The forest outside the village was unnaturally quiet. In the centuries before, a boy like Jacob would never have dared to step past the treeline alone; the shadows were once thick with nekkers and drowners. But those superstitions were dead. The Temerian soldiers, armed with the precision of modern ballistics, had already cleared the area of monsters and wild animals. In this new era of Law, the woods belonged to the people, and Jacob was free to explore them safely.
Jacob knelt in the damp soil, his fingers brushing against a patch of Celandine. He wasn't looking for a magical reagent; he was practicing herbology. It was the most traditional and accessible branch of technological knowledge inspired by the old herbalism. Jacob had a simple, peaceful goal: to become a Doctor and use the chemistry pioneered by Robin the Lawbringer to heal. To do that, he needed to practice, and he had spent the afternoon gathering specimens to study.
As he worked, the distant political tremors of the Continent felt a world away. After the reign of Jan Calveit, the Northern Realms had surged ahead. Aedirn, Kaedwen, and Redania had broken free from Nilfgaardian rule. Temeria, along with the twin kingdoms of Lyria and Rivia, had undergone its own revolution; the original rulers were overthrown and replaced by newly formed Parliaments, with the kings remaining only as ceremonial figures.
Nilfgaard had been slow to adapt to the rise of technology. For a long time, the Empire lagged behind the North's industrial leap. But after their own internal revolution—where the Emperor was reduced to a figurehead and an elected government took power—the Great South accelerated its technological advancement. Determined to reclaim the North in the Nilfgaardian Reunification Wars, the Empire had grown strong enough to fight back. They started their campaign with Temeria.
Jacob gathered his satchel, satisfied with his harvest, and began the trek back to his village. The sun was dipping low, and he looked forward to showing his findings to the village elders.
But as he cleared the final ridge, the village of Temeria—his home of peace and progress—was gone.
In its place was a jagged skeleton of rubble. The war had arrived while he was in the woods. The stone houses where his neighbors had lived were reduced to heaps of gray ash and shattered timber. The telegraph lines were torn down, and the peaceful life he knew had been crushed under the weight of the Nilfgaardian advance.
Jacob stood at the edge of the ruins, his blue eyes wide with shock. He clutched his bundle of herbs, staring at the spot where his home used to be.
******
High above the clouds, the sky had hummed with a sound the North was still learning to fear.
At a nearby Temerian outpost, the radar operators stared in horror at their flickering screens. They had tracked the Nilfgaardian fighter aircraft crossing the border, but the speed of the assault had outpaced their communications. The soldiers realized too late that they wouldn't be able to warn the surrounding settlements.
The tragedy, however, was born of a mechanical error. The Nilfgaardian pilots had been ordered to strike a strategic military base located miles to the north. But in the chaos of high-altitude flight and the early stages of their technological acceleration, the Empire's targeting systems failed. They misfired, dropping their payload of high-explosive ordnance directly onto the peaceful civilian village instead of the intended military target.
Back in the village, the air was still thick with the smell of scorched earth. Jacob moved through the rubble like a ghost, his hands shaking as he tossed aside blackened timbers and shattered masonry. He called out names—his father, his mother, his little sister—clinging to the desperate hope that they had reached the cellar in time.
But fate in the era of the machine was just as cruel as it had been in the era of magic.
As he cleared a final pile of debris near his home, he didn't find survivors. He found only bones and ash, the devastating heat of the explosion leaving nothing else behind. The reality of his loss crashed over him. His family, his friends, and every neighbor he had ever known were gone, erased by a pilot's mistake and a distant government's ambition.
Jacob collapsed into the soot, clutching his book of herbology to his chest, and began to cry. The scholarly dreams of a future Doctor were buried under the remains of his past.
"The world doesn't change," a raspy, melodic voice said from behind him. "It just finds faster ways to break."
Jacob looked up through blurred vision. Standing amidst the ruins was a woman wrapped in a travel-worn cloak. She didn't look like the Technologists of the city or the soldiers of the Parliament. When she moved, her steps were silent, and when the light caught her face, Jacob saw them: amber cat-eyes.
It was Ciri, a Witcher of the School of the Wolf.
She had been tracking the Nilfgaardian movement across the continent, watching as her former home—the Empire—prepared to swallow the North once again. She looked at the smoldering village and then down at the crying child, the lone survivor of a mathematical error. In Jacob's sobbing form, she saw the same cycle of war that had haunted her ancestors, proving that even in an age of logic, the innocent still paid the price for the pride of nations.