Dear Diary. Is that how this is supposed to start?
No matter.
Being unsure of who to talk to with the matters weighing on me, I have decided to write them down in the hope to find some sense for myself. I guess for that to happen, I need to start at the beginning.
My name is Anselm, and I am a Witcher.
It seems a lifetime ago that I passed the Trial of Grasses and earned the right to be called by my name once more – a name that felt alien to my ears after such intense training. My ears still twitch reflexively when I hear one of the new cubs being called by his number – a necessity, since so many of them won't make it.
My current predicament starts a month ago, at Kaer Marter, the Cat School. There, among other things, that bastard Maynard was murdered by a group of students under the "encouragement" of Master Niall. Or just Niall of Ard Skellig now, I guess, exiled for his part in the crime. Funny how history repeats itself.
Personal feelings about that "man" aside, I feel – no, I KNOW – that right now we are worse off than before. This isn't something I can change, and should not dwell on, but it sits in my gut like a stone (and like all those cakes they served at Kaer Marter – I think only now have I sweated them away).
What sits worse though is that Master Jodok has decided that to further my training towards being a Master, I am to take the students that killed him under my tutelage. Is this to test my own resolve? My feelings were well aired about them around the table while we debated taking them in. Does he think I cannot control my emotions on this, that I will push them harder and try to break them – maybe that is even what he wants?
I cannot feel sympathy for their situation. Indeed, I feel a low, simmering anger towards them. Their actions were foolish, brash, hot-headed and completely unbecoming of Witchers... But they're not Witchers. Or at least, they weren't, and it's not like I wasn't a pain in the ass before I passed my Trials and gained a little perspective.
But on the other hand, they have doomed countless innocent lives to death by Monsters. They've sentenced many, many future Witchers to death in the Trials without Maynards expertise, and the death of every man, woman and child that those Witchers could have saved is on their hands – hands now placed around swords, and placed in my charge.
Master Jodok, what are you thinking? The time I asked him "Why me?", he just gave me that cold, inhuman smile of his. The same one I get just before he asks me to present my sword and show him how I have improved – so then this must be a test? But how do I pass?
Is his intention for me to fail in this, to show that I still have my emotions driving me, like he does? To berate and beat and break them with their training, to make them learn the extent of what they have done, and reforge them into Witchers?
Or is the test that I can put that aside, and act like a Mentor to them, to guide them through the hard choices, as Jodok has done for us?
I can't think about this any more tonight. Jodok has noticed that I am having a hard time focusing in my sword lessons with him as it is, and has asked me to meet him after dinner. This too worries me – normally that time is our own, and Sven had a few Orens from a recent contract that I was looking forwards to winning from him over a game of dice.
I shall write again soon, as if nothing else I feel calmer. Perhaps reading this in the morning will help find some perspective.
Anselm.