#trial of the grasses
a potion that’s 1 shot of vinegar and 1 shot of mercury that instantly transforms you into a devoted taoist monk but only if it doesn’t kill you first
Rating: T
Pairing: Deglan & Vesemir, Vesemir & Lambert
Word Count: 4.3k
CW: Injuries, Trial of the Grasses
There was a particular smell to basements and cellars, any man-made space that had been clawed from the bowels of the earth. It was a dark, damp scent, part earthy and vibrant, part musty and decaying no matter who owned the thing nor how diligently they had it cleaned. It was the scent of a transitional space, a battlefield of sorts, where the millions of tiny creatures that churned and teemed away mindlessly to till the fertile soil met the inexorable vacuum of a sentient species’ necessity and power to control their environment. And, like all battlefields, they attracted death-eaters: mildew and mould, the vulture and crow of the microscopic world.
They always made Vesemir slightly uneasy, an instinctive biological response to the scent trigger that bypassed his conscious mind and went right for his gut. He had heard it said that smell was the sense most closely tied to memory, and Vesemir believed it. One deep breath in and he was back in the cellars of Kaer Morhen lying in a pool of his own bodily fluids amongst the dead, the dying and the ‘lucky’ few who were being painfully reborn, all the while desperately trying to focus all of his nascent super-human senses on the comparatively neutral background of the basement instead. But one severely injured and one unconscious witcher were easy pickings out in the open—he needed to actually sleep, not just meditate, and Kreve only knew if Deglan was even going to wake up—so he wrinkled his nose, bit back the bile rising in the back of his throat, shifted the dead weight of his not-quite-dead-yet mentor on his one good shoulder and descended the worn stairs.
