A Scholar's travels with a Witcher

by Spike368

Sent out to gather the knowledge of the real world. A young scholar from the University of Oxenfurt finds a wounded Witcher on the steps to the inn where he was staying. So he starts gathering the material for his journals. Rated T for language

162. Chapter 162

(Warning: Contains some body horror. Also contains some historical references to some… I'm gonna call it "questionable" parenting. Also, for the spelling, grammar and punctuation hounds amongst you, and I know you're there, my spell checker and grammar checker is causing my laptop to freeze, so I'm doing my best with the onboard google docs one. Please be gentle.)

It took me a long time to wake up.

The first sense was that I was warm, dry and comfortable. It is a truth that even should you go to sleep on the coldest of stone floors, in that moment where you start to wake up and you feel the solidity beneath you, it can feel like the softest mattress. Even should you be cold, pillowing your head on your arm, then that arm will feel like the softest pillow that will seem to suck your head into it with the beckoning arms of warm slumber.

Then I've found that the mind performs a kind of process, like a list of things to check. It happens in no particular order and can take a certain amount of time. There is also the problem that if you have confused the brain with things like narcotics, sex or alcohol, then it might get its priorities wrong. For me, that checklist will go down a number of things. Do I have any chores to do that day? Do I need to get up and urinate or defecate? Am I hungry or thirsty? Do I have something to do?

Is the outside world too cold and scary to be contemplated at this particular time?

These are the questions that we ask ourselves. To my mind, there is a process and there are priorities. Other questions creep in like, Is it safe where I am? Am I outside? Am I about to be attacked?"

We will come back to that one.

Another question is as to whether or not there is someone in the bed with me. Now I have never been mystified as to the identity of the person that I am snuggled up to in the early hours of the morning. I have always known who it was and as such, I have always been able to remember their name. But I am told by people that have been down this route themselves, that waking up next to someone can also be a matter of panic, as you try and identify who the person is and what you were doing with them the night before.

I have had the thing where I have woken up with a nice warm woman in my bed and felt a desperate surety that I should stay in bed and see if I could convince the lady to stay with me for a bit longer. That is something that I can get behind.

If the answers to these questions turn out to be things that can be ignored or are otherwise, nothing to be worried about. Then I, for one, used to take great pleasure in simply rolling over and going back to sleep. There are some simple pleasures in life and one of those pleasures is the ability to stay in bed when you want to.

Eventually though, the pressures of the world will drive you from your blankets. The need to feed yourself or urinate is the most common cause of forcing me out of my bed in these situations and as soon as the air hits my body, that begins the entire process of my waking up. It is never pleasant and I always resent it, but sooner or later, what are you going to do.

But even then it is a battle, the balancing act of being warm, comfortable and cosy can keep you in bed until one factor overwhelms the other.

The best, or worst if you have that point of view, is on those cold winter mornings. If you are lucky, someone might have been able to set a fire in your room. One of the benefits of having servants although Flame knows I try not to abuse that immense privilege. But when you know that the outside world is a cold and inhospitable place, the warmth and cosiness of your little cocoon of blankets can be awfully seductive. It's at these kinds of points when other people say "You can't stay in bed forever" and you find yourself tempted to test that theory for everything that you're worth. I will admit that I have never managed it though. Hunger and boredom are powerful masters.

But even during these times, you start to wake up. Your brain starts working and doesn't want to let you go back to sleep. It wants to turn over and start thinking about the various chores that you have to do over the course of the day. The meetings that you need to have, the people that you need to talk to and the conversations that you need to have.

And slowly, the warmth leaves the bed, the softness leaves the mattress and the pillows beneath your head become lumpy and uncomfortable. Your body starts to feel stiff and your back starts to ache The eventual inevitability of having to wake up and get out of bed in order to get dressed starts to come to your mind.

It was one of those situations.

It was more interesting to me at the time because I so rarely get to experience this kind of thing any more. Kerrass has trained me well and although I am grateful for his training, there are times when I sincerely wish that I could set the training aside. In this case, the ability to set aside the fact that I haven't slept a full night through in several years. Not because of anything in particular, but because Kerrass has trained me not to trust my own safety to anything else.

I have been trained to expect a threat at any time which, in turn, has led to me keeping my spear next to my bed and my dagger under my pillow. I sleep lightly now. In a castle, inn or building, I wake up if someone walks in the corridor outside my room. In the woodland or in the fields or under hedges, I will wake up if someone is moving down the nearby lane. I can hear the animals in the trees, can sense Kerrass when he is moving around and I act accordingly.

You see, the problem is, that it is always better to check. Always.

Paranoia is not paranoia if they really are out to get you. It is an old joke but at the same time, there is truth in that. When you are out in the countryside, there are always monsters creeping through the undergrowth. Sometimes bandits, sometimes enemies seeking to do you some mischief. And sometimes, it is what everyone else thinks of as monsters. Necrophages and the like.

So when you are sleeping in a forest clearing. Yes, it probably is just the wind blowing the branches and yes. It might just be some running water, or a rabbit nudging a rock. But it might just be someone trying to sneak up on you. In inns it might be the innkeeper trying to get at you because he has decided that the amount of money he is getting from you for the room and the food is not enough and wants to kill you, sell your goods and go through your bags in case you might have a bit more money hidden away, given your fancy clothing and things.

In castles and manor houses. The person that you are staying with might be an old friend. But if they have duties elsewhere, or you have offended their masters or there might be something or someone that they have allegiance to over and above the friendship that they have for you, then your safety is meaningless.

And if you are in your own home. Your own castle. Then your enemies know where you are and might have sent assassins or bribed servants or guards or any other things.

That is why I keep a dagger under my pillow.

Yes, there might be people on watch, yes, there might be trusted guards walking the walls, a watchman under your window walking up and down and loudly declaring that all is well on a regular basis. But at the end of the day, the only thing that you can do is to take your own word for it.

So you teach yourself to check. You teach yourself to jerk awake, weapon in hand and prepared to fight. I have it on good authority that I have leapt to my feet, drawn weapons, pulled on an armoured coat and been facing down someone who has come to inform me that breakfast is ready before I have even opened my eyes. It makes for some interesting conversations when you do wake up and have to explain such things to your host. Military households tend to understand but courtiers?

Sometimes, they might understand but be looking for an excuse to pick a fight.

So I don't get to wake up slowly any more. The flipside is that I can fall asleep just about anywhere. But that's not a story for right now.

I woke up slowly. I didn't jerk awake or sit up violently or anything like that. I didn't scream or gasp or carry on. I woke up slowly. I was lying on my side, and had tugged my blanket tightly around my shoulders. For some reason I find that particularly comforting when I sleep. I have never been able to understand why I find that comforting but I do.

My pillow was soft and properly supportive and my blanket was warm. I was lying on some sleeping blankets and there was a scratchy feeling that suggested that I was on some kind of forest floor. Loose leaves, bits of twig and rotted debris have a particular kind of feeling under a blanket. It was not uncomfortable though.

I didn't need to urinate. I didn't need to defecate and I was not hungry. It was dark. It might sound obvious but you can tell through your eyelids so I didn't even need to open my eyes to be able to tell these things. No part of my body was in any kind of pain and I felt rested, comfortable and calm.

So I did my best to go back to sleep. For a while, I drifted in and out of that kind of feeling. Emma calls it 'snoozing'. That point between proper sleep and proper wakefulness where your body walks that line, occasionally tipping over from one to the other. It is a glorious state to remain in and not one that I get to explore too often.

Slowly, other sounds and sensations started to occur to my thoughts. I was warm, but I could also hear the crackling of a wood fire going on. The realisation that the fire was behind me. I could feel that heat on my back so I knew where the fire was.

Interesting.

The next factor was that I could hear the gentle sound of the breeze blowing through the trees above me. It had a certain quality that I had missed while under the canopy of the Black Forest. It was a restful feeling rather than an oppressive one. I cannot properly describe the difference as to how that made me feel, but the difference was definitely there.

Which was the first time I realised that I was not in the Black Forest any more. The air felt different. It felt fresher. The trees felt looser and calmer. I felt… Comfortable and safe. It had been long enough that I had forgotten what that was like.

For a long moment I felt like weeping, but I did not yet want to wake up from my slumber. The realisation that I was no longer in the Black Forest was a powerful one and I allowed that to carry me home for a moment and into some more time spent dozing.

But my brain was awake now and was working through the situation.

I was not in the Black Forest any more. Was I dead? Was I in any pain? Had, by some miracle, someone come to save me and carried me from that awful place?

I performed the rituals of self assessment. I could feel my arms, wriggle my fingers and toes as well as have a quick check to ensure that my manhood was still present and correct. It might make you female readers chuckle to hear that, but it is a thing that worries us malefolk. Please do not judge.

I wasn't in any pain. Nor was anything missing and I wasn't confined in any way. Meaning, I wasn't someone's prisoner. Nor was I strapped down to aid in healing.

Had it all just been some dream? Was I still on the road somewhere to the West of the Black Forest? Would I open my eyes to find Kerrass, Trayka, Henrik and the rest pottering around camp?

I listened, my eyes still too heavy to want to open properly.

There was someone else in the camp. I could hear them moving around. Occasionally clearing their throat and shifting their weight.

Not Kerrass then. He has trained himself not to do that so that he doesn't give his position away absentmindedly on the hunt.

I listened. I heard them play around with the fire. The sound of something heavy being lifted, along with the kind of held breath groan that older people make when they are awkwardly lifting something before an explosion of sparks and the sounds of wood settling. A branch cracked in the flame and then there were the sounds of burning ashes being stirred. The strange roaring sound of the fire adding extra layers to the sound.

I listened. A pot was placed above the fire. The metal handle being hooked up to something, a metal cooking tripod settling into place under the weight of the pot. The sounds of a metal utensil stirring the liquid. The smell of hot metal.

So there was one person who was working next to the fire. Playing at making camp. They were sniffing, clearing their throat. Making the small noises of a man who is comfortable in their surroundings. I was confident that it was a man. Definitely a male. There was an overtone to the voice that made me certain that it was a man that was doing the work.

I listened.

There was wind in the trees above me. Nothing too strong, nothing too powerful. But try as I might, I could not find the sounds of anyone else in the background.

Time to try an experiment. I shifted my weight a little bit. My dagger was under my pillow which was a good sign, and if I leant over a little way, I could feel that my spear was where I would normally be happy to leave it. The man in the camp did not react. He was not worried about me, he was not watching me or taking care of me in any way. He was just moving around the camp.

I rested. I tried to think of everything that had happened. To try and reason out what had happened and what was happening now.

The most obvious suggestion was that I had died and that I was on my way to… whatever it was that came next. I didn't feel dead. There was certainly a feeling of cold when I moved around and adjusted the blanket. The ground was hard, even while it still had the false comfort of a surface that I had been sleeping on. But I was not in any pain and had no idea what was happening.

I thought back to the ending of the adventure in the Balck Forest. I remembered being hit by the flailing root… But that was wrong. It had not been flailing. It was more like a tentacle in the way that it had moved. It had made a spear out of itself and lunged at my chest like a javelin thrown by a soldier. It had pierced my chest. I had felt the crunching of bones and the strange discomfort, as well as the pain, of having something alien moving around my insides. And then the agony of being lifted in a way that a human being is not meant to be lifted. I remembered my feet being off the ground and moving around.

I had kicked out. I remembered the taste of blood in my mouth and trying to spit. I remembered that the movement of the tentacle, root, branch or whatever it was within me and a new feeling of agony tearing through me and then…

And then…

I was waking up here.

I felt… Good. I felt rested. Not tired, not thirsty, maybe a little hungry. I felt underneath my clothes for a scar, or some kind of pain in my chest where I had been struck. But there was nothing there. No pain, nothing. No matter how hard I pushed, it was all ok.

I felt… absurdly relieved by this and I settled back down into a snooze. But such actions were now in the process of kind of denying the inevitable. My body was waking up now. That process of bits of me trying to wake up and let me know that I was still human after all. There was a growing urge to urinate. A similar urge was either the need to pass wind or the need to defecate. But one of those feelings could go either way.

And my brain was awake too. Other suggestions as to what could be happening to me were occurring. The possibility that I might be dead was still a high one. There was no denying that and that possibility would need to be confronted at some point. But there were others as well. I even allowed myself to be reassured and dwell on these thoughts for a while. I could have been dragged clear and then drugged to keep the horror and the pain of my injury from coming to mind while I healed. So it was more than possible that now that… whatever process I had gone through, I was now recovered, or recovering.

Another possibility was that it had all been a dream. And yes, I know that this is a cliche answer and it is true that I hate it when these kinds of things are done in plays and in books as well. But at the same time, it was possible. Magical things have had that effect before where people have been known to spend an awfully long time suffering from some kind of delusions that have been summoned by… whatever.

So it was possible. I was a bit reluctant to say that it had all been a dream. It was so detailed. I could remember so much. The pain, the fear, the pleasure and everything involved with that.

It was no good though. My eyes no longer wanted to stay closed. I mean, they would have been happy to stay closed, but they were no longer glued shut and the urge to feed my curiosity and satisfy my other bodily needs was becoming oppressive.

So I opened my eyes and looked around.

Well… That theory about me having been taken away and healed in a way that I do not understand was clearly out.

I was in my clearing. The one that I had been dreaming about for so long. I could see the stars above me and the tree branches blowing softly in the wind. It was a northern forest as well. Some difference in the types of the trees made that clear. Occasionally sparks were thrown upwards by the fire and I cautiously and slowly looked around myself, all the while my brain was working and trying to figure out the riddle of what was happening.

The theory that I was dead and that this was a measure of what came afterwards was still a strong possibility. But there was something in that that left me feeling a bit disquiet. There was still discomfort here. Not pain which I might expect if I had gone to some version of an afterlife where I was due to be punished for my sins. This was more… everyday in its discomfort. So death was still a possibility. As was some kind of magical delusion. But this felt… real to me. I had no explanation for what was happening.

There was another bed roll a little distance from mine which gave me my second shock. It was not Kerrass' bedroll. You can tell this because of the layout of his swords and the way he sets out his gear.

This was an expensive bed roll. Something akin to what a noble might have. And when I say noble, I mean the kind of noble that spends time out of doors. The blanket was well woven and patterned. It was not just undyed wool or oilskin. There was an expensive but worn looking longsword propped next to it. The belt that the sword was tied to was of rich, dark leather with silver ornaments as well. The hilt was shiny where it was metal but had well worn, more practical leather where it was not.

The colour of the leather on the hilt matched the leather of the scabbard and the sword belt. That was the kind of ornamentation that only noblement can achieve and care about. The rest of us just choose a belt that will do the job rather than caring about things like colour coding.

Having said that, the weapon was clearly a practical one. There was a quiver of crossbow bolts next to it and a boar spear was set nearby. All of which were good quality. I was looking and I found a leather bag which I would assume held the crossbow itself. Like many such nobles do, the saddle was positioned as a pillow and it was, again, of good quality.

Ok. Enough was enough. I rolled over to look at my erstwhile travelling companion. It was time to see who I was dealing with.

He looked familiar to me but I could not quite place him. There was a feeling at the back of my mind that I knew this person although I could not immediately tell you why.

He saw me looking and pointed towards the woods with his spoon.

"I am relieving myself that way," he told me. Again, the voice was familiar to me although I saw no recognition in his face when he looked at me. "The drinking water is in the other direction so we will be better off…"

His voice trailed off as a look of confusion crossed his face.

Then he shook his head.

"Anyway. I have tea brewing. It is late but I find that I cannot sleep."

I nodded and went off in the direction that he had pointed.

There was more of that feeling of nobility about him. He probably thought he was travelling incognito. The same way that I had once thought that I was travelling cautiously and carefully without actually doing any of those things. Now that I was several years on the road, I could see the telltale signs. His boots were expensive and obviously made by a proper craftsman rather than a village cobbler. His clothing was well worn and hard wearing but it had also, just as clearly, been made with care and out of expensive materials.

I wear similar types of clothing myself although Kerrass has taught me how and where to shop if I don't want to draw too much attention to myself. And how to wear it as well.

I went into the trees and did my business before returning to the fire and frowning at the man opposite me. Now that I was closer, I could see more signs of his aristocratic nature. He was well cleaned. More than just the clean that happens with the occasional dunk in the nearest water source. This was done with soap and scrubbing. And hot water. His face lacked the marks of disease and he moved easily.

He peered at me for a moment before a frown of frustrated and impatient annoyance crossed his face.

Which was when I knew who he was.

"Do I know you?" He asked me sharply.

I couldn't speak. The 'I'm dead' theory was becoming much more likely.

"Well," the noble demanded. "Speak up man. I feel certain that…"

"Father?" I wondered.

He peered at me sharply.

"Is this a joke?" He demanded. The tones of disapproval and annoyance were well remembered. "You are clearly no son of mine. No son of mine would dress like that or carry weapons like those."

I looked down at myself. I was dressed the same as I ever was after these three years on the road. I looked back up at him and realised what was happening. I started to laugh. All thoughts about this theory or that theory were gone.

My Father did as he always had, as I had always known him do when he was confronted with someone that he didn't know that was faintly annoying him. He retreated into formality.

"I assure you, sir, that this is not funny." He said sternly, that same tone of voice that he used to use when he told me that my latest flight of fancy would not be tolerated. For a moment, an old thrill of fear went through me. Old memories, old unhappinesses and old resentments. Old pain and anger.

I laughed louder.

"I am glad that you find this amusing." He told me in some measure of disgust.

"Ah Father." I told him. "You always get this little crease between your brows when you get annoyed." I pointed at my own forehead. "It's your youngest son." I told him. "Your greatest disappointment."

"Impossible." He recoiled from the idea. "Freddie is…" And then he stopped.

"Freddie is what… Father." I felt the latent anger in my own voice.

Many people know that I don't like to be called Freddie. But now I will tell you why.

It's because of the way my father says it.

Most people, including Kerrass pronounce it "FReddy" whereas my Father, and therefore my mother and a lot of the people that have, or had some kind of authority over me, pronounced it "FreDDiey." Which gives it that extra edge. When my Father says my name it reminds me that my full name is Frederick. It makes me think that he wanted my name to be Derrick but put that extra syllabelle on the front because… I don't know. Annoyance maybe?

It made me feel as though he couldn't be bothered with saying the rest of my name. As though it wasn't worth saying it. As though I wasn't worth it.

It was made worse by the fact that everyone else in the family got called their full name by my father. Helped, I have no doubt, by the fact that their names were shorter and punchier. Emma, Mark, Edmund, Samuel. But that was defeated by Francesca. For her, he always used her full name as well, despite the fact that her name was longer and more involved than just about every other person's name combined. I was the only one that had a shortened name.

And he would bellow it at me whenever he caught me doing something that he disapproved of. Or when I disappointed him in some way. Which was regularly, let's face it. Whenever he caught me reading a book rather than working on my correspondence with any of the women that he had arranged for me to be introduced to. Women that I could tell wanted nothing to do with me or the provincial, new money Coulthards. But I couldn't say that to his face of course.

He would sigh and say it whenever he would watch me getting my ass kicked on the practice fields of the castle. He would yell it in annoyance when he saw me avoiding my chores or putting in what he thought to be, only the barest minimum of work on those things that he, my father, was most interested in.

It was the word that would be bellowed at the bottom of staircases. That would summon me from whatever refuge I had found in order to pursue my own interests and would disturb the fragile peace and quiet that I had managed to summon in order to… I don't know… make my peace with the world.

I hated those two syllables with all my heart and that name, that hated name, was the first thing that I shed when I left home. I would no longer be Freddie, I would be Fred, or Frederick. And I was happy with either of those things. I used to get really cross and angry about it too.

My attitudes started to shift as I got away from home. As I started to grow up and realise the difference between my friends calling me that name as a term of endearment rather than as a term of punishment, it started to become something that only my friends were allowed to call me. It was a privilege that only I could bestow upon people. Then, over time, as people's pronunciation shifted, I started to relax my deathgrip on the name.

Emma and Mark have adjusted the pronunciation of the name. I don't know why. Knowing them both, it was because they finally took on board the way I would always shrink from whoever had said the name previously. They saw the way that Kerrass said it and the way that Ariadne said it and was happy with that.

If you meet me, try it and see. Try to call me Freddie and see what happens. You will soon find out whether or not I like you.

But hearing Father call me that old name and in that old way. It brought out that childish rage that still lives in the depths of my chest. Whether I want it to or not.

"Freddie is what, Father?" I growled. Putting everything I have ever learnt from Kerrass about making my voice seem dangerous. It was not hard. I was angry.

"Shorter?" I spat, "less able? weaker? less confident?"

He seemed to subside.

"A disappointment?" I hissed that last one, no longer able to keep the emotion out of my voice.

He gazed at me steadily before opening his mouth.

"I was going to say that Freddie is far from here." He told me, picking out the words carefully. "He is in the north somewhere, with his Witcher companion. Although I do recognise the petulant tone in your voice, I would not recognise you otherwise. You are taller than I remember although it has been a couple of years since we saw each other last. Harder as well by the look of you."

He reached out and stirred the pot again.

"These years have been good to you." he declared. "I recognise the boy that left, in the man that I see before me. The boy that I expected to come crawling back on his belly when he found out that the world was harsher than he had led himself to believe. Although I also see that you know that. That you have been hurt by the world. You are older I think, yes… much older. Older in a way that has nothing to do with years. Tea?"

I nodded and he placed cups out in preparation.

"I understand your anger." He told me. "There were many harsh words that were said between us. Some of which I deserved and some of which you deserved. But…" He looked up from the cups and stared me in the eyes. "You were never a disappointment. Never. Do not think it.

"And…" His gaze hardened, "I would also remind you that whatever else might be the case, whatever else that you might have been through or whatever Countess that you might have caught the eye of. I am still your Father and you will talk to me with a civil tongue in your mouth."

I just gazed at him as he looked back down to his work. There is something about parents that, no matter how old we get, we are still reduced to children when we find ourselves before them.

"Whatever else might have happened." He spoke again after a moment. "No matter how much training you might have received at the hands of that Witcher of yours, that I am looking forward to meeting by the way, I would still think you would struggle to overcome my blade. So watch your tongue boy. I deserve better than your scorn."

He added a touch of honey into both cups. A moment of dismay occurred to me when I realised that I take my own tea with a similar amount of honey. As I watched him add cows milk and stir the pot, I felt a certain strange horror that I did not recognise. I took my tea in the same way. I make tea the same way that he did. I wonder what else was the same between us.

"You would be surprised." I pulled the words from the depths of my soul and then my voice broke. I cleared my throat and tried again. "You would be astonished just how quickly a person realises that they are their Father's least favourite child."

He looked up at me and I found myself quailing before an anger that I saw in his eyes. Anger and hurt.

"No." He snarled. "No. I will not sit here and be lectured by someone who has no idea what they are talking about. I will not be told by anyone, by anyone, that I love one of my children more or less than the others. You have no idea what it is like to be a parent. What it is like to plead to the Gods for their safe return. To be there at their birth and simply pray for something as simple as having the correct number of fingers and toes. I love all my children, all of them. Do not lecture me about how I loved one more than the other."

His eyes blazed in a way that I didn't immediately remember having seen before. Then he laughed.

"Flame curse me, but I even love Edmund and I'm pretty sure that he tried to kill me."

He laughed again at the thought and I felt a lump rise in my throat.

"I love you, my son. Look at me."

My eyes had sunk to looking into the flames and his command forced hy eyes up to stare into his eyes.

"I love you, my son." he told me. "And I am more proud of you than I can put into words. All men have talents and I am immeasurably pleased that you have finally found yours. But being genuine and loving was not something that I was good at. Not after… well… That's not really an appropriate thing to talk about at a family reunion. But I love you and I am so very proud of you."

I sobbed. And stared back down at the fire. I listened to the sounds of something being stirred, spoons rattling against metal pots and wooden cups.

"I cannot deny it though." he told me. "That there have been times that you have made me more angry than I can ever remember being. And other times where I have been unable to fake happiness at some of your choices. But even so…"

I risked a look up. He was pretending not to notice the state that I was in.

"I am happy to see you Freddie. Never doubt that again. Now…" He passed me one of the cups before he looked at me strangely before shrugging. "I think you're old enough," he muttered before he pulled a small metal flask from somewhere on his person and poured some into his own cup.

"Don't tell your mother." He told me. "But I always enjoyed some strong spirit when sleeping out of doors on a long hunt. She didn't approve but…" He shrugged. "What she doesn't know doesn't hurt her and from the look of you, you are old enough and experienced enough now… You've probably had more than just a snifter in a hot drink at the end of the day haven't you?"

I took the offered flask from his hand and sniffed it. It smelled like Brandy, good stuff too. The kind of Brandy that I would always have thought that my Father would insist on serving to only his closest friends. Let alone from drinking it in a cup of hot tea. I tipped a bit into my tea.

His eyebrow raised. "Surely you can do better than that." He told me.

I poured more into my cup.

"Good." He decided. "Now tell me about this Countess that your sister is telling me about."

All thoughts left me as I leant back with the cup in my hand. Whether I was dead, dreaming, hallucinating or whatever. It had all left my mind at that moment. I was warm, comfortable, safe and it seemed that I was having a campfire talk with my father. There are times when you just have to say "Fuck it" and just go with the flow.

"What can I tell you?" I told him. "She's a Countess of a minor duchy called Angral to the East of our lands along the Pontar valley on the Southern tip of the mountains."

Father nodded. "I have heard of it."

"Her lands were being mistreated by the previous Count. Kerrass…"

"Your Witcher friend?"

"That's him. He and I released her from captivity and in turn, she rescued the Duke from the Count who was plotting treason. She was awarded the County as part of her reward."

"And where do you fit into all of this?"

"I helped her…"

"No no no. You are marrying her? How did that come about?"

"Oh, well…" I looked at him sidelong. "Emma told you who she is, right? Elder Vampire and Sorceress?"

"Yes, she did mention. I recall laughing and saying something like 'of course she is' and 'only Freddie'. My only concern in that regard is whether or not she could produce sons in order to further the line."

"She tells me she has some ideas in that direction. She would describe herself as a scientist as well."

"Good, but you were saying."

"Yes, ummm. But she was used to an ancient way of thinking and I challenged her I think. She claims that I surprised her in a way that she had never come across before and that endeared me to her. When she was named Countess, she was told that there were certain duties that were expected of her and that one of those was to marry. She was already interested in me and so… she enquired as to how she would go about arranging that."

He nodded along.

"So you will be a Count?"

"Yes. Lord Frederick von Coulthard. Count of Angral."

Father nodded and a huge grin split his face. "Now that sounds good." he said. "Fairly rolls of the tongue." He leaned forwards. "So let me ask this. I have a lot of questions on the subject. I want to know about her lands, road access and primary exports and imports, that kind of thing. But before I ask all of that I need to know this. Is there…"

He winced at something and a shadow crossed his face.

"Is there an understanding between the two of you? I don't mean love. That can come later but…"

I held my hand up.

"I love her Father."

He nodded as another shadow crossed his face.

"And will she treat that love with the respect that it deserves?"

"I think so." I said, "There have been mistakes made between us. On both sides. But she challenges me in ways that I had not expected and…"

"Good." He smiled. "You need someone to challenge you. I had always thought that the way forwards for you was to be the driving force behind you. I thought that you needed someone behind you, cracking the whip and driving you on. As it turns out though, you needed me to forbid you from doing something and then just get out of your way."

We both laughed. It felt amazing.

"Now tell me about Angral." He told me. "And tell me about her as well."

And I did.

I started with Angral, giving him the rough layout of the land and what it looked like. I was forced to describe all the cruelty that had been committed against its people and the deep scars that had been left in the countryside. I also told him about the horrors that Kerrass, Ariadne and the Bishop of Angral had found and what had been done to the old manor. I pretended that I really was just the Freddie that had come down from the north when I had been summoned when we had really heard about his injury and pending death.

It was a remarkably pleasant fiction.

I told him about the plans that Ariadne had for the surrounding area and I told him about the general things that could be expected to come from the land. He expressed interest in the exports of Angral and admitted that he had all but dismissed the place in the past as mostly being able to export sheep and the like but he did consider how much of a benefit it would be to have a base there in order to get to the Eastern Markets in Vengerberg and the like.

The problem with trading down the Pontar valley is that sooner or later you have to go through Flotsam by river and that place is rather known for its corruption. We talked about that briefly and he was surprised that my knowledge base about trading and the like had expanded since I had left home. He approved.

"So tell me about the girl." He told me.

"Other than the fact that she's several hundred years old, a Vampire and a Sorceress rolled into one?"

"Yes."

"What is there to say?" He seemed to be taking that supernatural element in his stride.

"Emma has told me an awful lot." He told me. "She is eager for the marriage to go ahead. Her dowry is mostly in land and title which you will assume and although she trusts that you will work with her on things regarding her land, she is not averse to the fact that you will be called Count and will be assumed to be the ruler of her lands. I also know that she is interested in you intellectually and that one of the reasons for her interest is that you are undeterred by her supernatural status."

"You don't seem too worried about that side of things." I prompted.

He waved his hands dismissively.

"She is a woman." He said. "She brings you titles, lands and others. I admit that I would be a lot more concerned if she hadn't openly discussed that she was willing to convert to the worship of the Eternal Flame. Something that I am looking forward to discussing with Mark by the way."

He smirked a bit before sniffing and moving on. I was astonished. I had forgotten my father's occasional playful side.

"We did ask about the status of any heir production," he went on, "and it would seem that the lady is not concerned in that regard. Precisely what Emma said was that she "had ideas in that direction which would need some experimentation." I understand that there were other parts to that conversation that a Father and a man did not need to know. But none of this tells me about the woman herself."

"She is…" I laughed at something. "She is both older than me and much younger than me. She is wiser in the nature of things than I can easily describe but at the same time, there are things that she is utterly naive about. She cares about things that we would not even begin to consider while at the same time, not caring about others. She is kinder than I deserve, more considerate than I am to myself and more than once, she has told me off for not taking proper care of myself."

Father nodded and held his hand out for my cup which I passed back as I spoke

"She is a scientist and she approaches the entirety of life like that. She sees something and then she needs to test that something. She forms theories and then needs to test those theories under certain conditions. She is magical so she has contacted me in the middle of the night in order to ask me questions about aspects of life and society that I had not considered."

I laughed at another memory.

"She certainly has 'opinions' on the traditional role of the female in society as well as other matters of societal pressure that she is learning to live with. She also likes to take advantage of it as well. She tells me that she has taken meetings with so called 'powerful men' who have misjudged her by her appearance and her gender. They look at her and see a young, attractive and as yet unmarried woman. Then they think that this means that they can take advantage of this and try to run roughshod over her before they realise that she has distracted them in some way and that they actually have surrendered more than a small amount of what she wanted. She also enjoys confounding people's expectations of her. She wears bright, light dresses and enjoys sunshine and out of door activities when people expect her to dress in dark, forbidding clothing due to her vampiric nature."

He enjoyed that. "Which in turn means that when she wears a more expected costume, the effect is more pronounced. I like the sound of this woman and look forward to meeting her. What does she look like?"

"She is shorter than you think when you look at her, maybe a little shorter than me and a clear head shorter than Emma. She has some measure of control over her physical appearance which is, I understand, more to do with her vampiric abilities than her magical ones. There is a slightly otherworldly look to her face, meaning that she looks human but in a certain light she seems a little alien. She suggests that this is due to the mouth shape of having to accommodate fangs. She is certainly aristocratic to look at. The high cheekbones and pointed chin that you would expect but there is… It's difficult to describe. Something to do with her not being human. She looks otherworldly to my eyes."

He smirked. "You like that though don't you."

"I do. I admit that. She wears her dark hair long and she teases me by wearing it pulled over one shoulder. I don't know why I like that but I do. Nor do I know how she found out that I liked it so much."

He laughed with me at that.

"Emma tells me that, according to the maths, she wrote to arrange a marriage almost immediately after you left her lands."

"So I'm told. Yes."

"Eager wench isn't she."

"Don't call her that." I snapped.

"What? But…"

"I said don't call her that." I felt the growl in my throat.

Father's eyes hardened. "I would remind you who you're…"

"I know who I'm speaking to sir." I told him, my own voice becoming formal. "You say the word 'wench' with a derogatory tone in your voice. You will not speak of her in that tone to me, or using derogatory language again."

"I am your Father." He stood up.

"And I am your son." I stood up as well.

"What derogatory language? She is a wench just like any other."

"Wench is a catch all term." I told him, feeling my temper rise. "Men call women wenches when they want to dismiss them as just some kind of eye candy, or a woman that makes their living off their looks more than… Men call barmaids wenches when they want to excuse the fact that they slapped their arses or tried to steal a look down their tops. Men call sex-workers wenches, barmaids, farmers wives and daughters. Any kind of attractive woman that they might feel some kind of lust or attraction to, get called a wench. It's a term of dismissal. A term of…"

I ran out of words.

"But this woman, this lady, is a Countess in her own right which is more than you can say. She attained that rank under her own merits and by her own whatever small part I played in those auctions are things that I am proud of. And even if she wasn't a noble woman and a noblewoman. Even if she was some kind of tavern worker, sex-worker or normal kind of villager. Even if she was just some woman that I had picked up off the street, you would not be allowed to call her 'wench'.

"Now I know that you have read my work so you will know that I have been trained to fight by a killer, some distance from your training yards. You might be a gifted swordsman, sir. But if you speak of Ariadne like that again, then you will find out what kind of spearman I have become."

A slow smile crossed his face.

"You really do love her don't you?"

I stared at him. Feeling a childish anger being replaced by the rage of an older man.

"I've not missed this." I told him. "I've not missed the little manipulative games that you like to play. I used to protest them and insist that I was not a child any more and you would laugh and tell me that that very protestation proved that I was still a child. Well I am telling you now, Father, that I have done everything that you wanted me to do in order to prove that I am now a man. I went into the world. I have made my own way. I have fought. I have killed and I have known the love of several beautiful women.

"As you bid me, Father, I have widened my horizons sir and I would thank you not to forget it. And before you start even further, I would warn you that if you insult her in her presence? I will not need to defend her honour."

He stared up at me and it occurred to me that he had sat down in the middle of my tirade.

"You are right." He said. "I am sorry. I handled you very badly Freddie. Very badly indeed. You were lost when you left the army and I thought that I could help straighten you out but I was wrong."

He laughed at a thought. My two sons, the ones that I handled badly. Edmund turned into… well… Edmund. And you became the man that I see in front of me. I wonder what would have happened if I had just left Edmund alone a bit."

"He would have spent all your money." I said, warily sitting down. "And then you would have had to rescue him from his creditors."

He grunted his agreement. He looked at the cups before shaking his head and just taking a sip straight from the flask.

"Is there anything else you want to say to me?" He asked. "Anything else that you want to get off your chest?" He offered me the flask.

"So much." I told him. "So very much." I honestly considered taking the flask off him and hurling it into the woods. But that would have been the actions of a childish Freddie. Instead I took the flask and took a sip.

Father grunted.

"You have grown." he decided.

We sat in silence for a while, watching the fire burn. The moment stretched and I felt myself reaching for that same sense of calm that I had felt when I had woken up.

"Anyway." Father said. "Thank you for coming. We had no idea whether or not the message would reach you."

"It did."

"Heh." He chuckled. "You know that it was Edmund that arranged my injury right?"

"We do." I told him. It seemed that the unfortunate part of the conversation was coming up on us.

"Idiot." Father snorted. "Couldn't even murder his Father right. I'll have to disown him or something. Really figure out what I'm going to do with him."

I risked looking up at him. He was frowning in thought, looking around us.

"What do you remember?" I prompted, as gently as I can remember.

He looked at me sharply. "How much do you know?"

"Pretty much everything." I told him.

"It's all a bit fuzzy for me." He replied. "I love Edmund, he is my son and although he was the worst possible of my children to inherit, the world doesn't work that way. So we tried to train him and he hated us for it. He had got involved in that cult of your mother's." He sighed, shaking his head. "Bloody fool. I should have seen it coming really but the Kalayns had sworn that they were out of that and that they didn't do that kind of thing any more."

"They lied." I told him.

He laughed, despite my serious tone. "Well of course, I know that now." He chuckled.

"I looked into that, you know. I looked into what they did up there. Couldn't find anything so I asked your mother. She hated me for a while, again I should say. And then I found that your cousin had come south and that Edmund was associating with the execrable little man. I was concerned and asked some questions and Flame help me, I found answers."

He shook his head.

"We had already been hiding his indiscretions for years but that was the last straw. I told him that if it didn't stop… well…"

"You threatened to disown him."

"Yes, scandal be damned. He didn't take that well and we had a screaming row. I looked into it further and discovered that Edmund had been involved in a local branch of that awful cult and I lost my mind. I went for a hunt to calm myself down and then…"

"You fell." I told him. "Edmund goaded you into riding angry and not checking your gear. He had sabotaged it and you fell, injuring yourself."

"You speak as if…"

"We were there, Father." I told him.

He shook his head. "I remember none of it. Those drugs they gave me to help me fight off the infection were powerful things. Lucky for me that I got better isn't it."

I sighed. How do you tell a person that they died. And then how do you tell a person that you died too.

"Freddie?" He prompted.

"You didn't get better, Father." I told him. "You died. Kerrass and I…"

"Your Witcher friend who I'm looking forward to meeting."

"You may get to do that sooner than you would like. But Kerrass and I arrived to find you on your deathbed. You on your death bed and Edmund murdered in your study. I hired Kerrass to investigate your murder. That's why I know so much."

"That's not funny," his eyes darkened. "That's not a good joke. I remind you that…"

"Lets not do that dance again." I told him sadly. "Look at my face Father. I was there when you died. Sam, Mark, Emma, Mother and I all sat at your bedside while we watched you die."

He stared at me for a long time.

"No," he said. "No, I cannot believe this. No. I am not dead. I cannot be dead. How can I be dead? Edmund failed. He was not clever enough. I had found him out, our doctors were on top of it. There was an infection in the injury to be sure but at the same time, I was getting better. I know that I was getting better.

"Look around you Father." I told him. "Look around you and see where we are. Do you know it? Do you recognise this place?"

He did as he was told.

"Which of those horses are yours?" I asked him, pointing. "Because neither of those horses are mine. Where are your servants? Where are your guards? Even if you went out on the hunt and stayed out overnight, you would not have been allowed to go by yourself. I know that you like to think of yourself as a worldly man who can live and manage by yourself but I would wonder as to when was the last time you cooked a meal on your own fire? When was the last time you did a camp chore more basic than taking care of your horse and weapons. When was the last time you dug your own…"

He held his hand up, halting the flow of words.

"I don't feel dead?"

"How would you know?" I wondered. "Have you ever been dead before?"

The tensions between the two of us disintegrated and we both started to laugh abruptly. Then he sat up.

"Then the thought occurs." He began. "What are you doing here?"

I smirked. "I rather think that I bit off more than I can chew."

He raised an eyebrow.

"I got overconfident." I told him. "I have survived more than I can easily describe and it seemed impossible to me that I would lose anything else. It seemed impossible that I could lose and then…?" I shrugged.

He nodded thoughtfully.

"We will get on to that in a bit. What happened to me please? Leave nothing out."

"We were on our way south. Kerrass wanted to take advantage of the regular bounties on Necrophages on the border of Northern Temeria. We got your message and came as fast as we could south as fast as we could. We got to the gates of the castle where we were met by a man called Sir Robart de Radford."

Father grimaced at the name.

"De Radford." I went on. "Accused me of Fratricide which is when we discovered that… You know what? I'm telling this in the wrong order."

"No no," He said, leaning backwards to listen. "Keep going."

"So that was how I found out that Edmund had been murdered. Radford had a grudge against the family and against me in particular for reasons that we never really found out. Although I think it was some kind of trade issue but…"

I shrugged.

"We got free. We found that you still had a few days to go before you would depart. Edmund had been found a day or so earlier with a stab wound to the neck in your study. He died quickly. I was concerned that the rest of the family didn't really seem to care about this death so I hired Kerrass to investigate."

"Why were you so concerned?"

"Because I thought that it might not be a one off attack. It could have been a prelude to a greater move against us, against Francesca in the South. I thought it might have been a destabilising effort. After all, if Edmund didn't inherit, Mark couldn't, Sam was a younger man and not trained to be the head of…"

"Yes, I had foreseen that issue which was why I took the steps that I did regarding my will and your inheritances. Why was no-one else concerned?"

"I don't know. I think it was partly because everyone thought that Edmund had it coming. I know that that was certainly Emma's view. Everyone rather thought that Edmund had owed the wrong person too much money or had offended the wrong person and that vengeance had finally caught up with him."

"But you didn't think that."

"It wasn't that I didn't think that. I was more concerned about what would happen if we were all wrong."

He nodded. "It seems that you took on the lessons of your political tutor better than we thought."

"I did." I told him. "Believe it or not, I have had many opportunities to use those skills over the years. I keep meaning to find out where he is now in order to thank him."

"He always said you were too soft for it."

"And I am. I hate using those skills. But I would be lying if I said that sometimes, it isn't deeply satisfying to take a man down hard."

He chuckled. "I seem to be taking this awfully well. What did your Witcher friend find?"

"We knew that you and Edmund had had a confrontation about something. We later found out that the confrontation was probably about the cult activities that he had been a part of. Where they were taking young and beautiful people out and slaking their sick lusts on them. Edmund panicked when the prospect of his free meal ticket was taken away. Went into Oxenfurt where he had hired rooms and set about getting drunk, getting high and talking to his fellow cultists about what he should do."

"That sounds about right."

"At some point, someone, we still don't know for certain who it was, came up with the plan of rigging matters so that you were injured on a hunt and that you would "die of your injuries". We know that it was someone else, both because we reasoned that Edmund wasn't clever enough to come up with the plan by himself and because a cultist that we caught agreed.

"He rigged your tack so that you would fall off your horse badly. Riled you up so that you wouldn't check your own gear and went out. Sure enough you were hurt. Badly."

"Yes, I remember this much."

"The horsemaster figured all of that out and left."

"I remember Emma telling me that he was distraught."

"He was. Edmund had arrived at the castle to 'help' and the horsemaster went to Edmund with his suspicions about the sabotage of your horse. In the process, the horsemaster figured out that Edmund was at fault and he fled. Edmund hunted him down and killed him."

Father winced at that. "Poor man."

"Emma and mother called for the doctors who worked to heal you. According to our consultant. They did everything right and Edmund again panicked and started to smear the bandages, or poisoned the herbal stuff that the bandages were being smeared in, so that the infection would get worse, not better. At around the point where it was clear that no matter what, you were not going to survive. Edmund reverted to type. Lauding it over Emma and the other servants, talking about improvements that he was going to make and things that he was going to do.

"Fearing that Edmund was just going to turn our lands into some kind of cult haven. Mother had a moment of… I don't want to call it clarity. She realised that Edmund had killed you and that he was the biggest threat to the future. So she killed him."

"Holy Flame." Father breathed.

"Pretty much what I said." I told him.

"You figured it out?"

"Kerrass did, but even he admitted that it was only because we had run out of other suspects. We found out about Edmund's involvement, about the cult. We were confident that Emma didn't do it and she had an alibi anyway."

"Her maid?" Father asked.

"You knew about that?"

"Of course I knew. They were not as discreet as they would like to have thought. You only had to look at the way that Emma's face lit up whenever that maid of hers walked into the room. I've known for a long time that Emma preferred women. I imagine that I knew before she did."

"How?"

"We were visited by some country dancers. They performed for their supper and Emma was uninterested in the men but was openly fascinated by the women dancers. I never told her that but she was so fascinated that it was almost comical." He chuckled. "Mark?"

"Mark was tricky. He had refused to be questioned at first but his recoil and confusion about the cult was impossible to fake. And given that your accident and Edmund's murder were linked. Mark had no idea that you were being murdered. He hadn't even considered it and resented that we pursued that line. And he wasn't there for some of what was happening. And he was guarded more than you were. No way that he could have snuck off and murdered Edmund.

"Sam was also late to the scene and frankly, Sam isn't that good of an actor either.

"We tracked Edmund's trail into town and figured out how he was communicating with the cult. We raided a cult meeting and arrested a good chunk of them, including Cousin Kalayn who claimed to have inducted Edmund into the religion."

"Yes. He did. It was before you were born. I have been angry before but…" He shook his head. I waited for a while to see if he would keep talking but he lapsed into silence.

"At first our assumption was that Edmund was not playing nicely with the cult. The whole… debt thing didn't ring true for us on the grounds that Edmund was going to inherit."

"He wasn't."

"Yes, but neither he, nor we knew about that at the time."

Father grunted at that.

"But it turns out that Cousin Kalayn had no idea about who had killed Edmund. He was furious about it too. Edmund was his meal ticket and they were looking forward to spending all of that money on cult things."

"I bet they were."

"So in the end, Mother was the only one that fit."

"Why didn't my healing work? Our doctors were the best."

"According to the doctor that Kerrass called in, they were once the best, but they were not any longer. They had grown lazy in their old age."

"I can see that."

"So you died. The cultists that we had taken were victims of some vigilante justice, including Cousin Kalayn."

"Vigilante justice?"

"Yeah." I scratched my chin. "Many of them were sons of powerful men. Those powerful men brought wealth and influence against the arrests and it looked likely that many of them were going to be released. So locals, outraged at the story coming out. Broke them out of prison and burnt them alive as heretics."

"You didn't have anything to do with that did you?" he looked at me sharply.

"I had absolutely nothing to do with that." I answered carefully.

He looked at me for a long time.

"So that was that." He decided. "That was how I died. Victim of Patricide."

He shook his head after a long moment. "Edmund was not clever enough to come up with all of that on his own."

"No, he wasn't." I agreed. "We only have Cousin Kalayn's word for it that the initial idea didn't come from him. But the idea to kill you was given to him by someone else. The plan as well as the materials. We are sure that Kalayn was involved in the planning of things but…"

I shrugged.

"So Kalayn died as part of the…" He waved his hand.

"He did. And get this. Lord Kalayn threw himself on the bonfire when his son could not be saved."

Father frowned at that. "That doesn't sound like the man I knew. He would be far too… self-centred to do that."

"Again, we don't know." I said, "It seems that the Northern cult might have had a hand in that too. He wasn't as devout as they liked."

Father grunted. "It would seem as though there is much more to your story."

I nodded. "There is."

He leant forward and stared at me intently. With a focus that I had always found off putting as a child and was the same as an adult.

"Tell me." He said. "What did you get up to? And not the sanitised versions that you put in your articles. Tell me the real story."

"It's a long story."

"Well, if you're right, then we're dead. What else are we going to do?"

I didn't have an answer for that.

A sudden pain ripped through me. I have no words to describe it. It felt like, literally, that I was being torn apart. That the corners of my mouth were tearing. That my eyes were bugging out of their sockets. And that my ass was rupturing. I know that there's a reading of that statement that makes it seem funny, but I promise you that it is anything but that. It hurt so much, so very much. An agony the likes of which I have never experienced and I hope to never experience it again.

I was also struck by a very vivid and painful shade of green. I know that that makes no sense, but that is the closest way that I can describe what it looked and felt like to me. It felt like I was being assaulted by a colour. I have always thought of the colour green to be a fairly nice colour, a restful colour that we could use to fall asleep to. I associate it with pleasant things like grass on the hillside, trees in the sunshine. The old riddle about how to describe colour to a blind man and you say that yellow is like the sun on your face, red is the heat of the fire when you reach towards it, blue is the cool water running through your fingers and green is the sound of wind in the leaves.

That has always struck me as being quite a restful thing. And even though it is true that the sound of wind through the leaves has taken on a new and sinister meaning when talking about moving through the Black Forest. Green was still a quite pleasant feeling for me.

But just then, it was a violent, upsetting and off putting thing. It hurt.

It was as though I looked around myself and all of the greens in the surrounding area seemed to surge towards the forefront of my vision. It leached the reds, the oranges and the blues away until all that was left was that deep, violent and unpleasant shade of green.

I reeled backwards and I found myself leaning on the ground, supporting my weight while I gasped for breath. The feeling began to fade slowly. The greens started to retreat from the front of my vision and I was back to being sat across from my Father in a wooded clearing.

"Are you alright?" He asked me, gazing at me steadily.

"I'm fine." I said, "I don't know, I suddenly felt as though I was in a…"

My words petered out and I couldn't think of anything else.

"Take your time." Father told me. He poured me some more tea. "Tell me what happened.

Such are the habits of being obedient to our parents that I did as I was told. I sat, took some more tea and drank it which seemed to soothe the sudden pain and nausea in my gut before I started to speak. I told him about my time with Kerrass. I told him about the rescue of Sleeping Beauty which he didn't seem particularly interested in. He was only curious from a kind of distant way and when I asked him about it he pointed out that Dorne was a long way from Novigrad, that the lumber concerns would not be that important to someone in his position and that therefore, there was nothing immediately to worry about from his perspective.

"Emma took advantage of it." I pointed out.

"Oh?" His eyebrows raised.

"Yeah, after she took over the company, she was making efforts to expand her own circle of influence and one of the ways that she took advantage of the matter was that people underestimated her. So she helped the Princess because no-one else would. I'm told we got a good deal on the lumber coming out of Dorne and also, we had access to the blade thorns. Applications are still being worked on in the Sorcerous elements of our society, but it looks as though it might make a real difference."

"Interesting," Father stroked his chin.

"Also, Francesca made an introduction to the Empress and so, we are quite well thought of in Dorne. Emma tells me that it's a nearly invaluable route in, a foothold into being able to trade in the South."

"She always had a good head on her for that. What happened next?"

I told him about my attaining my qualification in the university which he congratulated me for. Although he was more interested in any monetary income that I might make from such a thing and said that thing that I really hadn't wanted to hear.

"Well, it's good to hear that your hobby has paid off." He told me. In another time or another place, I might have gotten really angry with him about that.

I told him about having an engagement ring made for Ariadne and my plans to propose over the Winter court at the coronation of the Empress. But then I had to tell him about the disappearance of Francesca.

I did not enjoy that.

I told him about what we did and how we did it. I told him what we had found and what we had guessed. He just stared into the fire as I spoke. He didn't yell, weep or recriminate which I might have expected otherwise. He just… He just sat there and listened. I explained the strange world that Jack took me to. He did admonish me about my stupidity regarding throwing myself into an offer of service to an otherworldly being. An accusation that I have no response to.

I mean he's right. In the list of stupid things that I've done, despite Kerrass' personal list on the subject, I think that my headlong rush to serve Jack in an effort to find out what had happened to Francesca still ranks as the most stupid. I mean, I was desperate and if you held a gun to my head, I can't pretend that I would do anything else if I had my time again, but still.

When I was done, he didn't say anything for a long time. Instead, he just stared into the fire. The first question was about Jack. So too was the second question. Then the questions started to come thick and fast. Leaping around in the narrative. I don't know what his thinking process was regarding it all. At the time, I wondered if he was trying to work his way into the fact that Francesca had been taken from us. He asked about the efforts to find her. He asked about how she had been lost, the framing of Sam and how I had figured out that Sam was innocent.

He was interested in the way that the Empress had reacted and listened in detail to the hunt through the streets of Beauclair for the false Jack.

Then there was another long period of silence while we both stared into the fire.

Then he took a deep breath.

"I think you were taken for a ride." He said.

"What do you mean?" I wondered.

"That false Jack that was running through the city scape. The disappearance of your sister. I can think of several ways that it could have been done in quite mundane ways. I can also think of several ways that that false Jack of yours could have been faked."

"So can I." I admitted. "And it turned out that at least some of that is true. We found the guy who did it and it turns out that some of it was very basic. It was more than likely that Francesca was under our noses on several occasions. The mage that did it was studying magic that is outlawed and that the use of the Jack entity was true though."

Father shifted uncomfortably.

"I suppose that we must trust the experts who were there at the time." He said unhappily. "I have heard of several of the names that you mention. Figures of politics and power. But I also think that it's true that knowledge can blind you to things that are obvious. It can make you arrogant and blind you to certain solutions. Certain obvious things that you should have seen differently that would provide explanations and answers that you would even be reluctant to see. Sometimes, all you have to do is to look at things a little differently and then the entirety of the tapestry unravels."

"You are not wrong." I told him. "All I can say is that we operated on what we knew at the time."

He looked up at me sharply for a long time.

"So you left to try and find your sister." It was not a question.

"I did. I took Kerrass with me and we went to work."

He nodded. "Whatever else I might say, or however else I might act. Do not doubt for one moment that I admire your filial duty, and respect your devotion to your sister. I know that Francesca was the one member of the family that everyone loved. But even despite all of that. You went after her when others would not. I am proud of you for doing that and even though it might seem as though I am disapproving of some aspects of your scheme. Do not doubt that I am proud of you for those actions. But do not mistake that for condemnation of your other siblings for doing what they felt was right."

"Thank you." I told him. I felt an absurd urge to bow.

"Why did you chase after her? Leaving aside love and devotion. Leaving aside the fact that your sister and brothers all felt the same way. Why did you go looking?"

"Starting with what I knew at the time then. I went because I could. Emma had responsibilities with the company and Mark was sick."

"Mark was sick?"

"Yeah…."

I explained the entire situation. He listened carefully.

"So Sam is going to be my heir." He mused.

"He is."

"Hmmm." He grunted. "I think, I would rather it was you."

"Why? I think he will make a great Lord Coulthard."

Father smirked. "You were always the closest with him but that made you a little blind to his faults. No-one works harder than Sam to fit in. But you didn't see how lazy he could be. Or how judgemental or stubborn he could be. A lord needs to be able to listen to the advisors around him and be able to adapt to those opinions. A lord needs to put the good of his people over his own selfish desires. And Sam hated me, and your mother I think."

"I don't believe that."

"Oh he did." Father nodded. "You weren't there but your own story backs this up. He wanted to execute your mother for the murder of Edmund. I can't say that he was wrong. But I think he would be the kind of person that would want to tear apart everything that I had built so that he could prove that he was his own man. He resented being pushed into military life, even when it turned out to be one of the only things he was ever good at. I love your brother, but it is also a Father's duty to see the flaws in the child and to address them and help to educate him out of them.

"Just as I tried to educate you.

"I made mistakes there. I did well with Mark, Emma and Francesca. The three of them went where they were told and found that they were suited to where I put them. I ruined Edmund by trying to turn him into something he was not. Sam… I was blinded by the fact that he seemed to be suited to the role that I had chosen for him and didn't see his resentment. He wanted to find his own way, like you did.

"The two of you were very alike. Where I was right in his life path, I was wrong in yours. But he still wanted to have found his own way and he hated me for not letting him do that." He shrugged and sighed. "Ah well. It's done now and I must live with it. You were explaining why you took the search for Francesca on yourself."

I smirked at the question.

"Would you like to know the answer as I think of it now? Or as I thought of it at the time?"

"Are they different?" Father asked with an answering smirk. "Why not tell me both?"

I nodded.

"Then at the time. I thought that I was uniquely suited to the church. I was convinced that Francesca's disappearance was to do with me. I was also convinced that I was guilty of the fact that I hadn't done right by her during the search and I felt, very strongly, that I needed to atone for the mistakes that I had made.

"I knew that Francesca was a favourite of the Empress, so I also knew that the Imperial Guard would be looking for her. I knew that the Imperial intelligence service would be looking for her. I also knew that there would be, almost a contest between the different magic users, knights and courtiers to find Francesca. Because they also all knew that the person that actually managed to find my sister would be sure of rank, wealth, privilege and advancement.

"So everything was covered except the Witcher angle. There was something monstrous in the taking of Francesca and of all of the people that were out looking for her. That was the angle that wasn't being covered."

I considered it for a bit longer.

"I was also convinced that Kerrass and I were uniquely suited to the search. We would be able to look in places that other people would not be able to look. We would be able to ask questions of those people that would not want to answer to the newer version of the Lodge of Sorceresses or someone in Black armour with the Golden sun emblazoned on it. I thought that there were places that we would look that no-one else would think of.

"I also felt that someone from our family should be personally involved in the search. I knew that Emma had to be involved in the trading company or a significant portion of the Economy of the Northern Kingdoms would collapse. Not all of it, but the failure of Coulthard trading would impact the regrowth of the nations of the North after the depredations of the war. Mark was sick and had work to do of his own. Sam wanted to get back to his lands in the North. He had taken the loss of Francesca quite hard, not least because he had been accused of being involved in the affair. So he wanted to go back to his lands in the North which he told us were problematic and that we intended to visit anyway because we thought that one of the elements of Francesca's disappearance was possibly revenge for the loss of the cult around Oxenfurt.

"And that was another reason why I went. Because I felt that if I was going to be looking, then I would draw out our enemies."

The fire crackled as we sat in silence for a while.

"All of that sounds a little bit weak." Father said with a slight smile. He even looked a little bit surprised when I agreed with him.

"And it was." I told him. "Now for the real reason. I mean, there's more to it than this, but what it boils down to is that I could not bear not to look."

Father nodded to that.

"I was the protagonist of my own story." I told him. "I was right and everyone else was wrong. I remember looking around at the Empress, at Emma, at Lord Voorhis the head of the Imperial intelligence service. I remember looking at them all and I distinctly remember the moment when they all gave up on Francesca and I remember being so angry with all of them. I wanted to shake them and rage and scream and shout."

I chuckled bitterly at the memory.

"That was very much the start of my downfall. The beginning of my taking stupid risks for no other reason than I thought I could do it, I thought I would get away with that. That… rage, that anger. I still struggle to let go of that today. Why did I do it?

"I wanted to be the one that found her. I wanted to be the one that took her from the dark, horrible, damp, slimy dungeon that she would have been kept in. I wanted to be there. I wanted to see her and for her to see that it was me that had found her. I wanted to prove myself, in her eyes, in everyone's eyes really. I wanted to be the hero of my own story.

"It was arrogance." I said, "It's easy for me to say looking back. And also, that arrogance has never gone away. I was the one that figured out how to lift the curse on sleeping beauty. I had been the one that had kept Ariadne from laying waste to that part of the North. I was the one that… Something else that has only got worse over the years."

Father nodded when he ran out of steam.

"So I'm dead?" He checked with me.

"I'm afraid so. I was there when you gasped out your last. It was a friend of mine that pulled the sheet over your head to cover your face."

He grinned.

"So why am I hungry?"

"I… I don't know."

"Are you hungry?"

I considered the question as he climbed to his feet.

"I am," I decided after a while. Surprised at my own answer.

"I don't remember how I got here." Father said as he went over to his bags and started to rifle through them. "But if there's no food packed in these bags then I am severely out of character. As are you for that matter if you have been travelling in the world and you don't have anything to eat in those bags of yours. Check, would you."

I grinned and went to the bags. Sure enough, I found some bread and a small, leaf wrapped hunk of cheese. There were also a couple of apples in the depths of the bag that I produced triumphantly. Father did slightly better and had found a line of sausages and a hunk of bacon.

"Father?" I asked as I watched him beginning to carve up the bacon and the sausage.

"My son?"

"Tell me something, have you ever actually successfully managed to cook anything?"

He stared at the sausage that he had been in the process of mangling. "You know what?" he said. "I don't think I ever did."

"Always had a servant do it did you?" I teased.

"Less of your cheek, young man."

I just laughed at him and commandeered the meat out of his hands. "Just cut some bread will you." I told him.

He watched me for a moment, also passing over the small pot of butter that he had found before he cut and buttered some bread before watching me work. I turned and looked at him.

"I don't suppose you know what wild garlic and rosemary looks like do you?" I asked him.

He snorted and went into the undergrowth. Away from where he had told me that he went for latrines. He came back with what I was looking for and I started to set about adding some flavour into the meat that he had provided. He settled back onto his seat and watched.

"You know something?" He told me. "You're going to make someone a lovely wife one day."

"Fuck off Father." I told him, turning the sausages over carefully.

He chuckled. "When did you learn how to cook?"

I considered the question.

"I think it started in the army." I told him. "Life in the logistics corps was a lot like being a student really. Except for the fact that there were stricter morning calls. But even though we were routinely informed that we were the most important division in the army and that without the logistics corps, the entire armed forces of Redania would collapse. Even despite all of that, we still had to live off the shittiest food and everyone looked down on us. No glory to be found in the Logistics corps is there?"

He chuckled. Missing my remaining bitterness from not being able to serve in the proper army. I mean, I know and he was right to do it. But that doesn't leave me feeling any better.

"So we found that we had to make do with what we were given." I told him. "Foraging teams don't pay attention to things like wild garlic and herbs. They are after meat, butter, milk, cheese and vegetables. Things that they can store for extended periods of time. So we found that we had lots of bits of flavour and as such, we could even make an infantryman's boots taste good."

Father laughed at the old army joke.

"Then it just occurred to me while living in digs, that it was cheaper to cook good food than it was to try and eat out all the time. And then when I hit the road with Kerrass…. I mean, he can cook a decent steak but other than that… he's a Witcher. He can live off things that would turn you green. Turn me green too for that matter. He sometimes jokes that they burnt the taste buds out of him when he was a trainee Witcher."

Father laughed a bit harder at that.

"I mean," I went on. "He can appreciate a good meal when it's put in front of him and he certainly enjoys luxury when he can get it. But I think he feels that food is fuel and good food is a luxury that can be done without."

"He's not wrong." Father commented.

"He's not. But at the same time, if a little bit of effort, some proper seasoning and a knowledge of cooking herbs and everyday spices can make the difference between food being considered as sustenance and a meal that you enjoy eating with friends?"

I shrugged.

"An interesting philosophy." he told me. He had also found some wooden plates and had poured some more tea while I cooked.

"Tell me about how you looked for your sister and where."

"Well… The Lodge of Sorceress had decided that the imprinting of certain aspects of the Jack entity onto someone else was a magic that they didn't recognise. I have since found out that it would be a form of Goetia but that would suggest that Jack himself would know something about that. And given that he didn't, that would mean a new form, or a strange form, of Goetia that the existing mages didn't know anything about. Therefore, strange and foreign kinds of magic were our target. We also promised Sam that we would go north and look at the Castle Kalayn to see if there was anything going on there. From that, Kerrass had a few other ideas as to where to go next, but we didn't really talk about that at the time."

"Tell me."

Again. Although I was a grown-ass man. There is something primal in me that passes straight down my spine and into that primal instinct that says that i had to obey my father when he gets a specific tone.

I told him about the vault, guarded by Sally, Saffron and Pula. I wanted to spend more time on the hunt for the Knights of the Flaming Sword but truth be told, he didn't seem to care that much. As soon as he was told that the small family of creatures were dead, he seemed to immediately lose interest.

From there it was the march north, stopping off to tell him about the adjustments that were being made to Oxenfurt docks and the next run-in with Sir Robart de Radford. I told him about the cult in the North.

He had a lot of questions

I don't want to go over what happened in too much detail. Aftera ll, you read about it so you probably remember what happened. But he had a number of very detailed questions including some things that I really had to struggle to remember.

He was particularly interested in the outfits that the cult wore. I had to describe that the cult, especially Lord Cavill, wore animal skulls over their faces and that Lord Cavil, the leader of the cult wore a crown of antlers on his head. He seemed to find this both funny and a little offensive for reasons that I could not immediately understand. He asked why I thought that might have been, that they would use such costumes.

"After all." He told me. "The purposes of the cult, from what you've said, is the promotion of the human form and spirit. From what you have said, they are literally called the cult of the First-Born Suns, so why would they choose outfits like those?"

"We had several theories." I told him. "Most of it is psychological. They had a number of slaves that they used to use and they needed to keep those slaves in line. The easiest ways to do that was both through the many many drugs that they kept them docile with. But also, through fear. It is entirely possible that they used the combination of the two to literally force their slaves to think of them all as demonic creatures and they used whatever they could get their hands on in order to fulfil that ideal."

Father grunted at that.

"Another theory that we had was that the woodland around that area was old and quite ancient. Therefore, there were a lot of Leshen around there. If you wanted to pretend that you were ancient, terrifying spirits that are emerging from the depths of hell in order to torment the people in those areas. Why not model yourself on the genuinely terrifying things that are out there."

Father grunted at that as well.

"We also wondered whether or not the outfits, the weapons, the masks and the headdress were things that the cult had gotten off the being or entity that it had made contact with. We can't be sure though and those people that know about such things have been rather… intense on preventing anyone from trying to contact the entity to follow through on that particular theory. There is, as it turns out, such a thing as too much knowledge.

"If life on the road has taught me nothing else, it is that the old saying that 'no knowledge is evil, it is only the application of that knowledge' is, in fact, wrong. Pursuing the knowledge that these entities would give you would involve evil acts to make contact, evil acts to pay the price of the knowledge and then evil acts to make use of that knowledge. It is not worth it and therefore, living with the mystery is preferable."

Father considered this for a long time before nodding, a little unhappily.

"Were there any other theories?"

"Yes." I admitted.

"Which were?" He prompted, a little sternly. Father liked people to follow through on these kinds of things. There is an old joke among teachers and philosophers where someone says, 'Can I ask a question?' meaning it as a prelude to asking a question that the second person might not want to answer. It's the kind of thing where people prepare the person that the coming questioning is not going to be pleasant. The second person would look at the questioner and say 'yes', before walking off.

Father would not stand for that. If someone said that to him ``Can I ask a question?" he had been known to fly into a rage and tell the person that they should 'ASK THE DAMN QUESTION ALREADY,'

I took a deep breath. "Lord Cavil was an educated man." I said, "He was also a clever man. It is more than likely that he read about The Schattenmann and the awesome power that The Schattenmann was supposed to wield over the surrounding area. If he could borrow a certain amount of that power, even if it was just the reputation of that power, then I think he would use it. We also know that symbolism is powerful in this kind of thing and that therefore, it would not be beyond the realms of possibility that he was trying to subvert the power of the Schattenmann."

"Explain a bit more of that."

"It's just a theory. But these entities… those that exist outside of our realm, our sphere if you prefer that term leftover from the Conjunction of the sphere's event. But there are a number of these entities. The Horsewoman of war, the headless horseman which, as it turns out, are different things. The Schattenmann, Jack, the Shadow, the Rumplesteldt, the Master of Mirrors. Cromm Cruarch, the crooked man of the mound and whatever power it was that the cult of the First-Born were worshipping and empowering through their rites. All of them have power and that power can be evoked. We don't know how of course but we know it can be done.

"One of the theories about how that is done is to emulate the entity in question. Pretend to be the thing and then you get some of the power of the thing. It is one of our…" I could not help but sigh with exasperation. Exasperation that Father seemed to find amusing. "many… theories as to why the 'Jack' entity is so annoyed when people try to emulate him and copycat his methods and crimes.

"So it is an outside theory that what was happening was that Cavil had read or heard about The Schattenmann and was deliberately trying to steal or emulate some of that power in order to better serve his master."

Father grunted about that.

"Of all the theories that you propose regarding that instance, that is the most worrying. Do you think it worked?"

"Nah." I told him. "I think that the most likely scenario is the simplest one. I've seen that in so many of my studies and through so much of my time spent with Kerrass. The most obvious solution is the most likely. And in this case, it is by far the most likely that it was just a psychological trick that they were playing. Something to terrify the people that they were chasing and terrorising."

"If that was the case then," Father countered. "Why Antlers? From what you say, they set great stock about the antlers that Cavil was wearing. He had this whole apparatus about wearing it."

"He did, in which case the stuff about the Leshen comes in. He was copying Leshen and that that particular crown belonged to one of Cavil's predecessors and therefore, a lot of stock was set by it."

Father grunted again, I could tell he wasn't happy with that solution but I am familiar with that debate, it's one of the many circular mysteries that we just don't know the answer to and will probably never know the answer to. One question leads to the next question which leads to the next question and round and round it goes until you run out of energy.

I was saved from that debate by the fact that the sausages were finally ready. They had taken their sweet time to cook and then I looked down and suddenly, they were on the verge of being ready.

I had a brief moment where I bemoaned the lack of onions, but there's only so much you can do when you're out the road.

"Tell me about these ghosts that saved you?" He asked as we ate.

"Can we not wait until I've eaten?" I asked him. "I don't want the sausages to get cold."

He fixed me with a glare that I remembered all too well from the dining table of old.

"No." I told him, raising my fork at him in an attitude of defence. "You can glare at me all you want, you can order me all you want. But I am not going to waste hot food. I am going to eat first and then I will answer all the questions that you want to ask about the subject of Cromm Cruarch, the crooked man of the mound. Not that I can answer much."

I didn't look at him. "I just ate, avoiding his gaze. After a while, I heard the sounds of eating coming from that side of the campfire.

Pain flared again. I blinked but I couldn't see. All was red blackness in front of me. I tried to blink it free but discovered that my eyes wouldn't blink. My eyes felt as though they were being held open. They felt hot, dry and they hurt.

If only that was the worst agony that I could feel. I couldn't breath. I was choking on something hard that had been wedged down my throat. The corners of my mouth felt as though they had been torn and I could feel something running down the sides of my face. Was it blood, was it saliva? I could not possibly tell. A similar tearing feeling was happening in my backside. Agony was literally tearing me in half, splitting me in two. I could feel something groping around in my insides and as well as the agony, there was a discomfort deep in my gut as something hard felt around in the depths of my bowls.

I tried to scream but I was smothered by something, unable to breath. I couldn't move my arms as they were weighed down by something and tied by something else. My legs as well.

I started to panic, my vision went green.

"Are you alright?" Father asked.

"What?" I was staring at the last sausage on the plate.

"Are you alright? You just seemed to… go somewhere just now?"

"I don't…" I looked up at him as the pain receded. He seemed the same as he ever was. I suddenly felt cold and the clearing seemed somewhat darker. I reached towards the pile of firewood and added some more logs to the flame until I felt that bit warmer and the fire was leaping up to spread more light higher and further. I also fetched my blanket and wrapped it around myself while I finished my dinner.

"So you were saying." Father prompted.

"Was I?"

"About Cromm Cruarch?"

I shrugged. "I don't think that there is much to say. The way Kerrass talks about it was as if he was solving some kind of riddle. He solved the riddle of the man on the mound and summoned him through the ancient rites of that part of the countryside."

I described what had happened as best as I could manage. Father asked some questions about the forms that the spectres took and we talked about it a little from there.

"So who was he?' Father asked. "This crooked man of the mound?"

"We truly don't know." I answered. "And I have looked. And further than that, I have got Emma to pay other scholars to look for me while I have been on the road. The best theory that we can come up with is that many different cultures have some variation of the King that waits. Some fabled and ancient warrior that sleeps underneath a hill should the enemy that he was famous for defeating return to wreak their havoc upon the ancient warrior's homeland.

"So the theory that we have is that the entity that we had found, the Crom Cruarch was the literal interpretation of that. Some entity that had come through to fight the being that the cultists worshipped and had stayed, providing the locals with the means and the method to summon him should he be required to fight against the enemy in the future. As to who he definitely was?"

I shrugged.

"Kerrass thinks he was something similar to the woman that he worships as a Goddess. Another world's, another sphere's God or Goddess. Chireadean, the elf that I was travelling with and who saved our lives… He thinks that it was some kind of ancient Elven hero. But that is another one of those mysteries that we will likely never know the answer to. It is possible that if we found the answer to who, or what it was that the cult worshipped, we would find the identity of the other. But would it be worth it?"

I shrugged again.

He grunted and considered the matter for a moment before shrugging. His little hip flask came out again and we traded it back and forth.

We went on to talk about the ending of the cult in the North. How Ariadne, a vampire that I later figured out must have been Regis, and a dragon that must have been Maleficent cleaned out the cult caves on behalf of the crown. Father did stop me there.

"So your intended is friends with more than one Vampire and a dragon."

"That can shapeshift. Yes."

"Huh." He frowned as he thought about this.

"Also a pair of very old, very powerful Elves." I added.

"So when you marry her, you are going to be careful not to annoy her?"

"To the very best of my ability. There have been several instances where we have not been able to avoid upsetting each other but I suppose that we will get to those in time."

"I suppose that we shall." He told me.

We spoke about a couple of the leads that didn't pan out, the final days of Aunt Kalayn and her poor, unfortunate Elven Servant. He asked me what had happened to her and he frowned when I admitted that I actually didn't have any idea and that Chireadean would never tell me. Which was alright because I didn't really want to know. We talked about the incident in the village of the Unicorn.

He laughed for a long time when I told him about "The demon with the yellow eyes" and thought I was rather stupid for not figuring out what that was all about. I admit that it seems foolish in retrospect but at that time and that place… I argued that I was still recovering from my time in the North and that as such, it was not unreasonable for me to still have some gaps in my ability to think.

We did go over the conversation with the Unicorn though. He was interested in the Unicorn's perception of reality and about how the world and the universe works. I had nothing to add in that regard. I mean, I've had several different conversations along those lines now. Speaking with beings that think that they know the way that the world works. A lot of it matches up which is interesting but also, a lot of it could just be utter bullshit. Father seemed to be a little disappointed when I told him that but at the same time, he could not make any argument to the contrary that I couldn't immediately strike down with some counter arguments.

It was a big moment for me. The first argument and debate that I had with my Father that I had won through a purely logical argument.

Almost enough that I record it here, but I reason that it has little value to add to the debate so instead, I will just leave it and try to be the bigger man.

Beyond that. He was very interested in the stories surrounding the Skeleton Ship. He made me go over all the myths and legends about the thing. He made me go over what Ciri had said about her journeys to other worlds and what she had seen there. The account of the sailor was very interesting to him and he asked me about what the ship had looked like, over and over and over again until eventually, I went to my pack to find a piece of paper and I drew it for him using a lump of charcoal from out of the fire. Art has never been my strongest talent but at the same time, I was quite proud of what I managed to produce at the time.

Now that I was talking about it, It occured to me that I hadn't really thought about what had happened with the Skeleton Ship for a long time. It had soon been overtaken by later events with the Goddess and my slow climb back to health beyond that. But at the time, the question was about what we should do with the sailor, the traveller from another realm and whether we did the right thing in handing him back to the Skeleton Ship. If we did the right thing to hang the Albatross around his neck? I had not considered otherwise for quite a long time.

Father had no illusions.

"Of course it was the right thing." He said. "There are two possibilities for you if you go to a foreign nation to escape persecution. If you are fleeing something else, then you must ask yourself if you are going to bring the wrath of that "something else' down upon the world that took you in. Even if you have not done so deliberately. If the answer is that you are not going to bring that threat down upon you. Then you do your best to contribute everything that you can towards those people and that place that has taken you in. If, however, your presence is causing active harm to the people around you, then you should either continue your journey, drawing your enemies on after you. Or you should go back to where you came from in order to spare the lives of the innocent people that you have injured.

"And those people that you are staying with. If you hide, bringing harm on people that cannot possibly know better. Then they have every right to be angry at you. Especially if their continued presence is continuing to bring harm. You did the right thing there Freddie, do not doubt it."

He considered for a moment.

"At the very outside, there might have been some other knowledge that you might have gained from keeping hold of him in order to interrogate him further. But what benefit towards what gain? From everything you have said, people die, either directly or as a result of the passage of the Skeleton Ship. Therefore, the life of the man that brought that down on you, versus the lives of those innocents that he is harming through his own cowardice?"

He shook his head.

"It was a hard choice, but it was the right one. Proud of you Freddie."

I have no easy words to tell you just how much what he said meant to me. I had been longing to hear those words or words like them since… well… for as long as I can remember.

He couldn't care less about the dynastic problems of Skellige although he was pleased that I managed to secure passage for Coulthard trading ships without possibility of them being attacked by Skelligan pirates. He was proud of me for that.

Then we talked about the Goddess. He didn't like her. Not one little bit.

"Conflict has its place." he said. "But the truth is that it is only through cooperation, that things are achieved. Politicians and courtiers like to say that conflict is just an extension of diplomacy but that is clearly nonsense. Diplomacy, or the proper application of it is about reducing the need for conflict. Debate is not conflict. Debate is about learning. You take on the point of view of the other person, and test it. Even she admits that. And then, if that point of view can help you grow then you graft that knowledge or that philosophy onto your own point of view and then you move forward. That is how people grow. Not just humanity either. Conflict is so rarely truly necessary that it beggars belief.

"The wars against the South were not necessary. They happened out of fear and because it was the easiest way forward. The first one was because the returning Empire found himself in charge of a nation that was so geared towards warfare that to stop it was pointless and that he was still overwhelmed by people that hated him. A nice quick war would mean that he could prune his own officer and diplomatic corps when it inevitably failed.

"The second war took place because the wounds of the first were still too deep, the end of the first war was not satisfying to anyone and maintaining peace was more difficult than simply going to war."

"What about the third one?" I asked.

"The third one was necessary." He said. "Sometimes, an illness gets into a crop, a disease gets into the woodland, rot gets into the barrel of fruit and then it needs to be cut out. Everyone was still so angry about everything that had come before. Sooner or later war was going to come again. Henselt wanted to come south and claim the fields and the crops of Aedirn for himself. Maeve of Lyria & Rivia wanted to go North for the same reasons. Temeria was tearing itself apart because the succession wasn't secure and Radovid was going mad.

"War is a disease and the Kings of the North and the nobles of the South had caught it. They looked at the previous two conflicts and told themselves that if only they could be in charge then things might have been better. They all wanted that "third time's the charm" final victory that utterly destroys the opponent, War was coming and anyone with an ounce of sense could tell you that this time was going to be final and devastating.

"The Emperor knew two things. He knew that the Northern Kings were overconfident and had a taste for war now. So they were going to fight it out amongst themselves. He knew that. But he also knew that if they fought it out amongst themselves, then the already decimated Northern Realms would struggle for crops and a healthy populace as well as be united behind a single, all powerful, battle-hardened ruler. They would invade South. So he attacked first. I could even argue that he didn't really have that much of a choice.

"Arranging for him to hand power over to a Northern "daughter" afterwards was a masterstroke. So masterful that there could even have been an argument that he planned it that way.

"War had become a disease in the wood that would have spread and rotted the trees. The irony that he used warfare to cut all of that out is not lost on me."

I laughed at him and he gave me a look.

"What?" He demanded.

"Trust my Father." I told him. "The only man that could argue two years worth of analysis which is spread over several shelves of books at last count. An amount that is only going to increase over time and you boil it down to one solid rant delivered in a few minutes."

"Well…" He sniffed. "You scholarly types never say anything in a dozen words that you also say in twelve thousand. That people insist on paying you for the privilege of spouting that nonsense is one of life's little mysteries."

"I would point out that my several thousand words got the Coulthard family the ear of the Empress." I pointed out. "Just a little bit of a push more and Emma is going to be named Imperial Treasurer. Last time I heard, she was practically doing the job anyway."

"That's not a good thing."

"Also…" I cut him off. "I can't help but notice a lot of plant based metaphors in your little diatribe."

He shrugged. "I am a merchant. Most of what I deal with is in food, timber and crops. If I was a doctor I would talk about cancers and if I was a scholar, I would probably say…" He reached for the words.

"You would say," I said for him, "That bad information can spread, infecting minds until more people believe the falsehood than believe the truth. Which is why facts must be confirmed and checked and then verified by an external examiner. Why opinion is important but it must still examine the same facts to be valid."

"Precisely." He said. "So this Goddess of your Witcher is wrong. Conflict should be the last possible response. After everything else has been tried. Instead, growth, the grafting of more knowledge onto your own so that you pass that down to your children who will take on new knowledge and new experiences before they pass that down to their children and so on."

"There is an argument to say that this will make humanity homogeneous and boring." I told him. "That it would reduce individuality and make a chaotic mess."

"I also remember someone telling me that there is great beauty in chaos." He told me. "But apart from anything else, her "conflict as growth" philosophy, hurt you to the point that you nearly didn't survive."

"It did. But I got better."

He grunted at that.

"Tell me." He told me.

I won't go back through all of that again. It was a painful time in my life and if we're being fully honest with each other. I don't like remembering it and… well… I am kind of going through something similar at the moment. Not as bad as I was at the time but that doesn't change the fact that I am really struggling with things right now. Once again, I refer you to the chapters that deal with my sickness and eventual recovery as that goes into more and better detail than I can really manage.

That's not to say that I skipped over them with my father sitting in front of me though. He wouldn't let me. I am well practised at it now though and as such, I didn't really need much prompting.

I have found, when talking about these kinds of difficulties, when your brain decides to try and make you sick, then the difficulty is not in telling other people. Telling other people is the easiest bit. The hardest part is dealing with how other people see you.

This has happened to me multiple times now where people, often well meaning people including friends and colleagues, have asked me about how everything happened and I have told them about it and what it's like. The little things that have contributed to my sickness and how I am dealing with them.

I swear that people have looked me in the eye and told me that they didn't need to know that, that they didn't want to know that. But they asked.

So what's a man to do when people ask these things.

Father remained neutral on the subject though. He listened carefully, asking several pertinent and pointed questions. He did not judge as so many tend to, nor did he try and pity me which is the hardest thing to deal with. He just… listened.

When I was done, he shifted his weight a bit and scratched his chin.

"I think you are lucky in your woman." He told me.

"Don't I know it." I replied quickly.

He smirked at that. "I'm not sure that what you did was right. I am not sure that I would have forgiven myself, even for succumbing to the whims and thoughts of a Goddess. I would have removed myself from the situation in advance I think. I would have spent the evening in the pub, had a bath and gotten an early night."

"I didn't know that that's what was going to happen. As so many people have said, the life I have chosen, the path I was following was destructive by that point. I was desperately looking for Francesca. I needed to find her and I was not going to let some Goddess stand in the way. Before I stepped into that circle of flames, I would have told you that I would have paid any price for the knowledge of where my sister was or what had happened to her. I would have done anything I would have given anything."

"From the sounds of it, you very nearly did."

"As you say. A knight that I met in Toussaint told me that it is easy to pay for something with your life. Any idiot can do it, laying their lives on the line for a cause, a country, a crown, a flag, family, friends and loved ones. But what happens if you don't die? What happens if you lose a limb instead and then you have to go on living for your country. What happens if you have half your guts removed or what happens if the mace mashes your face in so that instead of a mouth you have this weeping sore on the front of your face that your family and nurses must shovel nutritional goo into? What happens when your head gets so badly injured that you spend the rest of your life with the mental age of less than a child and have little to no control over your body.

"After that? All your ambitions, they are just done. Your marriage to that pretty lady that gave you her favour before you went to war? Well that's over. If you are already married, your life has changed because now your family's existence is about you. Your children, your parents, your friends. Everything has changed. People don't think about that. Every idiot with a sword will say "I will give my life for… whatever cause we're talking about but not many people completely think that kind of thing through."

I took a deep breath.

"I was willing to pay that price." I said, "I didn't know what it meant at the time, but now that it has happened, I know that I am paying that price. That I am still paying that price and that more than likely, I will be paying that price for the rest of my life. And if it meant getting my sister back?"

I felt hot tears on my cheeks.

"Flame curse me to hell." I scuffed at my cheeks angrily. "I miss her Dad. I miss you. I thought I was over it and every time I think that it's done and that I don't need to shed any more tears over it then more tears come. I want my sister back. I don't mind the price, I would pay it. She was the best of us. Better than me, much better than you. I want my sister back."

It took me a while to swallow the tears. Father took up a stick and poked the fire for a while so that he didn't have to see, didn't have to comment on my tears.

"She was the best of us." He agreed after a while. "I think that the best thing I did for any of my children was when I sent her off to the Imperial Court. I thought she would be safer there than anywhere else and then…"

He shook his head. "Still."

"So then we went back to Toussaint." I told him, diverting him away from the subject.

He didn't care about the Jack conspiracy. He dismissed it as political squabbling amongst the nobles of a foreign power and not the kind of thing that he was interested in or particularly cared about. I will leave you with this quote.

"One of the things that all of these monarchs, nobles and lords like to forget is that it's all desperately important from where they stand. I understand that, I can even agree with that. But at the end of the day, who is on the throne, who owns the castles and who gets to wave the flags are unimportant. At the end of the day, in the years to come, we are all ash on the wind or mouldering in the ground. The very best that any of us can hope for is a line in a history book or a statue that pigeons shit on every day.

"No matter what happens, the peasants still need to work the fields because without those peasants, the merchants have nothing to sell and the taxes cannot be collected. Without either of those things, a nation cannot exist and all of that nonsense, all of that power is… useless.

"The nobles of Toussaint might have succeeded in making the duchess powerless. They might have replaced her with a more pliable Duke or Duchess but at the end of the day, they would still need to find ways to sell their wine. Because without that wine, Toussaint is nothing. Just a bunch of fools that still believe in nonsense like chivalry, courtly love and the use of might for right. When anyone can see that the only reason some warlord hasn't conquered them is because it's too much effort."

My response to that. Bearing in mind Father said this with some genuine anger and passion in his voice. There was a wild look in his eyes, spit flew from his lips and he bit off the words in the same way that he did when he was… well… passionate about something. I waited until he was done before I allowed myself to grin.

"Wow Father" I said. "Tell me how you really feel."

His eyes blazed at me for a long moment before he saw the funny side of things and started to laugh.

He was interested in my final conversation with Jack though and was particularly intrigued about the message that he gave me for the unseen Elder when I went to see him. He also liked Jack's curse on the Duchess.

"That's good." He said. "As ways to bring down a nation go, that one is particularly good. That's going to drive her mad."

I felt myself frown.

"A bit harsh Father. My reading of the Duchess is that she's a good woman."

"I have no doubt." He told me. "But you cannot deny the power of that curse or why it's going to work. That bottle that he gave her could be filled with vinegar but she's going to drive herself mad trying to convince herself that it's the most beautiful wine that she's ever tasted. Because she's the DUCHESS OF TOUSSAINT and it couldn't possibly be anything else. She's going to serve it to other people, as you said, in thimble sized cups and you are all going to sip it and then look at her, like the mad woman that she is while she asks you your opinion on it and how she should go about duplicating it. You don't have to hate her, or like her to admire the incredible trap that he has set for her.

"Also, what she was doing, naming a new order of Knights after a girl that they had utterly failed to protect is a travesty bordering on insult. It was grotesque, insensitive and awful and as a result, I think she kind of deserves everything she gets."

Pain tore through me again. I bent over double with it as again, I felt like I was being split in half. I screamed in that clearing next to the Fire.

Father frowned.

And then All was in that strange kind of green darkness. But I could move. There was also more sensation now. I was choking. Something large had forced its way down my throat and I could feel it blocking everything. It was hard and brutal and it was so large that it felt as though my jaw had been broken in order to accommodate it.

But I could breathe.

I was still split in half from something that had forced its way up my recrum, but I was no longer confined. I could feel my legs and my arms dangling free as though I was hanging above something. And I could hear. Something tore and snapped. I couldn't see as there was something covering my face. Realising that my arms were free I tried to lift my hands to clear what was going on over my eyes.

The agony that the movement caused was indescribable and I screamed as the thing in my bowls and the thing in my throat seemed to move and protest with it. I tried to scream and shout but I couldn't move. I was hanging in the air by the things that were impaling me. I pulled the thing off my eyes and I tried to look around but I couldn't move my head.

I screamed againI was in a web of green. Limbs and vines and branches surrounded me, moving and waving in some kind of breeze or at the whim of some kind of intelligence or instinct that I could not identify. I looked about frantically and I could see nothing else. I was being tugged in different directions by it all as though there were hooks embedded in my skin. Those tentacles of green reached out and struck me, impaling me in the chest and the abdomen.

More pain, I felt and saw blood and worse, spilling itself down those tentacles, those branches of pure green. One tentacle that looked nothing more than a large dark, forest green worm reared up before my face and spat a goo of green horror onto my face. I was smothered and I could no longer see. I thought I had been panicking before but now I really started to scream and then…

"Freddie? Are you ok?"

I scrambled backwards and away from the fire through instinctual horror more than any kind of real conscious effort. I climbed to my feet, found my spear and brandished it in front of me, looking around for an enemy, anything? Something to explain what was happening.

"Freddie?" Father was climbing to his feet with the slow, exaggerated movements of a man trying to ensure that he didn't panic the crazy person. "Freddie?"

"Who are you?" I demanded. "What are you? What's going on?"

He frowned slightly.

"Freddie?" He said it slowly and carefully, drawing out the name in a way that was probably meant to be cautious but came across as being kind of threatening.

"What is this place?" I demanded, looking around me again, trying to see it for the first time. Trying to really look at what was happening around me. I leapt to my feet and ran over to the nearest tree and pushed at it, trying to tell if it felt real. Was it real? What did it feel like? Was this real or was this all in my head.

Both reassuringly and terrifyingly, it felt like a pine tree.

I knelt on the ground and started scrabbling at the ground. Maybe, if I dug down deep enough I would be able to dig below the leaves, the moss and the pine needles and then I would be able to find the edges of the illusion and some kind of evidence that all of this might not be real.

Again, both reassuringly and terrifyingly, it felt like mud. Slightly damp, slightly cold and even when I drew my dagger and tried to dig with it, it was still just compacted ground. I even found part of a tree root.

I absently wiped the dagger on my arm before realising what I had done but then I looked at the mud smear. There was normal, reddish brown mud. A touch of grey clay in the midst of it. It was mud like any other. Nothing to add, nothing else to say.

I put the knife away in the often practised and automatic movement and ran over to my pack which I unpacked. It looked like my travel pack. The blanket felt like my blanket and even had the same pattern. The spare clothes in my pack were my spare clothes and the gear was either mine or close enough to mine to suggest that I had replaced it. Sooner or later tinder and flint need to be replaced and there are many different kinds of tinder and flint for you to play around with.

"Freddie?" Father called. He was standing now.

"Shut up." I told him as I looked around the place frantically.

My eyes lit on my spear and I picked the thing up from where I'd dropped it. I automatically broke it down before slotting it back together thinking that if all of this was an illusion summoned for my own head, then there would be a mistake there. It would feel wrong somehow. And if this was a delusion that I had summoned from my own mind, then there would be a mistake because I wouldn't be acting or thinking rationally.

The spear slotted together the same as it ever had. I examined the spear further. Looking for the scars on the haft that were left from the many times that I had used it in order to protect myself. The slightly discoloured metal where the sheen was different. The glittering lines of fresh impact. They all fell into place where they were supposed to be.

I examined the blade in the same light. According to a couple of craftsmen that I know, the blade is holding up well through all of the abuse that I have put it through over the years. More than one person has wondered where the smith was that made it for me on the grounds that she had more than a small amount of talent and was wasted being just a village blacksmith. I agreed with them but I have long since given up trying to find the place on a map. Just one of those small farming villages that happen in the world. Far too small to be mapped and named by anything greater than the tax collector that was just passing through.

I looked at the blade for a long time and took a deep breath. I pulled my sleeve up my arm exposing some flesh and started to lower that arm towards the blade.

Father's arm slapped into my shoulder and he pushed me off balance.

I reacted instantly, brandishing the spear towards him. Kerrass has been training me for a long time after all. He leapt back. Father saw service in the first and second Nilfgaardian wars. Mostly in the Logistics divisions given his status as a merchant. The first war he served as a Quartermaster for a cavalry regiment and in the second, he served as a Colonel of logistics when he was newly married. He claims to have fought, but will not say when or where which actually makes the possibility of him actually fighting more likely. In my experience, people that have combat experience prefer not to talk about it whereas people that have none will not stop talking about battles that they have fought in and the number of people that they have killed.

He certainly leapt backwards from me fast enough and his sword leapt into his hand with the speed of long reflexes before he realised what happened and put the sword away again. Still taking care to stay well out of range of me though.

"Freddie." He said carefully. "I don't know what's going on but if you try and hurt yourself I will try and stop you."

"Why?" I demanded. "We're dead aren't we? Why stop me? What possible further harm could we do to each other?"

"Are we dead?" He countered. "I only have your word for that. For all I know, this could be a dream."

"I sat next to your death bed." I told him. "I chanted the psalms with Mark and I prayed for your soul. I ate a ham sandwich at your bedside when Mother used logic in order to point out that I would need my strength and that it was not me that was dying."

He smiled suddenly. "That sounds like something that she would do."

"Who are you?" I demanded. "Who are you? What am I doing here?"

"I am your Father."

"No…" I said, "No you're not. I am getting on with you much better than I ever got on with my Father."

At first he seemed to get angry about that. A sudden flash of anger crossed his face before a deep sadness settled in his eyes.

"That is, unfortunately true and I bear the fault for most of that. But…" His eyes narrowed at me, the firelight reflected in them making him seem angrier than he was and uncomfortably sinister. "You cannot claim that there were not times when you made things worse, deliberately antagonised me or otherwise made matters harder on yourself."

That is probably not unfair.

"Come and sit." He said, seating himself back down.

"Tell me something that only you would know." I demanded, proving again that there are always some cliches that are based in fact.

"Are you sure?" He asked, a slow smile crossing his eyes.

I brandished my spear, not really seeing the humour.

"Very well." He said with a smile and holding his hands up in surrender. "But don't blame me when you get all of those years worth of embarrassment in your face at the same time."

He leant back and closed his eyes.

"You were fourteen." He said. "I was already confident that you liked girls rather than boys because I had seen the way that you looked at those Elven Acrobats in Oxenfurt market square when you were twelve. But there was a time when a minstrel had come to the castle in an effort to sing for his supper. He was good, but not great. His name was…" he paused in thought. "Pavel. Your mother claimed that he had some talent but that all he was doing was playing other people's songs."

I realised where the story was going. "Ok, that's enough." I told him.

"Oh no," He told me with a smile. "You started this so now I'm going to finish it. He had a dancer with him. She was graceful and was doing her best to act as a honey trap. Trying to seduce me, just as the minstrel was trying to seduce your mother or Emma, which ever he could in order to guarantee some kind of longer term meal ticket. I won't deny that she was a good looking girl but her advances were too clumsy for me. Edmund and Mark were long gone. Sam was uninterested and so she tried her moves on you, you remember?"

He mimicked a woman holding his arms out to the side and shaking his torso from side to side as if to jiggle breasts that weren't there.

I sat down.

"I remember being confused." I said, "I had no idea what was happening at the time."

"No." Father nodded, "I should have sent you to the Belles in Beauclair so that they could take care of you and ensure a proper education in such things. I would have done, or hired one to come and see to the matter. I wanted to but your mother would not allow it. I thought it would help prevent you from being… I thought it would prepare you for what happens to your mind and body when a woman decides that she's going to make a fool out of you."

"Did that ever happen to you?"

"Don't try and change the subject. I remember you blushing when she bent over to show you down her dress. Later, after you went to your room, I had to come and tell you about a message that your tutor had sent and to make sure that you had written to Lady Anita in order to further your courtship, do you remember?"

"I remember that Anita called me a foolish little boy."

"You remember what you were doing when I opened the door?"

"Of course I remember." I retorted. "You should have knocked?"

"As I have explained before, it is my castle and I will go where I wish. It is not my fault that you had taken that opportunity to try and pleasure yourself."

I cringed in left over horror. One of those teenaged embarrassments that never leave you.

He grinned at my reaction.

"Besides." He went on. "If I had knocked on any of your doors, it would have given you time and warning in order to hide the contraband. Like the bottle of wine that Sam would regularly keep under his bed. Or the foolish books of romantic poetry that your sister was obsessed with. She called them "Bodice-rippers'' whatever that meant. The difference being that she always dreamed that she was the one doing the ripping of the bodices.``

"Thank you for that image, and that memory Father." I told him. "Now I'm definitely going to turn my blade on myself in order to save myself the embarrassment."

"Don't be too embarrassed." He told me. "Most people do it. Mark never did for reasons that I never understood. Or if he did, I never caught him. But at the end of the day, parents are more perceptive than you might think and whatever your mother might have to say on the matter… I remember doing it when I was fourteen and I have a similar story about my father catching me at it after a day of playing in the local pond with some of the village girls."

His face became solemn. "Your mother didn't have the childhood to compare it to though so she couldn't have known."

"I remember that you said nothing," I admitted. "Just gave me the time to… conceal and pretend to myself that I had gotten away with it."

There are so many times as a parent." He told me. "That the best thing you have to do is to pretend that you saw nothing."

We both laughed.

"Now will you sit down?" He asked me.

Not being able to think of any other reason to do otherwise. I sat where he gestured.

He stared at me over the fire before passing me his flask again.

"Keep it." He told me. "I don't know why you take brandy with you on a hunt, or why you give it to people after they've passed out or are in the process of freezing to death, but they do and it works. So take your time with it. It's expensive."

I nodded and did as I was told.

"What's happening?" He asked. "Why the sudden panic?"

"I saw something." I said, "I have no idea what it was but I saw something."

"What did you see?" He asked gently, more gently than he had ever asked me anything in his life.

"I was hanging." I told him. "There was something in my mouth and something in my… in my bowels. I felt like I was being smothered but at the same time I could breathe."

"What did you see?" He asked again, softer this time.

"I saw a network of things. Ariadne would be cross if I tried to call it a web, but that was what it was. It was a web. Clusters and junctions with lines of stuff connecting the one thing to the next. I was hanging wrong. Far above the ground."

"What did you see?"

"I saw these pulses of green going through the web. It felt like a heartbeat as it went but at the same time, there was less order to it. No… I'm wrong. It wasn't like the pulses of a heartbeat, it was more like the flashes of lightning. I was looking… I was hanging above the ground, looking up I think. I couldn't see the ground and it gave me this feeling of, I didn't know what was up or what was down. A thing came to my face and fired this goo at me. I couldn't see anything else."

"Then what did you hear?"

"I heard… I heard a voice calling to me. It was telling me to… Wait, be patient."

"Who was it that was calling to you?"

"I don't… I don't know."

Father grunted and looked down into the fire.

"What's happening?" I asked again.

"I'm not sure that I'm the right person to tell you." He said, stretching his legs out. "I am the merchant son of a farmer. You and Mark were the ones that asked Spiritual, existential questions about life, consciousness and the expectation of… being wasn't it?"

I smirked at the memory of having an argument with Father about the implications of consciousness and what we were if the soul didn't exist.

"Something like that."

"So what do you think is happening?" He prompted.

"I don't know."

"Come on Freddie, you can do better than that?"

I felt myself stiffen and an old anger rise in my chest. There was that way that he used to say Freddie again.

"'I don't know' is a perfectly good answer." I told him. "How else is a tutor supposed to know what we know and what we don't know unless we tell them that we don't know something."

"Which is true," his own voice raised a little, his eyes narrowing and flashing in the firelight. "Unless the phrase "I don't know" is being used as a substitute for doing actual work. If you say "I don't know" because you can't be bothered to think about the question or if you are using the answer in order to excuse yourself from actually doing the work and finding the answer." He told me. "You are the one with the experience in these matters. You tell me that I am dead. Fair enough. Does that mean that you are dead?"

"Probably?"

"Probably," He echoed with a bit of a sneer. There was the Father that I remembered. "But I am not experiencing these visions of a network of green. So what's going on? What is the difference there?"

"I don't…" I found my mouth forming the words automatically. "The fact that you are here and that I am here would suggest that I am dead as well."

He nodded. "Then the only thing to do is to wait and see if things sort themselves out. Although it has to be said, again, that I don't really feel dead. If we're dead. I thought there would be a flame, something that would lead me into the next world or at least, that's what your brother kept promising me."

"That's the accepted scripture version of it, yes." I told him. "The church of the Great Sun believes something similar where they think that the…"

"I know what the Great Sun says." He snapped. "You might be a professor now but that doesn't mean that you get to lecture me on things that I already know the answer to."

"Sorry Father."

"So I should hope. I don't know what the network of Green was that you were seeing though." He told me. "Sounds… unpleasant."

"It was certainly not something that I am entirely comfortable with." I admitted.

"So where does that leave us?" Father asked. "Dead?"

"More than likely. Or at least…" It was another one of those moments where I could feel that my brain was starting to work. "Or at least you are. I was there when they entombed you so you had better be dead. Otherwise, there is going to be an awfully unpleasant conversation coming up in a short while."

He sniggered.

"But I suppose… if there is a death. And a place where you go when you die. We know that some people kind of hang around because they have unfinished business, because the emotions surrounding their death are so extreme that they cannot move on, or because it does not occur to them that they might be dead. So in turn, they refuse to believe it. Therefore, it would suggest that there is a place where the dead go before they move on to whatever it was that comes next."

"How do you know that?" He wondered.

"Because… wraiths." I told him. "I have seen a number of wraiths now and I have watched as Kerrass has destroyed them. It's never fun, it's always tragic and more often than not, I always find myself siding with the wraiths."

"Fair enough. So by that logic, I am here because I am waiting for someone, or because something in my life is unfinished." He considered this. "I would like to see your mother again. I have a lot that I would like to say to her and a lot to apologise for. I should have been a better husband to her. But still…"

"So for me." I went on, ignoring his self pity. "I am here because… I suppose it's possible that I am not quite dead yet. Or that something is happening that is keeping me from death."

"Or that you have unfinished business of your own." He suggested.

I considered this.

"No." I said, "The only thing I have left is Ariadne and that is sad, yes, but we knew that this would happen eventually. She is Vampire and I am human. I would have died long before she would even notice the onset of age. And she would be the first to dismiss me or see that I moved on to a better place."

"Are you sure?" He wondered. "Absolutely no unfinished business?"

Something in the way that he said that caught my mind and I forced myself to consider what he was saying.

"No." I decided after a long while. "No, there is nothing outstanding."

He gazed at me for a while before shrugging.

"If you say so."

"The other possibility is that I'm not dead and that things are happening to me that makes me over on both sides of the line."

"Nasty. So, you could go either way is what you're telling me. You could wake up, any second and you will be back to being the obnoxious and unfairly still alive Freddie that I know and love and despair of at the same time. Or you could die properly and move onto wherever or whatever will come for you next."

"That sounds about right."

"Lovely. Although the prospect that you might have something in your mouth and something in your bowels doesn't give me much hope."

"Not really."

"So you know what you should do?"

"Stop worrying?"

"Almost, but what I think you should do is to come and sit back down next to the fire and share a drink with your father. You have yet to finish up the story about what was happening to you. And call me selfish if you like, which I will admit to, if not entirely happily. But I want to know the rest of the story if you're going to be whisked off to the next stage of your afterlife… What happened?"

"So I finished telling him about Toussaint. I went back to the fireplace, settled myself down, accepted another long pull from the flask, which should have been long empty by now, and I started to talk. I told him about the Knights of Saint Francesca. Something that he was appalled by, and I told him about my part in that. I told him about the deepening rift in the family between Sam and Emma which he was not as disturbed about as I thought he would be.

"Those two never got along." He told me. "Too different. The only thing they had in common was you, Francesca and the sure knowledge that neither of them were going to inherit. So it is not a surprise to me that the knowledge that they are both going to inherit bits, while at the same time neither of them are going to inherit the entire thing, would be dangerous. With Francesca leaving and you finding love, rank, fame and wealth separate from the pair of them. It is not that surprising to me that they are at each other's throats."

"I always thought that they were…"

"I love you my son but you have always had a blind spot when it came to your family. Your mother and I did our best but she had no idea how to be a mother given that her family were so utterly bad at it. She had nothing to base it on. And I… Well, I have many excuses. My Father was not an ideal Father either and I am very much afraid, looking back, that in trying to be a different man, or a different kind of father to how he was to me, I ended up becoming just like him.

"If you do manage to return to your life and return to that Vampire woman of yours. And if you do manage to make her pregnant if that turns out to be remotely possible, then ensure that you do not repeat the same mistakes that I did. And when you do anyway, despite your own best efforts, be generous with yourself. Do not be too hard on yourself. None of us know how to be parents, we're all just making it up as we go along. Remember that."

I took that in as best as I could.

Then I told him about how we had found out about what had happened to Francesca. About how a chance meeting from Kerrass while I was convalescing told us that our true enemy was someone that we hadn't met for the longest time. That he'd hated us for years and that we had never seen him. And that he had done, just what we had most feared. He had kidnapped Francesca, intending to torture her, and us, and use her in his magical experiments. But then he realised that there was too much risk, slit her throat and dumped her somewhere.

I told him how we had caught Phineas Tordril looking to take a ship for the Ofieri Empire in Novigrad and that he had confessed to the crime before biting his own tongue off to ensure that he would tell us no more.

Father didn't take this well.

"That makes little sense to me." he said.

I just laughed at him and he frowned.

"Father, nothing about any of this makes any kind of sense. I have been over the disappearance of Francesca in my own head, over and over and over again. I have gone over the days of her disappearance until it literally made me sick. I have wondered what would have happened if I had done this or if I had done that but I keep coming back to the conclusion that I could have done nothing other than what I ended up doing. I might have done other things if I had had more information but the truth of the matter is that we did the best we could at the time.

"The problem is that everything we tried, everything we thought of was dreamed up by rational people. But we weren't dealing with rational people, we were dealing with a mad man. That is what makes no sense and it makes me sick. Literally sick. We had him, we were inches away from him and we had no idea. I hate myself for that mistake but it was made and now there is nothing we can do to bring her back."

There is always a danger whenever someone tries to talk to me about Francesca's disappearance, that I can go a bit off the rails. I find myself wanting to relive the entirety of the investigation and go through it again. I can tend to get a bit overwhelmed by it all and suddenly, or if I'm not particularly careful, it can become too much and I turn hysterical. So if you do have any theories or anything that you want to talk about when it comes to Francesca's disappearance. I would ask you to do us all a favour and only approach me on the topic if I seem to be in a good mood and of a mind to discuss the matter. Because otherwise, things are likely to go badly for both of us. And for the love of the flame, if I tell you that I don't want to, or am not up to, talking about it. Take the fucking hint.

"Hey hey hey," He spoke calmly and firmly. "Don't… Don't fall over."

"The problem is," I took a couple of deep breaths. "That we were always, always thinking about what we were doing from the point of view of someone that was making rational choices. Someone that was thinking clearly. At the best, this man was a mad man who was pursuing his sick experiments. The most conservative, sympathetic viewpoint is that he was frustrated with his lack of power and that, in trying to find ways to make himself more powerful, he accidentally opened his way into another realm where the beings or the entities on the other side of… wherever the fuck, took advantage of him and tore him apart.

"The less sympathetic viewpoint of the matter is that he did this deliberately. He found cultists and other places that needed his services and that he fed off them, taking money, resources and Flame knows what else until they were caught or were going to be exposed and then he moved on.

"We caught his eye because we were at the root of several of his places of power being destroyed. That's it. Nothing more complicated than that."

"No," He said, shaking his head. "I understand all of that. But the basic premise is incorrect. Even if he was mad with power, then he would still need a certain amount of logical intelligence to be able to use magic. Over and over again, people have told me that magic is as much science and craft as it is art. And both science and craft, especially science, need logical thought behind it. Mark has told me these things over and over again. As has Emma for that matter."

"I know that you and Emma worked hard to get a lot of mages out of Novigrad Father."

"Yes, well…" He sniffed and looked, much to my astonishment, embarrassed. "Foolish of Radovid to get rid of those resources like that. Magic users are powerful tools, and to ostracise them, to get rid of them with that level of…" he shook his head in disgust. "Foolish."

"All of that is correct, but you didn't have to do anything."

He sighed and rubbed at his forehead. "Yes I did. But don't let my philanthropic efforts distract you. Magic is a logical thing. He would know that to attack us would draw our ire. Even if, as you suggest, he didn't know that Francesca had the ear of the Empress and that the amount of attention he was receiving was more than he could easily cope with, even if that was the case. He still knew that we were rich and powerful. He still knew that if we put our minds to it, we could hire detectives, mercenaries and hunters. Royal favours of which we are still owed several, could be called in and he would eventually be found. To challenge us was a mistake. I won't try and say that the Coulthard family is too big to fail, or too powerful to attack in the way that we might be vulnerable to. But we are pretty big and we are pretty powerful.

"He must have had a reason beyond simple revenge. He could have killed us in the street. After all," he gestured at me, "you tell me that Edmund and his friends of all people, were able to come up with a scheme to get me killed."

"That's true." I admitted, feeling the pull of the mystery even if it had already been solved.

"There's a 'but' coming here isn't there." He declared.

"Even if magic has a requirement of logical thought and calm intelligence. That doesn't mean that the person has to be entirely sane. Speaking as a person that has gone, at least, a little bit insane. I thought that what was going on made me saner, and it wasn't until other people pointed out how stupid and mad I was being that it all came crashing down around my head. He hated us. And it was Imperial interrogators that were getting this information out of him. We have to assume that they knew their stuff."

"Do we?"

"But the other point." I said, ignoring his comment. "Was that he's dead. We can't ask him any further questions. His places of power in the North have been destroyed and the churches of the Eternal Flame, Melitele and the rest are all looking out for those same kinds of cultists. And whatever else might be said of the matter. He is dead and we can't ask him what his reasons or his methods were. I'm told that the Empress even enquired as to whether or not Necromancy was a viable option. And she was told it wasn't."

He shuddered but asked the question anyway. "Why not?"

"Apparently, Necromancy works by summoning the spirit of the dead person into the body that they used to reside in. If that body can't speak because, I don't know, it's jaw is broken or it's teeth are all caved in, then the necromancer can't ask any questions. In this case, the prize monster turd had bitten off his own tongue. So all we would get is some incoherent groaning."

"But wraiths and ghosts happen all the time?" Father protested.

"Yes they do." I agreed. "But in those cases, the wraith generally wants to come back. Necromancy is the forcing of unwilling spirits to return to their former bodies."

Father nodded, considering the matter before taking a deep breath.

"No-one tried to necromancy me did they?"

"Not that I ever heard of. And besides, with you. Wouldn't you have felt it by now?"

"I don't know." He thought for a while before shaking his head, clearing his mind of the image. "So what happened next? You had a small existential crisis. It turns out that Francesca's name will be remembered long after the rest of us are forgotten about, even if it is in a ghoulish and macabre way that she definitely wouldn't have approved of. And then you did what?"

I told him about the conversation that I had with Yennefer and Jack. About how my new way forward and the new thing that I was going to do was to contact and interview otherworldly and powerful entities. That I intended to publish a series of books on these entities, starting with Jack, moving through the Unseen Elder and then onto other things. Including the Schattenmann of the Black Forest as well as others. He grunted as he listened.

"Why did you go to the Black Forest?" He asked.

"What? To speak to the Schattenmann of course."

"Yes, I know that. But why did you go to the Black Forest? You didn't need to, you were already sending the best possible envoy that you had at your disposal in sending that Witcher friend of yours. You could have stayed in Toussaint eating the best food in the continent, drinking the best wine and making love to the best women given that your betrothed seems quite open to that kind of thing. So why did you go to the Black Forest? Why did you go to the Black Forest?"

I heard another voice then. It was an alien voice and it sounded harsh in my ears. It was as though I had been listening to a beautiful piece of music and then the musician suddenly hit a wrong note and thus, destroyed the entire piece of music. It was discordant and hurt my ears. I felt sharp things in my skin and then a now, almost familiar agony ripped through me.

"HOLD ON FREDDIE." Kerrass was screaming.

I was staring through this greenish film that was covering my face. I could see all of the roots and the vines and the leaves and how they were all connected with each other. I could see the seeds and the petals and everything. There was a music to it all that sang in the depths of my very soul. I had not heard it before but it had somehow always been there. I knew that now and it sounded beautiful.

"HOLD ON FREDDIE."

THere was something intruding on my sense of peace. The pain obviously, there is only so much that can be done to ignore the fact that I had a large, intrusive… thing jammed down my throat. But there was the sound of something thrashing about. I could hear things screaming and tearing. THere was wood splintering and the sound of metal chopping into wood.

"HOLD ON FREDDIE."

I tried to turn my head to see what was coming and there I saw him. My friend. He looked awful. Not just because he was paler, thinner and more skeletal than I could ever remember seeing him. Not just was it the lank, greasy hair and the huge bloodshot eyes set in deep, dark, shadowed hollows. Nor was the blood that ran down his own mouth where the corners of his mouth looked as though they had been torn. Nor was it where the snot from his nose mingles with that very black blood or the way that his clothing was tattered or the livid black bruises that stood out on his skin. He looked… ugly. He looked… frightening and scary. He looked as though he was everything was wrong in the world. He looked…

He looked like, you are standing on a hillside and as far as you can see is the basic farmland and wilderness of the wilder parts of Temeria. You can see the odd stone wall or old fencing and you can see flocks of sheep and herds of cattle. It seems peaceful, quiet and even pleasant. But then you turn your head a little further and you see the remains of a battlefield, or an industrial smelting furnace with the horrific, oily greasy smoke belching from the top.

"HOLD ON FREDDIE."

Vines and tendrils were reaching for him and taking hold of his legs and his arms, pulling him back, pulling him flush and preventing him from moving. His arms spu and the sword that he held moved with it, freeing him from the grasping tendrils, but there were always more tendrils.

"HOLD ON FREDDIE."

And I was next to the fire, staring at my Father who was gazing at me steadily.

"Why did you go to the Black Forest?" He asked again.

I looked up at the sky and it seemed to me that a layer of clouds had covered the stars as I could only see blackness. The moon must have set as that too had vanished from sight. A sense of stillness had come over the clearing. There was no longer any breeze disturbing the leaves int he trees overhead and I looked at my Father.

"Who are you?" I asked him.

He frowned. "I thought we had been over this." He said unhappily. "I am your Father. I swear Freddie, for a clever boy you can sometimes be extremely stupid. I am your Father. Now stop avoiding the question and answer it. Why did you go to the Black Forest?"

"Don't you want to know about the rest of the journey?" I challenged him. "I could tell you about my companions on the journey or I could…"

"And I have no doubt that I will enjoy hearing about all of those things." He retorted, a shade of anger deepening in his voice. "But for now, I am asking you a question and I would like you to answer it please. Why did you go to the Black Forest?"

"I went because to do otherwise was unthinkable." I told him. "I have been travelling with Kerrass for just about three years now and although it has left me hurt, wounded and almost certainly dead, I have learned so much, I have gained more than I can possibly imagine. To not go was unthinkable. I literally couldn't contain myself and not go."

"Why did you go to the Black Forest?"

"Who are you?" I demanded. "What are you?"

"I asked first, and also answered your question in case anyone is keeping score. Which I am not. I am, instead, becoming annoyed."

"I have also answered your question."

"Claiming that you did a thing out of habit is not the same as an explanation." He snapped. "I am still your Father Frederick and you will tell me what I want to know. Why did you go to The Black Forest?"

"Because I had nothing else to do." I told him. "THe wedding was months away. My latest work was completed and I was essentially a book in hand, waiting for my collaborators to catch up. The planning of the wedding is all but out of my hands, handled by Emma, Ariadne and the Empress of all people. So it was this or sitting there with my thumb up my ass."

He looked me in the eyes and waited until he was sure that he had my gaze. "I don't believe you." he told me. "The only reason I haven't slapped you for lying, the same way I did when you were a child."

"I WAS FOURTEEN." I bellowed at him. A hurt that I had forgotten bubbling into my voice.

"AND BEHAVING LIKE A CHILD." He snarled before suddenly stilling. The only reason I haven't done that is because I honestly think that you are trying to convince yourself of that as well. Why did you go to the Black Forest?"

"I went because I missed my friend." I told him. "I went because I missed being on the road. I went because I love it, riding along the small roads that no-one other than the locals have travelled over. I love drinking local drinks and eating local food. I love the faces of the villagers and the farmers when I insist on paying for their goods and services rather than expecting it and demanding it like their own nobles do. I love coming around the corner and seeing a new place that is so utterly different from everything and anything that I have seen before and likewise I love it when I come around the corner and I see something that is exactly the same the world over, showing me that no matter how hard we try to differentiate ourselves from each other, we are all the same really.

"I love the old buildings and I love the mystery of what they used to be. I love walking around them and imagining the men and women, or dwarves and gnomes or Elves or Vran or Werebubbs or whatever the fuck, who put them there. I imagine their hopes and dreams or were they just doing it as fast as they could so they could get home to their wives and lovers. If all they were looking forward to was the equivalent of a pint or whatever it was they had in mind at the time.

"I love it Father and I know, I know that I will have to go home and I know that sooner or later I am going to have to get involved with the wedding and dealing with things. I am looking forward to being a married man and I am looking forward to making love to the woman that I love, dining with friends, working in a study of my very own rather than a commandeered one from the place that I still think of as your castle. I am looking forward to all of those things but I still, I STILL dread the moment where I stable my horse and know that I might as well sell the poor beast because I am never going to put her to the amount of work that she deserves to be put to again."

"All of that is true," he snapped. "All of it, I can hear it in your voice and see it in your face but that is not the only truth Freddie." He took a breath to steady himself. "I love you my son and I know you better than just about anyone except maybe that Witcher of yours and one day that Vampire that you have fallen for. I know you and I hear the desperation in your voice. It is the same desperation that you used to try and convince me that you had done the work that I had set you. It is the same desperation that you used to tell me that you had done your utmost to woo the daughter of Baron Strenger of Velen."

"She had no interest in me, it was a wasted effort."

"SHE HAD NO INTEREST IN YOU BECAUSE YOU DIDN"T TRY HARD ENOUGH." He bellowed. "You gave up at the first hurdle. But you stood there and told me that she had no interest in you and that everything you did was rebuffed. But at the same time, you tried nothing at all to meet her on her level. You went through the motions. You went after a woman like that with poetry and flowers and then you…." He took a deep breath.

"And you are not going to divert me, my son." He said it calmly, almost gently. "You are not going to lead me away with old arguments which I am old enough and wise enough to see that we were both wrong. Why did you go to the Black Forest?"

I screamed as the agony tore through me again.

"HOLD ON FREDDIE." Kerrass was screaming. The agony was different this time. There was a new component to it. It wasn't the agony of foreign things ripping and tearing their way through my insides. This was different. Kerrass struck at the thing that was coming out of, or going into my mouth. He struck it as though it was a tentacle but his sword bounced off the surface of it. The vibrations of the impact shuddered down the… whatever it was and directly into my insides. I would have howled with the agony of the thing but the thing itself seemed to howl for me.

The same screeching sound that didn't sound as though it could have come from the throat of a person, was echoing all around me. I could see stumps of tendrils that Kerrass must have cut through to get to me, they were waving around in the spasming agony that is universal in all living things. They were leaking a white, creamy liquid that seemed to pulse out of the ends with the same kinds of rhythms as a heartbeat.

Kerrass snarled, his own voice being used as a weapon against the nose battering at his ears and mine. His body, clearer to me now that it was closer, was torn and battered. Horrific bruises stood out on his skin where the clothing was torn, blood ran down his face which was in its own rictus of hate, pain and… something else.

He grunted in frustration before he gestured at the trunk of the thing where he had struck, sparks shot from the palm of his hand and scorched the surface.

Hot, burning agony was added to the horrific, tearing sensation.

After two seconds, no more than that, a whimpering Kerrass struck out again at the burnt patch.

"I'm sorry," he whimpered, tears mingling with the blood that was running down his face. The sounds of his voice making it through my own agony. "Just hold on, please hold on."

I was back at the fire.

I looked around. There was darkness all around me now. I could still see the trees but beyond that first layer of trees was just a shadow. I felt like I was surrounded by a painting of trees, a painting of a clearing. But the fire still burnt and my Father was still watching me.

"Who are you?" I said again.

"I am your Father." He told me, seeming a little bit frustrated with the question.

"My Father?" I checked.

"Who else would I be?"

"You are not the only person who has asked me that question?"

"Which question?" he countered. The question about whether or not I am your Father?"

"Now who's ducking the question." I retorted.

"I remind you that…"

"You are my father, yes you said. You look like him and you sound like him. You even behave like him."

"I told you the thing that only I could know."

"Yes, but I know it as well and you're in my head aren't you. So of course you know it too."

He sighed looking defeated.

"I remember the day you were born…" He began.

"Another story that you have told me a thousand times before."

He threw his hands up in the air, frustration marking his face and his body language. "How can I convince you that I am your Father then. If everything I tell you is lies in your eyes, how can I convince you? Making your mind up to the exclusion of all others is a sign of weakness. Real strength is allowing other points of view to be entertained so that you can act on them and do things with them. See if other people might be right where you were wrong."

"Another line straight from our dinner table. This time directed at Mark when he dismissed some of the teachings of Melitele as being weak and you wanted to tell him off for presuming that women are weak. You are not the only person who has asked me why I went to the Black Forest and you are not the only person who has been dissatisfied with every answer that I have been able to give."

"That could be coincidence. But../"

"But you don't believe in coincidence."

"Fine then." he snapped. "If I am not your Father, who am I? Because I don't feel like a figment of your imagination?"

I tried to get my brain to work.

"It is possible…" I began carefully. "That I am talking to someone else. And that rather than trying to talk to me like the… strange, otherworldly powerful thing that it is, it has chosen the image and form of my Father to have that conversation to put me at my ease."

He shook his head.

"I love you my son, but it is also true that I am a bad choice for that. I have never not loved you, but in our time together, we argued as often as we relaxed and I lost you just as we started to have things in common. They would have been better off sending you an image of your sister. Either sister. Your tutors, take your pick. But me? I am the very worst person that they could choose to put you at your ease."

He wagged a finger in my face.

"And before you start to argue that that could be the point. That the flawed choice makes it the perfect choice, I would point out that you are looking for confirmation bias there. You have decided that I am not your father and there is no proof that you could accept."

It was a fair point.

"Let me counter with the fact that it went into your mind and pulled me from wherever it was that we go when we die." He said. "It chose me because it knew that for all our interactions were sometimes, no… often antagonistic, it knew that we loved each other. Why not someone else? Why not some other departed soul? Because you respect me. And also, because I want to know how everything has turned out. I wanted those answers more than your sister did. So I was the one that was sent back because I made the most sense."

More pain, Hot, cold, metallic, ripping and tearing agony.

"Hold on Freddie," Kerrass whimpered. "I am nearly through." He struck at the charred, all but cut tentacle again.

Now there was just the fire and my Father who was still speaking.

"Regardless of whether or not I am your Father, or whether I am some… phantom, some wraith of your father summoned from… wherever. If I am your Father, I want to know the answer and also as your Father, I think you need to tell me the answer. I think you need to confront it for yourself. Why did you go to the Black Forest?

"Also as your father, I don't believe the thing about boredom. You could have learnt to be a Count. Meet the people that will be your people. You could have gone to court, from everything that you said, you have the ear of the Empress and I have no doubt that you could represent us well in the courts of the Empire. You could be a Professor. I am proud of that by the way. Truly. You set yourself a target that no-one in our family has ever achieved and you did it, in some cases despite us. You could be giving lectures and shaping young minds. So don't feed me a line of having nothing better to do.

"But if I am some… image of your Father. Then answer the question. Why did you go to the Black Forest? A mission that you knew might end in your death. A mission that over and over again, people have been warning you was incredibly dangerous. Why did you do it? Why? What could possibly have possessed you? What was worth that risk?"

It was both agony and a relief. Kerrass had finally cut through the thing that came from my mouth.

"LET HIM GO." He screamed as he took hold of the stump that emerged from my throat and started to pull.

It was agony and relief.

"What was worth all of this? What were you so desperate for?" Just my Father now.

And just like that, the answer was obvious.

"I want to know what happened to Francesca." I sobbed. "We were always going to come here as the next thing. To try and ask The Schattenmann what he might know about Francesca, her disappearance and why someone might have taken her. I have to know, I need to know."

My Father's face fell. "Oh Freddie."

He rushed around the fire that was no longer there and he embraced me like a Father does. Hard and firm, a pillar of strength that I needed and had not had for far too long.

"I need to know Dad. I need to know. And I will never find out now. I will never… I will never know. My sister. I loved her and I failed her and there is nothing I could have done differently but I should have. I should have known and I should have done it differently. I should have protected her and seen the threat and I…"

"You know how I feel about babbling." He chided gently.

I laughed and as it has before, laughter was the last crack in the dam that sent the torrent rushing forward. I screamed the horror, and the longing and the pain and the sorrow into my Father's chest. Tears clouded my eyes and soaked his shirt and I no longer cared. I have no idea how long that lasted before the pain came again.

"NEARLY THERE FREDDIE." Kerrass grunted. He was cutting at the thing that came out of my bowls now. My upper body was resting on something soft and firm. My hands scrabbled and I felt something soft and damp. I thought it might be moss.

Whole new levels of agony tore through my insides as whatever it was that was inside me scrabbled for purchase.

Just my father now, sitting in front of me. All was blackness now. Just blackness. Father was looking around.

"It is so beautiful here." He said. Tears streaming down his own face., answering to the wetness on mine.

"Yes," I agreed. "It is."

He looked at me, sensing the lie I think.

"It seems that my time is growing short." he told me. "So let me leave you with this.

"Whether I am a figment of your imagination carrying you through a dark and awful time. If I am the ghost of your Father summoned back from beyond to help be a messenger or whether I am a construct of whatever it was that is trying to talk to you. All three things would say that I have heard your story and I know several truths."

I swallowed.

"There was nothing you could have done. Nothing, to prevent your sister from being stolen from us. It was the act of evil men, fanatics and I would charge you to be vigilant. Where there is one there is always more and you know that."

"I do." I was trying to listen. This might be the last advice I ever received from my Father.

"Where there is one, there is always more." He said. "Remember that."

"I will."

"So I am your Father and even if I wasn't, then I would tell you that I love you so much. Believe it my son, even if I didn't tell you enough in life. I hope that you know that is true."

"I love you too Father and I am so, so very sorry that I…"

He held his hands up to stop me.

"You do not need to apologise." He said. "You are my son and I…"

I screamed as Kerrass pulled the last tendril from my bowels.

was sobbing. In pain of the body and the soul.

"Well Freddie." Kerrass said as he tried to put my arm over his shoulder. "Lets…"

I couldn't stand. My mouth was swelling and filling with blood. A horrible sticky wetness was running down my leg. I grabbed hold of Kerras and tried to turn his head to mine. I tried to tell him to leave me and I had no words… I couldn't say it, I couldn't form the words but he knew.

"Fuck that." He told me. "I would never leave my brother."

He lowered me to the ground and stood over me with his sword raised. I could hear things moving, slithering towards us.

"Besides." he told me with an awful grin, blood leaking from the corner of his mouth. "What would I tell Ariadne?"

I saw the tendrils and the tentacles behind him. He screamed as he attacked but there were so many and they were moving so fast.

My last thought was a hope that I would see my father again and that he would let me finish telling me that I was sorry for letting him down and that he could finish telling me… whatever it was that he was going to tell me. Then darkness took me.

I had time to register it as a warm, soft, even restful darkness of a strange kind of purity that I had not found in any of the other darknesses that I have seen or been part of before. In the real world, there is always something there. Always something deep in the darkness, even in our fears. Sleep comes with dreams, the darkness of a city is always broken with the torch or lantern light of the guard and the watch, broken by the sounds of the people in those houses and broken by the distant glow of cities. Even at night, there is starlight and moonlight which sometimes, when the moon is particularly full, that moonlight can shine through even cloud cover. This was none of those things. This was the darkness of the purest, deepest sleep that you can imagine. This was the darkness of what you hope death will be like.

Restful, complete and quiet.

I have no idea how long that darkness lasted. No idea how long that… rest was granted to me.

Then I woke up.

Compared to my earlier waking, this was so utterly different that I almost look back on it with amusement. This was not the long, slow climb towards wakefulness. This was the surge of adrenaline version of waking up. That moment where the pressure in your bladder becomes too much for even your exhausted brain to be able to ignore. This was the adrenaline shot of hearing something nearby that you do not recognise. This was the surge to your heartbeat from rolling over to find someone unexpected in your room.

I woke, the sunlight cut through my vision like a hot knife and I came to a fully sitting position as though someone had jammed a hot poker in my… well…

It was a bright spring morning. There was the shine of damp in the air and the slightly watery feeling of the sunlight shining through that dampness. I could see the sky looking as blue as I could ever remember seeing it with large puffballs of clouds floating serenely by.

Realisation struck me almost immediately afterwards. I could see the sky. And it had never seemed quite as beautiful before. It was so beautiful that it seemed to take my breath away.

But I could still hear the sound of wind in the trees. I looked around me frantically. Kerrass was lying next to me and like me he was frantically examining himself. Also nearby were our two packs, our weapons and all of our belongings, even our two horses were nearby with all the signs that they had wandered off to tug at the grass that was all around us, rippling in the breeze.

Kerrass looked over at me and with some kind of inarticulate cry, he all but leapt at me and started checking me for injuries.

"Freddie." He said as he grabbed my head and twisted it this way and that way, examining it minutely. "I swear that your jaw had nearly been torn off with that… And I could see that…"

He said this last as he tried to turn me over and examine my backside. Never the most flattering of angles and I protested automatically.

"You have your silver sword." I pointed it out. "I thought that that had been left behind when…"

He spun and took it up from the ground. He stood and prowled around, snatching the cat medallion from around his neck and walking around in a long circle, examining the medallion minutely.

I also stood, carrying out my own examination of my clothes and my belongings. My spear, dagger and knives were all in their proper positions. If I didn't know better I would say that they were freshly oiled and cleaned. My clothing as well. I remembered the broken ankle or whatever it was that I had suffered when the dryads had taken me and I pulled off my boot and lifted my trousers to examine the area. I could see a little scar and if I really tried to probe the area then I would be forced to admit that there was some muscular tenderness. But beyond that, it was the same as it ever was.

I checked the rest of my belongings. They had been packed away neatly and carefully. If I really tried to exercise my paranoia then I would say that it was close to how I would pack them, but not quite correct. But even that would have been false on the grounds that I pack my travelling bags with the kind of logical process that anyone would. So that meant nothing. I went over to the horses and checked them as well, they seemed fine and well looked after. Nothing that some time in a decent stable wouldn't fix. They had the same kind of wear and tear that you would expect from a pair of horses that had been on the road for a long time.

Then I ran out of things to look at and I could no longer ignore the vast expanse of trees on the horizon. The forest was this huge, massive thing that dominated the skyline. And everything just kind of hit me in the face. Everything that had happened or that I had thought had happened and my knees just kind of buckled and the tears welled up in my eyes. I remembered the conversation with my Father, or not my Father and I just wept for a long time.

Kerrass came over and crouched in front of me., waiting for me to find my sense of calm again.

"If all of that turns out to have been a dream, or some kind of vision." I began after a while, my voice trembling a little. "Then words cannot express just how pissed I'm going to be."

He chuckled at me and turned to look out over the treeline.

"I don't think so." he said. "Some of it was, not all of it but I think some of it was. Who knows what kind of hallucinogens that they gave us, or plants that we ingested. I'm going to need to think about that for a while. But first, I think it's time that I took you home and got your sister to sit on you."

I nodded and his face seemed to fall. He had been trying for some levity or something and instead I was on the verge of tears.

"I didn't come here to keep you company Kerrass." I admitted. "I came here to keep looking for Francesca. I wanted to ask if The Schattenmann knew something about it and I wanted to… Flame, I wanted… I don't know."

He put his hand on my shoulder.

"I know Freddie. I know. I knew from the first moment that I saw you. The only reason I didn't kick your ass was because I didn't know if you knew." He smirked at a memory. "That was the other reason that I was pissed at you when you found us. Also… I was still looking for Francesca as well. I mean, I know that she is gone and that we won't find her now. But I am still looking. I honestly wonder if we will be looking until the ends of our lives now."

"Flame I hope not." I told him. "But I don't think I would be wasting my life to do that."

"You would," he told me.

"I know. And that's why you're right. I had already decided. I need to go home now. I need to stay there. It's going to be hard and I will hate you and Emma and everyone else involved, but I think it needs to be done."

He nodded but I was not looking at him. Another thought occurred and I was pulling at my clothing. Looking for the item that was how I contacted the woman that I love. I took hold of it in both hands as Kerrass saw what I was doing and walked off a little distance to give me some privacy.

"Ariadne?" I asked in a small voice.

"Freddie?" She called back in an equally small but far more hopeful voice.

I couldn't say anything else as I was already in tears.

This is not the end of the story although it was the end of our part in it really. And indeed, the story of the Black Forest is still going on as I sit here writing this back in Coulthard castle in the North. I am getting regular reports though and some other detective work has been done in the meantime. It has been some time since I have been able to write a proper kind of "aftermath" of what my adventures entail though so I feel positively nostalgic about this.

We didn't go straight home. As Kerrass said, we had a lot of thinking to do. We stayed where we were, thoroughly taking stock, for about an hour until Ariadne arrived and we pitched camp. Kerrass did some personal exercises while I sat and told Ariadne everything. She sat and listened, taking occasional notes, acting as both my fiancee and the woman I love, but also acting as a member of the Lodge of Sorceresses which answers to the Empress. When we had finished she looked at me for a long time.

"So you have daughters?" She asked with an odd note to her voice.

"I'm sorry." I said, "I probably have daughters, I think so, or am going to have daughters or… I don't know. It gets complicated."

She nodded. "Of course I forgive you." She told me. "You did what you did for the sake of survival, but I cannot deny that I am jealous, of them I mean. Later I might get angry but I would not be angry with you."

"I'm sorry." I said again.

She sighed in exasperation. "I'm not angry with…"

"I know." I told her. "I also know and have known that you would forgive me, or at least, that you would forgive me if I wasn't so much of an asshat about it this time."

She laughed at that.

"But that doesn't change the fact that I am sorry. Sorry for the pain that this will have caused you and sorry for the fear that I have given you."

Very carefully, she set aside the travel desk that she had worked on, rolled up the papers into her messenger tube and sealed it, putting away her quills and ink before she looked at me with watery eyes.

"I was very scared, Freddie." She told me. "I will admit to not wanting you to go anywhere without me again for a while, or at least until after our wedding night."

"I'm sorry." I said again.

"I mean," She sighed with annoyance. "Obviously there there are things that you have to do and that I have to do and that there are different places and…"

She was locked into one of her spirals of thought and I know from experience that the best thing to do in these instances is to just shock her from that spiral. So I hugged her and told her that I loved her. It seemed like the right thing to do.

"Interesting." She said after a long while before tightening the embrace. "Daughters. I would like to meet them. And to meet this Chestnut-Shell and Apple-Seed that you seem to have spent so much time with."

"If you do." I told her. "I would ask you to be gentle."

"I will, I promise. They are just as much victims of their society as you are. I shall tell them so and do my very best to see if I can help them. I like the sound of this Chestnut-Shell."

I felt a familiar fear come over me then. It had been the same fear that I had felt when Ariadne had spent time with the courtesan that she had chosen for me. Your fiancee discussing you with your previous lover, swapping tricks and things.

The Horror.

She left before evening to make her report and start the ball rolling on what needed to happen. I had no idea what that was at the time but have since learned that it was mostly to do with things like protecting the borders of the Black Forest. Making sure that there were no unfortunate logging efforts or that people were taking advantage of it.

Eventually that led to contact being made with the dryads of the Brokilon forest who are sending a mission to the Black Forest in order to make contact with their lost sisters.

I have no idea how that is going.

Kerrass and I didn't return home immediately. We both had a lot to do and a lot to think about. Not least was trying to establish how much of what we had seen was a dream or a vision and how much of it had actually happened. Ariadne came back after submitting our research and we found her cooking breakfast for the three of us the following morning.

That day, we travelled easily, Kerrass and I on horseback with Ariadne making her own way by whatever means she found necessary. Neither of Kerrass' or my horses were used to Elder Vampires and both objected to her presence, otherwise I would have taken great delight in riding with her. But it was impractical. Instead, she stayed at the campsite when we rode off, met us for lunch and camped with us again that night.

We were trying to find out where we were and although there were plenty of villages in the nearby area. Kerrass and I wanted to dissect our past activities in order to see if we could figure out a few things. Ariadne's input was invaluable and we didn't want to talk about meeting The Schattenmann in the middle of the local tavern with locals nearby that might revere him like a God.

Although we could never prove what happened or what our experiences were, we decided that everything was true up until the moment that Stefan struck the Schattenmann's form with Kerrass' silver sword.

By the way, Ariadne was insistent that she would have gone to the Black Forest and lived with me for those seven years, even if I had become The Schattenmann's vessel. She would have stayed and done her best to help prolong my life.

I love her an awful lot.

Kerrass had a similar experience to mine. He remembered the two of us fleeing the raging Schattenmann after Stefan's presumed death. When we were overtaken, he remembered sitting by a stream, speaking with the Unicorn and Schrodinger before his Goddess had turned up and proceeded to kick his ass all over that streamside clearing. He had woken up wrapped in green tentacles and had freed himself using at first a knife and then his steel sword that was nearby. It took him some time to find me but when he tried to cut his way towards me, the green roots, tentacles or whatever they were really were, got angry and started to attack him. The rest seemed to match up with my own memories.

Ariadne travelled with us for about a week on and off, occasionally disappearing for a day only to meet us at night. Sometimes she would just stay with us for an hour, watching me as if making sure that I wasn't just going to run off somewhere. Then she would go back. Her report, and later mine after I had had the chance to send my own report to the Empress, had kicked off a stink. Bordering Lords of the Black Forest had been eyeing the place up for logging rights for decades and now the Empress was forbidding it on pain of the second Imperial army. This did not sit right with many people.

So Kerrass and I travelled together for a bit, trying to retrace our, and his, steps in order for us to try and decide what was real and what was hallucination. We figured out where we were fairly quickly and headed to a nearby town where we bathed thoroughly and Kerrass found himself a willing woman. I was too tired for anything though so I just ate, bathed until my skin became wrinkled and climbed into bed. Then we set out.

The first of our companions that we found any trace of was Piotr. Or rather we found the village that he had come from. The one that had lynched Piotr's wife and then The Schattenmann had found some measure of vengeance for the fallen woman.

We found the Father of Piotr's wife who attentive readers will remember was called Hugo. He told us that Piotr had come back from his last journey with a strange expression and an attitude as though he had been slapped in the face. I said nothing to that as the poor man looked as though he was on the verge of tears. We asked him where Piotr had gone and what he had done and we were directed towards a camp that was out in the woods. The old man who looked as though he had visibly aged in the time that we had been gone gave us careful directions with an attitude of bittersweetness.

We stayed the night in the village and then went along the directed path in the morning where we found a clearing that seemed natural to our eyes. Before anyone gets caught up in the symbology of the thing, it was not the clearing of my dreams and where I had spoken to my Father. It was only similar in that it was flat, surrounded by trees and had running water nearby.

Off to one end of the clearing there were signs of some ground clearance and some area was being marked out for the building of a new cabin. Nearby there was a large, pavilion style tent where we found the old herbmistress and healer of the village who was called Rose. I wrote of her as a handsome but bitter woman in her early to mid thirties. To see her this time… They say that emotions have an effect on a person's appearance and if that were the case, Rose was the best evidence of this theory. She looked like she had lost ten years of age, as though she had slept a proper night's sleep and a smile seemed to be permanently fixed to her face.

She greeted us warmly and bustled around to make us tea. She didn't let us in the pavilion as she told us that she had a couple of sick children in there that had eaten the wrong berries. Kerrass offered to look and she looked at him with a sly smile before allowing him entrance. She had not been lying.

She told us the story quite happily and thanked us both, particularly me, for what had happened. She told us that a tearful and a confused looking Piotr had turned up on her doorstep and demanded to know if what I had said would be true.

"You told him that I loved him." She accused with a smile.

"Call me a liar." I retorted and she laughed. It was like talking to a different woman.

She told us that he had sobbed and had wailed the question "Why?" telling her that he was an awful man and that no-one could love him, least of all a wonderful woman like her.

There had been a row, and then a conversation and then a tentative agreement and then a realisation that there was enough affection there to build on.

Piotr couldn't live in the village, but neither could Rose leave the village. The neighbouring village also needed a healer and an arrangement was made. A cabin would be built between the two villages. Piotr would continue to work as a local guide and Rose would be a healer for both villages.

The two would try living together. We didn't probe too deeply but it was pretty clear that the pair of them were lovers and that Piotr was trying to change his life.

"How is he?" I asked.

"He is…" She frowned. "He hates himself." She admitted. "Over and over again he tells me that he is not a good man and that I should flee far away from him. I tell him over and over again that if he was a bad man, or if he acts like a bad man then I will leave in a moment. But he has already lost that shadow that hangs over him. I have friends that are watching him and he has not grown angry and…"

She laughed.

"He says that he is a bad man. But in the time since he has come back, we work on it. He weeps regularly and I hold him. He has nightmares. But so far he is doing well. He has told me all about the women and the drink and the narcotics as well as the fits of temper. He knows that I will stand for none of those things and he agrees. He goes into the woods when he gets too angry. He says that he is a bad man but I live for the day when he says that he "was" a bad man."

We checked to make sure that she was alright. Kerrass was concerned that Piotr might turn abusive and said so. Rose admitted that she was aware of the danger. That she still slept with a knife, had a separate sleeping area and that her old house was still open and available. That she was visited regularly by her friends and the sheer number of patients now that she had been given two villages to look after. Then he would be held accountable and so would she.. But that, so far, his anger and his hate was directed inwards rather than at her. To her, he had behaved as a gentleman.

We stayed for a while, hoping to see Piotr but it became clear given a couple of the hints that she gave us, that he knew we were here and had gone off to hide in the woods. He had no intention of coming to see us and would deliberately stay away until we had gone. He was due to guide a wagon train through the nearby paths the day after tomorrow, his second since he had returned and so far, there was nothing for her to complain about.

So with her best wishes and her sincerest thanks, we went back on our way and stayed the night at the next village over.

We found news of Trayka next. There was nothing unusual about her other than the fact that she was a woman. The continent is full of men that lived the way she did. Killers and hunters that live on both sides of the law, hunting down fugitives and other people for the legal authorities and sometimes for the not so legal authorities. Men who blow into town, drink all the drink, sleep with all the women, take the wanted posters just before they are due to be forcefully moved on by the guard and then come back a week later dragging the fugitive or the proof of the fugitive's death and then the entire thing starts again.

The only difference being in this case that she was a woman and slept with men rather than with women. She didn't seem to care, or even notice all of the scandal that she caused when she passed through, but that didn't stop it from happening. We found several richer men who had tried to keep her as a mistress and one instance where she had been forced to flee town when she had visited a medicine woman to help her with an unwanted pregnancy which would be the bastard of the local Reeve.

She hasn't come back and as far as we know, she is a dryad in the Black Forest now. We tracked her back to her home village which was when we found news of Henrik.

Henrik had turned out to be well known as the town drunk. He was genuinely thought to have been a good man and when sober he worked hard and did his best to bring his family up. To my eyes and ears, Trayka's account of her father was a bit harsh. When his children had left, Henrik had worked and provided money to ensure that they had food, but Trayka had been stubborn and refused it until the son had been old enough to ask for his father.

Henrik's story was considered a village tragedy. His heart was broken and he'd had a tough life. Then every time that Henrik had done his best to pick himself up, life had a habit of hammering him in the face. In the end, it was clear that Henrik had become sick and they had wondered where he had gone with his daughter.

They did not like Trayka very much. Lots of stories of "She was a very unhappy child" and stories about broken hearted boys and a bad attitude. She had apparently taken the time to hide out in the village after some of her adventures had gotten her into trouble and the village resented that. We told them that they probably didn't need to worry about either of them. The village put up a memorial stone for Henrik, but not for Trayka.

We also heard the story about how Trayka's brother had been taken. It does have to be said that that account was true as far as we could tell.

We went to see the line of ash. It was still there and I spent a long time looking at it. Kerrass was next to me and informs me now that he was ready to physically restrain me should I have tried to cross the line.

We found no sign of Stefan. Absolutely none.

We went to the monastery where Kerrass had recruited Stefan from. Kerrass' account of meeting Stefan was that he had been asking for guides and companions to travel with him into the Black Forest for an expedition to speak to The Schattenmann. He had received news that there was a local monastery that was interested in that kind of thing and Kerrass had gone.

Kerrass led me to that monastery, you can find monasteries like them occasionally. Men and women, although it's mostly men, who find spiritual fulfilment through the learning of martial arts. There are good and bad examples of this throughout the world and also knightly, martial orders that start as one and then become the other. Normally when politics are introduced into the mix,

Like normal for this kind of thing, the monastery was either built as a fortress or had taken over an old one. Not as big as some, but it was still quite big. There were twenty warriors, another dozen older, retired warriors, most of whom were sporting some kind of old injury and maybe sixty novices. The place seemed to make Kerrass uncomfortable for some reason and we were in and out fairly quickly.

According to the abbot, Kerrass had arrived, spoken to the abbot at some length about the requirements. But there wasn't anyone skilled enough or properly available to go on the mission with The Witcher. The Abbot seemed genuinely upset that this was the case and apologised often.

Kerrass had to leave but I stayed there for some time, meeting Kerrass in the village every night to discuss what I found. Not only was there no Stefan, but it appeared that there never was. The monastery, as they tend to, kept careful records of their members, the missions that they departed on. In theory this was to remember the fallen but I also got the feeling that this was also so that they could feel good about themselves.

But there was never anyone called Stefan that had stayed there or trained there. No record, nothing. I asked many of the attending Knights and Elders and they agreed. Even physical descriptions of Stefan and his history which he had recounted to me over the time that we had spent on the road together, there was nothing. It was as though a great hand had reached into the very existence of the continent and had plucked Stefan from the face of history.

We gave up after a few days.

We also found some evidence of the three men that were with us when I knelt before The Schattenmann and Stefan stole Kerrass' sword.

Regarding the woodcutter that had been taken prisoner and was there with us at the end, I'm afraid we could find no sign of and we looked. Unfortunately, it is true that I possibly haven't been able to communicate just how vast the Black Forest is end to end. And after our own adventures in the depths of the thing, I would also say that the difference between flying over it and and actually walking through it would be, not inconsiderable. Therefore that woodcutter or whatever he was could have been anyone and could have become anyone else.

His is an interesting case. When I met him, I didn't really get to know him because I was so tied into my own thought patterns so I didn't get to know him when I had the chance. But the probability that he simply entered the Black Forest from a different direction than what we did is high. The follow up problem to people like that is that people like him, men, and women, both human and non-human, can be found up and down the continent everywhere. Indeed, I only call him the Wood-cutter because I don't want to call him Villager, peasant, Farm-worker or any other slightly derogatory phrase that people use about such people. People that were born in the place that they are going to spend the rest of their lives in. Their lives are simple and that is all that they want. And if we're being brutally honest, they don't have the ability, imagination or the intelligence to do anything else. That's not a knock on them. I know that it sounds like it but it really isn't.

Some people are born to that life and are satisfied with that life. Simple in mind and wit and if it seems like I am being down on them then let me say this as well. Sometimes, I quite envy that kind of lifestyle. To know that I get up at a certain time, that I need to do a certain amount of work and that when that work is done, then I will have provided for myself and for my family. Lacking in the imagination or the intelligence to do more than that. That sounds like a simple life to me and I like the sounds of it.

Of course, if you pick me up and put me in such a life then I would last a few days before I find it boring. He seemed like a good man, paralysed by the terror and the strangeness that was surrounding him and that wherever he is, I hope that he landed on his feet and can find some form of happiness.

We also didn't find the specific soldier that acted as the woodcutter's friend but we did find out the likeliest solution as to who he was. We would have found him eventually if we had had the freedom and the luxury to keep looking.

In that part of the Empire, there have been no real wars to speak of for a couple of generations now. But the local lords like to throw their weight around and when hunting no longer fulfils that desire for warfare and bloodshed then they conduct raids on each other. In light of the continental wars taking place, it would be laughable for us to call these raids full blown wars but I suspect that it would be no less unpleasant and violent for the people involved.

"Armies" would be numbered in the hundreds rather than in the thousands and these nobles, who like to think that if they had fought in the continental wars then it would have all been over in a matter of weeks rather than the Empire needing several attempts to get it right. I have spoken about such men before. See my comments when it came to Lord Cavill and his court as well as the nobles that would have made up the Knights of the Burning Sword. Sir Robart de Radford is one of these kinds of people.

So they all get dressed up in their finery and meet in fields to smack the shit out of each other. In return a bunch of soldiers get killed, a bunch of villagers get displaced and if it all gets out of hand, the Empress has to intervene. It's the kind of thing that has been going on for the last couple of centuries. Men need to think of themselves as warriors and when they are bored, they look around for someone to fight and normally, they find one.

According to the locals that I spoke to, this kind of "warfare" had gotten quite brutal about a year ago. Just when I had been departing Toussaint for the first time in my hunt for Francesca. One of the nobles decided that he was going to terrify the locals into submission. He raised a largish army and hired a bunch of mercenaries and laid siege to a series of villages and towns full of common folk. He ordered his troops to do horrifying things to the common people in order to subdue them. Eventually a division of Imperial forces arrived and spanked them. There were a bunch of beheadings and a series of younger sons took over the former noble lands.

It is almost certain that the soldier in question was one of these soldiers that had been ordered to carry out, well, war-crimes.

It is easy to condemn such men and I am not going to fall into the trap. My brother was a soldier and several of my closest friends are soldiers. I spoke about this to Sir Rickard when I got home and he had this to say.

"I cannot tell you what it's like to be part of a sieging force. It's one of those things, like the huge battles, that you can either be in or not and trying to describe it is fruitless. But it changes men and later on, when the siege is over, you look back at the horrors that you lived through and the horrors that you perpetrated and you despair at the things that you become."

He considered. The two of us were sitting in Chireadean's tavern at the time. I had just arrived back from the south and Shani was away on some mission which always leaves Rickard introspective and a little maudlin.

"There is a fear of being in a siege." Rickard went on. "It doesn't matter if it's a village or the largest fortress that you can imagine. It's different to battles as well because you can see the bastards in a battle and you know that sooner or later, one side is going to advance towards the other and do their best to carve a new asshole for each other. But in a siege? The defenders are terrified because you can see the besiegers prepare assaults and there is the constant knowledge that sooner or later, the food and the water is going to run out. So you spend all of your time coming up with increasingly awful things to do to the other guy when they come over the walls.

"And being the attacker is worse. You are outside in the elements, in the filth and the mud and the horror. Bored out of your mind, waiting for the disease that always accompanies besieging forces. Eating rotten food and drinking foul water and you look at the city, or town and all you do is imagine all of the horror that the defenders are storing up just for you. You think of them as being warm, dry and eating good food and drinking nice wine. Maybe with a pretty girl to keep them warm at night. And you know that eventually, your generals are going to order you to throw yourselves into that awful place.

"There is hatred in a siege, where there often isn't in a battle. In a battle, you are just doing your job and doing your best to prevent the other guy doing theirs. But in a siege? The attackers hate and fear the defenders and the defenders hate and fear the attackers. So when it's over, when that fear is proved false, it can send a man mad.

"You yourself have felt that moment, where fear turns into anger and it feels wonderful doesn't it?"

I nodded, listening in fascination.

"So there you are, in the homes and the streets of men and women that you have hated for days, weeks, months and in some cases even years. And that explosion of fear defeated, spiced with hate? It does awful things to a man. I've seen good family men go into a building, rape the women before murdering them and then stealing everything that seemed even remotely worth anything. Just as I've seen the most awful, cut-throat, psychotic murderer weeping at the sight of the baby that the previous family man killed. It's even worse when the nobleman orders you to that horror. Because what's a common soldier to do when he is ordered to visit horror on his enemy? Refusing the order leads to torture and death and the habit of obedience under combat is drilled and flogged into the soldiery."

He shrugged and ordered another round.

"Write that down Freddie." He told me. "Write that down."

So I did.

And that's who I think that soldier was. A good man was ordered to do horrible things that would and have haunted him for the rest of his life.

Eventually though it became clear that it was time for me to be taken home. I felt the pull of the Black Forest and admitted it to Kerrass. I wanted to go back and see if I could speak to Chestnut-Shell and Apple-Seed. I wanted to properly speak to The Schattenmann and I could feel it in my bones. My legs ached for not walking towards the Schattenmann and my soul wept for not turning my horse for the line of trees that still dominated the horizon. So we set aside our enquiries and headed north. Ironically, this was when we found out the identity of the minstrel that The Schattenmann had killed in so awful a fashion.

We had travelled to the coast and then taken a series of ships to get to Novigrad. Kerrass and Ariadne had schemed to take me by ship so that I could both enjoy the last part of the journey but also so that I couldn't sneak off in the middle of things to go and indulge my increasingly spiralling thinking. The plan worked and we arrived back in Novigrad with about five months to spare before the wedding day which, at time of writing is still going to take place at the Autumn Equinox.

By this stage I was resigned but a strange feeling had stolen over the both of us. It was clear to us now that this was going to be the end of our journeys together and neither of us wanted it to end just yet. So we dawdled. We spent a couple of days in Novigrad. We told ourselves that it was to relax after so long spent at sea, but the truth was that we just weren't ready for things to come to an end yet. So we stayed at the Rosemary and Thyme as guests of Professor Dandelion and Master Chivay.

We got drunk, played cards and Kerrass made use of several women that were available for the use. One night while Kerrass was out enjoying himself and picking fights with some of the local riffraff… I mean, he calls it working as there are increasingly monster types that live exclusively in cities that the guards like to hire Witchers for when available. But Kerrass was out and I was telling the story to the Professor while we were listening to Priscilla perform.

I got to the part where I was describing the death of the Minstrel in question and he abruptly sighed and hung his head, setting his lute aside. Up until that point he had been gently playing around with the music, partially accompanying his lover's music but also just playing.

Then he hung his head for a while before shaking it and beginning to speak. It is sometimes easy for Professor Dandelion to pretend that he has never lectured, but in the end, he slips back into that way of thinking with astonishing ease.

"Foolish, foolish boy." He said sadly before signalling for one of the barmaids to bring over some more spirits and a pair of cups.

"Did you know him?"

"Saying that I knew of him, would be closer to the mark. I met him a couple of times and warned him about his lifestyle choices but he was young and beautiful and…" He accepted the bottle off the pretty woman that served us. All the bar staff at the R&T are pretty. Apparently, Dandelion demands them that way although I have it on good authority that it's actually Priscilla that does most of the hiring. And as far as I know, Dandelion has never strayed and the ladies are not required to do anything they don't want to.

I am going to do my best to capture this lecture as close to the man's actual words as I can.

"His working name was Wilhelm von Plume just as mine is Dandelion and his problem was that he did not see the irony in our role as bards or minstrels.

"Our job is to provide an escape in the world. Even you yourself, while commenting on the life and works of the Witcher that is in your care, have remarked that even the most fantastical of existences can become mundane and boring after a while. A Witcher's life is boredom, followed by excitement and in that way, they are like soldiers except that the Witchers fight their wars without glory, without banners, without nations, generals or battles to be written in the history books. There will never be medals or plaudits. Not parades or flowers strewn at their feet. The only thing that there is is casualties in that war. The never-ending battle of the Witcher."

He picked up his lute again and strummed a few chords. I was reminded of the romance of the thing that had attracted me to the subject in the first place.

"But everyone is the same really. As soon as something becomes routine it becomes mundane. Magic users spend most of their time in their laboratories or libraries. Theirs is a life of research and experiment so that they can keep up with the latest knowledge and fashions while their factionism means that they try and insert their way into courtrooms so that they can protect their fellows and students and so on and so on. And to many, the courtroom is actually more relaxing than dealing with the fast and terrifying forces that they have to deal with otherwise."

The strumming on his lute had taken on a plaintive note and he got a vacant expression, tilting his head over to one side as he considered, playing a few chords over and over again at varying speeds and emphasis. Like many creative types, he habitually keeps some parchment and charcoal near himself and he quickly pulled them over and scribbled down a few things. Similar to my own scholar's language, his seemed to be a series of letters and numbers along with some dots and lines that were drawn on a series of horizontal lines. Then he quickly wrote a couple of lines before violently strumming something else.

"What was I saying?"

"Routine and that a bard's job is…"

"Ah yes. Peasants grinding their lives away in the fields. Merchants working away at… whatever it is merchants do. Market stall holders accept abuse and hurling out friendliness in an effort to attract customers. To the next person over it might seem more attractive but the truth is that all of our lives are a matter of routine and that routine becomes boring.

"The task of the travelling bard and minstrel," he struck a couple of heroic chords and puffed out his chest, "is to provide a moment of fantasy to help people escape from that life. We arrive at a place and we perform, we sing songs, play music, dance, juggle, perform acrobatics and things so that in that moment, the watcher and listener can be transported away from their mundane existence and moved towards a higher place, a different place.

"And everything we do is geared towards that end. The way we dress, the way we speak and act. Our entire persona is geared towards that goal. Including, the keeping of ourselves, personal grooming and all of that. But it's also in the art of seducing the right person. Because if you can get that bit right, then your name will spread.

"Because we all need an edge. Not everyone can be as talented, handsome and wonderful as I can."

I can never tell whether or not he's joking when he says things like this. I have seen the stage persona of Dandelion and I occasionally think that I have seen Viscount Pankratz peeking out from behind Dandelion's eyes, laughing at all of us buying into Dandelion's nonsense.

"So we need an edge. Something to make people remember us and to drive the story of us forwards to the customers down the road so that we get hired and invited into the powerful places to perform and get a better payday that is more than a patch of floor to sleep on and a hot meal in our bellies. Something that will not help us when Winter comes.

"Hmm."

He frowned into the distance again.

"We are like soldiers and Witchers again. Except our enemies are boredom and mundanity. Our war is a private thing, fought in the hearts and minds of… Nooooo, no no. No-one will find that tragic."

He tilted his head to one side, trying to remember where he was.

"So seducing the audience is part of what we do. In theory that is in order to get the audience to buy into the stories that we tell. So that they are in the mood for what we have to offer. Not all villages are capable of enjoying epic tales and histories. Likewise, some don't want to hear about long, convoluted romances. They want a bawdy tune that they can sing along to. So you must convince them that they want to hear what you have to offer.

"And that will also involve seducing the individual. Sometimes a side-effect, sometimes… It can help to have a muse. Inspiration can come from anywhere and it is hard to sing about the most beautiful woman in the world if you are keeping yourself separate from the women in the room. So you pick one, and you sing to her. You convince yourself that she really is the most beautiful woman in the world and after several days on the road with only your horse," he cocked his eyebrows at me "or your Witcher for company, she might actually be that. And so you fall in love with her because you have to believe the song that you are singing. And then you have to move on in the morning to avoid the angry Father, older brother or husband.

"But also to avoid hurting her. There is an art to this as well. Not all people can be loved and left so you have to choose the right one. Someone that is available for what you are offering. But also, if you choose a woman who's husband is particularly vengeful and angry, then that can cause problems for her after you've gone. It took me…"

His eyes went vacant.

"It took me a long time to learn that lesson and I have only recently learned it."

He spent some time looking at Priscilla on the stage. Then he set his lute aside and leant forward, suddenly all business.

"Wilhelm was a moderately talented bard. He was never going to achieve worldwide fame and no-one was going to take his songs and perform them themselves. He was a good player, good singer and his poetry was passable but the only person that could elevate what he wrote was himself. When his music came out of other hands than his own, it was flat and lacking in passion.

"His major weakness though, was that he would set himself targets of women. He had bought into the image of the travelling bardic seducer and to be fair to him, his conquests were legendary. But he prioritised looks over willingness."

He caught my gaze.

"Oh, he wasn't a rapist or an assaulter. He was a seducer. And he was good at it. If you were slightly naive and very beautiful, you would be vulnerable to his charms. He would hunt them out, travelling, not where the money was as a proper bard does, but where the targets of seduction were. The beautiful and unhappy women would be open to his charms and then when they were a notch on his bedpost, he would move on. Not caring about the trouble he left behind.

"Speaking as a fellow lover of the feminine shape and the noises they make when they are excited, I can understand. But where I was always shocked when the wings of love struck my heart, he would seek them out and do it deliberately.

"There are several stories like this in his past. The one that I know about is this one as I was in Toussaint at the time while Geralt was off doing what he did and I heard about this from someone I trust."

"While you were with the Duchess you mean?"

He didn't rise to my baiting.

"She was a beautiful young nobleman's daughter. Younger daughter, unfortunately intelligent and ridiculously beautiful. He was similar in that he was a younger son, good with a lance and very dutiful. He was doing his best to get some capital together by working the jousting circuit in order to buy himself a title and they caught each other's eye. I'm told the romance was sudden and passionate although there was no feeling of impropriety. They were engaged, agreements and oaths were given, marriage contracts exchanged and a beautiful ceremony was had.

"Like all such things, the wedding night was less than stellar for either of them as the pressure of the thing was too much and it was over too early and they both fell into a drunken stupor. Then disaster struck.

"At the party, the groom's older brother and heir to the Earldom got drunk and insulted someone powerful. A duel was had and the older brother was trounced. Suddenly the groom had gone from a travelling Knight to the heir to a, not rich, important but less than picturesque Earldom. So the girl had gone from the glamorous life of the jousting circuit to the wife of an heir in an old, cold and draughty castle where her dutiful husband was riding around, learning his duties and neglecting her by extension."

Dandelion took a drink before continuing.

"Wilhelm heard of this and heard about how beautiful the girl was and decided that she would be another notch on his belt. He went, seduced the maid first and then managed to make the girl fall in love with him through numerous passionate songs and performances. She was naive and believed herself the heroine in some tragic love story. A falsehood that Wilhelm took full advantage of. The inevitable happened and the couple got caught because Wilhelm was having far too much fun, and she was being far too naive, to be properly discreet.

"He fled. The cuckolded man was not unaware of the girl's plight and would have done her best to hush the thing up for her, and his discretion. It would seem that he really did love his wife and had hopes of reconciliation. But Wilhelm destroyed that because he wrote a song, probably the best song he ever wrote. Certainly the song was good enough to make Wilhelm wealthy for a time and it was often requested and spread with speed. In theory, the identity of the heroine of the song was hidden but practically? The groom's father carried out an investigation and the truth was soon found.

"In that part of the world, the punishment for adultery and the helping of that adultery is rather extreme. The maid was hanged and the bride was packed off to a convent where she killed herself in an act that was undoubtedly hoped, by her, to be part of the very tragic poetry of her life."

Dandelion rose at that point as the applause from the stage was building and Priscilla was bowing.

"The person who told me this story," Dandelion told me, "was Wilhelm himself." He took up his lute and strode towards the stage, leaving me with this comment.

"He was proud of the story."

Dandelion sat on the stool so recently vacated by Priscilla who came over and sat with me.

"What did the two of you talk about?" She breathed in awe as she looked at the man that is essentially her husband.

I didn't have time to answer as Dandelion started to play, forestalling the jugglers that were supposed to climb on stage instead. It is part of his ownership that whenever Dandelion feels like performing, then the stage is his, no matter who or what is about to take a turn. Many people frequent the R & T in the hopes that they see one of these performances.

I've heard better songs, but not many. It is possibly true that the artist elevated the art, but still.

The song he sang was a beautiful, simple story. A flower which was clearly a young woman of startling beauty, kept in a tower of ice by an unfeeling jailor. It was clear that the jailor loved the flowers but did not have any care for what the flower was feeling. Then the gardener came who told the jailor that the flower needed care and so the jailor listened.

The gardner climbed the tower of ice and sat with the flower, talking with her for a long time until slowly, the flower started to trust the gardner and just as slowly, the gardner began opening the windows around the flower's prison so that the flower could see all the beautiful countryside around the tower and as the sun shone on the flower, her petals bloomed.

Then the jailor grew jealous of the gardener and cast him out before closing all the windows, reforming the ice around the flower. The flower petals closed, although for a while, the flower hoped that the gardener would return. But the jailor was vengeful and the gardener was too afraid. And eventually, after much heartache, the flower died. According to the song, the gardener still thinks about that flower and mourns the loss of such beauty and the cruelty that kept it from the world.

It is easy to mock and tease Dandelion and his abilities but there is no denying that the man is supremely talented and has the genius to use that talent properly. The truth of the matter is that when he set aside his lute and wiped his eyes, accepting the applause graciously and a hug from Priscilla even more graciously. I will freely admit that I had tears running down my cheeks as well. And then the context of the song made me hate myself a little.

I talked to Priscilla about it later while Dandelion was working on something.

"The power of the song comes from the fact that all of us see ourselves as the flower and the gardener both." She explained. We want to be the gardner that rescues the flower and causes her to," she smirked, "open her petals. But we are also the flower hoping to be rescued from… whatever it is that is keeping us cold, tired and isolated at that point in time. And we are made vulnerable to those emotions by the fact that we are all guilty of the suspicion that we might be the jailor. That guilt opens us up to the greater emotions conveyed which is what makes the song so effective."

She laughed, she does that often. "I did not know that he knew it. It's not a great song as you need to put a lot of emotion in it to play it well. But it is often taught at the academy in order to illustrate the proper use of emotional context and how to draw the listener into the composition."

I said nothing to this and went to my room that night, still fighting back tears. I called for Ariadne who is, and was, keeping an eye on me for my emotional state and I told her about the song and the vague, romantic longing that it had awakened in me.

"Oh Freddie," She took hold of me and held me tight. "You did more than open the windows. You took me by the hand and helped me out to the door, even when I was afraid of the light and fought you. You helped me to step into that sunlight and feel the gentle warmth on my face. That's why I love you so much."

I no longer tried to hold back the tears.

When I calmed she got a sly, hungry look in her eyes. "And," she said, lifting my eyes up to meet hers. "I look forward to blooming for you."

And I'm afraid that that's it. Nothing more exciting to say I'm afraid. That is the end of the story and there is nothing more to tell you about the adventures of a scholar and a Witcher in the Black Forest of Nilfgaard. I know that it's unsatisfying. I do and I completely sympathise. It is unsatisfying to me too. I hate stories that end with the whole "It was all just a dream" or a vision of some other kind of fuckery.

My sense is, and Professor Dandelion agreed, that what I have done and talked about is just the start of the story. I have no idea how long that story will go on or when, or even if, the story will have an ending. Such is the nature of history rather than bardic tales. I have more questions now than when I first set out from Toussaint to meet up with Kerrass. Most of those questions are questions that I picked up along the way. Still others are questions that I took with me without intending to. So many mysteries that swirl around in my nightmares.

And I don't know these answers. I wish I did and I wish that I could pass them onto you.

What was the vision that both Kerrass and I saw after Stefan struck the blow with the silver sword?

When we got back to Coulthard castle, Laurelen and Ariadne summoned Dr Shani in order to do a full examination of Kerrass and myself. As it turns out, there are tear marks in the corners of my mouth and anus, my Jawbone was shattered, and I have injuries in the depths of my bowls, throat and other internal organs. Kerrass has similar injuries although his are more healed than mine are. In the words of Shani, "Such injuries are deadly. She only sees injuries like that in cadavers after they have died in catastrophically horrible ways." So how did we get them?

These facts give credence to the possibility that we were taken somewhere with the tentacles, roots and Flame knows what else they were. But I remember seeing the sky as I was hanging in the middle of that network of horror. So where is there a thing like that that exists? How did we get back to the outside of the world? And ok, the dryads have ways of healing that we do not understand, but still. Those are some difficult injuries to come back from. But if those injuries are true, then how come my clothes were not torn apart. Why not my trousers and shirt? Or Kerrass' trousers and shirt?

There are no signs of repair on those garments and I have had a seamstress look.

How did we get outside the forest? I am prepared to admit that the Black Forest is larger than we can conceive and is larger than just the mere boundary of trees. But how did we get there? Who brought our horses? Who refilled our bags, returned Kerrass' sword and my spear. Who did all of those things?

The likelihood is that it was the dryads that did all of those things in the aftermath of everything calming down.

Kerrass and I had a lot of time to try and untangle these riddles and what we came up with was that the events leading up to Stefan's attack on The Schattenmann happened. Then the clearing for me and the river bank for Kerrass as well as the people we spoke to was some kind of vision or separate, non-physical experience. We think that whatever the place was with the tentacles and the… you get the idea. Whatever that was, was some way that our physical brains coped with the horror of what was actually happening to us.

There is a philosophical debate that starts with "Perception shapes reality" therefore, if perception shapes our reality then how Kerrass and I saw those places… was our best guess, our best interpretation of what we saw.

What about the place that we saw? The riverbank that Kerrass described was the same place that we met with Schrodinger and the Unicorn. My clearing? I don't ever remember the place. It was, at the same time, just like any number of clearings and forest openings that I have spent any time in before, or camped down in before. It is true that, often, these places tend to kind of blur together.

But here's the extra problem. I was dreaming of that clearing for days, weeks even before I met the Schattenmann. Ariadne claims that I dreamt about that clearing back in Toussaint although I don't remember that.

Who was it that I spoke to in that clearing? This has been the subject of much debate in my family since then.

Emma wants to believe that it really was Father. She says that it sounds like Father, he behaved like Father would and said the kinds of things that Father would say. So she wants to believe that it was our Father.

Mark is the opposite view. Not really surprising because, after all, the man is a churchman. He pointed out that if it really was Father then it upends everything about what we know or think we know about the way the afterlife works. And he found that terrifying on a truly, fundamental level. He asks questions like, "Why Father? Why not Francesca? Why not Edmund? Why not those non-human friends of yours that died. Or any number of dead people that we, unfortunately, know? But Father? You and Father didn't get on. It was clear to all of us that you loved each other but sometimes, people that love each other can drive each other to distraction. You loved Francesca more and deeper and she died more recently?"

Like all of my questions, there are no answers to this and of course Mark is right but so is Emma. As far as I can remember, that was my Father. But it could just as easily have been the Schattenmann taking the memory of my Father out of my head and forming a construct of him.

Me? I am as confident as I can be that while I was talking to our Father, I was also talking to The Schattenmann. There are reasons that the Schattenmann would summon the image of Father or bring Father out to talk to me. The position of authority, the combative nature of our relationship. All of that would contribute to the sort of figure that I would speak to and answer to an inquisition for. But the ending of our conversation gives me pause. Why would the image of our Father, possessed by The Schattenmann, seek to comfort me?

I like to think that The Schattenmann, whoever and whatever that is, summoned Father's spirit back and that although it was Father that I was speaking to, I was also speaking to The Schattenmann. That is the image that gives me the most comfort.

Now we're onto the big questions that I still have left over. Who, or what, was Stefan? I have no theories about that.

We examined as much of our back trail as we could and we could find no record of him. Even places where we stayed could not remember him. That is just going to have to be one of those mysteries that remains, annoyingly, unsolved.

So what do I know?

I know that Kerrass knows more than I do. He thinks that his Goddess gave him the strength to escape our captivity of visions. He hopes that the images of Schrodinger, the Unicorn and my father were just summoned by The Schattenmann because if not, that would suggest that his friends are dead and that causes him pain. Apparently, one of his many plans for after my wedding is to go and see if he can find the pair of them again to confirm this. Or avenge them if necessary.

He also doesn't want to tell me much more. He spoke directly with The Schattenmann several times. Including in the conversation that happened immediately before Stefan's strike. He jokes with me that the purpose of this secrecy is so that he can tell Yennefer when the book comes to be published. She is coming up to spend some time with us over the next few days to interview us both on the subject in order to get the new book planned out and researched. The book on the Unseen Elder is just being proofread now to make sure that Lady Yennefer and I are happy with it and then it will be off to the publisher.

The other reason for not telling me everything is that he doesn't want me to relapse. He, my family and friends, and myself to a certain extent are concerned that I would take to horse and charge off South again to have it out with The Schattenmann. And Kerrass is concerned that his words would act as a goad towards that end. He might not be wrong with all of that.

So there you have it. I wish I had a more satisfying ending for you all. Not least because this will be the last article in the "scholar's travels" series and is likely to remain so for several years, if not forever. There are certainly no plans of doing any more at this stage. But leaving it like this makes me feel like I'm leaving it with a whimper rather than a bang. We did not solve this mystery, we did not lift this curse or talk to the monster and get its story. Some people are claiming that we did and bless you for that opinion. But I disagree.

You will not be getting rid of me permanently. Neither Kerrass nor I can completely escape you now even if we wanted to. I have made him famous and although I think he enjoys the notoriety, it does not stop him from being annoyed with it.

For myself, you can find me in the lecture halls of the university and my work with Lady Yennefer will continue to be published. After the book on The Unseen Elder is published, we intend a book on the Schattenmann and after that we are immediately unsure. There is a new and powerful entity that haunts the coast of Skellige and those parts of the continent that are closest to the islands nation where witnesses describe a figure, a person that gestures and waves of snow and frost come from their hands like a wave. Apparently, messages are being sent to try and contact the Yukki-Onna about who it might be, or what it might be.

According to Lady Yennefer, Lord Geralt has made contact with some friends and we might have a line on meeting the Rumplesteldt. And speaking personally, I want to meet the headless horseman and find out his story.

But I can't be on the road now. I need to stop, for a long time, maybe forever. I want to thank you for travelling this path with me for these… Flame it's only three years. So much has happened and you have been with me every step of the way. Words cannot express how much that means to me. Thank you and thank you and thank you again.

And if you do meet a Witcher on the path, treat them well, buy them a drink and respect their privacy. They will appreciate it. And so will I.

Go well.

(Editor's note: This series of articles on Professor Coulthard's journeys and adventures on the Black Forest are done. It's taken us several weeks to split them up into separate issues and when he wrote those words, he absolutely meant them. However, in the intervening time we received this note that he asked to be attached to the ending of the last article)

There have been some small developments in the saga of the Black Forest and The Schattenmann. I will try and be brief as I am trying to meet a deadline.

It would seem that The Schattenmann still exists. He's still there and there have been sightings in the local villages. So whatever it was that Stefan did, it certainly did not slay The Schattenmann.

So it would seem that The Schattenmann has chosen a new host. I have no idea who it is, who it might be or whether I even met them. However we do know that the new host is far cruller, much more defensive and at the same time, much more merciful than his predecessors.

The last confirmed source was from the Imperial escort that was taking the Brokilon delegation to try to make contact with The Schattenmann. What they found was… not ideal. Sometimes it is clear that I have had a positive effect on the world and sometimes it is clear that I have caused quite a lot of damage. There have been groups of men, men of the worst sort that have either read, or have heard of my story and have tried to invade the Black Forest in order to get at the dryads for reasons that, frankly, horrify me.

The forest has not taken kindly to this and the surrounding areas are now littlere with the bodies of these men that have been torn apart and killed in the most horrible ways. There are reports of entrails strewn from tree to tree among other things that I will not repeat in print.

On the other hand, the villagers that live in and around the Black Forest report that they have had the perfect weather for their lifestyle. Rain when they need rain, sun when they need sun and although there is noticeably less game in the area. There is still plenty for themselves and their families providing they work hard enough for it. It would seem that the new Schattenmann believes in the virtues of hard physical work.

The last report that I had of the group was that the Imperial escort, along with the pair of dryad delegates who volunteered for the journey, were camped at the village of the hanging priest. The village that is deepest into the borders of the Forest.

The path into the forest is no longer there. Instead there is a wall that has cut off that entrance. A wall of solid thorns that seem impassable. One soldier tried to cut a way in before the accompanying dryads both screamed and begged him to stop. The report said that despite his progress, he could see no end to the thorns and that he had been cut through and around his armour.

According to the report that was sent to me, the Priest no longer hangs there and there is a sign that someone regularly comes to tend the grave that we dug for him.

(A/N: I'm sorry about the ambiguity of the ending but sometimes there are mysteries too big to be solved and speaking personally, I quite like that. That was always the ending too, it wasn't because I wrote myself into a corner or anything. Call me cruel if you like but there we go.

I'm also sorry for the delay. Not only have I been away, but it turns out that the chapter was also ridiculously long. Normally I might have split the chapter into two, or even three parts. But while editing, I just didn't think it worked unless the reader could see the whole picture. So thanks for your patience.

Also, this is not the end of the story. Although again, same as last time, Freddie thinks it is. There is still one story arc to go, then an aftermath and finally an Epilogue, so you're not getting rid of me just yet either. Although if this was an ending, I would be happy with it. And indeed, knowing what comes next, there are some people that might prefer this to be the ending.

Shit's gonna go down y'all.

And lastly a dedication. I want to dedicate this chapter to my Father. Freddie's father is not based on either of my father figures. My Father was much better than the former Lord Coulthard and my Step-Father was much MUCH worse. All of Freddie's family are who they are because of plot reasons. But still, I've been thinking about my Father a lot while writing this chapter.

My Father told me that I could do anything. He made a childish game out of reinforcing that message to toddler me. He would make me stand there and say "I can doooooo…." and then I had to finish it by raising my arms in the air and yell "ANYTHING" and it would always earn a hug and a laugh. But the lesson was remembered. I would love to talk to him again.

So….

Dedicated to my Father.

Thanks for Reading.