#sor’ca

[nopekaat]

Geralt trying to be subtle in Baptism of fire 🔥

Spoiler : he is not.

The fact that’s an actual moment from the book made me go crazy, I love it hhh

Click for better quality :)

[hanzajesthanza]

the multilinguality of a lot of the witcher characters is something i love and also probably a feature resulting from sapkowski being a polyglot himself as well as creating a fantasy world that mimics the real one.

it’s a more obvious and crucial element in the hussite trilogy, but i think that it’s also significant in the witcher, too.

languages are not as simple as belonging to one people group. for instance, one can know one dialect of elder speech and be fluent in it, but struggle to communicate in another dialect.

there’s various dialects of elder speech, the first being the classical, the one spoken by elves. another one is nilfgaardian. another one is skellige jargon. another one is brokilonian… and there is an entire variant of elder speech used by mer-people and sea creatures, but it is sung, with one’s musicality, melody, and intonation affecting their accent.

and elder speech is needed for specific activities. if you cast spells? if you’re a human, you need to know classical elder speech, because the human way of casting spells requires incantations and hand gestures.

if that wasn’t enough, the concept of languages dying out and intermingling and evolving is also touched on.

for instance, the dwarvish language exists, but is quickly being forgotten as assimilation into human settlements becomes more and more common, and youngsters are reluctant to speak their own language

another example of time and the mixing of groups affecting the evolution of language is in the north case, a mountainous region in which nilfgaardian and northern tongues have been mixing for the past couple of decades due to imperialism and nilfgaardian expansion northward. and owing to this is an eruption of new slang using words from nilfgaardian has entered the local tongue.

(this part is just a headcanon:) there’s probably a lot of local languages and dialects, from regions the nilfgaardian empire consumed, that are various stages of dying because some places were conquered hundreds of years ago and some were conquered only a few decades ago

there’s even more obscure languages like the vampire language which is only known to us in a nauseatingly menacing, terror-inducing song and… an untranslatable pun.

what’s more is the curious use of latin words and phrases used as one mught use them today; for which, of course, the out-of-universe explanation is that sapkowski is addicted to using latin, but, in-universe is an ancient language with a similar role latin has in modern society being “translated” to our latin, just like the common tongue is being “translated” to polish.

and what i love the most about this is that this isn’t knowledge that lives in the background, not touching the lives of our characters. the characters’ abilities (or inabilities) to speak languages affects them in many ways throughout the story.

geralt speaks elder, but his brokilonian dialect is poor (at least during sword of destiny, in time of contempt he seems to have improved somewhat during his month-long stay)… and dandelion had to learn elder speech for his expedition to brokilon, to sing elaine ettariel and speak with the dryads, and you can see that he’s a beginner in the language.

milva gains multiple nicknames in elder from the elves owing to her service to them, not solely out of respect, but because her given name is hard to pronounce for them. and her present nickname, the one she should be proud of, is not of any of her attributes, but a familial title—sor’ca, sister.

another thing about milva is that she is illiterate, but at the same time, bilingual. one does not preclude the other!

cahir’s mother language is nilfgaardian, but speaks the northern common language because of his northern ancestry on his mother’s side. and in times of stress, his mind blanked on northern, as well as when he swore in nilfgaardian.

cahir can understand angoulême’s north case slang, as well as “translate” for the rest of the company, but they have probably run into confusion or frustration—“how did you get that from that?!”

and regis’ language is so obscure, he makes a joke in it to himself and no one else understands, but he still is clearly amused by it. and vampires seemingly also do not speak with their mouths, only using telepathy, so the acquisition of human language must have been a challenge for him. and i wonder how many human languages he’s learned only to later face their extinction. perhaps when he came back from the grave, the human language he had learned was now defunct, or rarely used?

[on-a-lucky-tide]

Ohh, you opened your prompts, what a treat! I love all of your Aiden/Lambert fics, funny or bittersweet, but especially the funny ones. So can I ask for some Aiden/Lambert "babysitting" teenage Ciri in canon verse, please? I leave the rating and everything else to you :p

A/N: Ciri spends some time with her favourite uncle and his half Aen Seidhe boyfriend, Aiden. Warnings: uh, a little bit of suggestive knife twiddling? But it all stays very tame; there are innocent eyes around, after all! Aiden’s not a monster.

“Deep breath, sor’ca,” Aiden said, nudging Ciri’s rear foot to broaden her stance. “You’re holding it again. You won’t hit anything if you pass out.” 

Ciri growled and dropped the arrow down. They had been working on archery for little over an hour but already she was craving a return to the backflips and pirouettes of morning footwork drills. It was a close summer afternoon, with a shimmer on the parched horizon. It was the kind of heat that one could smell in the sluggish water of the river and the wilting green of struggling plants. Only the light breeze that rustled through the leaves of the ash and beech trees took the edge off, whisking the beads of sweat from Ciri’s brow and cooling beneath her arms when she lifted the bow.

Lambert lounged not three metres away. Sprawled amongst the twisted roots of a downy birch tree, he picked idly at his fingernails with the blunted edge of a throwing knife as he watched Aiden instruct his niece on the fine and, if someone ever bothered to ask Lambert’s opinion, pointless art of archery.

Ciri drew the arrow back to her ear, took a breath and released the nock in the space of three seconds. The fine white fletching, crafted by Aiden’s very own hand, whistled into the distance. She’d missed the target by less than half a foot. “Gods dammit,” she scowled, gnawing on her inner cheek. “I did everything right.”

“You’re still holding on too tightly, staring at the target as if you can glare the arrow through it.” Aiden took the bow from her bone-white fingers to illustrate his point. She huffed indignantly but released her captive and watched as Aiden plucked an arrow from the soil by her feet. “Any hack can wield a sword and do damage without training, but a bow demands more respect. Observe.”

Lambert huffed a laugh as he uncurled to his feet, moving to stand next to Ciri to get a better vantage point from which to observe the lesson. 

Aiden continued, unperturbed by the insolent smirk on Lambert’s face as he imitated Aiden’s tart ‘observe’ with a splayed hand on his chest. “Your bow hand should have as little contact as possible, barely there, just a steadying presence,” Aiden spread his feet as he notched the arrow, drawing back to his eye, “then, relax your shoulders, focus on your breathing. You’ll loose on the outward breath, but don’t rush it. Count to five; one, two…”

Lambert exchanged a glance with Ciri. She pressed her lips together to quash her smirk and his eyes crinkling in the corners as his inner mischief took over. Flipping his knife over in one gloved hand, Lambert strolled behind Aiden – “three, four” – and leaned in to gasp a breathy whisper over the curve of one elegantly pointed ear. “Five.” 

The bowstring twanged and the arrow disappeared into the canopy. Lambert guffawed, delighted at the result of his most sultry purr, and Aiden glared. “You’re an asshole.”

“Yeah, I may be an asshole,” Lambert tilted his head, gaze travelling to the target, “but by the time she’s gone through your twenty-point checklist, she’ll be dead. Now a knife,” he waggled the blade in his hand, finger and thumb at the edge, “is quicker, cheaper and,” Lambert twisted, arm uncoiling like a coiled snake, and the knife hit the target with an audible ‘thunk’, “deadlier.” 

Ciri folded her arms and grinned, regarding the dagger embedded in the rotting bark of their target with an appraising eye. She had been won over by the simple inelegance of it. Aiden sighed, placing his bow down with a defeated air. “Dh’oine, always looking for the easy way out.”

“Efficient,” Lambert corrected, jutting his chin as Aiden stepped up to him. “Easy ain’t got nothin’ to do with it.” 

“Now, you say that,” Aiden moved with the swift athleticism for which his school was infamous and grabbed Lambert’s arm. His shoulder shoved into Lambert’s chest to throw him off balance and then, with one deft twist, Aiden lifted the wolf from the ground and over his back. Lambert had no time to react as his world turned upside down and then righted abruptly when his back hit the floor. Aiden flipped him over, twisting one arm up his back, and then primed a knife to his throat, “but most people who use knives are terribly inefficient.” 

Ciri placed her hands on her hips and smirked down at her uncle as he grimaced and scowled. “Dunno, Aiden,” she said. “He looks pretty done for.” 

“Just proved my point,” Lambert wheezed, arching away from the sharp edge that teased the line of his beard. “Slit my throat and I’m dead.” 

“People can survive a slit throat, sor’ca. Witcher I know has a second smile, from ear to ear. Can’t talk, but still plenty capable of cutting you to pieces,” Aiden said, releasing Lambert’s arm so that he could bury his fingers in ruffled brown hair and make him arch back just a little further. “Do you know how much strength it takes to cut deep enough? And what if your knife is a little blunt? Your target isn’t going to sit and wait for you to slice him up like stringy venison at the dinner table.” As Aiden spoke, he teased the edge of the blade against Lambert’s skin, listening to the wolf’s breath hitch as it nicked over the ball of his throat. Gloved fingers gripped at tufts of dry grass in search of purchase and Aiden heard the steel toes of Lambert’s boots scuff in the dirt behind him. 

“So, a knife’s actually worthless then, unless I can get a good run up?” She pouted, her brow furrowed. 

“Hm,” Aiden’s grip tightened in Lambert’s hair, “not quite.” Aiden drew back long enough to flip Lambert onto his back again. The wolf didn’t even try to fight to his feet and laid perfectly still as Aiden straddled his chest, knife spinning through his fingers. Ciri couldn’t smell what Aiden could. The mushroom broths made her stronger, faster, but they didn’t give her the sharper senses of a witcher. Lucky for Lambert, really; Aiden would keep his filthy little secret.

When the edge rasped through his red and grey speckled beard again, Lambert swallowed audibly, tilting his head back into the dirt so that Aiden could see the full curve of his throat. “You can cut below the ear, beneath the curve of the jaw,” Aiden murmured, watching as Lambert’s pupils swallowed his entire iris, leaving just a thin ring of sunstone yellow. “But a witcher worth his salt would have a vial of Swallow to hand. A human can fight you off, stay conscious just long enough to get help. There’s only one way to ensure a quick, clean kill.”

“How?” Ciri insisted, watching Lambert with wide eyes. 

“Place the knife here.” Aiden placed the tip of the blade at the hollow between Lambert’s clavicles, where his windpipe was exposed and vulnerable. The edge grazed Lambert’s skin, drawing a thin, white line of prickled skin, but no blood. Aiden’s control was absolute. Lambert swallowed again, the ripple of his throat pressing lightly against the point. “Tilt it up, just so, and then,” Aiden lifted his palm and drove it down with intent and blinding speed, but the heel of his hand stopped at the hilt before it connected. Ciri gasped, but Lambert stared at Aiden in mystified silence, his breath held. Aiden leaned in close, almost nose to nose, and whispered. “You force it through to the spine. Victim chokes on their own blood in seconds.” 

“Caen me a'baethe?” Lambert whispered hoarsely, offering a cocky, lopsided smirk that invited teeth and fire. Aiden’s lips parted, tongue pressing to the roof of his mouth as he fought to resist. There were young eyes present, after all. 

“Wait,” Ciri squinted at them and then stuck her tongue out in the exaggerated disgust only a young teenaged girl could manage. “Oh, ew, is this––are you flirting?”

Aiden sat up quickly, his cheeks flushing a vibrant claret. “No, teaching. This is––I was giving instruction––oof.” The Cat flailed as he was shoved in the chest and thrown to the side. Lambert rolled to his feet next, keeping his back angled towards Ciri as he hobbled awkwardly towards the treeline. Aiden huffed. “Where’re you going?”

“To make an offering to Freya,” Lambert called airily and disappeared completely into the trees. Aiden smirked at his retreating back before falling onto his own, hands tucked behind his head. The leafy canopies above swayed, casting dappled shadows over Aiden’s serene expression.

“They don’t worship Freya here,” Ciri mumbled. “It’s Melitele.” 

“Melitele won’t want anything to do with the offering Lambert has in mind,” Aiden teased, pinching her bicep playfully. She kicked him lightly in the thigh and then flopped inelegantly to bask in the sun with him, her head on his stomach. 

“Men are gross.”

“That they are, sor’ca, that they are.”

sor’ca = little sister

Caen me a'baethe? = give me a kiss

Freya is the Goddess of fertility, love and beauty; I’ll leave you to work out what kind of offering Lambert was going to make. 

Aiden is Aen Seidhe (or at least half). Inspired by the fact that the School of the Cat worked closely with the Aen Seidhe after they abandoned Stygga, swelling their ranks with strays, orphans and unwanted “halfbreeds”. 

Cool graphic sourced here.

[unfeeling-piers]

Request for sor’ca

[gayregis]

the current state of the hansa in netflix, post-s1

jaskier is fun and funky but they took away his ability to engage in solemn and serious circumstances and they prohibited geralt from interacting positively with him and removed jaskier’s ability to critique geralt in such a way that it takes away a lot of his weight in the narrative... this will be a very boring eventual trek to toussaint if geralt does not talk with him

since they fucked up the narrative concerning the elves and also brokilon they have NO WAY of introducing milva because her entire backstory hinges on both of these political situations... sor’ca......... also judging how they treated the dryads by giving them very little actual lines and nuance with regards to what they do because they must... doesn’t look good.

i’ll wait until season 2 to see how they adapt a grain of truth to see what their take is on vampires... it really doesn’t matter anyways, asides from aesthetics, because regis is such an incredible outlier... but judging from how poorly they have represented grey morality and advising/engaging in deep conversation with the white wolf his personality does not bode well.

cahir is dead

they’ve shown competence in making spunky young girl characters but i don’t know if they would want to discuss a backstory as real and violent as angoulême’s on screen... so she’s half and half right now. if they get to her before cancelling after the third season, as netflix does

[twojowniczka]

@midwinter-fox​

Hands clasped behind her back, Toruviel was standing only an inch away from the red haired elven woman, casting a highly critical eye at her as she analyzed the other. Judging from her worn clothes and bruised ear, the stranger had barely escaped execution, then again, is she really the only survivor? Was she actually the best among the unit? Toruviel looked away for a moment, trying to banish all her negative thoughts and speculations, turning her thoughts toward raw facts. 

In addition, she’d rather spit in her own face than to reject an elf in need - she knew only too well what it's like from the other side. The commander gave her a last, cold look before she nodded at the young one, gesturing her to follow her. If anything goes down, her men’d cut her down in just a blink of an eye, that adds a certain safety, after all.

“Come sor’ca; eat and drink first, let’s save the gruesome details for later.˝

[number63liveblogs]

Baptism of Fire: Chapter 1 part 3

‘The kings won’t get their hands on her now, for your Cirilla, it turns out, fled straight from Thanedd to Nilfgaard; probably with those treacherous mages.[“]

And now Geralt has bad info about where Ciri is. I mean, it could be a blessing in disguise, when Ciri hears about “her” being in Nilfgaard, about to marry the emperor she’ll know where to find Geralt. And if everyone who’s after Ciri sees that Geralt believes she’s there too they might also stop looking.

Apart from the people of Nilfgaard who know they have a fake Ciri, of course, but that’s still way fewer people than she had after her before.

‘Cead, Coinneach,’ she greeted the approaching commander.

‘Ceadmil, sor’ca.’

Okay, the thing is… The audiobook pronounced this the same way as the Finnish word for “mallard”. And for some reason I found it mildly hilarious, which in turn ruined the atmosphere for the scene.

I’m going south, she thought, and quickly. I have to warn that fool of a witcher, I have to warn him about what kind of a turmoil he’s getting himself into. I have to make him turn back.

She’s not going to be able to do that, Geralt thinks that his daughter’s future is on the line and something like an incoming war isn’t going to stop him. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it made him even more determined to go get “Ciri”, to get her out of danger. Of course she’s a valuable hostage and nowhere near any fighting, but again I wouldn’t be surprised if Geralt moved more base on feelings than logic.

[twojowniczka]

Because I can and temptation is a bitch 👌👌👌👌 from Elrenie too ♡♡

send me 👌 if your muse would bang mine

“And all this time, I took you for a shy girl! I must tell you, this is quite a surprise, sor’ca. I wish to know and see if you are truly as fiery and passionate as your hair.˝  Toruviel winked at her reassuringly and reached out to take her hand.