The rain began an hour north of Doln, a relentless, cold drizzle that seeped into everything. It matched Geralt's mood perfectly. The wound in his shoulder, bound tightly beneath his leathers, throbbed in time with Roach's plodding steps. The coin purse he'd left behind was a triviality; the lesson it represented was not. He'd intervened in the natural, miserable order of things, and the natural, miserable order had pushed back. Harder.
For two days, he followed the mud-track that pretended to be a road, skirting the dense, dripping expanse of the Murkwold. His destination was a place his Witcher training had taught him to seek out in such situations: a crossroads of information. Not a lord's hall, but a university town. Oxenfurt lay to the northeast, its spires a beacon for scholars, charlatans, and everyone in between. If someone in this part of the world was dabbling in forbidden mutagenics, twisting swamp-dwellers into chimeric horrors, an academic with loose ethics or a prodigal apprentice might know of it.
But Oxenfurt was weeks away. First, he needed a more immediate source. He needed an apothecary, a hedge-alchemist, or a retired physician who might recognize the peculiar blend of chemicals he'd smelled on the creature and that now clung to the severed mandible in his saddlebag.
On the third day, the road climbed out of the fenland, and the world changed. The oppressive grey-green gave way to rolling hills of patchy farmland and scraggly oak woods. The village of Gors Velen was little more than a fortified trading post where the river met the road, but it boasted a sturdy, two-story inn with a sign depicting a surprisingly cheerful-looking cockatrice. The Griffin's Claw, it declared, with artistic liberty.
Geralt stabled Roach, seeing to her oats and a careful rub-down before even considering his own needs. The stable boy's eyes went wide at the white hair and the swords, but he took the copper coin without a word. Pushing open the inn's heavy door, Geralt was met with a wave of warmth, the smell of stew, woodsmoke, and unwashed humanity. The conversation dipped for a heartbeat, eyes flicking to him, then quickly away. Witchers were bad for business, unless your business was monsters.
He took a corner table, his back to the wall, and ordered ale and stew with a silent nod. As he ate, he let the conversations wash over him, filtering them with the detached focus Vesemir had drilled into him.
"… tariffs on Nilfgaardian lace are ruinous…"
"… my cousin says the Scoia'tael raided a supply train near the Dragon mountains…"
"… bloody flux took three in the lower hamlet…"
"… strange lights up near the old watchtower, I tell you. Blue, they were…"
Nothing of use. When the serving wench brought him a second ale, he placed a silver coin on the table but kept his finger on it. She was a worn woman with shrewd eyes.
"I'm looking for someone with knowledge. Of chemicals. Unusual ailments. Maybe an alchemist."
Her eyes darted to the coin, then to his face. "We've a barber-surgeon. Old Man Havel. Cuts hair, pulls teeth, sells piss-poor remedies for the clap. His shop's by the tannery. Smells better than you'd think."
Geralt slid the coin to her. "Anyone else? More… specialized."
She palmed the silver with practiced ease, leaning in slightly. "There's Aldous. Used to be something at the Oxenfurt Academy, they say. Fell out of favor. Lives in the old millhouse, half a league up the Redfork. He's… odd. Buys strange supplies. People leave him be."
Odd was promising. Geralt finished his ale.
The old millhouse was a picturesque ruin. The great waterwheel was skeletal and still, choked with vines. The building itself was stone, with a sagging timber roof. What marked it as different were the windows: they were glazed with real, if murky, glass, and from within came a soft, steady glow that wasn't firelight. It was the cold, blue-white shine of charged dimeritium or perhaps a hex-light.
Geralt approached cautiously, his medallion vibrating against his chest, not in a warning hum, but a low, steady buzz of active chaos. Someone inside was working, and working with power.
He knocked on the heavy plank door. A long silence, then the sound of shuffling feet. A small viewing slit slid open. One eye, magnified hugely by a thick lens secured in a brass frame, peered out.
"What?" The voice was reedy, impatient.
"Aldous? I was told you have knowledge. I need to identify a substance."
"I'm not a herb-seller. Go away."
"It's from a creature. Mutated. Artificially."
The eye blinked. The slit slammed shut. For a moment, Geralt thought he'd been dismissed, then he heard the clatter of multiple locks and bolts. The door swung inward.
The man who stood there was tall and gaunt, draped in a robe that might have been velvet once but was now stained with a galaxy of chemical burns and mysterious powders. His hair was a wild grey mane, and the lens apparatus was strapped to his head, giving him the look of a cyclopean insect. He smelled of ozone, sulfur, and dried lavender.
"Mutated, you say? Artificially? Show me."
The interior was a chaotic temple to the arcane. Books were stacked in precarious towers. Alembics, retorts, and copper coils gleamed on workbenches. Strange specimens floated in jars of yellowish brine. The blue light came from a large, crystal-like stone set in a complex silver cradle, pulsing gently.
Geralt unwrapped the mandible and placed it on a cleared space of bench. Aldous descended upon it, his lens clicking as he adjusted its focus. He didn't touch it. Instead, he produced a thin copper rod and tapped the chitin. It emitted a faint, crystalline ring.
"Fascinating," he breathed. "Chitinous structure shows accelerated keratin deposition. Forced growth. The patterning… see these striations?" He pointed with the rod. "Not natural growth rings. Stress lines from rapid expansion." He finally looked up, his real eye squinting at Geralt. "Where did you find this?"
"In a barrow in the Murkwold. Attached to a kikimora-worker hybrid."
Aldous went very still. "Describe the other modifications."
Geralt did, in precise, clinical detail: the bipedal stance, the splayed claws, the chemical odor, the vestigial limbs, the obsessive, shrine-like behavior.
"Behavioral degradation," Aldous muttered, pacing. "The mutagenic process was unstable. It amplified base instincts but fractured higher cognitive function. The compulsion to order its kills… a pathetic echo of ritual, a brain trying to make sense of its own ruin." He stopped, turning his magnified gaze on Geralt. "The alchemical signature. You said you smelled it. Describe it."
"Acrid. Like vinegar and burned hair, under the rot. Sharp. Metallic, but not like blood."
"Zerrikanian Fire? No, too volatile… Could it be… extract of rebis? Stabilized with powdered dimeritium?" He was talking to himself again, scurrying to a vast ledger bound in cracked leather. He flung it open, pages fluttering. "Three years ago… a shipment to… yes! Here!"
He thrust the book at Geralt. The page listed supplies, costs, and clients. Most entries were in a neat, small hand. One, near the bottom, was scrawled in a hurried, arrogant script.
For Lord Mervyn de Ruyter, of Fen Hythe:
*- 2 oz. Concentrated Wyvern Embryo Extract*
*- 1 lb. Powdered Dimeritium Shard*
*- 6 vials, Standard Mutagenic Base (Sylvian)*
*- 1 custom catalyst, per my design: 'The Alba Corpus'*
Paid in full. Discretion assured.
Fen Hythe. De Ruyter. The lord who had fined Doln for Geralt's intervention.
"De Ruyter," Geralt said, his voice low.
"A petty aristocrat with ambitions larger than his intellect," Aldous sneered, snapping the ledger shut. "Came to me with grandiose ideas. Wanted to create 'guardians' for his estates. Imbue 'loyalty' into base creatures. I told him it was folly. The process to bind consciousness is theoretical at best. He demanded a simpler approach: enhance aggression, territorial instinct, and durability. I refused. The order was immoral and, more importantly, sloppy. He found someone else to do it."
"Who?"
"I don't know. A hack. Someone willing to use my preliminary notes and a brute-force approach. That creature you slew… that's the result. A sentient being turned into a pain-wracked monster, doomed to a short, violent life. De Ruyter probably had a few created, then released them to 'patrol' his borders. When they became uncontrollable, he simply denied their existence. Cheaper than paying for a standing guard." Aldous's lip curled in disgust. "He likely sees the villages on his land as a buffer. Let the monsters thin the herd, then he can claim the emptied land for timber or pasture."
The cold knot in Geralt's stomach returned, tightening. It was worse than he thought. This wasn't just an abandoned experiment; it was a deliberate, cruel policy. The fine levied on Doln wasn't just about jurisdiction—it was a punishment for interrupting the cull.
"You have proof? Of his order?"
Aldous looked at him with pity. "Proof? That ledger entry proves he bought supplies, not what he did with them. My word against a lord's. And I am a disgraced academic who talks to himself and lives in a mill. You are a mutant who kills for coin. Who do you think the king's magistrate would believe?"
The truth of it was a physical weight. Geralt stared at the mandible, no longer just a trophy, but a piece of evidence in a crime no one would acknowledge.
"Why tell me this?" Geralt asked.
Aldous sighed, deflating. "Because I helped lay the first stone on this path, even if I refused to walk it. Guilt, witcher. A powerful catalyst in its own right. And because that thing," he pointed to the mandible, "deserves to be more than a lord's failed experiment. It deserves to be a story. Even if only you and I know the whole of it."
Geralt rewrapped the mandible. "What will you do?"
"Nothing. I will continue my work. The pursuit of knowledge is not inherently good, witcher. It is a tool. In the hands of a de Ruyter, it becomes a weapon. In mine… well, I hope it becomes a light." He gestured to the glowing crystal. "But light casts shadows, too. Now go. Your path leads to Fen Hythe, does it not? To the source."
Geralt paused at the door. "The catalyst he ordered. 'Alba Corpus.' What is it?"
Aldous's face darkened. "A theoretical compound. Designed to force a creature's biology to accept foreign mutagenic elements. To make the blending… stick. It is, essentially, an alchemical crucible for flesh. The fact that he had it made means his hack wasn't just mixing potions. He was attempting true, deep-structure transmutation." He met Geralt's gaze, his lens making his eye enormous and terribly serious. "If he has refined the process, what you faced in the fens may only be the first, clumsy draft. Be careful."
The walk back to Gors Velen in the deepening twilight felt longer. The rain had stopped, leaving the world glistening and sharp. The political web was no longer an abstraction; it was a tangible net, with Lord de Ruyter at its center, and Geralt had just blundered into its sticky threads.
He couldn't bring de Ruyter to justice. There was no justice for this. But he could sever the thread. If the lord was creating monsters and unleashing them on his people, that was a different kind of contract. A witcher's contract. Not from a village, but from the silent, screaming land itself.
Back at The Griffin's Claw, he didn't retire to his rented pallet. Instead, he sat by the fire, sharpening his steel sword with long, slow strokes of his whetstone. The rhythmic shink-shink sound was a meditation. He was no longer just a young witcher on the Path, cleaning up monstrous messes. He was walking towards the maker of the mess. The politics were personal now. The trouble he was in was deeper than a lord's displeasure; it was a confrontation with the kind of evil that wore a doublet and a ring of office, and thought of people—and monsters—as ledger entries.
The road to Fen Hythe would wait for dawn. Tonight, there was only the sound of steel being honed to a razor's edge, and the blue, chemical light of Aldous's warning burning in his mind.