Following the eclipse, Sypha immediately threw herself into the museum’s astrological wing in search of any historic links to eye-related-visions. She’d been relatively insulated from the other Summoned until days later, when she’d slumped unsuccessfully back to her boarding house.
The less said about everything encountered on that return trip, the better. Like many others, she’d attempted to isolate herself in the Horizon, only to be battered by disembodied visions of other lives, wave after wave, like the aftershocks of an earthquake. She can’t help but wonder, as she scrapes herself together enough to exit that meditative plane, if she was an epicenter herself. What rippled out from her?
It’s incidents like this where she almost hates her eidetic memory - all these pieces of other people’s lives, entirely without context, and Sypha unable to simply forget them.
She does her best to set them aside and focus on other matters, but occasionally something will trigger a sense-memory that doesn’t belong to her. One such hits as she re-enters the city after a full day of foraging for a type of grass needed for her inks (and safely letting off some steam among the dunes). A flash of entering a very different kind of curtain wall - taller, more imposing, dark blocks of granite instead of sandstone and brick. The gate worked well enough, but it was battered and much-mended, unlike Cadens’ gleaming bronze and wood structure. There’d been snow in the memory, too, fat flakes spinning through the air instead of glittering sand and dust.
She remembers the feeling of a child at her side, then dashing away into the keep. Sypha looks through the crowd, reflexively scanning for a head of pale hair—
—and, oddly enough, she finds one, though the person it belongs to is very much not a child. She stops, blinks, hears a gravely voice call “Ciri!” in the back of her skull, hears distant gleeful laughter, and blurts:
[closed] Geralt
The less said about everything encountered on that return trip, the better. Like many others, she’d attempted to isolate herself in the Horizon, only to be battered by disembodied visions of other lives, wave after wave, like the aftershocks of an earthquake. She can’t help but wonder, as she scrapes herself together enough to exit that meditative plane, if she was an epicenter herself. What rippled out from her?
It’s incidents like this where she almost hates her eidetic memory - all these pieces of other people’s lives, entirely without context, and Sypha unable to simply forget them.
She does her best to set them aside and focus on other matters, but occasionally something will trigger a sense-memory that doesn’t belong to her. One such hits as she re-enters the city after a full day of foraging for a type of grass needed for her inks (and safely letting off some steam among the dunes). A flash of entering a very different kind of curtain wall - taller, more imposing, dark blocks of granite instead of sandstone and brick. The gate worked well enough, but it was battered and much-mended, unlike Cadens’ gleaming bronze and wood structure. There’d been snow in the memory, too, fat flakes spinning through the air instead of glittering sand and dust.
She remembers the feeling of a child at her side, then dashing away into the keep. Sypha looks through the crowd, reflexively scanning for a head of pale hair—
—and, oddly enough, she finds one, though the person it belongs to is very much not a child. She stops, blinks, hears a gravely voice call “Ciri!” in the back of her skull, hears distant gleeful laughter, and blurts:
“Oh! You must be Ciri’s dad!”