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Ciri hauls herself up another few feet and pauses to fumble for her next handhold, digging her fingertips into the crack in the rock and grinning to herself when her toes find a small protrusion. Some of her coworkers hate this part of the job, so Ciri always volunteers to take it. She likes rock-climbing - likes putting herself to the test, pitting herself against uncaring nature and standing triumphant at the peak.
The added danger of being in griffin territory just adds a certain thrill, honestly. Though she can understand why her coworkers don’t find it quite as exhilarating. They have to rely on griffin-repellant noisemakers and the fact that the griffins who live in the park have long since learned that fish and deer are much tastier than humans, while Ciri has a few extra tricks in her bag.
One of those tricks is waiting at the top of the cliff as she swings herself up over the lip. He’s sitting on a boulder, leaning back on his hands and watching a hawk wheel far above them. Ciri slumps down next to the boulder and leans against it, unslinging a water bottle and taking a deep drink. “Did I keep you waiting long?”
“Not long,” Geralt replies, tugging gently on her braid. “Came up the east side, found a couple of patches of that moss you folks are keeping track of.”
“Oh, nice,” Ciri says, making a mental note. The moss in question is endangered, and as far as Ciri knows there weren’t any patches on the eastern face of this cliff the last time anyone checked, so Geralt having found some is rather exciting.
“Mm. Are we just counting eggs today?”
“Nope.” Ciri grins up at her Father of Surprise. “We get to wrestle baby griffins!”
Geralt snorts. Ciri always signs up to ear-tag the baby griffins, because she can do it without capturing and sedating and generally traumatizing the little murderous fluffballs. None of her coworkers understand how she does it, and Ciri doesn’t ever explain - a mysterious smile and ‘Animals just like me’ is far simpler than actually admitting that she’s a sorceress and her adoptive father is a near-mythical monster-hunter with minor mind control abilities.
Back when Ciri was young, she would never have dreamed of using Axii to make a griffin chick hold still long enough to have a tag put on its ear, but then, when Ciri was young, griffins weren’t an endangered species. More an endangering species. But that was then and this is now, and now griffins are mostly confined to wildlife preserves like this one, and witchers are considered stories for children, and Ciri spends far less of her time fighting for her life than she used to. Which is a pleasant change, all things considered.
“Lambert said he’d like some shed feathers, if we can get ‘em,” Geralt says.
Ciri shrugs. “Can do.” Griffin feathers are extremely illegal to collect or transport, but Ciri, like the witchers who raised her, has a rather loose relationship with the law. And it isn’t as though Lambert is going to be making hats with them, or selling them on the black market, or anything unsavory - well, unless you consider refining potions to be unsavory. Which, well, they usually do taste terrible, but that’s a different sort of problem.
“Alright then,” Geralt says, and pushes himself to his feet, wincing a little as one of his knees creaks. Ciri hops upright, nudging their shoulders together without any force. Geralt is still a witcher, but she knows his old injuries pain him. Less so when it’s warm, though, so basking in the sun while he waited for her was probably good for him.
They make their way along the cliff, edging past scraggly trees and scrambling over boulders, until they’re directly above the griffin nest. The parent griffins have already headed out for their morning hunt, which is absolutely intentional on Ciri’s part - holding Axii on an adult griffin while messing with its chicks is not an easy task, and having to teleport away and come back later would be very annoying.
She helps Geralt belay down onto the ledge that holds the nest; the griffin chicks make interested noises, little clicks and hisses, but don’t squawk in fear. They don’t know that humans are anything to fear. Ciri teleports neatly down next to Geralt - climbing is fun, but right now they need to be efficient rather than indulgent - and fishes a tracker tag out of her pocket. There are four chicks, a good size for a clutch, and they all look healthy and alert. None of them are substantially larger or smaller than the others, either. The adult griffins whose nest this is - officially M19503 and F16427, although Ciri and her coworkers usually refer to them as Halftail and Angel, because the male got the tip of his tail bitten off in a dominance fight years ago and the female has astonishingly pale wings - are good parents; this will be their eighth clutch together, and they don’t usually lose more than one chick at most before fledging.
Geralt casts Axii on the nearest chick, and Ciri scoops it neatly out of the nest, flipping it over onto its back and crouching down so she can cradle it on her lap while she works. The other three hiss and click a little more, but since their nestmate isn’t making any distress noises, don’t start making a true clamor. She checks the little griffin’s sex - male, apparently - and clips the ear-tag on with the ease and speed of long practice, and deposits little M20356 back into the nest. “Next,” she tells Geralt, already reaching for the next curious chick.
“Draw,” Geralt says, and Ciri shoots to her feet, whirling to face the sky.
The creature arrowing down out of the clouds is not either of the parent griffins. Ciri would prefer that. It’s a forktail - there aren’t supposed to be any forktails in this preserve! - and it is clearly after the chicks, and Geralt and Ciri for dessert if it can get them.
A narrow ledge, next to a nest of griffin chicks, is a terrible place for a battle. The easiest and safest thing for Ciri to do would be to grab Geralt and teleport them both to safety, and let nature take its course.
But this is Ciri’s wildlife preserve, and these are her griffin chicks, and she’s never been good at giving in without a fight.
She has a sword, of course. She keeps it in the spelled bag Yennefer made for her years ago, that looks like it can hold a coin purse at most and is actually large enough on the inside that Ciri could probably fit most of her worldly goods into it. She draws it out, stepping up to Geralt’s side, both of them between the griffin nest and the diving forktail.
Geralt meets the forktail’s dive with a focused blast of Aard, which knocks it sideways in the air and ruins its momentum; Ciri waits until it reorients itself to teleport atop it for a split second, sword swinging down to cut through the taut wing membrane. She’s learned from experience that she doesn’t have the strength to actually behead a forktail in one of these lightning-quick hops, but she can sure make its life more difficult. She lands on the cliff beside Geralt again as the forktail goes into an inelegant sideways swoop, one wing failing to catch the air.
It’ll reorient itself in a moment, Ciri knows - forktails often gain wing injuries in fights with other forktails or their prey, and the successful ones learn to deal with it long enough for the wing membrane to heal - but it doesn’t get the chance.
Halftail hits the forktail’s head in a gorgeous diving strike, his claws fisted so he won’t bind to it, and as he rows his wings to get up and away, Angel comes in just as fast. The forktail might have stood up to one full-strength strike; it cannot manage two, not with an injured wing to boot. Its wings crumple, and it plummets, clearly unconscious. Halftail follows it down, screeching victory.
If it survives contact with the ground, it won’t survive the angry griffin, Ciri is quite sure.
Of course, that leaves the question of whether she and Geralt are going to survive the other angry griffin.
Angel comes sweeping around to land beside her nest, and Ciri and Geralt back up, Ciri reaching out to grab Geralt’s arm so if she needs to teleport them away, she can do it without any hesitation. They both lower their swords, though neither sheaths them - there’s showing willingness to be friendly and then there’s outright insanity, after all.
Angel eyes them warily, eyes gleaming with battle-rage and protective fury, then apparently decides they’re not going to attack at once. She ducks her head and looks over her chicks, nudging each of them, and takes an extra long moment with M20356, clicking the very tip of her beak against his ear-tag. Ciri winces a little. If she bites the tag off, that might mean she’s going to remove any ear-tags from her chicks, and tagging adolescent griffins is a lot harder. They’re squirmy, and Axii doesn’t take as well.
But Angel doesn’t bite the ear-tag off. She nuzzles all of her chicks and then she sits back on her haunches, curling her long tail around her paws, and gives Ciri and Geralt what Ciri would swear is an expectant look, and clacks her beak.
Ciri looks at Geralt. Geralt looks as baffled as Ciri feels.
Angel hisses softly and leans down to nudge one of the other three chicks closer to the side of the nest. Closer to Ciri and Geralt.
Very, very warily, Ciri puts her sword away, seeing Geralt do the same out of the corner of her eye. She takes another ear-tag out of her pocket. And despite every instinct screaming that this is a terrible idea, she moves slowly and carefully to the side of the nest, under Angel’s watchful gaze.
Geralt casts Axii very, very gently. Ciri doesn’t dare pick the chick up, but she rolls it gently onto its side - oh, a female, nice - and puts the ear-tag on with smooth, slow movements. Geralt lets the Axii up, and the chick bounces over to its nestmates with a cheerful chirp.
Angel nudges the next one over to Ciri.
Ciri is never going to be able to tell her coworkers about this, because none of them are ever going to believe that one of the griffins helped her tag the chicks. But she tags the last two chicks carefully - both female, that’ll please the people who track griffin genetics - and then gets up and backs away until she and Geralt are standing as far away from the nest as possible given the size of the ledge.
Angel heaves a great sigh and flops down into the nest, curling around her chicks and nuzzling at them as they clamber over her with excited squeaks and chirps, and clearly puts Ciri and Geralt entirely out of her mind.
Ciri takes Geralt’s hand and teleports them all the way back to where she met him this morning.
They stand there in silence for a few moments, and then Geralt says, “Huh. Gonna have to tell Eskel his theories about griffin intelligence might have some merit.”
Ciri snorts. “Fuck, I forgot to grab some feathers for Uncle Lambert.”
“I think he’ll forgive us when he hears about this,” Geralt says dryly. “Fuck, I need a drink.”
“Yeah,” Ciri agrees, shaking herself vigorously to try to shed some of the jitteriness of a too-brief fight and a nerve-wracking half an hour’s work under a griffin’s gaze. “Yeah, a drink sounds good. I’ll go report in, and meet you in town?”
Geralt grins. “At the Griffin’s Rest,” he suggests, naming one of the better pubs in the nearest town.
Ciri whacks him gently on the arm. “At the Griffin’s Rest,” she agrees, and takes Geralt’s hand to teleport them down.