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ok so i got kind of tipsy last night and reread much of Baptism of Fire and
so this Secondhand Summary of it is going pretty well actually.
I also went through and put in chapter breaks in the draft of Pearls so I
have some idea of when all this is coming.
but also oh man i have a bunch of editing to do before this. But. It’s
there, which is better than not being there.
The reread is reminding me that Cahir is just such a fucking nice dude.
He’s deferential, polite, quick on the uptake, holds his tongue, resists
provocation as much as he can while still adhering to his sense of honor,
leaps to defend everybody– he’s just so goddamned nice. He’s a Good Boy. How
the fuck do you get a sociopathic mass-murderer out of that source
material
anyway here is an actual snippet from the actual version of the story I’m
actually writing. (Dheran, canonically, is Cahir’s only surviving brother,
a few years older than him. The Seventh Daerlan is canonically the cavalry
unit that tangled with the Cintran unit that captured Dandelion and Geralt.
Clearly when he was naming things it never occurred to Sapko that those two
entities would ever be in the same paragraph, but like, dang bro.)
(Meanwhile Tarren is an OC I made up because Morvran really ought not to be
an only child: he is ten, and Morvran hasn’t seen him since he was three.
Fuck, his name is too similar to Dheran’s, out loud, isn’t it. Well I’ll
have to think about that won’t I.)
“The Fourth Cavalry took Fort Armeria sometime in… maybe it was that
October,” Morvran said, considering. “I think it was the Seventh Daerlan
Brigade specifically. Their device is a white scorpion.”
“I think they did have white scorpions, now you mention it,” Geralt said.
“Well– I wasn’t so concerned with the specifics.”
“Seventh Dheran?” asked the smaller boy, drowsy in his mother’s arms on the
floor.
Dheran laughed. “Daerlan, sweetheart.”
“Was it their attack that freed you?” Morvran guessed, and then realized to
his chagrin the good Vicovaran [liquor] had loosened his tongue and he was
interrupting.
Geralt didn’t seem offended, laughing; Ciri’s expression was harder to
read. Morvran made himself put his glass down rather than letting it be
refilled; he couldn’t let his guard down, not this far. “Ah,” Geralt said,
“their attack was singularly ill-timed, as far as I was concerned. No, in
the middle of the night, about a quarter of an hour before the Daerlan made
their move, our barber-surgeon appeared as if by magic in the shed they’d
locked us in, in the middle of the Nilfgaardian camp.”
“How did he do this,” Mawr demanded, entranced.
“Well,” Geralt said, “it’s a point of shame to me, as a professional
monster-hunter of no small experience, that before this moment I had never
put the pieces together. We discovered our barber-surgeon living next to an
ancient graveyard, collecting herbs so he said, including poisonous ones,
and just before our party was scattered by the attack we had all watched
him retrieve a white-hot horseshoe from some coals without burning his
hand, so I had belatedly begun to put together that perhaps he was not
precisely as he seemed. When he appeared from the darkness, having
magically put our guards into a deep sleep, it finally struck me that
perhaps, perhaps he was…”
“What was he?” Tarren demanded, almost falling off the settee again.
Morvran caught him and pulled him back with both arms, and Tarren, clearly
completely accustomed to this kind of physical affection, leaned against
his side, settling in almost just as he had when they’d last been together,
seven years ago. He’d been much smaller then, but so had Morvran.
“Well. He didn’t cast a shadow, and he could disappear at will, was
impervious to burning or freezing, and had powers of hypnosis,” Geralt said.
“A vampire,” Tarren breathed, reverent, and the others all looked at him.
“Yes,” Geralt said, more keenly, sitting forward a little. “A higher
vampire. You know aught of monsters, then?”
“I have a book,” Tarren said, suddenly shy under all this attention, and
burrowed himself backward into Morvran’s shoulder. It was all Morvran could
do not to weep at the familiarity of it, but he kept his expression as
neutrally polite as he could.
He knew what book it was, too. He’d read it too, as a child. It had been on
the shelf in his room, when he’d left his childhood behind.
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