In the seven months after the war, Finn was still in the lodge the Bat-King had given him.
For the most part, the kingdoms left him alone. He wasn't an important man by any measure, and there was no reason for anyone to come looking. Only The Titans stopped by occasionally. They'd been recruited by the kingdoms to keep the peace and seemed to treat his lodge as a waypoint whenever they passed through. As for Ciri, she was still in Amazonia. The messsages she'd sent implied she was enjoying herself.
Finn, meanwhile, had buried himself in experiments. He was running three of them. The first was figuring out how to harness the green ring without wearing it. The second was trying to activate the gateway inside the hextech crystal he carried, the property that would feed him infinite magical energy, and that one had ground to a halt early. The more he tampered with the crystal, the more he noticed something wrong in the ground near his workspace: patches where the surface had warped and pulled inward, distorted, like the material of the floor had started folding over itself in small ways that had no business being there. A benign corruption, as far as he could tell, but enough to make him stop. What he found in the process, though, was that the crystal could be made unstable, and that struck him as potentially useful down the line. As a form of last resort.
The ring work wasn't going well either. He'd enlisted Constantine's help, asked him to bring any books tied to the green ring and any magical languages that might let him rewrite the ring's rules from the outside. Constantine didn't do it for free. Finn paid in information, bits and pieces of his travels stretched into one conversation at a time. Eventually Constantine put together what Finn actually was. He didn't say anything about it after that, he just kept showing up with books and leaving with answers that he wanted. The arrangement stays transactional between them.
The ring's behavior kept pointing Finn toward one theory. From what he knew, it had been found inside a meteor by the Green Man, Lex Luthor, who was corrupted and became mad due to it, yet the white martian had used it as easily as any ordinary ring. That wasn't how a typical green lantern ring worked obviously, which made Finn suspect it wasn't one at all, even though it acts like it, or maybe just a different interpretation of it entirely. Martian origin was more likely by the day. J'onn J'onzz was gone, though, and without him Finn was left working through it alone, with no one who might have cracked it quickly.
The third experiment was less an experiment and more a test. The ice staff, Captain Cold's, ran entirely on the crystal at its tip. He needed to know whether the magic was in the crystal alone or if there were external threads running through the shaft of the staff, tied to something he couldn't carry to another world. He checked carefully and found nothing tethering it to the world around, which means there is no outside source feeding it. The crystal was the whole of it, and whatever was inside could call up something close to a blizzard without much effort. With that confirmed, he pulled the crystal free from the shaft and modified his own mechanical staff until the dimensions matched, set the crystal in, then spent time learning what movements and triggers would set it off.
After that there wasn't much else to say about the seven months. Finn had genuinely rested, which wasn't something he got these past few worlds. The worlds before this one had been chaotic enough that the peace felt strange at first, but the seven months had done him good overall.
After seven months, though, the quiet had worn through his patience. He'd grown restless.
He gathered everything into his bag, and when it was all accounted for he went outside and set the lodge on fire. The hextech corruption had only touched a small patch of ground near his workspace, but he wasn't willing to leave it behind to spread into something worse, if it will at all.
He was watching it burn when suddenly, Constantine arrived, with a book tucked under his arm.
Constantine took in the burning building and came over to where Finn was, saying nothing for a moment.
"So there's that, huh?" Constantine said. "You're leaving?"
Finn looked at him for a moment, before humming. "I've stayed for too long in this place. It's time to go."
"And what about this book?" Constantine held it out.
The book was about the language of Atlanteans. Finn took it and turned it over. "I don't think I need it anymore, but who knows?" He tucked it away into his bag. "So, what kind of questions do you want to be answered now?"
"Just one." Constantine pulled out his smoke pipe. "What do you think of this world?"
Finn laughed at the question. "A nice one. Why do you think I stayed for seven months here?"
Constantine puffed out a smoke. "So there are more bloody depressing worlds out there?"
"Many, probably." Finn hummed. He turned and patted Constantine's shoulder. "Anyway, I thank you for your help these past few months. I need to go now. I need to catch a ship."
"To where?" Constantine raised his brow.
Finn shrugged. "Amazonia."
—
Meanwhile, in Amazonia, Ciri was finishing a training session.
The Amazons had given her bracelets after the war, a gift of thanks for her part in it. Her trainer was a woman named Cassandra, and for the past months Ciri had been working through their weapons training under her. She was already more than capable with a sword, the Witchers had seen to that, but the Amazons had other things to teach her, and she'd learned.
When the session ended, Cassandra handed her a drink and settled beside her.
"How has Amazonia been treating you?" Cassandra asked.
Ciri wrapped her hand around the cup. "Fighting..." she said. "It is all I have ever known. My background has always been that… I am grateful to learn more from the ways of your people. And I have." She turned the bracelets over on her wrists. "They even gave me artifacts I am not certain I should have."
Cassandra shrugged. "The bracelets are given to any Amazon at fifteen. It is a given."
Ciri looked down. "...I am not going to stay here. I am to travel again. I have to."
"Why?" Cassandra asked.
Ciri shook her head. "I don't want to be a burden. There are things... that you should not have to deal with because of me."
Cassandra rolled her eyes. "Don't say vague things."
"I cannot say." Ciri paused. "I have to leave, sooner or later. I don't want to bring more pain to you all."
She picked up her sword and walked back toward the quarters Amazonia had given her.