The Exception
Exception noun
a case to which a rule does not apply
Yennefer considers herself proud. She has never once asked for help and very rarely has help offered to her. It is a badge of honor, to live as independently as she has. Never asking for help means she has never been weak. It means she has never gained anything that she hasn’t fought for herself. Everything that makes her who she is has been built up from ground dust into something powerful by her own hands.
There is no one controlling her. There is no one who can harm her. There is no one she would ever want help from.
However, sometimes, late at night, under stars and darkened skies when no one is around but the curling wisps of her own thoughts, Yennefer lets herself dream.
She dreams of The Exception.
The one person who she wouldn’t run from, would get close to without fear of intimacy. They would know her as well as she knows herself.
It is lonely, to be as determined as she is to remain independent and proud. Every connection she makes is thin and wavering, like a single thread of spider’s silk connecting them which could snap at any given moment. It is tenuous and anytime that thread moves to strengthen, she keeps it fragile.
Yennefer believes that she must have the ability to leave at any moment and escape any relationship. She never wants to be trapped again.
Still, everyday while she feels as if she is alive she doesn’t feel as though she is living. She is surviving, still reeling from a trauma she can’t name or place or heal from because where its title should be there is an echoing silence.
But The Exception. They would be able to name her trauma. They would be able to give this great beast inside her a name and chase it away. They would be able to hold her close and know when to let her go. They would understand her need to run, to leave and maybe, just maybe, they might run with her.
Yennefer doesn’t want help. She doesn’t want friends or a lover or any connections to this cursed plane. This is repeated like a mantra every time a village asks her to leave, every time she must curse someone to get her way, every time someone tries to get close and she leaves before the sun rises.
She tells herself she is satisfied with her life, with the empty gnawing inside of her, that once she searches for a way to remake everything that was stolen from her it will go away. But she knows it won’t. She knows she is tracing empty hopes as a way to distract from her inability to keep connections and her drive to always leave, to always run.
It is easier, she thinks, to be proud and never ask. If you never ask, you are never disappointed. She tells herself she wants for nothing but power.
Despite this.
She dreams.
Of The Exception.