Continuing their journey, they passed through a door after a few hours of searching. They arrived in a frozen world. The frozen world lasted half a day. The volcano world after that lasted less, both of them moving fast through the heat without stopping to appreciate anything. There were three more after that, strange ones, a world where the sky was green and the grass was black, a world that was nothing but flat white stone in every direction, a world where something large moved in the fog far away and neither of them mentioned it. They kept moving through each one, following the compass from door to door without much conversation.
Then they came to a world full of pine trees.
The portal closed behind them and Finn took in the surroundings. Tall pines in every direction, the ground covered in a carpet of fallen needles, the air cold. Birds somewhere above them. The light coming through the canopy was grey, afternoon heading toward evening.
"A lived-in world?" Ciri said beside him.
"Maybe." He turned slowly, taking in the treeline. "Could be a world in its early stages. Could be lived in. Hard to tell yet."
Ciri pushed a branch aside and moved through the trees a little, scanning the ground. "There's a road."
Finn followed her.
She was right. A dirt road cut through the forest, two ruts worn deep into the earth by cart wheels, the ground between them packed hard by years of foot traffic. Whoever made it had been using it consistently for a long time.
"Civilization somewhere," Finn said. He crouched and pressed two fingers into one of the ruts. The edges were still defined. Recent use. "Not far either."
Ciri crossed her arms against the cold. "We should find somewhere to rest for the night. Resupply if we can. Then figure out where we are."
Finn hummed in agreement and they followed the road.
They walked for a few hours. The pine trees ran on in every direction without much variation, the undergrowth occasionally rustling with something that never showed itself. The road curved twice and straightened out again and still there was no settlement, no smoke, no noise of people.
Then they found the caravan.
It was spread across the road in pieces. Three carts, all stopped at odd angles, one of them tipped onto its side. The horses were gone, either fled or taken. The cargo had been pulled out and gone through, crates broken open, sacks cut and emptied. The escorts were on the ground around it, five of them, and none of them had died of anything comfortable.
Finn crouched beside the nearest one.
Arrows, several of them, the shafts crude and roughly fletched. Axe wounds on top of that, the kind made by something not particularly refined. Whatever had hit this caravan had hit it without warning and hadn't been interested in leaving witnesses.
He looked at the armor on the escorts.
It was plate, but not the kind he'd seen in Westeros or Ciri's world. The shapes and styles of it were different, probably similar to that of an armor of the renaissance era, more advanced in some ways and oddly behind in others. He turned one of the pauldrons over with his foot. There was a mark on it, stamped into the metal, a crest he almost didn't register consciously before his brain caught up.
He knew that crest.
He straightened and looked at the side of the nearest cart. The caravan's owner had painted their sigil on it, faded but readable. An imperial crest. The double headed eagle of the Empire of the Old World.
Finn stood very still for a moment.
Then he saw the signpost at the edge of the road, half hidden by a low branch. He walked to it and pushed the branch aside.
Ubersreik. With an arrow pointing down the road.
"Oh hell no," Finn said.
Ciri was checking one of the broken crates a few paces away. "What?"
"We need to find a portal." He was already turning, pulling the compass off his wrist to check it properly. "We need to leave this world. As quickly as possible."
"What's wrong with it?"
"Everything." He found the needle and started tracking its direction. "Pick a problem. There are several hundred."
Ciri left the crate and came to him. "What kind of problems?"
"The end of the world kind." He kept walking, following the needle into the treeline. "I don't know exactly when, but it's coming, and I don't want to be here when it does. And that's before you factor in everything else that lives here."
"Everything else?"
"Things that make the Wild Hunt look manageable." He pushed through a low branch. "Trust me on this one."
Ciri didn't follow immediately. He heard her footsteps stop behind him.
"Now I'm curious," she said.
Finn turned around. "Don't be."
"You're scared of this world." She said, interested. "I've never seen you scared of a world."
"I'm not scared, I'm sensible. There's a difference."
"You said the Wild Hunt is child's play compared to whatever lives here."
"I did say that, yes, because it's accurate."
She crossed her arms. "Now I'm very curious."
"Ciri." He pointed at the trees around them. "This world has things in it that have been killing everything they encounter since before recorded history. It has diseases that turn people inside out. It has corruption that rewrites what you are at a fundamental level. It has gods that are actively malicious and present and paying attention." He paused. "You'll be curious for a day. The day after that something will eat you and that'll be the end of it."
She went quiet, the curiosity on her face faltering.
"We could just teleport if something happens," she said.
Finn laughed, there was no humor in it. "You think you'd have time to teleport before something in this world killed you?"
Ciri frowned, working it over, the confidence behind her curiosity visibly thinning.
"I am vetoing this," Finn said. "Formally. We are leaving this world right now and we are not staying to see what's around the next corner."
"What in the hells does 'veto' mean—"
"Don't worry about it." He reached back, grabbed her wrist, and started pulling her through the trees in the direction the compass was pointing. "I have been travelling between worlds for four years and I have never once run from a world as fast as I am about to run from this one. That should tell you something."
Ciri stumbled over a root but didn't pull her wrist free. "Fine. But you're telling me about it later."
"Later," Finn agreed. "When we are in a different world. Several worlds away, ideally. The evil of this world most definitely can cross worlds."
He kept moving, compass in one hand and Ciri's wrist in the other, the pine forest dark around them and the road with its dead caravan somewhere behind them, and he did not slow down until the treeline thinned ahead and he found another portal that could take them away from this world.