Author's note: I envision this being a four-part series. It will have some plot that goes beyond the usual smut.
----------------------
"Fucking Shani," Yennefer said as she plucked the reins of her horse. "Can you believe it?"
"No," Triss said slowly, "I cannot. I would have thought..."
She let the sentence hang in the air.
"Ploughing ginger slut," Yennefer said, her horse speeding up to a gallop. "Sorry," she added a moment later, casting an apologetic glance back at her friend.
It was indeed unbelievable: when forced to choose between the two of them, both accomplished and beautiful, Geralt had instead chosen the medic, a simple girl from the slums of Vizima who was as plain-looking as she was simple and naive.
"What does he see in her?" Triss wondered, not for the first time. She had long known men were not entirely comfortable with beauty and power, odd as that may sound. Though she had her fill of suitors, over time her magical powers and political influence made most men insecure and, when it came down to it, the vast majority of men preferred to couple with their inferiors, the sort of simple country girls who went wide-eyed at the sight of a witcher's sign.
She drew on the reins of her steed to catch up with Yennefer.
It had been a long time since Triss spent the afternoon on horseback and she found herself growing tired. Usually, there was little reason avoid using portals, Geralt's morbid paranoia about them notwithstanding; but portals could be detected and the two of them were eager to keep their movements hidden.
They conceived of this trip a week ago, shortly after Yennefer stumbled onto an unexpected find in the archives of the academy at Oxenfurt. The two of them were putting together a transportation spell, something powerful enough to send hundreds of refugees across the length of the Northern Realms; and, though it was likely to be a lost cause, Yennefer insisted on looking over the Elven section of the academy's archive of ancient manuscripts. The Aen Seidhe were said to have been masters of this sort of magic, capable of sending masses of people not only across vast distances but even between worlds.
But an afternoon in the musty basement of the academy revealed little of value. Elven manuscripts were full of information but it ranged from the trivial to the cryptic; not entirely unexpected, since Yennefer was hardly the first to examine them. As her eyes passed over page after page, she wove a thread of magic in the air, an old habit, something with no purpose besides giving her hands something to do. She was nearly ready to give up when she noticed one of the pages vibrating in tune with her magic.
Intrigued, she probed the parchment with scrying spells; before long, she discovered a note hidden magically within the margins. The ambient mana stored in the parchment must have been interfering with her idle spellwork. She spent a few minutes carefully peeling away the concealment spells layered upon the page before the letters began to appear one by one.
But the note itself turned out to be nonsensical, a seemingly random combination of letters and numbers. Written in code perhaps? Indeed it was: being schooled in the modern science of encryption, Yennefer had quickly figured out the simple letter transposition scheme which unscrambled the message.
Looking at what she had deciphered, she recognized an old dialect of Elven speech, dead for many hundreds of years. Not only was she ignorant of most of the words, even some of the roots were unfamiliar to her. She hesitated: was it really worth it to spend time translating it? But the thought of finding a hint of new magic, something unknown to the mages of the modern era, spurred her on; such things often brought great power to their discoverer. Availing herself of several linguistic tracts from the main wing of the library, it was some hours before she finally managed to make sense of the scribblings in the margin.
It turned out to be a terse set of directions. There were two sites in Skellige, each of which would contain an artifact, not described but presumably identifiable by its magical aura. These two artifacts would need to be brought together to a third location, where they would unlock a door within the "bowels of the earth," or so the note had said. The final words simply invited the reader to venture forth and prove himself worthy.
What was it all for? No explanation was given.
It was all very puzzling, but one hypothesis stood out, for the last location was near a sequence of inlets off the northern coast of Ard Skellig where the Diadem of Kovir was rumored to be lost. The diadem was supposed to be a power source, presented to the first king of Kovir by one of the dignitaries of the elder races, and it was said that the power within the diadem could amplify the casting strength of mage many times over; a magical apprentice on his first day had more spellpower with the aid of the diadem than the most experienced mage of the time. A number of generally reliable historical sources seemed to think of the diadem's existence as fact, though modern historians thought it more likely that the diadem was only a legend.
Assuming the stories were true: to have that much power would be....world-changing, Yennefer thought, it would be world-changing. Magic was infinitely powerful, but strong spells required much magical energy, limiting the spells that mages could cast. With that much power at her disposal...she would be able to murder Radovid or decimate the Nilfgaardian armies, as she chose, all with a single incantation.
Of course, it could all be a joke, a centuries-old prank played by some long-dead scholar on a gullible colleague.
Another thought occurred to her: she could search for the diadem alone, but what would happen if she failed, if, by some chance, she happened to perish along the way? Given the state of the world now -- the Nilfgaardian invasion, the slaughter of mages throughout the Northern Realms, the rise of the Church of the Eternal Fire -- the power in the diadem was too important, it needed to be used for good purpose regardless of whether she could be the one to use it.
She needed to share this knowledge with someone, someone she could trust. Someone who would aid her on her journey. She ran her mind over the possibilities and came up with only one name.
