She turned away and put her fingers in her mouth and whistled, the same way a shepherd whistles to a sheep dog. Her horse leapt over the remnants of the flames in the early morning light and approached her. Contrary to what had happened earlier, it was saddled and had the bags on it's back also. From the saddle she first took a skin of water and cleaned the spear that she carried. It looked much more normal and simple than it had when I first saw it. There were still barbs but nothing that marked it out of the normal sphere of what makes up a spear in my head. Then she wrapped the head of the spear in a leather bag.

Then she drank some water and wiped her mouth on the back of her hand.

"But I like you." She said. "Don't get me wrong. I'm not going to give you anything more than I have already given you." She was rummaging around in her saddlebags and produced a clean pair of trousers that she pulled on followed by a larger length of cloth that she used to rebind her breasts. "You were, and have been, there for a man that is dear to me. My followers tend not to last long in this world and he has nearly died many times. But he has been stronger with you around him and that means a lot to me."

She pinned the straps in place before pulling out another black dress which she pulled on before strapping a belt around herself, tying various pouches onto the belt.

"But it is not in my nature to give you the answer to something without making you fight for it. You are a good man though and, despite everything and against my better judgement, I gave you everything you need to solve this and get to the bottom of it. But I don't think you will. And I am a little sad for it. Even though it will mean for a much greater battle at the end of things. Better for me, but worse for you. And much worse for him." She gestured along to where Kerrass was sat, head bowed.

"So," She climbed onto the horse, not bothering with boots which were tied to the saddle, she was clean but the floor was still covered with mud and that mud was smeared up her ankles. "I will remind you of the only piece of advice that I ever give anyone. You have all the weapons you need. Now Fight."

She gave a jaunty little wave.

"My regards to your intended." She called. "I like her too."

Then she was off. A quick gallop, another leap over the fire and then she was trotting her horse off towards the village of Brenna. I would later find out that she hired a bath house, bought a solid breakfast and rode off into the morning.

Shortly after she was gone, the rain stopped and it began to look like a beautiful morning. The weight of my betrayal began to grow in my head then and Ariadne's face seemed to hover in front of my vision. I started to imagine the hurt that she would feel and picture her face as it would crumple in pain at the knowledge.

As I say, The prospect of not telling her what had happened did not even occur. I started to wonder how I would tell her. What would I do. Should I write, should I talk through our link or should I wait until I saw her in person. I thought about how I was going to tell Emma and the other members of my family. I thought of Mark and wondered if this whole episode had endangered my soul.

I wanted to run and hide and bury my head in the sand. I wanted to run, over the sea to Ofier. Or over the mountains to Zerrikania. But I knew that sometime in the near future, there was a vampire who's heart I was about to break.

I began to weep. My own broken heart in pieces all around me.

Footsteps approached and I looked up at Kerrass. The side of my jaw was swollen to make speaking difficult. Kerrass just looked down at me, his expression unreadable.

"Flame Kerrass." I wailed. "Why did you bring me here?"

He looked down at me for a long time.

"Because you asked me to Freddie."

(A/N: Believe me when I say that there is some fallout coming. So don't come at me too hard just yet. This chapter was written with the help of some experienced with Feminism in Literature as well as the representation of Pagan Gods and Goddesses. So my thanks to her.)

(A/N: As a final note. The world seems like an awful, dangerous place at the moment. I don't want to give in to hysteria or add to any panic. But nor do I want to turn the current crisis into less than it is. All I will say is to wish you all luck and to ask you all to stay safe.

And as always, thank you for reading.)