Ciri loves to travel through space and time. Yet, there is one thing she loves even more.
For the Tumblr February Ficlet Challenge, Prompt 8: Timeless & Sparkle
Timelessness envelopes her like a comforting cloak. The stars that flash past her as she makes the jump from one sphere to another, one timeline to the next, sparkle on the dark velvet of the endless universe. Where will she go today?
She has explored so many a world and still, there is so much out there to find, to see, to smell, to taste. Colours, scents, sounds, symphonies for the senses. Often similar to what she knows, and often so very different. Oceans of pink, viscous fluid with strange, translucent creatures drifting along in it. Planets with triple moons and as many suns. Sparkling rainbows across vast plains of purple grass alive with millions of tiny, yellow, chirping, six-legged fluffballs that look like no animal she has ever seen in her world, but so cute she could spend hours just gazing at them. And she can. For what is time to her, or space?
Nothing, really. She is the Lady of Space and Time. And there is so, so much more out there. A never-ending adventure, and she is right at the centre of it, free like a swallow in the sky.
Yet, is this what truly makes her happy?
No.
No swallow wishes to forever live in the vast and empty blue alone.
It is coming home to Corvo Bianco in the fairytale Duchy of Toussaint, to her family, filled to the brim with new stories to share and hungry for theirs, even if nothing much has happened in their world while she was gone. As in their world, not much time has passed since she left. A few hours or a day or two. She would not want to miss out on more of their lives. On Jaskier's new ballads, Geralt's adventures in wine-making, Yennefer's struggles to keep her granddaughter, Ciri's beautiful little baby-girl, from accidentally blowing up the world.
And then, there is her lover. Who would have thought she would ever miss the black knight of Cintra? But she does. And nowhere in the timeless, endless universe does she feel safer than in his arms.