Though conversation with the White Wolf flowed easily, Will never lost sight of the two figures lingering a few paces back.
Both were uniquely significant to Geralt: one his Child of Surprise, the other his fiercely possessive companion.
Geralt extended his calloused palm first.
As their fingers closed, a warm, surging wave of life essence poured across the contact, lightening the witcher’s stride like a fresh breeze.
Old battle aches and the deep fatigue of days on the trail melted away in heartbeats.
A rare spark of wonder crossed the mutated hunter’s face.
“Quite a gift. The goddess granted you this?”
Had such vitality been brewable in an alchemical phial, a witcher’s endurance during long contracts would climb tenfold.
Will offered only an easy smile, stepping past Geralt to clasp palms in turn with the other two travelers, letting the same calm warmth circulate through their grips.
Ciri’s jaw went slack in plain astonishment.
The stiff knots in her shoulders from long hours of posture drills dissolved instantly, and the chaotic prickle behind her breastbone calmed into quiet embers.
Yennefer followed the alien conduit with practiced focus, though she withdrew her fingers after several seconds.
The power bore no kinship to the four elements of Chaos; it was a phenomenon that demanded separate, rigorous study.
“Will, how were you sitting in the middle of those flames without a mark on you?”
Curiosity bubbled over in Ciri’s voice, heedless of ceremony.
She was barely fifteen winters old, her cheeks still soft with youthful roundness, before the sharp, sculpted beauty of her maturity had fully set.
“I felt no elemental Chaos radiating from the coals,” she pressed.
“Is that Melitele’s work too?”
“Ciri. Mind your manners; do not pry into another man’s craft,” Geralt admonished, his voice turning low and stern.
Will smothered an amused smirk.
The White Wolf had slid into the role of a protective father without even noticing.
“No harm done. In truth, it is just a matter of seasoning the hide, like this.”
Will reached into his shoulder satchel, drew out three blackened ghoul talons, and drove them cleanly into the meat of his left forearm.
“Gods above, boy! Have you lost your mind?!”
Geralt lunged forward, though he was half a beat too late to catch the youth’s wrist.
Why did the lad treat his own flesh like scrap leather?
A necrophage scratch was foul business; Geralt had taken venomous lacerations only weeks prior and knew the bitter burn of the fever.
“Steady, Geralt. Look closer.”
Will lifted his arm into the lantern light.
Beneath the punctures, pale tissue flexed and knitted, forcing the keratin spikes back out through the skin with crisp clicks until they dropped into the mud.
The three wanderers closed in to inspect the forearm.
Not a scratch remained, the surface smooth and pale.
“You would make an exceptional research assistant for an archmage, Will,” Yennefer observed, her violet eyes narrowing with clinical interest.
“Have you ever considered entering an academy?”
An assistant?
She meant a walking pincushion for vivisection.
One did not look for gentle sentiment in a practitioner of the Art.
Yennefer had crawled through the cutthroat cruelty of Aretuza; that she had emerged without turning into a sadistic monster was something of a miracle in itself.
Geralt stepped between them, an uncomfortable grimace twitching at the corner of his scarred lip.
“Drop it, Yenna. The boy had a grim time of it before he woke at the altar.”
“Think nothing of it,” Will said with a casual flick of his wrist.
“I was an alchemist’s lab rat before I hit five winters. Nothing new under the sun.”
After all, those years had belonged to the original soul of this shell, not the mind standing here.
A faint shadow of regret crossed Yennefer’s proud features.
She dipped her chin in apology, then turned a sharp finger straight at Geralt’s nose.
“And you, Geralt! Why keep quiet about this? You always swallow half the story until it suits you.”
“A thousand apologies, madam,” Geralt muttered, raising his palms in surrender.
Seeing the storm brew, Will backed away with quiet grace.
Getting tangled between those two was a quick path to a migraine.
He caught his gelding by the bit and led it over to Ciri, offering the stirrup with an exaggerated bow.
Flustered, the girl placed her slender hand into his palm, using his firm lift to swing cleanly into the saddle.
As skin brushed skin, the ancient bloodline dormant in her veins stirred with a faint, resonant hum, catching the foreign pulse resting within him.
Will took the lead rein, guiding the mount northward toward Ellander, discreetly pulsing Life Drain along the hedgerows to sweep up field mice and beetles as they walked.
Watching his back, Yennefer bent her will, sending a telepathic whisper brushing against Geralt’s thoughts.
I cannot read a flicker of his thoughts.
If he truly carries the favor of the Great Mother as you claim, coupled with that uncanny vigor, he should pose no threat to the girl.
Geralt offered a barely perceptible nod, waving for her to pick up the pace.
Walking beside the stirrup, Will’s mind turned over possibilities.
Geralt was far more approachable than common rumors suggested.
If the opportunity arose, he might convince the witcher to help him locate the mutagenic formulas for the Trial of the Grasses, using alchemical decoctions to force his dormant magical conduits open.
The grand schools of monster slayers had withered over the previous century.
Egged on by venomous tracts and instigators in high places, hysterical mobs led by rogue sorcerers had laid siege to the keeps, putting the brotherhood to the sword.
Only a handful of witchers abroad on contracts had survived the slaughter.
The School of the Wolf had clung to stubborn neutrality, avoiding court intrigues, yet nearly sixty master witchers had bled out on the stones of Kaer Morhen during the sack.
The trial itself was butchery.
Young apprentices endured years of brutal conditioning before being strapped to the table for the decoctions, weathering seven days of agony where seven out of ten boys perished. Follow the newest chapters on novelping.com.
Kaer Morhen’s manuscripts held the highest survival rate at roughly thirty percent; other schools saw fewer than one in ten walk away alive.
Yet the rewards are staggering, Will reflected.
To an ordinary man, it was a lethal gamble for superhuman attributes: centuries of lifespan, sensory sharpness that pierced the dark, monstrous stamina, and access to the magical spectrum.
Lost in calculation, he led the company into a quiet clearing bordered by ancient stones.
It was an defensible spot, clear of briars, where dry kindling lay thick beneath the brush.
Geralt gathered several pine boughs, snapped his right wrist, and traced a sharp triangular glyph in the chill air.
Igni.
A concentrated spark of Chaos detonated from his fingertips, blooming into a tidy tongue of fire that caught the dry needles with a crisp snap.
Will watched the flames take hold with quiet envy.
His plan hinged on using mutated organs to establish a magical bridge.
That was precisely how witchers without a natural conduit managed to cast Signs in the field.
Alchemically altered glands gathered and concentrated ambient Chaos from the surroundings, allowing the caster to shape quick combat spells with a single gesture of the off hand.
To high sorceresses like Yennefer, Signs were mere cantrips, parlor tricks for unruly children, yet in the thick of a monster den, their efficiency was lethal.
His thoughts drifted back to the suffocating vat, and he turned toward the fire.
“Yennefer, if an archmage were setting up a delicate experiment, would a subject lacking a natural magic source hold any value?”
The sorceress shook her head without a moment’s pause.
“I do not experiment on children. Furthermore, a natural magic source is the rarest gift on this earth; squandering it on crude mutagens is unconscionable. Any scholar with sense would cultivate the child into an archmage.”
Her violet eyes cut toward Geralt.
“Carving up boys sounds more like the trade of mutant hunters.”
“Slander,” Geralt grunted around his dry rations, unbothered.
In truth, common folk often confused cause and effect.
Ancient witchers had taken in foundlings, unwanted bastards, and Children of Surprise to replenish their ranks, breeding ugly rumors that they raided peasant hamlets to snatch babes for the butcher’s slab.
Yennefer studied Will’s profile across the embers.
“Is this what happened to you? Name the practitioner; I may know his circle.”
“Melitele granted me a clear glimpse in a dream,” Will said, adjusting his collar.
“The scholar who bound me to the table was named Professor Moreau. An alchemist obsessed with secondary mutations.”
“His grand project was reversing his son’s witcher mutations back into a mortal state. His boy was named Jerome, taken by the School of the Griffin.”
Across the fire, both Geralt and Yennefer fell into deep silence, brows furrowed as they dredged through a century of recollections.
After a long pause, both shook their heads.
The name had never crossed their paths.
“He kept his work buried, then,” Will mused, a cold edge entering his golden gaze.
“Jerome is likely still rotting in some vault, and that old lunatic Moreau may well be drawing breath down south.”
He stared into the orange embers, the pieces beginning to fall into place.
Things were growing interesting.