#eskel witcher

Cursed picture from my sketchbook

"I know." Eskel held him close, strong hands laying on the man's lower back.

"Take it away, Esk." Please was left unsaid on his tongue. The sentence already dripping with experienced ache.

Eskel cast axii on him, like he did every night, and would continue to do until falling asleep didn't hurt.

Link to Masterlist here Summary: Eskel returns to the scene of the massacre to deal with the bodies. Along the way, he considers if he's gone too far. Word Count: ~2.5k Tags/T.W's: ESKEL ANGST (oh mama). Exposition heavy. Lots of brooding. Mentions of corpses and corpse burning. Brief mention of virginity.

Chapter 17: The Reason

Eskel watches you slumber, listening to the healthy, wet thud of your heart beating rhythmically in your chest. You’re exhausted, utterly spent, made clear by the lavender shadows beneath your closed eyes, and the even, deep breaths that fill your lungs. You nuzzle your cloak every now and then, pulling it closer to you, as if trying to draw some measure of comfort from the fabric. A soft sigh catches in your throat, your lids fluttering with dreams. Happy ones, he hopes. The line between your brows smooths out, a peacefulness settling over your still body the deeper you sink into unconsciousness.

You fell asleep in his arms.

He could have spent a small lifetime staring down at you, memorizing the sweep of your lashes, the constellation of freckles across your cheeks, the delicate pout of your lower lip. It’s been a long time since he’s been so close to someone, since he’s had the opportunity to appreciate the human form, to bask in the gentle light of such feminine beauty. It’s why he lingered, why he couldn’t stay his hand from tracing the alabaster symmetry of your flesh – or so he tells himself. Gentleness is such a rare thing. A moment of relaxation a luxury scarcely afforded. So he inhaled the sweet perfume of your skin, soaked in the body heat you radiated, revelled in the pressure of your weight against him. Something for later – when the rain soaks him to the bone, when his mind grows weary, when the taste of contentment is but a distant memory. He’ll always remember this.

Eventually, he maneuvered you back down to the floor, straightening your blood-stained cloak, and ensuring you rested on your uninjured side. You uttered a small groan of protest before falling soundly back to sleep. That was enough for him. He sat next to you for a long moment, resisting the urge to tuck a loose curl behind your ear.

Around your throat, an oddly shaped purple bruise blooms. From the clasp, he recognizes. One of the mercenaries choked you with it. This realization stokes the pyre of rage burning in his gut, but he quickly quells it. He can’t make them any more dead than they already are.

But he had ensured they suffered.

Eskel stands, picking his chest armour up from the worktable and slipping it over his shoulders. As he fastens the ties, his gaze roves over you. You’ll be asleep for hours yet. Plenty of time for him to return to the mercenary camp – to burn the bodies before the necrophages get to them. Sighing, he buckles his sword scabbards securely to his back, the familiar weight of them offering him some measure of calm.

When you first jumped through the portal, he allowed himself a second of stunned silence. His frustration was immense. He felt like a fool for thinking he could go any meaningful distance without being honest with you – that you weren’t clever enough to put the pieces together yourself. You called his bluff with unflinching accuracy, not backing down from his hesitant, uncomfortable answers. You wanted the truth and you weren’t going to stop until you got it.

Eskel stands in the pale morning light, the distant scent of ash on the wind. Wraith chuffs at him softly. Absently, he pats the gelding’s neck. He’ll make the journey back to the camp on foot. It’ll give him the opportunity to clear his mind. For now, he remains deeply trenched in his brooding.

You make him question his choices – something new for him. Supreme competency in his decision-making has been something of a fastidious quality about him for as long as he can remember. He weighs the pros, the cons, the extraneous variables, and then moves forward with whatever road makes sense at the time. He is unburdened by the curse of hindsight. A Witcher’s eye is always set on the horizon, on the rising sun, on the path ahead. Very rarely does he have to witness the wake of his destruction – to answer for past mistakes.

But you are certainly one of them.

If he had half your gall, he would have confessed the reason he hadn’t come back for you as child. That Dierdre had done such a number on his psyche that he simply couldn’t hold himself over those coals again – that he couldn’t take the risk. The fire still burned. His wounds, unlicked. He didn’t have the chance to put it all away into nice, neat little drawers, boxes in an apothecary table – and he may never find the time. It tears at his heart still, as vibrant and visible as the scars etching through his face. Impossible to ignore.

Especially now.

Eskel whacks at a low hanging branch, boots soundless in the soft earth. The scent of your blood still lingers – a sightless thread to lead him back to the camp.

He followed you through the portal after he’d ascertained everything worth taking was looted from laboratory. He knew he wouldn’t be back. The doorway dumped him in a nearby forest, not too far from where Wraith was casually grazing, awaiting the return of his master. Like now, your perfume hung heavy in the air, a pungent trail to follow. He looped back to the statue of Melitele and gathered his horse, patiently leading the Appaloosa through the forest, tracking your footsteps in the soil.

He arrived a moment too late.

He watched in horror as the compact throwing axe careened through the air before embedding itself in your shoulder – a streak of red hair in the dark before you collapsed. He watched the leader, the biggest of the pack, saunter over to your writhing form to callously reach down and rip the weapon from your body.

Then he heard you scream.

The rage blinded him. He had already killed three before he realized he had set the pasture ablaze. His hands and feet had a mind of their own as he hacked his way through the mercenaries, drawing as much blood as he could. His blade thirsted for their agony. His focus was singular. Get to you. He saved the worst for last, disembowelling the sellsword and planting a boot to his chest, kicking him over into the tall grass to watch him writhe. He gazed down at him with apathy as the whoreson attempted to gather his protruding intestines, veiny, fleshy-pink links slipping through his fingers, to no avail.

A small whimper to the Witcher’s left brought him back to his mind, back to the reason for his wrath.

You were soaked in blood. A mess of it, smeared by cruel hands all over your skin. The hem of your trousers ripped, the shoulder of your blouse askew. You were crawling, steadfast in your movements, fingers gripping the dirt, dragging yourself an inch at a time. He expected you to claw at him, to try to push him away, to bite him if you had to, as he attempted to lift you to safety. Instead, you immediately sagged in his arms, your tears slicing through the mud caked to your cheeks, revealing trails of pale skin beneath. You gazed up at him with relief, your emerald eyes brimming with it.

You reached for him with a tenderness he has never known. He can still feel the ghost of your touch, smearing a drop of blood across his jaw. Washing him clean. He has never been a religious man, never found solace in the divine, but in that moment, he felt forgiven. In a burning field of bodies, after bearing witness to his own barbarianism – however justified – you were gentle with him. Patient. You trusted him to carry you to safety, to stitch you together, to make you whole again.

“You came for me”. You had whispered the words, marvelled, wrapped in disbelief. As if you hadn't been cradled in his arms, pressed tight to his chest, his muscles twitching with the effort of not crushing you to him completely. As if he wouldn’t have crossed oceans of time to return to you, restless and unrelenting, until he knew you were safe once more. Afterall, he made a promise. To Agatha. To Fate.

To himself.

Eskel arrives at what remains of the camp, a short enough trek from the logging cabin. The flames have reduced the tall grass to ash, wispy smoke rising into the air as the breeze lifts the debris from the ground. He pauses to listen. No ghouls have been alerted by the scent of rotting flesh yet. There’s still time. To the west, the wagons laden with stolen loot remain unscathed. The Witcher imagines there might be something useful among the boxes and burlap sacks. He and the scavengers have more in common than he likes to dwell on.

He picks his way across the destruction. Water laps at the shores of a nearby pond, birds flapping near the reeds, a lone fox snuffling through the overgrowth at the edge of the clearing. Strewn about the ash and scorched earth are the half-charred, half-decomposing corpses of the merry band of mercenaries. He approaches the nearest carcass. Nudges it with his boot. The blackened flakes of his skin detach, carried by the wind, wafting towards the treeline.

Exhaling tiredly, he sets to work. Dragging the dead weight to a rough patch of rock and dirt, doubling back for the next body. He searches the clumps of wildflowers for an errant arm here, a castoff boot there. As he tramples down the surviving brambles and weeds in the pasture, gathering the evidence of his rampage, a stab of anguish slides through his gut at the notion you might feel differently about him in the morning light. That you’ll wake, the wound on your shoulder aching, and recall his brutality with horror and fear.

He would not blame you for it.

Once the pieces and parts of the mercenaries are stacked in a somewhat orderly pile, the Witcher steps back, surveying his handiwork. The blaze will have to be hot enough to burn the bones – otherwise the risk of wraiths and ghouls remains. He trudges over to the wagon, sifting through the crates, a hum catching in his throat. Producing several vials of simple alchemy oil, he uncorks them, tossing the caps into the grass as he walks. He douses the bodies, heavy-handed with the splashes of slick, fragrant liquid.

At a safe distance for the health of his eyebrows, he casts Igni, a powerful stream of flames erupting from his palms. He stumbles slightly, shocked by the force of his own magic. When he’s keyed-up like this, it grows wilder and more unpredictable. Something his brother Witchers don’t have to contend with – a fact that has always puzzled Vesemir. The best explanation the old man had to offer up was that there had to have been a mage somewhere in his bloodline. Eskel has always found bigger problems to occupy his time with than charting his lineage.

The fire laps at the alchemy oil and the fat from the bodies, heavy black smoke belching from the pyre. The stench of burning flesh wafts into the air. It’s an old, familiar scent. Idly, he brushes the tips of his fingers over the scar through his lip.

The bite of Deirdre’s blade cut deep. His death was not off the table. Lambert dragged him back to Vesemir, gripping him with the apprehension of someone on the cusp of loss. Eskel can’t recall thinking a single coherent thought at the time, too in shock to pay much attention to the blood blinding his right eye, soaking his armour, pattering to the ground below. What he did remember was Vesemir cauterizing the worst of it. An iron solder, glowing amber in the brazier, pressed to his skin to seal the wound, to staunch the flow. The agony permeated the layers of his being, touched the very core of him. He felt the sear of it there, the jagged, mishappen scar it left behind. A pain that one does not forget.

Eskel turns away from the flames. There are herbs growing at the riverbank – and he promised you a salve. He recognizes that the crackling of the pyre, the reek of death all around him – it drags him down to the depths of his memories. To the places he avoids. Makes him confuse the past for the present, for what is real in front of him, alive and warm, with the cold, soulless specters that haunt him.

You are not Deirdre. He knows this. You are kind, and thoughtful. Witty. Self-assured, though he guesses it’s an act half of the time. You’re courageous, pure of heart, brave enough to say what you feel, even when the odds are stacked against you. You aren’t afraid of pain, or grief, or sorrow. You seem to run towards it, where others would shy away. Like it’s something you have learned to expect. Something companionable. He knows there is more to you than what resides on the surface – a distractingly pleasant surface, he recognizes. A glimmer of mystery in your gemstone eyes.

A touch of innocence too, perhaps.

You do not recoil from him. There is no hint of revulsion on your fair features when your hand is in his. You don’t duck your head to hide from the scars on his face, the snarl in his voice, the steel glinting on his back – you meet his eye, as if the rest of him fades into the background. In his arms, your gaze lingered on his ruined mouth, an observation that did not go uncatalogued. Behind his panic, a flutter of longing. You have no idea what you could do to him. The damage. 

He revists what the herbalist had said. You are a maiden. A flower not yet bloomed. A white rose. Chaste and pure. It answers for your scarlet-flushed cheeks and fluttering lashes every time he stares a moment too long. Splinters and fragments from a bygone era in Eskel’s life, moonlit memories of black-haired vixens and purring strumpets. Decades have passed since a woman last tugged on her plump lower lip in his direction. They know better.

You do not.

His redemption lays in his ability to keep his promise – to fulfill his end of the bargain. To get you safely to Kaer Morhen, as the creed demands. This he also knows. Your paths will diverge there. His foolish, errant thoughts must be stowed away, kept safely in the recesses of his mind where they cannot see the light of day – so that you do not read into the yearning of his gaze, make it something more than it is. He must remind himself that you are his ward, that you must remain at a respectful distance, lest he fall victim to the piercing, blood-soaked kiss of yet another betrayal.  

Not again.