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 I will be publishing this story on Royal Road /profile/349358

153. Chapter 153

If you ever want to start a fight in scholarly circles, ask them how Echinopsae start.

I don't mean that literally, it would have to be quite a specific subset of scholarly circles, I doubt that scholars of medicine would care a great deal as to how Archespores start, only to how they end. And I would be astonished to learn that there are any rhyming couplets that can go with "big fucking murderous plants that come out of the ground and try to eat you." I mean, I don't know, not being a poet myself, but surely that wouldn't be something that could happen.

But I promise that that particular group of scholars, the men, and women that study monsters and curses and strange magical phenomenon that assail the continent at every opportunity, will get into a massive row on the subject.

Not Witchers though. They don't care as much either. It is enough to know about them, to recognize the signs of their growth, and to take steps to destroy them and make sure that they never grow again. That is as much as Witchers care about such things.

So what is an Echopsae? Or it's larger and more powerful cousin, the Archespore?

That is an interesting question. Essentially they are giant, carnivorous flowers that sprout up out of the ground. They can lay dormant on the surface, showing only a small part of their bulk in an effort to lure in its prey before sprouting large Viney, sinuous growths that stand between seven and twelve feet tall with a flower that is easily two feet across. Then the flower attacks you. Generally, that comes in two ways. The first is that it will try to lash out at you by closing its petals and swiping at you, tearing at your body with its thorns and the sheer impact of being hit in the chest or face with a thick vine growth. Or it will spit its poisoned darts at you.

The darts have a soporific poison that will send animals and people to sleep so that they can be properly digested over time by the Echinopsae's poisons.

If that was all they did, then that would be horrific and dangerous enough. But the other thing that they do is that they can burrow underground. Don't ask me how they do that. Something with the working of the plant and the body of the vine I suppose. But then it can burst up from the ground and it moves with terrifying speed.

It's no fucking joke.

And even then, that is not all that they can do. If the plant has been in the location for an extended period of time, it can also grow bulbous sacks and leave them in their wake or around their area of territory. And these sacks are, by far, the most dangerous bit of the Echinopsae in question.

Why is that Freddie?

I don't know Freddie, they already sound pretty fucking dangerous to me.

Well, you would be right. The point is that these bulbs are inflatable sacks of growth. And as they grow, they are inflated with poisonous, acidic, goo, and a noxious gas that would be poisonous to the average human. Witchers are immune to the poisons of course, but that doesn't save them from the corrosive elements within the plant itself. Expensive gear can be reduced to slag and all but destroyed before the thing can be destroyed.

So to kill or destroy an Echinpsae, you have to be aware of its burrowing, deflate the bulbs by puncturing them with the thrust of a weapon, arrow, or crossbow bolt, and then you must remove the flower from the vine that it has sprouted from.

All while it is spitting its thorns at you and doing its best to poison you, strangle you, and… well… you get the idea.

But here is where it gets interesting. They look like plants and have all the features of a plant or a flower. There is a journal in Oxenfurt library from a scholar that travelled to the wild and fabled lands beyond Zerrikania where there was a plant described that would eat insects in a similar way to how the Echinopsae behaved.

But they are not plants according to any biological definition of the term.

There are no roots. As far as Kerrass can tell me, they do not use water or sunlight to grow. The sprouting of the flower would suggest some kind of bulb for the sprouting to come from, but that's not the case either. They die if you cut that central… stem in two with the base of the stem in one part and the flower in the other.

I've seen Kerrass fight one of these things for hours where I have also seen Kerrass blink when one has sprouted next to him before he cut it in half in the same movement as he drew his sword.

He has also, more than once, simply argued that the field that has sprouted the Echniopsae be covered in lantern oil and then burnt. This also seems effective.

So where do Echinopsae, or archspores which are essentially the same thing only bigger and a deeper crimson in colour… Where do they come from?

And this is where the argument comes in.

I have read a number of different works on the matter. One tome argued that Echoinopsae are from seeds that fell to the ground during the Conjunction of the Spheres. Another suggests that they are all seedlings from one, great, massive archespore that is somewhere in the world.

That thought is a truly terrifying thought and it is one of the few things that I sincerely hope I never get to see.

By far the most common theory is that they come from curses.

If someone curses the land, one of the things that might come up is that the land will start to grow Archespore. I have seen this one happen.

Kerrass and I were hired to investigate a field. No plants would grow on it besides these strange flowers. Animals that went to graze from what sparse grass could grow there would grow sick and die and when the farmer was questioned, it turned out that he had bought the field from his neighbour who had, themselves, bought the field from the former….

You know what, it doesn't matter.

But it turns out that someone in the field's history had said, "Well if I can't have it, you will never grow anything on it. I curse you and the field to grow nothing and all you will get from it is poison and misery."

Kerrass took one look at it and declared it cursed with Echinopsae. He killed it, suggested a field burning and then the field should recover.

What was interesting from my perspective was that the monster was confined to the field's boundaries, as set by old dilapidated fencing which would not have posed any kind of serious barrier to anything that was burrowing underneath it.

Another source of these vile and dangerous plants is bloodshed. This is similar to the above curse. You can often find Echinopsae growing in fields where people have been murdered or there have been large-scale massacres of some kind. Not battles though. You don't find them on battlefields. Another little mystery about these weird plants that aren't really plants.

Another area that Kerrass dealt with was the result of a group of Elves being rounded up into a particular field and then slaughtered. Their blood stained the ground and from that blood grew the Echinopsae. Kerrass destroyed the plants and advised the villagers to erect a memorial. The villagers told Kerrass that the local lord had committed the massacre and would be angry if such a thing were to happen. Kerrass shrugged, pocketed his fee and we moved on.

The matter is further complicated by the fact that you can often find bones, wedged in between the growths of the vines of these deadly things which lends credence to the following theories.

There are mirror image theories here. One says that if there is a plant that is buried beneath an innocent, murdered man. Or an evil, hideous man. Then that seed will sprout into an Echinposae. There is certainly evidence that Echinopsae have grown around graveyards and over the graves of murdered people.

What does Kerrass think? As I say, he doesn't care. He knows how to look for Echinopsae. He knows how to spot them when they arrive and he knows the various things that might lead towards the presence of Echinopsae. He knows the questions to ask and what kind of things to say. He knows when to burn everything and when to leave it alone. His theories? He agrees with me.

What do I think? I think that all of the above is true.

Apart from the thing about them all being sprouted from one giant carnivorous plant. That shit is too crazy to exist because if it did, then we would have heard about it by now. A giant Carnivorous plant that can send its seeds to all of the corners of the continent? I mean…? There is something in me that suggests that it might happen, that nothing is too weird to not exist in some form, but….

Whatever happens. There always seems to be a curse at the root (Freddie: unintentional pun there) of the problem. Sometimes that curse needs to be hunted out and found on the grounds that just killing the Echinopsae is rather a case of treating the symptoms rather than the disease. And whatever else happens, the thing needs to be destroyed, either before or after the curse.

And none of this knowledge or experience was of any use to us as the group walked smack into the middle of a patch of Archspore.

It was a sudden thing and there was absolutely no warning. Kerrass had time to catch his medallion before it shook itself free of his neck and to shout a warning, but that was it. They were on us and we were under attack.

We had left the last village behind a day ago. Not the village of Piotr's former residence, but the last village that we could get supplies from before we were making the final approach to the heart of the Black Forest. We were laden down with goods. Each of us had multiple skins of water crisscrossing our bodies because Piotr had warned us that we should drink none of the natural water from within the forest itself.

Apparently, it carried the Schattenmann's own essence in the water.

We were also laden down with firewood. Each of us strapping many different branches to ourselves. It was not cold and we always had Kerrass' rock warming trick to fall back on, but sometimes, firelight is necessary for… well…. Light.

And we all had supplies for a long time. We had no idea how long it would take us to find the thing that we were looking for, so we carried as much as we could to ensure that we would be able to find it. The march was ever as it always had been. Piotr was now, fully committed to his role as our pathfinder.

He had mellowed a little since we had all learned of his history. I didn't tell them the story, but somehow, Henrik and Stefan found out while Stefan had heard from the priestess at the village. Piotr led the way, his saber in his belt but he was using a broad short sword to hack his way through the undergrowth.

Kerrass went with him, Medallion out, half watching his medallion, half watching the foretrail and scanning off to either side.

Henrik came next, alternately carrying his wood-cutting ax or his bow which he used to scan for threats. Piotr had ordered us that we were not to hunt anything or to eat from any animal that we killed. An instruction that I was more than happy to keep. But Henrik was alternating between the two weapons. Occasionally wielding his ax when the path became too blocked for Piotr's short blade to be of much use.

Then was me. The close undergrowth meant that my spear was ungainly and I carried it in its sling over my shoulder. I was much quicker now than I had been when the journey had begun, and it would be in my hands in a flash if I needed it. I was also leading a small pony. Small enough to fit through the undergrowth but strong enough to carry some of the heavier baggage.

Then came the unusual partnership of Stefan and Trayka who guarded the back trail. I have no idea when it happened but the two worked well together. Trayka aimed past him as Stefan would scan the undergrowth. I remember no words between the two and there was certainly nothing untoward going on. But nevertheless, a friendship had formed.

And so we traveled along the overgrown track.

And it was a track. There were signs of people and wagons passing along there. Deep ruts in the earth, small pieces of debris as well. Stefan found a stuffed bear at one point, while I found discarded, bent nails and a damaged, heavily rusted horseshoe.

But that didn't stop it from being heavily overgrown.

True to his reputation, Piotr led us well and we carried on, making fairly good time.

Kerrass had time to grasp his medallion, shout and have his silver sword half in his hand before all hell broke loose.

I can only tell the story of that fight from my own perspective. It happened that fast.

There is a sound that happens when those Echinopsae breaches the surface and reach for the sky that is unlike any other. There is the rumbling sound of the earth being thrown loose, stones tumbling around, and the cracking of roots that were in the way of the spore growing. That is terrible enough, but as you are reacting to that, one of the things that I am always, always unprepared for is the feral… rattling sound that comes when they attack. It is hard to imagine a plant roaring or growling but that is quite literally what is happening.

Then there is the strange combination of spitting and swooshing noise as the poisoned thorns start to tear their way through the air towards whatever targets the Archspore dictate.

"Freddie", Kerrass shouted and I dashed forwards to support him.

I was not the best fighter in the group. Even if you discount Kerrass, Stefan was by far a better sword than I was a spear. The difference was that I knew how to fight these things and more importantly, had fought them before. My spear was off my shoulder and the two ends were being fitted together as I moved.

Not that I'm a veteran you understand. But I had, at least, seen them before and had killed more than a couple.

Stefan knew what to do, but he had never actually seen an Archspore and for a moment he was frozen while he took in the scene.

The mule screamed as one of the thorns struck it.

"WHAT DO I DO?" Trayka demanded.

"Shoot the heads," Piotr shouted.

"No," I screamed. The heads wouldn't even notice an arrow. "Shoot the bulbs." I pointed to one that was already growing.

All of that happened in the opening moments.

There were three of them that had grown on either side of the path. Flame knows what had happened to cause this here but that wasn't important right now. Two were on the left-hand side of the path and the other was on the right. One of the two had a large, purple flower while the other two were a more pinkish, orange-red.

I went for the one by itself.

Henrik had loosed his arrow at one of the flowers and missed. As the flower was swirling around trying to strike at the Witcher. Which is the other reason that shooting at the flowers doesn't work. He cursed, threw his bow aside and went for his ax.

Piotr had his sword out, buckler on, and was jabbing at one of the roots.

"SLASH AT IT." Stefan roared, finally free from his brief moment of shock. "THE Point is useless here." He hurdled the falling mule and leapt to Kerrass' side. Thus getting in Kerrass' way.

Kerrass cursed as he mistimed a dodge and had to halt mid-spin.

Trayka had taken cover behind the mule and was shooting at the bulbs that were now building up.

I got in two good swings at the plant that I was attacking. One blow bounced off while the other bit deep.

The flower screamed and shrank beneath the ground. And again, yes, plants can scream. I have heard them.

I spun, looking for where my spore would surface.

Piotr had taken the instructions and had slashed into one of the trunks of the spores only to find that his sword was now lodged deep into the body of the plant and was stuck. Kerrass was sending Stefan back to help Piotr. Henrik had pulled his ax free and was moving to help. Trayka was accurate with her arrows but more of the bulbs were bursting forwards.

"STAB THE BLUBS," I shouted at no-one in particular before taking a guess and jumping.

Echinopsae have some small intelligence, or at least, it sometimes feels as though they do, and my guess was that it would come up behind Trayka, or near her in order to stop the arrows flying.

So I dashed, half leaping, half running towards her.

More than one Bulb had burst now and I held my breath as I ran through an orange cloud.

Someone else had not been so lucky and I could hear someone retching. Even with my precaution, I felt lightheaded. Trayka blinked as she saw me running towards her and for a moment, her instincts assumed I was a threat and her aim waivered.

The spore breached the surface behind her and to one side. Trayka realised the threat and what I was aiming for, dropped her bow and drew her hunting knife.

"NO," I screamed. "I have this." I struck at the stem, my blow bouncing off the tough, sinewy vines. "Keep shooting the vines."

I struck again and my blow bounced.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what happens when you attack a monster without a silver weapon in your hand.

I was hurting the thing though, bruising the plant or whatever happens, and my next blow bit deep.

The spore screamed.

I felt an impact in my back, ignored it and swung again. This time my blow went deeper.

Another problem is that if you don't cut clear through the stem in one strike, then you must try and strike the same place again on your next strike. But I had hurt the archspore now and it was sluggish to react.

Another blow went deep. I missed again, and again but then another blow got through, all but killing the monster. It fell, limp and twitching.

Kerrass' training is insistent though. Always check to make sure that your enemy is dead so I struck again, severing the stem, and turned to see what was happening.

It was not completely disastrous.

Kerrass had killed his own spore and was trying to get Piotr to clear out of the way so that he could kill the third. A bulb had exploded over Stefan and he was frantically trying to clear the poison off before it did too much damage.

Henrik was down and Trayka was crouched over him.

"Fuck." I swore and hurdled the screaming mule for the third time to get to Henrik's side.

He was staring at the sky, blinking rapidly as he tried to follow something with his eyes. Something that no one else could see.

There were two of the poisonous thorns in him. One in his unprotected neck round the back and another in his forearm.

I swore again as I pulled the thorns out. I knew from experience that they wouldn't be barbed.

"I need water," I shouted as I started to squeeze the wounds to get some of the poisoned blood out. All that shit you read about sucking out the venom, can work but is just as dangerous for the man doing the sucking as it is for the man who has already been poisoned. Trayka pulled at me but someone, I think it was Stefan, pulled her off.

The last Archspore died.

Henrik gripped my arms and groaned with the pain as he started to sweat.

"You're going to be fine," I told him. And the thing was that he really was going to be fine. Kerrass knows a remedy for the poison of an Archspore, both short term and long term. I just didn't know if he had any ready.

I heard Kerrass' voice.

"We need Celandine, Mandrake, Sage and puffball." He told someone. "Go, be quick."

There was the stomping sound of some crashing through the undergrowth as someone pulled something out of my back.

Turns out that Henrik wasn't the only person that had been hit by a thorn. The difference was that the leather of my coat had protected me.

Here's one for your notebooks. Echinops thorns can be protected against by thick clothing, cured hides and boiled leather will do the trick. They will simply bounce off metal armour. I would imagine you might have a bad day if you depend on chain mail as the thorns are thin enough to find a gap. But those thorns are made for striking at the skin, not at piercing anything particularly layered.

"Careless Freddie." Kerrass joked with me as he showed me the thorn.

"And what about you?" I demanded as I pointed to two thorns in his own armour.

"Well, would you look at that?" He joked, pulling them out and tossing them aside.

"Is now a time for jokes?" Trayka demanded angrily. "My Father is dying."

"No, he's not," Kerrass told her. "Freddie has mitigated a lot of the damage and providing we can get somewhere safe in the next couple of days, then I can brew a proper cure."

"The village is not far away now." Piotr appeared with the required plants. "We will get there tomorrow."

"Echinopsae, want their prey weak and paralysed," Kerrass said. "That's why they poison you first. Yes, it is deadly if you don't get the thorns out and get some of the poison out as well. It stays in the system and multiplies so it can still be deadly, but not if we can get the cure into him within the next couple of days."

Trayka nodded miserably and angrily scrubbed the tears from her eyes while she stood up and moved away from my view.

"Someone get some water on to heat." Kerrass picked up a rock and heated it on the ground. "Then throw those plants into the mixture and stir them."

"What with?" Piotr asked.

Kerrass finally lost his temper. "I don't know, use your dick if you like." Then he bent to help me work.

In looking after Henrik though, we lost the mule. There was too much poison in the system of the poor beast already, we could not have got the poison out, and dragging it off to try and properly cure it would have been cruel. In the end, Trayka dealt with it and we divided as much as we could among ourselves and dragged some of the stuff behind us. The bundles of firewood, for instance, were tied to Henrik's feet and as well as carrying him, we dragged that stuff behind us.

Trayka fashioned a stretcher so that we could carry her father. Among other things, she stole my spear to do so. I deliberately said nothing other than to make sure that the blade was properly covered to protect it from as much of the forest debris as I could. She used a stout stick for the other three parts of the frame and used her own cloak as the base of it.

Stefan volunteered to drag the poor old man but even for him it was a struggle. I volunteered as well after it became clear that Piotr wasn't going to volunteer and that Kerrass was too needed to be practical. Trayka wanted to carry her father alone and though she was certainly strong, the offer was ludicrous in the long run. In the end, she and I would swap on occasion while she glared daggers into Piotr's back.

I took a rather perverse pleasure in the knowledge that Piotr would not be getting laid that night, nor any other night for that matter.

We made slow time and that night's camp was not a pleasant one.

Piotr and Kerrass argued. I didn't listen because I was too busy nursing Henrik.

Here is another note for those of you that might be trying to follow in my footsteps or otherwise emulate me. Ensure that there is more than one person in your group that knows how to care for injuries and sicknesses. Because if one of them gets injured (Henrik) then you must make sure that there is someone else (me) who can pick up the slack.

The argument was something about everyone having a role. Piotr was unhappy about everyone, including the "jumped up streak of piss of a nobleman" telling him what to do in the heat of the moment. Kerrass' point was that when you hire a guide, you follow their instructions, when you hire a soldier, you follow their orders on the battlefield and when you travel with a Witcher, you do what the Witcher tells you in the face of the monster. I was very gratified to hear Kerrass point out that I had killed one of the things whereas he, Piotr, had simply got his sword trapped and not been able to do anything.

Stefan tried to be a peacemaker but then Piotr turned on him, trying to drag the monk down with him until Stefan, who lost his temper after being called a coward, wondered how the best guide in the region didn't know where there was a patch of Echinops and how said guide had failed to prevent us all from wandering right into the middle of them. So then it was Kerrass' turn to act as the peacemaker.

I understand what Piotr was doing. He had reacted badly in the fight and made a few mistakes. He was angry with himself and therefore, he was angry with everyone else, struggling to find a target.

Had his mistakes contributed to Henrik's injury? There is no way for me to know. Such things happen when you are all surprised and… well… ambushed. I would dearly love to place all the blame at Piotr's feet, but that would be unfair. Even Kerrass, the Witcher, didn't see it coming and truth be told, we were lucky it wasn't worse.

I sat with Henrik and applied Kerrass' cleanse to his wounds.

Yes, I have been poisoned by an Echinopsae before and the recovery is awful. First there is the cleaning of the wounds and then you need to take the remedy which involves swallowing the herbal horror before shitting through the eye of the needle. Then it just stops. You feel like you're dying until suddenly, you feel perfect and can get up and carry on as if nothing happened.

Henrik was in the bit that feels as though he was dying. Trayka wanted to sit with her father but she was working off her own anger in her own way. Occasionally, we could hear the sounds of arrows striking wood nearby followed by the sounds of branches striking tree trunks until they snapped.

"I saw what you did," Henrik said, looking up at me as I bathed the wound in his arm.

"What?" I was distracted, wiping the clear discharge that was leaking from the injury. That it was clear and not creamy with black threads running through it was a good sign.

"You saved my daughter's life."

I tried to play it off. "Your daughter's shooting saved more than what I did," I told him. "Now lie still."

"When you take her." The old man pleaded. "Be gentle with her. I will not stop you." There were tears in his eyes.

"Once again," I said, wiping the injury again, before moving round to examine the neck wound. "I am engaged to a woman that I love and I believe in Monogamy. Your daughter's virtue is safe from me."

"But be good to her and take care of any issue." It was as though I hadn't spoken. "She is a good girl my Trayka and I love her. I have been a poor Father to her and I would ensure this one thing if I can."

I looked at the old man's face which was twisted in real distress as he stared at me, barely seeing me.

"I will take care of her," I told him. "Where it is my responsibility to do so."

The old man slept.

Eventually, Kerrass took over from me, ordering me to get some rest and I slept.

In the middle of the night, I woke up needing to piss and went behind a tree to let the water out before going to check on my patient.

I heard something in the wind and stopped, staring off into the night.

What with one thing or another, I had not actually stopped since the fight with the Echinops. Carrying a grown man who was made out of more than a little bit of muscle, followed by caring for that man had left me so tired that I fell asleep almost as soon as my head hit the bag that I used as a pillow. But I was on my way back to where my blankets lay when I first heard something on the wind and I stopped, dead in my tracks.

I listened. It was a clear light and the moon was shining, heading towards a full moon so there was plenty of light to see by. I had taken my spear with me and a number of years on the road had taught me how to piss while holding onto my weapons, but it took me a moment to realise that I was holding my spear, ready for a fight as I looked up at the sky, trying to find out where the sound had come from.

There was nothing.

I could hear Kerrass snoring a little way off, a distinctive rumble that I am now so used to that I only notice it when it changes. I could also hear Henrik wheezing but it didn't sound dangerous. It was the whistling sound of air between teeth. A man struggling to breathe a little bit, but there was no wetness to the sound. I had lost track of who was on watch and if Piotr, Trayka, or Stefan snored, I had never identified it.

But then I realized that it was not any of that I had heard. Indeed, I shouldn't have been able to hear the sounds of Henrik breathing in a forest. There should be the sounds of small animals rustling through the undergrowth, birds, and bats flapping about in the darkness. The wind in the leaves would have been quite comforting at that point in time.

But there was nothing. It was as though the whole world had stopped and was waiting for something. I felt like an actor on a stage who has just forgotten their lines, waiting for the next thought to occur and just hoping that it would turn out to be the next thing that I had to say in order to continue.

Then I heard it again. Just in the distance. A cry, a moan even, a sound of agony and torment that seemed to have been ripped from the throat that had made the noise. It rose and fell with a break in the middle, a gap for words to be spoken.

I shivered.

Trayka moved up behind me. I knew for a fact that if Trayka wanted to sneak up on me, then she could have done so and I would not have heard her, which meant that she had deliberately telegraphed her movements so that I could hear her and be prepared.

"It is the hanging priest's voice." She said. "You know, from the story? He is calling for help."

I nodded, taking in that information.

"He has been calling for help since we arrived." Trayka went on. "Depending on the direction of the wind, you can hear him for a couple of days in any direction. Including, presumably, from the heart of the Black Forest itself."

I think it was more words in one sitting than Trayka and I had ever shared.

Kerrass often has 'opinions' on being woken up in the middle of the night, but I found that I didn't want to be alone so I reached for a conversation starter.

"Have you been here before?" I wondered.

"A couple of times." She said, coming to stand next to me. "I came once before from a more Southerly direction. I had business in the area and decided that I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. It was a real tourist moment. One of those things. I was born and raised in the woodland around the Black Forest and I had only ever been to visit the Priest and see his warning when I was much younger. I wanted to see how much I could remember and how much was born of all of the terrible stories that the other visitors tell themselves."

"How was it?"

She shrugged.

And what was it like when you were younger?" I asked when it became clear that she wasn't going to give me any more details.

She didn't answer that question either.

"I saw what you did today." She told me. "You saved my life I think after I nearly shot you."

I shrank in embarrassment. "I do not travel with other people too often," I told her. "Mostly just with Kerrass where my entire job is to just get out of the way in a fight. But I do know that when shit like that happens, there is too much chaos going on to properly state who saved who or even who did what."

I could feel her looking at me in the darkness. "You are a good man." She decided, nodding.

"How can you tell?" I wondered, feeling amusement in my voice.

"You lie badly." She told me.

I laughed and after a moment, she added a chuckle to my own before the mirth died out to the sound of a particularly high-pitched bellow of pain in the difference.

"I shot him when I was last here." She said. "The priest that hangs from his church."

"I thought that the church had burnt down."

"It did, but it either got rebuilt or has regrown in the meantime. But he hangs there and he pleads, begs, and moans. Most of the people that visit try to kill him. Some of the more unpleasant visitors make a game of it, seeing who can kill him the slowest. Not that he cares. He barely seems to notice the pain anymore."

I took that in with a certain horrifying feeling.

"I shot him twice in the rib cage. I had been, seen the village and decided that I didn't want to stay. So I shot him in the chest. Deadly shots, both of them and he died. I swear that he died. Three hours later, I hear the cries start up again as I walked away."

"Lovely." I heard myself say. "Something to look forward to."

She grunted.

"You also saved my Father's life." This piece of gratitude sounded more like an accusation than anything else.

"I was there and I knew what to do," I told her.

"Some men would have left him." She hissed, a wave of sudden anger and bitterness was in her. I wondered if she was talking about Piotr.

"I am not some men," I said. "I am me. And anyone I know who I would have any time for, or would remotely care about, or claim friendship with, would have done their best to help. Even if we needed to help a stranger."

"Why?" She wondered. She seemed younger somehow.

"Because one day it might be me left lying there by the side of the road with an Echinops thorn in my neck."

She grunted in acknowledgement of that.

"Still," She said. "Thank you."

"You are quite welcome," I told her.

She waited a moment, possibly doing the same as I was which was trying to think of something else she could say. In the end, though, she turned and walked away.

"Wait," I said, something suddenly occurring to me.

She turned to face me.

"Why is your Father so insistent in his concern that I am trying to seduce you?"

She stared at me in the darkness, the light of the moon and the stars had thrown her eyes into shadow, making her look sinister somehow.

"My father loved my mother very much." She said. "I do not know, because she left us when I was very young. But according to the other people from my village, she was much younger than him. She was a pretty woman and married my Father because he was decent and kind to her, rather than just trying to have a pretty girl in their bed."

She sneered with an old anger.

"One day, a handsome young Lord rode into the village for water and food on a hunting trip. He saw my mother and invited her to go with him using pretty words and practiced charm. She went with him without a backward glance. Now my Father lives in terror that the same thing will happen to me. But he will not understand that he lost me a long time ago."

"What happened to your mother?"

She shrugged.

"I don't know and I don't much care. Bitch left us."

She was angry now and turned away. Our conversation seemed to be over.

I stood there and listened for a while as I heard the poor man, wherever he was, crying out in his anger and pain.

The following morning started slowly. Not because we were all reluctant to start, but because when you have an injured member of the group. An injured man who wants to pretend to himself and to everyone else around, that he's actually fine, then things can be slow to start.

Henrik tried to walk and argued with us when we tried to make him lie on the stretcher. Then he wanted to know why we kept the stretcher constructed rather than taking it apart as he thought we should.

Then he got out of breath eating his breakfast.

And that was the battle. We had had to divide up the goods that were on the back of the mule between us we managed to explain away the stretcher on the grounds that it would then carry our firewood and other goods that we didn't mind getting bumped around.

We were maybe a hundred paces further down the trail before Henrik simply fell over.

In the end, it was his daughter that stood there and glared at us all until we all backed off a little while and then she let him have it. I didn't hear all of it because I was trying to give the pair of them some privacy. But there were some parts of it all that we just couldn't avoid hearing, to the point that Piotr went a little bit ahead to scout the trail while Stefan, Kerrass, and I all stood around avoiding each other's eyes.

She called him a drunk, a lazy old lech of a man whose pride had destroyed what little amount of quality that he still had. And that was some of the nicer things that she said.

In the end, he was convinced to lay down on the stretcher.

The problem with Echinops venom is that it's an insidious thing. It latches itself inside the body in some way that I do not understand and would require a mage to explain it to you. It seems to get inside the bloodstream before it multiplies and then spreads. It is a paralytic so as it works its way through the body, it just grinds everything down to a stop. The danger is that if it gets into the heart or the brain then it will convince them to slow down and eventually stop. And it can take a long time too. A very long time. And people rarely die from it although it is deadly in the long term and in larger, untreated doses. That is not how Echinops kill people. It paralyzes them and then it eats them.

So what needed to happen, now that we had got the thorns and the worst of it out of his system. Was to get rid of the stuff that had taken hold already before it multiplied. That would need somewhere stable for Kerrass to brew the purging agent and then time for the stuff to come out.

Which was a process that I personally found less than pleasant. Apparently, the stuff that he brews is designed to break down the part of the poison that allows itself to latch into the flesh of the victim. I can't pretend to understand more than that. I know field medicine and injury treatment, but longer-term alchemical cures are a bit beyond me.

We got Henrik back onto the stretcher and made our way down the track. Kerrass and Piotr leading. Stefan and I dragging the now sleeping Henrik and Trayka bringing up the read.

Kerrass did say that it was ok for Henrik to sleep on the grounds that it would slow the spread of the venom in the system. That can sometimes go both ways.

In the end, we arrived in the village in the middle of the afternoon, later than we had planned but that's what happens when you drag a huge woodsman behind you.

We heard the priest before we saw him.

That wasn't just because I had my head down with the rope of Henrik's stretcher around my neck. Nor is it just a figure of speech. You cannot fail to hear him as you approach that town.

We stopped regularly during that patch of the journey. Kerrass insisted on it. The exertions of the previous day, the fight, and the emotions that stem from the sudden action can always leave a person more exhausted than their body would normally require. So we would pull and carry Henrik on the stretcher that we had improved during the early parts of the morning.

And then we would stop. Kerrass bullied Piotr in making us some restorative drinks. Piotr didn't like that, nor did he like the way that Trayka fell over herself to accommodate both Stefan and me.

It was in those quiet moments that the priest's voice would drift through the trees towards us.

"Help me." He would cry. "Help me…"

Sometimes it was a moan, sometimes a scream of anguish and pain. Sometimes he would whimper it and sometimes you could hear a rage in that voice as he used his anger to fuel that voice into a bellow.

"HELP ME." He would scream into the early morning leafy canopy.

Then the six of us would look around and realize that we were all listening to the voice. That we had frozen in place as we waited to hear what the voice would say next, how it would sound, or what emotion would be behind it.

Piotr would move first. Lifting his burden back onto his back and moving back to the trail. Somehow that would break the tension and we would all start moving.

"HEEEELLLLLP me."

Stefan and I would look at each other before moving to Henrik who would occasionally stir in his slumber to exchange words or drink the stuff we gave me before shifting his weight and returning to a kind of slumber or a daze. How Stefan kept going I will not know. My gear and share of the supplies were arranged around Henrik and on top of him. The rest divided between the others. My spear was still part of the stretcher and I carried my knives. But beyond that? Stefan insisted on carrying his sword and continued to wear his armour as some kind of… Holy burden.

"Help me," came the cry.

Stefan was a fit man, as strong a man, and as fine a warrior as I've seen. Kerrass had the edge but you could kind of tell that that was due, as much, to experience with the blade rather than anything else. The edge that Stefan had was in Strength and he would often get frustrated with Kerrass avoiding that strength.

But despite this, he was still left struggling with carrying Henrik as well. He would be red-faced when we took a rest and Kerrass had to stand over him in order for him to take refreshment and admit to the fatigue and the weakness.

Mid-morning, the priest changed his tune.

"Stay away." He cried. "Don't come here. Stay away."

We stopped again and listened to him. Ears open as we let the noise rush over us. All of us standing in a line, frozen by the anguished agony of the voice that we had heard. Kerrass sighed and ordered another rest.

"Kill me." The priest whimpered and at that moment, I would have done so in order to give my brain some peace.

I have said before that traveling is an almost meditative process. You travel along, the entire world reduced to the road under your feet or the horse under your arse. The scenery passes you by and unless you discipline yourself towards looking around and paying attention to your surroundings, that's the way it works.

At least for me.

My brain will go over old problems. Long finished conversations and arguments. Fantasies for how things could have turned out and dreams for the future. Books and essays that I could write, want to write, and will probably never write.

Let alone publish.

Traveling with someone can lead to long, pointless conversations about nothing. Going over the same conversations over and over again. But even with long-term comrades like that, you can find yourselves slipping into the gentle reverie of long-distance travel.

I longed for that dreamlike state and the priest was keeping it from me with his shouts, screams, whimpers, and moans.

Henrik was not that heavy. I mean he was, but the burden was more about carrying it properly. But after a while, it started to drag down and become more and more difficult. So I longed to escape into that dreamlike state. I wanted to picture what married life was going to be like with Ariadne. I am not ashamed to say that I was looking forward to my wedding night despite the fact that more than one married person has told me that the wedding night itself is never that great. That both partners are too tired, too full of rich food, too drunk from all the drink, and too sweaty from all the dancing so that the thought of actually making love with the person of your dreams becomes a little distasteful.

But for the dream of the road, that didn't matter. I wanted to dream of that magical moment when Ariadne would disrobe and I would stumble out of my clothes and then…

"KIIIIILLLLL MEEEEE."

It seeped into my mind. It was gradual and obsessive. Like a drunk singing in the street, a couple having sex in the room above you, or a dog barking in the night. Where just when you think it's over and that they've given up so that you can return to your studies or sleep. You just start to get back to grips with the whole thing and then it starts again.

"Help me. PLEEEEASSEEEE help me."

And this was worse. At first, I felt pity. I wanted to help him because he was clearly in so much pain and even if a person felt a fraction of pity for the poor man, you would react to that sound and want to help him. But after a while, I began to feel that pity, empathy, and compassion turning into a loathing so fierce that I could almost taste it.

I wanted to help him. I wanted to kill him or to get someone else to kill him for me. Anything so that I could have a bit of peace.

So I honestly didn't realize that we had reached the village until we were there.

All I was focused on doing was putting one foot in front of another and I just realized that I was no longer pushing my way through the undergrowth. I was at the back of the stretcher anyway which makes it seem a little more realistic.

So all that happened for me was that I realized that the undergrowth was no longer pulling at my ankles and footsteps and that the sun was falling on my face.

It was like a weight was lifted off my chest and I felt as though I could breathe easily again. Woodland, especially woodland as old and primeval as the one that we had been moving through can become an oppressive place. You can feel it weighing down on you. It becomes stuffy, dark, and hard to breathe. I make jokes about it being like traveling through a cave system or a mine and people laugh at me.

But it's true.

So feeling the sunlight on my face and the breeze ruffling my hair. I cannot tell you how pleasant it was.

It looked like quite a nice village really.

"There is a safe place to sleep, over in the stables," Piotr said. "This way."

I hadn't realized that we had put Henrik down until it became time to pick him up again. The last part of the journey is always the hardest. I gritted my teeth and forced myself on. One step in front of the other.

"What are you doing here?" The priest called. "Go back. LEAVE THIS PLACE. GO BACK TO WHERE YOU CAME FROM. GO BACK." His words became frantic and insistent. A ghost of his old priestly authority in the back of his throat.

"HE WILL COME FOR YOU," He shouted as the route that Piotr was taking us seemed to leave him behind. "THE SCHATTENMANN always comes. He will come and he will take you along with all of the rest. Leave this place."

That last was a whimper.

Piotr took us to this building. It was larger than the average stable that you would have imagined for a village of this kind but it was explained away by the fact that they might have needed somewhere to store the working horses and draft animals before the individual homesteads would be able to take away those particular tasks.

Whatever else there was, it was no longer those things. It was a sleeping quarters now. There was straw on the ground and I was surprised to find that it was clean and well maintained. Piotr led Trayka off to one end of the building and they returned, carrying blankets which we arranged to go to sleep in, laying Henrik down in one of the stalls. Kerrass asked for a flat and clear area to make his potion and he was pointed towards the tack table where a groom or stablemaster would work on harness and Kerrass moved that way before stopping with Piotr's hand on his arm.

Piotr turned to face all of us. Stefan was in the middle of taking his armour off with the obvious intention of throwing himself into his blankets and sleeping.

"Help me." The priest called.

"Now listen," Piotr said. "This is where my guiding ends but it is also the most important bit. Listen now or I will not be responsible for you disappearing.

"You will not need to see the Witcher's medallion dancing around to learn that this place is cursed. So heed this warning. By all means, wander around and explore. Pick things up, examine them. But then put them back. You might be asking why we don't pick a house and sleep in one of the beds there, many of which still have blankets on them. It is because you will not see the dawn. You will have vanished, leaving your belongings behind like the people of this place did.

"Whatever you pick up to examine, leave it behind. Take no souvenirs, down to a sprinter of wood in your clothing. We all mean to go deeper into the forest, but nothing from the village. You will find food in pots and water onto boil, but do not clean yourself from the well or eat any of the food that is cooking, despite how delicious it smells.

"Above all, do NOT, under any circumstance, pray in the church."

"These blankets have been brought from elsewhere and this is the reason that I told you to bring our own firewood, water, and food."

"HELP ME." The priest screamed. The voice sounded dull in the building.

"What about him?" Trayka wondered. "Sleeping is going to be really difficult if he's screaming all the time."

Piotr snorted.

"By all means try to help him. Pray with him. Bless him. Throw holy oils on him. Shoot him or kill him. Use your Witcher trickery if you must. But he will still be here when we leave. Better, wiser, and more powerful than we have tried to lift the curse and sometimes they have even lived to regret it. I would suggest that we take it in turns to kill him. That way, we can have a bit of peace. It takes him a couple of hours to recover and before friend monk or friend scholar" he said those words as though they were insults, "get upset. If he doesn't die instantly, he will look at you with gratitude in his eyes. He will literally thank you for the, hah, mercy."

He turned and went into his own stall without a word.

"We will be leaving the day after tomorrow at the earliest," Kerrass said. "It will take that long for the potion to be brewed, administered, and then finish moving through Henrik's system. Get some rest everyone,"

He didn't add the traditional "You will need it" afterward, but we all heard it anyway.

I ached in places that I was not used to aching. My stamina is now at the point where I can ride all day without really noticing it and I can fight for a good long while before I would start to feel out of breath. For reference that is still not as long as you might think of it in books or plays, but considerably longer than I used to. Carrying a heavy man plus extra burdens with ropes over my shoulders and around my neck takes its toll, however. I made an effort to rub some of the stiffness and pain out of my legs and arms, or at least the bits that I could reach, but it would take some time before I would be able to deal with my neck and shoulders. I wanted Ariadne to be there to be able to give my back a proper rub.

I took some of our water and soaked my feet as well after a little too long walking through the forest floor without taking my boots off

As a point to all of those would-be travellers out there, do not neglect your feet. Make sure to clean them up and air them out on a regular basis. Fungal infections and worse are nothing to be joked about. You will thank me for it.

I wrapped myself in a blanket and tried to rest. I was tired, I clearly needed the rest, my eyes wanted to droop closed and my thoughts were wandering.

But I ached and was sore. This is not an uncommon thing. I was also missing Ariadne keenly but I didn't want to disturb her in the middle of whatever it was that she might have been doing. But the last reason that I couldn't sleep, or even doze, was the priest.

"Help me." He would call. "Please help me."

Then there would be a pause while I waited to see if he was done. Everything became heightened then, the sounds of the nearby trees. Henrik's snoring and the gentle movements of the other people in the group seemed to be louder than they really were.

"Leave now, Go back. Do not be here." And the priest would start again. I concluded that I was not going to get much sleep, rose from my bed, dressed lightly, and went out into the village, taking my spear with me. Not that I was expecting trouble but… blah blah… when least expected… blah blah.

I stepped out in the open air, waving to Kerrass as I went past so that he knew where I was, and went out into the pleasant, mid-afternoon sunshine.

As I say, the village was quite nice. A little more spaced out than I would have thought. Normally villages seem to be clumped together for whatever reason, probably for mutual security and the like. But this one seemed to be spaced out.

I wondered if there was some kind of city planning going on.

Some of it made a certain amount of sense. There was a small windmill on the hill to one end of the village that did its best to poke out the top of the forest canopy. I didn't think it would be very efficient considering how pervasive the trees were but, the settlers probably assumed that they would be able to remove the trees for that reason. They were, after all, here to counter the influence of a being that lived in the trees.

There were also no pathways between the houses. Wide-open fields of green grass, rippling in the wind were all that stood between one house and the next. You could easily see the tracks that we had left earlier in the day as we had emerged from the treeline and moved towards the stables. Again, in most villages, you can see the pathways that have been carved between the houses. The alleyways and passages have seen so much footfall that they have become paths where no vegetation grows. It is in this way that roads are formed.

Here there was nothing. There was just the grassland. I wondered if this was because of the newness of the village and that there had simply not been enough time for anything to become worn in enough. Or if it was because, over the time since the village's desertion, the grass had simply reclaimed what the villages had begun to carve out.

"KILL ME," Screamed the priest. I jumped, it had been a while since he had last spoken

The wind seemed to echo in my ears but it was far from unpleasant. I even think I heard birdsong. As I looked around in the bright sunshine and pleasant warmth, I almost felt surprised when someone didn't emerge from the nearby houses in order to ask me who I was. It was a nice place, a warm place and I could easily imagine that sense of community spirit that could be used to bring everything together.

I chose the first building to the left and started walking. As I say, it was surprisingly far. And I was hit in the face with the first of the surprises of the village. There was smoke coming out of the chimney.

I looked around at the other houses and saw that this building was not alone in that. There was smoke rising, from multiple chimneys and I wondered how I hadn't noticed it before, or how I had possibly not thought of it as being particularly strange.

I suppose that fatigue had combined with a certain amount of expectation to mean that I had expected it to be there and had dismissed it without thinking through the implications. After taking that in for the moment, I turned back to my first target and restarted the walk.

The building had multiple chimneys and now that I was looking at it properly, I realized that it must have been the village Smithy or rough equivalent.

I looked back at the stables and back to the Smithy, again, taking in the distance between the two. Normally, planning would mean that the horse stables, livery workers, and farriers would be near the smithy in order to be prepared for whatever the need was. These people had obviously not seen it as that important.

"Help me." THe Priest shouted. "Kill me."

I ignored the noise. I didn't want to think about that yet.

The Smithy itself seemed to be well-appointed. I have been in and out of many such now and it seemed to my amateur eye to have everything that a village smithy might need or want. There were recognizable tools hanging on the wall, some more worn than others. Some had clearly been homemade and others had been bought from a trader for some specific but rarely occurring purpose.

The forge was lit and glowing, the smoke from one of the chimneys came from the forge. The bellows looked as though they had just been abandoned and resting on the anvil with a hammer nearby was a piece of metal, clamped in a pair of tongs.

I shivered.

I explored a bit but was left with the ridiculous feeling that I was snooping, going through someone's private things. The people involved must have been long gone or dead, but there was an immediacy here that left it feeling different to exploring ruins with Kerrass or for historical purposes. Not even close to the feeling of those homes that have been the site of some kind of horror that might result in a Witcher being called.

I found the door through to the living area of the building. It looked like a nice little home. There was a metal carving of the Great Sun symbol above the hearth that was lit. One of the cauldrons was bubbling some kind of broth and there was a large fish that was cooking in a pan directly over the flame. I could recognize some of the forest herbs that were in the pan with the fish that was sizzling in some, presumably, butter.

It smelled delicious.

Nearby there was a table with four places set and a basket of small bread loaves in the middle as well as a crock of butter. Separate jugs of milk, water, and a small wine decanter were also nearby.

One of the plates had a torn loaf in the middle where someone had set down a knife after beginning to smear some butter on the torn part of the loaf.

I backed away quietly.

The living area was equally nice and cozy. THere were six books on a shelf, one of which being the teachings of the Great Sun and the separate history of the Nilfgaardian Empire. The others had titles that I didn't recognize and guessed that they were some kind of fiction. The adventures of someone and the teachings of someone else.

There was a doll and a set of soldiers on the floor.

The sleeping areas were neatly prepared and clean. I could easily tell which one was the child's room as it was littered with old clothes and discarded toys.

I left quickly. Surprisingly so.

I am a historian. It is part of my job to go snooping around and this was the first time, ever, that I have felt uncomfortable because of it.

The next building was a house. It was large and a good chunk of it was uninhabited. I guessed that this was a family that had been split in two, or that they were hoping that soon there would be multiple generations. It struck me as a bit more optimistic than it had any right to be.

"LEAVE THIS PLACE." The priest howled in dire warning. I ignored it

There were more signs in that house that the residents had actually just put whatever it was that they were doing down and walked away. There was a spinning wheel that had just stopped as someone put the distaff down. Some milk was in the process of being churned and there was some furniture in the back yard that was in the process of being carved. But the chisel and the hammer had just been set aside, wood shavings and splinters all around it.

The next house was a shepherd's house. Smaller than the rest and the reason I could tell was due to the layout of the fencing in the back of the house. It was empty and clearly unused. Built for one of the families that were still on their way.

I was beginning to feel as though I had seen everything that I was going to see. I didn't want to be here to see all of the remains of the different families that had come here with their hopes and their dreams dashed in the face of an enemy that they had not expected and had not bargained for.

I found that I was angry and immeasurably sad. Sad for these people that had made the mistake of following a man who told them all that he knew better.

Religion is a funny thing. It can produce great good and great wonder, but it can also produce ignorance and evil on a scale like nothing else. A man, a priest with all of the awesome power and authority that position entailed had convinced himself that there was a way for his own advancement. He had convinced himself, presumably in the face of others that warned him of the dangers, and he had led those people that had come here to their doom.

This thought occurred while I was standing in the cottage of a woodcutter. There were many and various axes and saws against the walls of different shapes, sizes, and weights. Boxes of wedges, used for the splitting of the trunks and the making of the planks that would be needed accordingly. He had been chopping wood. I don't know why he was using that particular ax to chop the wood and not any number of the other axes that were propped against the wall. The chopping ax was buried in the middle of a large round and there was a stack of large logs on one side and a pile of split firewood on the other. There was a small wheelbarrow next to the pile of the cut firewood and the process was clear. There were children involved.

One child would move the bigger round in place. The ax would be wielded by the father in order to split the logs and then the younger child or children would collect the smaller pieces and move them to the pile. When there was enough, the wheelbarrow would be loaded up and the split wood would be taken and stacked against the eaves of the house. It was a nice picture and although I was probably being optimistic in my image of familial harmony, I couldn't help but picture it.

They had all put down their tools and walked off. They had even closed the gate of the yard behind them. I could imagine the father carrying the smallest child on his shoulder as they went.

I was getting angrier. I didn't want to see anymore, but there was something left that I still had to do.

I turned and moved towards the church and where I presumed that I would find the priest.

In theory, it was a nice, well-appointed church.

It was just off the middle of the village on a flat piece of land. If I didn't know the history of what had happened here, I would have said that it was quite a nice little church. It was obviously made from amongst the first logs to have been felled. They had been staked together in a lean-to kind of situation before earth and wattling had been used to pack the gaps.

Or at least I think that was what was between the gaps, it was probably some kind of variation on these things.

And yes, I know that the stories said that the church had been burnt down but, there it was, the wood looking as new and cleanly cut as ever.

There was the symbol of the great sun carved into the entrance of the church and I knew from experience of similar churches to this one, that there would be little inside but an alter at one end and a few benches against the packed earth floor.

It was undoubtedly the first building that had been built when the settlers got here. While everyone else was still living in tents and sleeping underneath wagons, some men will have been cutting logs and building this church while the priest and his immediate disciples will have stood over the place praying and otherwise being useless.

If this had happened in the North, they would have been waving censors with burning incense, torches that burned with holy oils as they waft the smoke closer and closer to the building that was being blessed. I have no idea what the rites of blessing a building in the name of the Great Sun involve.

I walked around the building first, examining the walls. And yes, I can admit that I was putting off going to the front of the building and interacting with the priest that was swinging there. I had seen that Stefan was there and was praying and although I told myself that I didn't want to intrude on the warrior monk's prayers, I was putting things off and I knew it.

As I say, the wood looked newly hewn. You could still see some areas where plants were trying to grow out of the trunks themselves. A few logs were sprouting leaves that were still green. Eventually, this building would be torn down and replaced with a more permanent structure which was why it was left a little more derelict than you would, at first suspect.

I found something round the back though. There was a patch of burnt timber that was still smoldering. I have no idea what that meant. But I watched it for a little while before moving on. I would look again before we left and although I hadn't marked the wood, I was fairly confident that the amount of burnt wood had receded a little.

There was no putting it off any further though and I walked around the front of the church where I found the hanging priest, yelling at the kneeling Stefan.

Stefan was barefoot and was wearing a simple robe that I took to be his monk's habit. It was worn over a simple shirt and pair of trousers and the only reason that it seemed a little odd and contrary to the idea of a monk was that it was belted with Stefan's sword belt and that his own great blade, only a little shorter than Kerrass', hung from his hip.

He knelt with his hands clasped in front of him as he mumbled his prayers.

"DON'T JUST KNEEl THERE," the priest screamed at Stefan, spittle spraying from his mouth. "KILL ME."

The priest was just as pitiable as I had imagined he would turn out to be. It was clear, even without getting up close and performing a proper medical examination, that he was only alive because something magical was keeping him alive. He was thin, skeletally so, and was suffering from rather extreme malnutrition and dehydration. One of Stefan's water bags was next to the kneeling monk and I could see water tracks on the hanging priest from where Stefan had wet a cloth and held it for the priest to suck some moisture from.

The priest's hair had all but fallen out. Just a few, greasy strands hung from a pale and greasy scalp that was mottled and discolored from some… disease that comes with not eating and maintaining yourself properly. His eyes and cheeks were sunken and a mottled, patchy beard covered his face although I noticed that it had not grown long.

He still wore a priest's robe and there was still a large and heavy-looking symbol of the Great Sun around his neck that seemed to weigh down on him even further. The robe was faded from what must have been its original black into a dark, greenish-grey.

The robe was ragged and you could tell the skinny, bony nature of the body underneath the robe from the shape of how it hung on the poor man. His feet were bare and looked more blue than skin color.

He hung by the wrists from some thorny vines that seemed to have grown from the logs that made up the front of the church. I don't think I need to tell you that vines like that don't grow from trees like the one that had been cut down. Trees that looked like some kind of Elm.

I got closer, ignoring the haranguing of the priest as he spat and swore at me in an effort to get me to kill him. The vines looked to be covered in small barbs and thorns, occasional large thorns seemed to sprout first. I didn't bother trying to touch them or cut at them. I knew what would happen if I did that. There was some sign that it had already been tried.

"I don't know what to do," Stefan said suddenly, rising from his kneeling position and coming to stand next to me. "THe price of my own arrogance is made manifest I think."

I snorted.

"You came here to try and lift his curse?" I guessed.

"Among other things." Stefan snorted his agreed amusement. "This would not be my first curse, just as I understand that it is not yours."

"It is not." I agreed. "But you will notice that I have not written about the curses that we did not manage to lift. Or…" I looked at Stefan carefully.

"Or those curses that the victims do not want to be lifted," Stefan said a little sadly.

"You know how this curse will be lifted?" I guessed.

"I have a number of ideas." The monk agreed. "But all of them require this man, the priest, to be at least a little bit cogent and at least a little bit able to think for himself."

The conversation stopped for a moment as the priest took that moment to hurl a long tirade of vileness at the pair of us for "not doing the decent thing and putting him out of his misery".

It left him gasping for breath in a way that was almost funny. It reminded me of a toddler's tantrum and the way that parents just kind of watch the tantrum play itself out for a while before just…. Continuing the conversation.

"The normal remedies are not going to work here." Stefan went on. I had the odd sense about Stefan that he was trying to pity the priest, but that he was finding it a struggle. Again, the way that a parent might try and sympathize with the trials and tribulations of the child while also trying not to find it funny.

The things that we do to ourselves in order to rationalize the things that we see. What was happening, what had happened, and what was going to keep on happening to that priest was horrific. There was nothing we could do, so we made light of it.

"Who is going to feel any kind of true love with that," Stefan said, gesturing at the wreck of a human being. "And if there was anyone who truly loved him, then they would have been in the group that came here with him. Prayer is not working as I think prayer is part of the problem."

I nodded, that made sense. The reason that this man had been cursed in the first place was that he had shown devotion to one religion while disrespecting what else was going on in the area.

"If I could, I would have suggested a priest of a different religion but that would risk angering both this priest and the Schattenmann himself. What do you think?"

"I am not the expert," I complained with a slight smile.

"Lord Frederick." Stefan snorted. "You are fooling nobody with this modesty act."

"No no." I joked. "I really am this modest. Ask anyone. I even have to point out my modesty to other people when they don't notice it."

Stefan laughed. The priest whimpered.

"The Schattenmann needs to release him," I said. "But I think, from the stories that you told me and that were passed on from Piotr's village, the Schattenmann is prideful. I would guess that the priest needs to apologize and show genuine contrition."

"I agree," Stefan said a little sadly. "I would even offer to take the priest's place but for the fact that, coming here, I am kind of left with the feeling that he brought it on himself."

The priest drew himself up, scrabbling with his legs against the wood that he hung against in order to try and find some purchase. He filled his lungs and screamed the order for us to kill him.

We both winced at the volume and started to move away and back towards the stables

"It is true," I said, "That most curses have been brought upon themselves by the person who is cursed. The problem often lies with the fact that the punishment, by some margin, seems to be more than the crime is worth."

"It is not a new argument." Stefan agreed. "The problem with it is that Curses are inflicted by the victims of whatever is going on and the weight of the pain caused by the thoughtless action varies from person to person. In this case, the Schattenmann was disrespected and insulted. We have no reason to believe that the priest's actions would cause any real harm to the Schattenmann as he, or it is a real monster, creature, or entity. Therefore it is an insult that he has suffered. To us, it would seem to be fairly minor. But to the Schattenmann?"

He shrugged.

"It is why Justice is blind after all," I said.

"It is supposed to be. Also," Stefan said. "There are curses that you and Witcher Kerrass have failed at?"

"There are always failures," I told him. "And I have even tried to have a couple of them published. But the truth is that people don't want to read about that kind of thing. They want to hear about the heroic Witcher making the world a little better for everyone else. They don't want to hear that sometimes, the cursed person just needs to be killed in order to put them, and the people around them out of their misery such as with the majority of Werewolves. Or that the solution to curing the curse is too dangerous to be considered or…"

I sighed.

"It is true that we have solved our fair share of nonsense," I told him. "But sometimes, a swift blade is the quickest way to end a curse."

Stefan nodded and considered. "Will your friend lend me the silver blade do you think? Steel blades do not work against the magic, but Silver?"

"You can ask him," I said. "He will not be offended although he is unlikely to lend. He is far more likely to try to perform the deed himself or to wait until after our mission is over. We want to talk to the Schattenmann remember. And offending him by ending his curse might be dangerous."

Stefan nodded glumly.

"Well, I think we should try and get some rest and I will try again tomorrow.

"You go on," I said. "I still want to have a bit more of a look around."

"Dinner at dusk?" Stefan asked.

"Same as always." I agreed, "have to use the last of the fresh ingredients today otherwise they won't be usable."

"Lovely," Stefan said. "You know, I have been on many missions with larger groups of people, but never have I truly appreciated what was going to happen when it was a small group. The food really does become quite monotonous doesn't it?"

"You get used to it," I told him, a little hurt as I thought my cooking had been going quite well.

"How long does that take?" He wondered.

"Well, I'm on year four now. You went to war?"

"We did. Me and my order. We were not at Brenna although young fools, the like of which you can probably imagine, will claim that if we had been there we would have made a difference. But the difference between eating from a commissary tent where there is literally a regiment of men and women who work to cook food for an army, and here where there are just the raw ingredients that we can carry on our backs."

"It makes a difference." I agreed.

He went into the stable.

I spent the rest of the afternoon looking around. I didn't want to go into the houses anymore because, as I say, I felt as though I was intruding on something private. I skirted around the edges of the village, looking in and trying to imagine what it would have looked like as a community, trying to approach my assessment by looking for things that I couldn't see. Things that weren't there rather than focusing on what I could see.

I looked for, and couldn't find a graveyard. Not even earthen mounds covered in grass that would suggest someone is buried without the time to place a proper stone or monument. No fallen wooden sticks or anything. That alone was unusual. People die, accidents happen. But these people had come here and erected several buildings without losing anyone. That said something. I have no idea what it said, but it definitely said something.

I couldn't find a definite gathering area. Societies need somewhere to gather. Even if it is just a house with a few planks nailed across a pair of boxes, there would always be a place where people could gather and have a drink. There wasn't one here. Nor could I find a building that looked as though it was imminently going to be converted into one. I suppose that could have been in the second wagon train that had not yet arrived but that suggested that these first people will have led some rather boring lives.

Not to mention that there was no town square that could be identified. No central gathering tree or maypole or any of those things. I guessed that this being a religious village, that such matters would just come together from the church and the mouths of the priest that was in attendance.

The only attraction that I could see to living in this place was that it was genuinely quite peaceful. Now that we had broken out of that treeline and come into the clearing, I felt as though I could breathe. I could see the birds overhead and hear them singing in the trees, contrary to the woodland that we had walked through. The wind blew gently in the tree branches and there was a real sense of peace here.

I found a spot on the edge of the cleared area and sat, trying to imagine the children playing in the fields of grass that were almost certainly going to be turned into farmer's fenced fields. I imagined dogs barking and cats cleaning themselves.

The rest of the village was much like the things that I have already talked about. There were a couple of store-buildings. A timber yard and a full industry that was constructing thatch for roof-tops. There were doors and roof beams being constructed as well as more than one building that had been built and were standing empty waiting for the newcomers to just move their stuff in.

I found Piotr standing on the edge of town at one point. He was standing, facing the Eastern bank of trees, the one that… presumably, we would all be entering soon. He seemed to be gently vibrating with some kind of… emotion. His jaw was clenched and he was gritting his teeth as he stood there.

I went back to see the priest.

He hadn't moved and I spent some time trying to talk to him. His refrain hadn't changed. He still screamed for me to kill him. Demanded help from me in a way that suggested he was trying to use some kind of imagined authority in order to browbeat me into complying. When that didn't work, he tried to get me to just… go away. To leave and flee and to run away and bring help.

I was trying to talk to him, to see if there was anything going on there that I could engage with and work with. I was pretty sure that I agreed with Stefan as to what the solution to this curse was. This man was tied to this realm by bitterness and anger from him and a sense of anger and justice from the Schattenmann. Essentially, the Priest needed to apologize to the Schattenmann. Forgive the Schattenmann for his supposed crimes and then be properly prostrate before the Schattenmann's wrath.

I couldn't see that happening. If the priest was in his right mind, he sounded like the kind of priest that would insist that he was in the right and that his hold calling granted him the right to blah blah blah. So he would demand that the Schattenmann be seen to be in the wrong and that the rest of us needed to back off and back down.

So the other option was to get the Schattenmann to forgive the priest. I couldn't see that happening either as the Schattenmann would feel that the priest was in the wrong and as such, why should he forgive a man that had insulted and attacked and blah blah blah.

I found that I was kind of on the side of the Schattenmann there. I have been dealing with priests and churchmen like this one for my entire life. The arrogant, superior, and ambitious men believed that they should be allowed to do more, be more than the next priest. That they were the chosen one and wanted to be seen as being… more than the next guy.

They all want to be the next Saint, the next Prophet, or the next Hierophant and labor under the mistaken assumption that to get there, they need to be more famous, more holy, and more… virtuous than the next guy.

In this case, this priest's arrogance and wilful ignorance had led an entire village to a fate that could not possibly be comprehended.

There was nothing there anyway. He had lost his mind. I would talk to the Schattenmann about him, presuming I got to speak to the Schattenmann in a way that we all comprehended. And I would ask for this priest to be released. To do differently was unfathomable.

That took me until I could see the sun beginning to dip towards the horizon and I went back to the stable to start dinner. I took my time about it. We would not be departing the following day and there would be no rush to get things done. The sudden stop was going to have an effect on us all, as was the occasional scream and bellow from the priest.

The priest's screams had a strange effect. It started that they were jarring. They had inspired a feeling of dread and horror as we had approached, keeping us awake in the darkness, but as time had gone on, the sounds that he had made had become increasingly monotonous to the point that I was increasingly able to dismiss them from my mind. It took a certain amount of concentration on another task. I couldn't write or make notes while the priest was carrying on, but I could cook and so I took great delight in taking extra care with the evening meal.

It was Trayka who broke first. She was crouched over her father, caring for his injuries with the odd mix of exasperation and affection that seemed to describe all of her dealings with the old man. She was watching him and it must have been some crisis where he was jerking around and towards wakefulness every time that the priest screamed which was meaning that he kept making her attempts to keep her father calm more difficult.

So after one particularly loud set of begging for us to kill him, Trayka stormed from the stable in her shirtsleeves and trousers. She had a bow, a couple of arrows in her hands and was muttering "Fuck this" as she walked. Kerrass, Stefan, and I exchanged glances with each other before, as one, we all moved to the door.

We had time to see her storm up to the priest, inform him that her Father was trying to sleep and that he would, by the Sun, shut the fuck up or she would do something really unpleasant to him. When the priest begged her to kill him. She did exactly that. Two arrows thundered into the priests' chest with such force that they literally pinned the hanging priest's body to the wall of the chapel behind him.

I saw the priest look up at Trayka and smile slightly before his head lolled in what I would otherwise assume to be a classic "I've just died" pose.

Trayka turned and walked back towards the stable without looking at the three of us as she passed us. Kerrass and I looked at each other before Kerrass shrugged and went back to the brewing of his potion and I returned to my meal prep, telling Stefan to remind Piotr about the food that I was cooking.

Apparently, Piotr hadn't moved from where had been standing for most of the day since we had arrived.

We were not a unit of people. Not really. If you gave us another few weeks of traveling and either got rid of Piotr or got him to lighten up, then we might have been able to approach the kind of camaraderie that I was missing from other journeys. Up until now, all we had to bind us together was a kind of mutual disgust with Piotr's attitude…

I remember a conversation with Svein the hard-hand about people like Piotr. Svein was a soldier and he spent most of his time at sea. But he had an interesting perspective. He said that Pearls are formed when a piece of dust gathers into the oyster shell and irritates the oyster until the piece of dust or dirt is covered in stuff that hardens and forms a pearl. He said that some men act like that as well. They are the irritant in the unit that unites everyone against them so that the unit is formed around that irritant. How everyone comes together on the grounds that the one thing that they all have in common is their dislike of this one figure.

He said that the danger is as to what happens when that figure is removed. Either the unit can shatter, or they will find someone else to hate and the danger of that is that it might be you.

That night though, we gathered to eat. Henrik woke up enough to gulp some food down. He needed something solid in his belly in order to properly take in the medicine anyway and so he ate with the rest of us. He was propped up against one of the pillars in the building and seemed like something approaching his old self, even if he was occasionally drifting in and out of sleep.

We ate, Stefan collected and stacked the bowls while I passed out some of the dried fruit we had and it was then that the hanging priest returned from the dead in order to scream out a plea for aid.

He had been dead for a little over two hours give or take a few minutes.

I sighed. "I guess we're not going to get much sleep tonight," I commented.

"We can take it in turns to kill him," Piotr commented. "It can be done."

"Strange as it might sound." Stefan began. "But I am not particularly tired."

We stared at the small campfire that we had going in the middle of the room. More for light and something for us all to look at more than anything else.

I summoned my courage and turned to Trayka. "I would like to know your story." I said "I know why Stefan is here. Piotr too despite his own best efforts."

"Hey," protested Piotr.

"Kerrass is here because I am paying him and I am here because of scholarly interest."

Trayka looked at me, her eyes reflecting the last of the sunlight as it sank below the western horizon through the entrance to the stable.

"Ask my father." She said after a minute before going to turn away.

"I did," I told her. "He said that it wasn't his story to tell."

She made to get up and leave but Henrik, of all people, stopped her. "Tell them." He said. "They deserve it and they are right, it is fair to do so."

Trayka sighed and settled down. "Where do I start?" She asked no one in particular.

"Generally at the beginning." Piotr joked badly. It is an old joke. Piotr was rattled by something and I thought I could see the man he had once been in the eyes of the man sitting across from me.

I still didn't like him though.

"We are here looking for my brother," Trayka said as though that answered everything.

"Surely there is more to it than that." Kerrass prompted.

"Come on Trayka." Stefan tried for lightness. "We have all told the story and I agree with Friend Coulthard. It is going to be a long night otherwise.

Trayka groaned and gestured for the bottle that Kerrass was drinking from.

"I don't think it's all the same thing." She argued but I could see that we had won the argument. People always want to tell their story sooner or later. It is a strange phenomenon and it has been noticed on several occasions. People want to tell their story, they need to tell their story.

"Piotr, the Witcher, and the scholar want to talk to the Schattenmann. Father wants to walk away from the Schattenmann but is here because he owes it to my brother and me. Stefan wants to destroy the Schattenmann as a 'last bastion of darkness'."

Her impression of Stefan was pretty good.

"Not true." Stefan protested. "I mean… well…"

"Come on." Trayka teased. Once again, she was reminding me of a cat. Standoffish and haughty to the rest of us up until this point with added snarling and claws. But now she was smiling and playful. And anyone that knows anything about cats will also know that this is when they are at their most dangerous. "Are you honestly telling me that if the chance presents itself, you aren't going to take a swing at the beast in order to save all these souls?"

"It is a matter of last resort." Stefan sighed. "It needs to be made to see reason. It cannot hold sway over all these lands in the face of…"

"I cannot help but think." Kerrass broke in. "That humanity has been saying that about Elven lands since humanity arrived on the continent."

"Also the dryads of Brokilon," Trayka said.

Stefan looked as though he had been struck by an unpleasant thought. "This is not the same…"

"Isn't it?" I wondered with a smile in an effort to blunt the barb I was sending his way. "Speaking as a historian, history rarely agrees on everything. But it is true that there is one thing that is always true, Humanity always wants more and they hide that desire behind religion and requests for the people that we are taking those things from to 'see reason."

"That's not…" Stefan frowned.

"You are a clever man Stefan," Kerrass said. "Who sent you on the mission? If it was your Abbott, then who was visiting with the abbot beforehand, and would they possibly have logging interests in the local area? Interests that would have been helped along with a donation to the abbey's coffers?"

Stefan opened and closed his mouth a few times before frowning.

"However." Kerrass turned to Trayka with a smile. "I notice that you still have not told us your story Trayka. It was an artful dodge but it was not unnoticed."

Trayka nodded unhappily.

"My brother is…" She looked over at her father who nodded unhappily. "My brother is the best of us."

(Freddie: The following is a version of Trayka's story. It is not accurate to exactly what was said that night and it is true to say that it is more condensed than what was said. The reasons for that are severalfold. Most commonly is because we were not that good an audience for her. We would interject, make jokes and tease each other. I know that this frustrated Kerrass but I actually quite liked it, it left me feeling as though we were bonding as a group a little bit.

Another reason that we made jokes and teased is that Trayka was nervous. Although I do think that she wanted to tell us all her story, she was not comfortable with the public speaking that was happening as part of that. So the teasing and the jokes helped her along and diffused the tensions. So this is as close to what she said in a linear way as I can manage. There were also factors of dialect and slang that have been replaced with words that we might use. Not ideal from a historical standpoint but it's the best I could do.)

My brother is the best of us.

I am an ugly, anti-social bitch that people only ever want for my skills or because I happen to enjoy fucking. My Father is an equally ugly drunk that rarely, if ever, gives a shit about anyone other than himself.

But my brother?

Everything that he ever had that I didn't, he deserves the lot. Where I am… average height, he was tall and broad-shouldered. Where I am… charitably, described as "comely" he was beautiful on the eye. Where I am in this shape because my work requires lots of physical exercise, he would put on muscle mass easily. Where I pick fights and avoid the company of people, he… I'm sure you get the idea.

In all ways other than the courage of his convictions and the love that he showed for his family… Where I was my Father's daughter, he is our Mother's son.

I should explain that.

My mother was a beautiful woman. I don't know who she was before or where she came from… Lots of theories have been suggested about her including that she was some Lord's bastard daughter. Some product of magic or had some kind of Elven blood in her veins… I don't know. I don't remember her parents and there weren't any that tried to help Father after she was gone, so they were either already dead or had left the village where I was born.

Father will tell you that the people of our village tend towards the darker skin, darker hair, and light, blue-green eyes. We tend to be shortish and round of figure. If I stopped training with my bow and running around the woods and chasing men through the night, I would soon blow up to the proportions of a melon. But my mother was tall. She was straight-backed with long blond hair.

Her eyes were blue and were said to be able to stare into a man's soul. I can see where the assumptions regarding her potentially noble blood might come from in that she was described as having high cheekbones, a narrow nose, and a certain attitude where she seemed to glide through the village.

To my continuing astonishment, my loathing of my mother is a rare thing. The people of my village loved her and insist on telling me stories about how wonderful she was. Someone like that in a working village could expect to marry the most handsome man in the village and never have to work. But she got her hands as mucky as everyone else according to those people that knew her. She would wield a shovel to help dig an outhouse pit. She would help deliver children, make dinners, peel vegetables and do all the work that a woman of the village was expected to do.

(Freddie: Trayka spat off to one side when she said that. It looked like an automatic response and reaction. Like my making the sign of the flame to ward off evil. Even though I know that such a thing doesn't actually work.)

According to those anecdotes, everyone loved her and there were suitors beating down her door to get at her, but she would always laugh and turn them down and if there was any resentment towards her, it was that she seemed to be a little bit dismissive towards those men that professed their love and affection for her.

Father was older than her. He had already been married once and she had died in childbirth of their firstborn. A girl who didn't survive the winter. Father is and was a woodsman and after his wife's death, he turned to drink. His friend is, or was, the brewer of the village and Father never found it difficult to get his hands on some ale or something stronger.

According to village legend, Father vomited at mother's feet, but instead of the usual pity or disgust that people would normally display in the face of Father's drunkenness, she helped him home, helped him clean up, and essentially put him to bed.

Apparently, he sobered up that day. Began to recover his standing in the village and reclaimed his standing as the pillar of the community. Everyone was astonished when he proposed marriage to our mother and even more astonished when she said yes.

I have heard the story many times. He went to her with a bunch of flowers in his hands, his beard was closely shaven, he was freshly bathed and carefully groomed. His clothes were clean and unstained. He got down on one knee and offered her the flowers. He has never told me what he said to her but according to people that saw it, she listened, considered for a moment before nodding.

She was not as overjoyed as you might expect a woman to be after being asked to marry the love of her life. She laughed when he picked her up and spun her around and she embraced him readily, accepted his kisses without complaint and there was never any challenge to suggest that my brother and I are anything other than our Father's children. Not even the rumour of infidelity. Which is rare enough to be almost astonishing.

Within a year of their marriage which was, as far as anyone has ever told me, a happy one, I was born. My mother will have been maybe nineteen or twenty. Five years after this, my little brother was born and I hated him on sight.

It's true, I did. I really did. He was loud and perfect and… everyone was paying attention to him and I didn't… I didn't understand it.

Two years later a nobleman came through our village. He was tall, handsome, and had a group of friends with him. He was hunting something and stopped to water their horses and have something to eat before they rode on. As I say, I only have this information from the other villagers. The village was concerned. A roving band of noblemen does not often bode well for the continued survival of the village or the virtue of the women. But these men were courteous.

They paid for some food, made no demands or anything. They were just passing through.

And then mother went to get water from the well.

According to the people that were there, the lead noble looked at her, said something, and simply held out his hand in order to help her onto his horse. She took it and their party rode off into the rest of the day.

I never found out what happened to her.

Do I care? I used to. I used to make up stories to say that she was kidnapped or she had been taken and that this noble was her long-lost brother or something. That she had forgotten who she was or what was going on until she saw someone that she recognized. I have no idea.

The truth is probably something much more boring. I remember ours being a mostly happy home but we were never rich. The village was well built and Father's skills were only rarely needed and we made more money when my Father would hunt. I think that she married Father because he wasn't as brutal in his courtship of her. I think she saw lust in the eyes of the younger men of the village and saw affection and respect in Father's eyes. But I don't think she loved him. Not really. I think there was affection there, but not love. And I think a young, handsome man with the offer of a better life. A woman who saw her youth and her beauty beginning to drift away… I don't know.

I used to hate her. I still do sometimes. But other times, when I particularly hate myself, I wonder what I would do in her situation. The offer of a better life with a nobleman. The opportunity to eat better food, sleep in soft beds and wear better clothes. Even if it did mean having to have sex with someone that I might not necessarily like. What would I do? What WILL I do when my eyesight starts to fail and my hands start to shake?

I have decided that I will no longer care. I'm not sure I would recognize her if I saw her anyway. I certainly have no idea where she is.

(Freddie's note: Kerrass and I have suggested the theory that given the rough, geographical location in the world. It is more than likely that Trayka's mother was either a former citizen of Sleeping Beauty's realm where the appearance and character of the people that lived there was still dictated by the romantic dreams of a sleeping princess. Or that the illegitimate child theory was an accurate one. And that she was a daughter or granddaughter of one of Sleeping Beauty's children from when she was still asleep. That would certainly match up with the physical description of the lady in question. There is little desire to look however and I am left with the feeling that this is one stone that is better off not being turned over.)

After she left, our lives kind of fell apart. Father despaired as, for all intents and purposes, he really did love his wife, my mother, and now she had left him. So he turned back to the bottle, leaving me and my brother to all but fend for ourselves.

I was seven. He was two and he had little memory of our mother when he was taken from us.

It was clear that Father wasn't able to properly take care of us. There were no Aunts and Uncles on my mother's side that we knew of to do any taking care of things and My Father was the youngest of three, all of which had moved away. The village mucked in and did their best, but it soon became clear that they just expected Father to get over things and pick up the slack. He was the one that was guilty of neglect and that was that.

I remember it distinctly. I had stolen a loaf of bread from a neighbour for my brother to eat on the grounds that he wept less when there was food to eat. The neighbour had complained and had expected Father to give me a thrashing. But Father had simply wept in the face of his neighbour's complaint and opened another flask of moonshine, prompting the neighbour to leave in disgust.

I remember looking down at my Father, vomit staining his shirt as he lay before the hearth, tears running down his face. Then I looked at my brother who was sucking on the remaining heel of the bread. I remember being angry because my brother, all of two years old, had not left me any of the bread to eat.

Yes, it's funny now, but I remember being so angry with him.

Then the logic of the fact that he was only two and I was seven hit me in the face and I turned to look at my Father and my hate passed over to him. People often criticise me and tell me that I can't possibly know what it's like or how my Father was feeling as I have never really been in love and as such, I cannot know what it is like to know what it was like to have my heartbroken.

Those people are correct. I have never been in love, or at least, I don't think so. But I do know that I would not have succumbed to the amount of self-loathing and… whatever it was that was happening to my Father.

I remember it distinctly. I looked down at my brother, picked him up and put him to bed. I found where the milk was stored and took him some. I remember it so clearly. I was seven and I was looking down at my little brother and I remember saying to myself. "You and me brother. You and me from now until the end of the world".

After that, I sat down and thought about what I would need to do.

I became the Father and the Mother of the house. I got the locals to teach me how to fish and how to catch small animals. I was not yet strong enough to pull the bow but I practised with my slingshot until I could bring down birds for pies.

I have always felt drawn to woodland and the like and I knew which berries to eat and which ones to leave alone. I ignored Father. As far as I was concerned, he had given up on us so I had given up on him. Some people claim that this is harsh but again, I was seven and I didn't know the answer to that.

When I became better at tracking and hunting small game I taught myself how to skin the rabbits and the squirrels that I was catching and I was able to trade them for the other things that we need. Looking back, I was given a lot of condescending little bits of advice and pats on the head. I am kind of angry now, but on the other hand, it kept my brother and me in milk, cheese, bread and medicine. I taught myself how to make clothing out of the skins I was taking and I clothed my little brother and me.

Father continued to drink and after a while, it became impossible to just ignore him. I went before the village council… I must have been about Eleven, and I asked for a house for my brother and me to share on the grounds that I had enough to do looking after my brother without having to look after a drunken Father.

They laughed and again, I remember being really angry about that despite the fact that they let us have a small cottage near the woodland that was probably once a shepherd's hut.

And that was how we grew up. When I was a little older and my brother started to properly grow, he needed more hearty meals than the rabbits and things that I was feeding him, so I saved up and bought my first bow. I was now able to add Foxes, boar and eventually deer to our diet. Becoming a better archer, I was paid to watch the village flocks and I was astonished when, the first time, I shot a wolf I was paid six silver pennies for the head of the wolf as well as having the rights to the wolf's fur coat and the meat.

I remember finding the meat a bit chewy but the pelt made a warm blanket for my brother that winter.

When I was around fifteen, Father came back into our lives. He was clean and sober and invited us back to live with him. I had heard tales that he had been a drunk for a year or two after my brother and I had left, but then, I understand his sister had visited with a tribe of grandchildren, and he had started to sober up and sort himself out. He had left town for a while before returning and getting back to work.

I had been aware of him in passing but I never talked to him. Then one day he decided that he wanted us back. He came and talked to us. He apologised properly and promised that he would never again become the man that we had known. The truth was that the shack that we had was old, and containing two young people, it was beginning to become a little crowded. So I extracted an oath from Father to say that he would never get drunk again and where possible, he would avoid drinking altogether.

(Freddie: In that kind of place and at that time, it is all but impossible to go without alcohol. Beer often carries less disease than water after all.)

He was as good as his word but now there was a new problem. I had been both the man and the woman of my own household and I saw no reason to obey his rules. I was no longer a virgin and I had decided that I quite enjoyed having sex with whomever I pleased, something that I know Father disapproved of. He persisted in trying to get me married off, but I would get quite cunning in avoiding the matter. It was good for my brother to have a Father in his life, but the gap between Father and I was never going to be crossed easily.

Taking the money from the killing of the wolf, I soon found that there was more money in hunting wolves as well as for food and after that, it was not much of a step up from that to be hunting outlaws for the local lord. I didn't allow myself to travel too far from the village. Working for the local Lord, a Baron de Belleme, who was definitely not the man who had taken my mother with him, gave me a steady income and access to a better class of bed partner. But I wanted to make sure that my brother would get that which he was owed.

He grew up to be a good looking young man and was already setting the village girl's hearts aflutter. I don't know whether he was a virgin when he was taken, but it would not have surprised me if he wasn't. As I say, he was tall, broad-shouldered and easily able to put on muscle. He was the village young wrestling champion for two years running and everyone loved him. I didn't have that nack and I know that the village was a happier place when I was not in it. I didn't care though. I loved my brother by then and I looked forward to the day that I could stand next to him on his wedding day.

We had already made a deal that, should I ever get married, then he would be the one to give me away, not my Father and should he ever get married, then I would be the best man for him.

Great Sun but I miss him.

I was nineteen and he was fourteen, maybe fifteen, and I was arranging for him to try his hands at various trades. He had tried hunting but he didn't like that. He was soft-hearted really and didn't want to kill the animals. It was for that same reason that he didn't work out when I took him to try out being a guard. He excelled in all other areas of guarding. His physical conditioning was excellent, but he could not bring himself to strike something in anger.

Wrestling? Sure. But not striking.

He could shoot at targets but not at animals. So that wasn't going to work. He didn't want to be a tanner for obvious reasons.

(Freddie: Probably the smell as a result of all of the horrible things that need to be done in order to tan a hide. It is not a pleasant profession to be part of. Also, the thing about working with dead animals might have been a factor.)

He had spent some time working with Father, but he found the process boring and unstimulating. He enjoyed working with horses, but his desire not to hurt, let alone slaughter, animals kept him from the farming of cattle. So his final choice was between working in the stables or working with the blacksmiths. He had yet to make a choice when he was taken.

So that was my Brother. As fine a young man as ever you could meet.

It's also important that you know about our village.

The heart of the Black Forest is an oval shape. Its upper reaches peter out somewhere in the realms of Sleeping Beauty and the bottom edge… well… isn't really important. We are somewhere towards halfway down the western side of the oval and piercing inwards. My village was on the North Eastern Bounds of the Schattenman's territory snf we had a similar relationship with The Schattenmann as Piotr's village has.

(Yes there was an argument here. Piotr tried to complain, on the grounds that he didn't see it as being his village, but as the village didn't really have a name and we all thought of it as that, then that was what it was. He was unhappy with this but… hey ho. He did seem… he was arguing for the sake of it I think. I don't think he meant any of the real anger that he was showing. He was arguing because he was used to arguing. I'm not going through it as it would be pointless. The argument died down although the raised voices woke up the priest. Drawing straws, it was agreed that the next person to put the priest out of his misery was Kerrass. He took his silver sword and a box for him to stand on in order to do the deed and he came back shortly for Trayka to restart the story)

As best as I could tell, our arrangement with the Schattenmann was even more reverential than that of PIOTR'S village. We still did not worship him as any kind of God and we were more than a little bit convinced from various signs that we saw, that he was just as reverential of the great Sun as we were. After all, trees themselves require sunlight to be able to grow so we were left with the impression that the Schattenmann was just as religious as we were.

Our village was old. Very old, I have no idea how old. Father used to think that we were a logging camp originally and that was certainly how we made the majority of our income for the village.

There was something about the local type of wood that made it particularly prized for use in Ship-building. Our trees were taller, straighter and had that peculiar mixture of rigidity and flexibility that is needed for masts. The taller the masts then the more sail that could be fitted to do them, or so I'm told.

So we made offerings. We danced and we performed a certain number of rites that were built around the reverence to the Schattenmann. The biggest of the lot that I remember was that we would not hunt, we would fell no tree, nor would we even venture beyond a line in the trees.

I have no idea why and if I do manage to speak to the Schattenmann then it is one of the things that we could answer. But anything beyond that line was the Schattenman's. That was final. No questions about it. If I was hunting an animal and it went beyond that line, then that animal belonged to the Schattenmann. If it ventured back over the line then it was fair game, but otherwise?

No tree, no bush… It all had to be left as we could see it.

We marked that boundary with a line of ash. The tree logs that we felled, would be cut and stripped of branches that would then be used to feed fires of all kinds. The ash from those trees would then be used to maintain the line of ash. It stretched for several miles along the edges of the woodland. On one side was the village's territory, the other was, well, you know. We had begun to farm the trees the same way that other men might farm wheat and raise cattle. We would plant trees in careful lines in order to maximise growth potential and all kinds of little things. We would rotate this woodland, allowing trees to grow for several years until they grew to the correct height and then they would be harvested. We literally used that word. Harvested.

So on one side was carefully cultivated woodland and farmland. Our village and surrounding homesteads. On the other side was as wild a patch of woodland as you will find in any place on the continent.

The line stretched for miles in either direction. On one end it ended in a cliff that was unclimbable and the other end seemed to go on forever until you reached woodland that was not ours to worry about.

It was not an idle taboo either.

In good years, we would hire some outside loggers to help us bring in the harvest. On more than one occasion, one of these loggers would get drunk on our mead and ale before wandering into the woods, never to be seen again.

I can see the Witcher shaking his head and I am sure that he knows the same thing that I do. That when drunken men go travelling through thick woodland, bad things are bound to happen and it is only superstitious fools that might put that down to the presence of some kind of… monstrous thing that might live out there. It is much more likely that a drunk fool gets lost and falls asleep somewhere, only to die of the cold or other elements. Accidents could happen and so on. All of that is true and I will not deny it. There is even some probability that this actually happened to more than one person that we are talking about.

But there was a feeling of the place. I liked it. As I say, I have always had something of an affinity for woodland and I am never more at home than when I am moving through trees. My regular employers in the Imperial forces have even joked that when I am sent after a person, I am more likely to find them in woodland than in open fields. And it is true.

But I was never so stupid to go past that line. I would stand there for long hours, looking into the darkness of the forest. I could hear things, all the things that you would expect to be there in that kind of woodland. You could hear deer barking, Pheasants and other game birds calling. You could hear the wind in the leaves and birdsong. But it was so dark.

But the really strange, really unsettling thing about it was the fact that there were pathways in the woodland, and they were not made by any kind of animal.

How do I know this? I can see that Piotr knows, as does the Witcher. Animals and beasts move through the trees in certain ways. They are dictated by two things. They need to move from one place to the next but also to do so without harming themselves. They don't want to go through a thicket of thorns in case they get trapped. Even the more aggressive of animals, the predators won't risk injuring themselves or tiring themselves out.

Animal paths are built over time and much use. There is a feeling to an animal path and these paths did not have it.

And remember that I hunt people for a living. This means that I know the difference between a path made by an animal and a path made by something, or someone else.

Someone moved through that forest. Something made those paths. And if you stayed there long enough, you would start to have the feeling that something was looking back at you. You would almost begin to feel the eyes looking back at you from under that fallen log or behind that tree. From the depths of that thicket or from just over that little dip in the ground.

It was an unnerving feeling to stand there and watch for a long period of time. It was even more unnerving to turn your back on the things that were there. I liked that feeling. People could even say that I thrived on that feeling and that… love of being in the woodland and love of that feeling of being unnerved might be the root of why I am so good at my job.

There was a game amongst the young people of the village. You would be taken into the woods to the line of ash and you would be stood in the middle of the line and you would be turned so that you had your back to the primaeval woodland.

This would mostly take place at night.

So you would be there and then your friends would leave. The object of the exercise was to stay there for as long as you could and from that long wait was decided your quality. I found the answer to the trick easily which was to embrace the feeling of fear and discomfort. In the end, I fell asleep on the ash and someone's parents had to come and get me. The few people that passed for my friendship circle were terrified that I hadn't emerged from the trees and ran to fetch their parents who found me, lying there, sleeping the sleep of the exhausted.

I was furious with myself. I had jeopardized my brother in risking my life in the face of the Schattenmann's anger. But there was no harm to come of it.

I was never invited to play the game again and what few friends I had left me after that. The boys didn't like it that some girl had bested them at their own game and the girls hadn't liked it that I was so much better at all of these things than they were.

My village either bred pretty girls with the flowing dresses and the braided flowers in the hair, or they were all tomboys. There was nothing in between the two. Guess which one I was. You are wrong. I actually quite like the idea of flowing dresses and flowers in my long hair that I would braid with daisies. The problem is that it's impractical. Skirts get trapped on brambles. Hair too. Flowers and other splashes of colour where there shouldn't be any can give your location away.

I was fourteen when I performed that little ritual. It's supposed to take place just before a person chooses their trade or starts to accept suitors for marriage.

We're not that backwards. I wouldn't be expected to choose a suitor until I was sixteen at the least and if you wanted to get married before being Seventeen then the parents of the couple and the Elders of the village had to agree. In broad terms, this was to stop people who just wanted to have sex from getting married in order to have sex. The truth was the same as it is the world over. If two people want to have sex with each other, they will normally find a way, adults be damned.

(Freddie: She stopped for a long time after this point, staring into the fire until we thought she had stopped. The bottle of alcohol was still passing backwards and forwards. We were teasing Stefan when he refused his turn and there was a bit more male bonding going on. Trayka would take regular swallows from it, but otherwise, it went on. At this point though, she suddenly shook herself and stole the bottle out of Kerrass' hands. I think he let her take it, he certainly looked amused enough. She took the bottle and finished it. It was some feat. Several long swallows of some fairly harsh, apple-based drink. She did cough which was the only evidence that we got that she might have been human after all)

This is the point where Father and others like him get angry with me and start calling me stupid. My brother's disappearance was my fault. Don't worry, I'm not going to weep, or shed tears or anything like that. I have admitted to it and I own that. It is why I have come so far to go into the depths of that forest and bring him out.

The game changed after my "trial".

It was a game. People did it multiple times. Especially those who couldn't last there very long. People would practice in daylight. I certainly did. But I was the last one who only did it by time. After my "trial" the amount of time that a person had to stay on the line of ash was standardised. It was made so that a person had to last at least five minutes. After that, they were brave enough to be accepted. The task was made trivial. People would stay there and watch, cheering on the teenager that was standing there, shivering with fear.

His name was Terraince. He was a little older than me. Not by much but he had done his stand at the line of ash some time ago. He was everything I hate about Men. Self-righteous. Handsome, arrogant, entitled and a bully. Or at least he was to me. He liked to steal kisses from girls and grope them before claiming that it was an accident. He got away with it because the other boys weren't strong enough to stop him, let alone the girls.

He stopped doing that when the Elder Brother of one of the girls that he tried things on with heard about it. He gathered a couple of the other older boys who were a couple of years older than Terraince. They took him into the woods, away from any prying eyes and thrashed him. It worked, he never did it again and when my brother was taken, Terraince was thought of as a good young man.

What really made me cross was that he got married to one of those girls that he assaulted. A pretty dark-haired girl called Della.

But that was still several years in the future from when our story takes place.

Terraince was angry that I had stood at the line for longer than him. He loudly declared that he was going to do one better than me by taking a step over the line of ash and standing one step deeper into the forbidden woodland than anyone else.

I wasn't there, but I'm told that he was still, essentially, standing on the line of ash. The traditional place to perform the trial was at a tree stump. What he did was to take a step off the tree stump and into the woodland. So there was still ash on, and under, his feet. But now, according to the rules of the game, he was actually in the woodland itself.

He stood there for all of half a minute before running back to his cheering friends. The first one to take that dreaded step.

He was not the last.

The second lasted maybe a heartbeat longer than Terraince and the two got into a big scuffle as to which one of the two had actually been longest. The next guy lasted a minute and Terraince changed his attitude and started to try and make a big fuss over the fact that he had been FIRST SUN CURSE IT.

I am a little bit proud of the fact that the first person to take the second step over the line was a girl named Katie. She was not a friend of mine as she was a year younger than me and her parents loved each other, and her, very much. Which in turn meant that she had much more leisure time than I did.

Did you ever know someone when you were younger where the two of you had nothing in common and could barely stand the sight of each other? But your parents or their parents would spend a lot of time trying to convince the two of you that you were friends. Katie was that person for me.

I didn't hate her, nor did I like her. We just had nothing in common. We couldn't even talk about boys as she wanted the whole, romantic marriage thing, saving herself for her one true love when it came to their wedding night. I had already discovered the joys and the, more frequent, disappointments of the bed-chamber and thought that she was being silly, depriving herself like that.

I now think that I was being a little unkind there. If that's what worked for her, but I was fifteen and…

The game had changed by now. The game was no longer about how long could a person stand there, on the edge of the darkest heart of the Forest and the home of the Schattenmann? But rather, it became about how far could a person go into that darkness before they would chicken out and come back.

Then came the day of my brother's attempt. I wasn't there. Not that I think I would have done anything about it. It was a rite of passage and the rules of the game had changed. If I had been there, I would have cheered him on when he came home. And when I did hear about it, I was proud of him for what he did.

I was nineteen at this point, give or take the usual boundaries of not knowing when, specifically, I was born. I was leading a scouting party of soldiers for the local magistrate to a haven of smugglers. Six men, but more than I could have taken by myself.

It was later that I found out what was going through my brother's mind.

It was my fault, all of it. It was my fault. Do not try and tell me differently

He was my younger brother. The younger brother of the girl that had changed the way that the game was being played. He had been teased about it. He had been insulted, cajoled and belittled. All of the usual things… the bullying that is hidden behind the veneer of so-called "banter" and friendship. He was also bigger, broader and stronger than many of his cohorts. He had the "gentle giant'' problem of that he had to be really careful that he didn't hurt people with his movements. He was quick, strong and heavy back then. The Sun only knows what he looks like now.

My brother knew all of this. He was very conscious of it and he was determined to make his own mark on the juvenile history of the village.

I wasn't there and I'm not sure what I would have done if I had been.

According to witnesses, he marched up to the traditional spot where the youth of the village would stand in order to challenge the darkness. Then he stood, facing the darkness as witnessed by his friends. Then he turned to them and said.

"It is only woodland." And he marched into the trees. How far he went varies according to the person telling the story. Some say it was a good fifty paces. Some claim it was as long as two hundred paces.

I have been to the spot since then a number of times and I think it was around seventy-five. These things are traditionally done at night and for people to be able to see him in order to see where he got to and when he decided to turn around and come back… I don't think it could have been longer than that.

He marched into the woodland. Easily seven or eight times further than anyone. Turned, stretched his arms out wide and stood there with his back to the forest. Then he shouted for the Schattenmann to come and get him if he dared.

(Freddie: Our group shuddered, Trayka just continued to stare at the fire.)

It was my fault. A relatively harmless game had turned into a dangerous pastime. Who could hold onto the burning brand for the longest? Who would stick their arms into the hornet's nest? Who would face down the angry charging bull the longest?

I had been the first to take that step on the journey. I had robbed the Schattenmann of his fear. And later, when the village Elders exiled me from my home. That was the reason that they gave. My actions had endangered all the children that had come after me.

(Freddie: We all chimed in there. Even Piotr was outraged that a group of Elders would blame someone for a childhood incident when others had taken things too far. The Elders were just looking for someone to blame rather than themselves for not taking firmer steps to protect the children from a very real threat. If I was being particularly cynical, I would say that the Elders, and the local lord, was actually pleased with the increasing proof that the old superstition was becoming exactly that. It was a superstition.

Those children were the equivalents of the rat cage that is lowered down the mineshaft by the dwarves to see if there is poison gas down there. If Trayka's brother had not fallen to disaster, it might even have been true that the first logging expedition into the heart of the Black Forest would have been authorised.

We, all of us tried to convince Trayka of this but she wasn't having it. She agreed with the Elders. She also needed someone to blame and in the lack of everything else, she had chosen to blame herself.)

My brother was the most famous young man in the village. When I returned he was still living off the tale and I was proud of him. Parents were communicating with Father about arranging for marriages to take place. Girls were simpering at him, as were more than one young woman. He was a handsome young man and I cannot begrudge him that. If he hadn't lost his virginity before then he would certainly have been able to in this period. It made me sick but I was so proud of him. He had thrown the expectations of the rest of the village back in their face. He had gone further and done so longer than anyone else. Not only that, not only had he not been afraid, but he had hurled that lack of fear into the face of the Schattenmann and had laughed at it.

I was so proud.

The Scchattenmann came for my brother three days later. Why three? I have no idea. It is one of the questions that I mean to ask him when we find him. Why three and not one, not five or a dozen.

I don't know if the story that was told about the Schattenmann's vengeance on the priest of Piotr's village was the same story that Lord Frederick was told. But if it was, then I will admit that it sounds very familiar to what I have seen for myself.

It started with a storm. I have since collected many of these kinds of stories while I planned my mission to rescue my brother and the Schattenmann's wrath always starts with a storm. Huge storm clouds gather over the depths of the Black Forest. Then there are flocks of ravens and Crows that swirl and circle as though they were part of the storm clouds themselves.

Then there are wolves howling in the distance.

I won't go over it all, piece by piece. It was so similar to what happened to Piotr and his people. Except that, instead of it being like an invading army of woodland creatures… It reminded me of the Lord coming into his own. He is heralded by the Crows and their screams coming from the treetops. Then his soldiers come next, wandering this way and that way, scouting out the way to see if there is any threat to their lord and master. Then came the Bears, the personal guards of the man himself as they stride into their halls. Heavily armoured. Powerful and frightening. Just looking for an excuse to show their devotion to their king.

Or at least, that's what it reminded me of when I saw it.

And yes, Friend Scholar. I have read the works of the bard. Don't look so surprised. Of course, I can read. I have to in order to be able to read the wanted posters and to ensure that I am not being cheated out of my just rewards.

(Freddie: This last was aimed at me. The description of the coming of the King is taken from a poem of that name by a poet that is only remarkable for not being Professor Dandelion. He was a court Bard for King Radovid before Radovid had him executed for a particular verse that Radovid presumed to be insulting to his person. It is a shame because according to Professor Dandelion, the man's work showed that he did have talent and that if he had been properly nurtured by a patron rather than being so tightly confined to a theme, then he might have done great things.

I was more surprised that Trayka knew the poem on the grounds that it is very much a Northern piece although I suppose that there is something that is said for its longevity. Apparently, the Emperor read a copy upon arrival in Vizima and quite liked it. He took to calling his Bodyguards Bears, his guards wolves and his Heralds as Crows, which seemed a bit on the nose for my tastes. He soon tired of the game as it was supplanted by other concerns)

I was staying with a shepherd that night. In theory, I was helping him protect the flocks but the flocks needed very little watching. He was lonely out on the watch and his younger wife was at home with the children and was less interested in matters of pleasurable company since giving birth a couple of times. We had an arrangement that if I was in town and wanted some company then he would be willing.

Father was at home and my brother was staying with the Smith and his family. It was all but certain that my brother was going to be a Smith and he was just having a taste of what Apprentice life was going to be like.

Then the crows came.

I hid with my Shepherd lover. The sheep fled and I cannot say that I blame them. The wind was high and the rain was heavy meaning there would have been nothing my shooting could have done as the wolves came out of the wild woodland. So the Shepherd shouted and screamed and the flock fled.

I don't want to go through it too much. It was one of those nights where I go over it and over it. I have, accidentally, let horrible criminals escape my gaze because of mistakes made and I have killed otherwise good men for money. But this is the night where I should have gone further and done more to save my brother.

We watched as the storm broke high above us, wind tearing at the houses of the village pulling thatch and tile free. We heard the rain hammering down on the ground so hard that it could bounce. So much of it that we could barely see the edge of the village from where we hid, clutching each other in terror.

Lightning ripped across the sky and the sound of the thunder struck us like hammers. I remember trying to scream against the noise of it, trying to drive the noise away with the power of my own voice.

Over all of this was the sounds of the Crows bellowing and the wolves howling. The birds circled above us and we watched as the Wolves trotted into town. They circled the village, prowling the alleyways and the paths. Jumping over fences and onto the rooftops of sheds.

I remember being astonished, even as I screamed and wept, that I saw a Wolf stalk past a chicken coop without even looking at it. Another came up to where my Shepherd and I were hiding, it sniffed us, growled, barked for a while, dancing around in front of us in a show of dominance before it growled again before leaving.

I thought I was dead then.

Then HE came. There was a bear on each side of him, striding along. Huge things they were. Huge furry masses of muscle, teeth and claw. These were not the bears of the trail which can be controlled and distracted if you know what they were doing and what to do in those circumstances. These were red-eyed slathering beasts.

And in the middle was him.

The Schattenmann.

I know you all want me to tell you what he looked like. I wish I could tell you. All I can say is that the name Schattenmann is well chosen. The man of shadows. He would be better off called "The absence of light." He towered above the eaves of the houses, eight-foot-tall, nine even. As for his form?

Have you ever looked into a cave and it seemed to just be blackness. Or have you looked into a whirlpool and seen the water swirling as it went down the hole.

It was like that. Except instead of water, it was light and the swirling, rippling effect was… You know the way the edge of your vision flickers and trembles when you're tired.

There was only one part of him that had any form which was that he wore a skull as a helm and faceplate. To my eyes, it looked like the skull of some mighty deer, much larger than any I have ever seen and the antlers on the top of the helm were huge, vast and they glinted in what light there was as though they were made of steel.

He strode through the village like the King returning to his halls after being away at war.

And even from the distance that I was, I saw that he looked over at me with the face of bone.

It was the only time I have ever soiled myself in fear.

Then he turned away and strode towards the Smith's house.

(Freddie: I thought of all the times I have seen this kind of symbology. The helm with the crown of antlers. I thought of the Cult of the first-born and Lord Cavil wearing a helm like that as he tortured Father Hacha and the day that he ordered his drug addled horde to destroy me. I shivered and tried not to think of the implication.)

I have heard many theories as to who and what the Schattenmann is, I have heard the stories about him being the first Leshen, the oldest Leshen and the most powerful Leshen. I have also heard the same thing about him being the first, oldest and most powerful Spriggan in the history of the continent.

I don't know about any of that. I have never seen a Spriggan so I can't comment. I have seen a Leshen and know enough about them to know that running away from them is the best solution to any problem that involves a Leshen and you don't have a Witcher travelling with you.

And yes, that is also the best solution even if you DO have a Witcher with you.

It didn't look like a Leshen to me. Leshen's have roots and branches and tendrils. This thing had none of those. It moved like a man.

But.

It had powers similar to that of a Leshen.

It walked up to the Smithy where my brother was staying and waved its hand across it in an almost leisurely way. Remember when I said that it had powers a lot like a Leshen. Well, a huge tentacle-like flow of roots and branches seemed to shoot out of the end of its hand like a whip that tore the front of the Smithy's shop away.

I could barely hear the screams over the echoing of the wind and the calls of the crows.

The Schattenmann waited for a moment as two wolves ran into the shop and then the Schattenmann itself followed, ducking to go beneath the eaves of the roof.

I remember howling with anger. Up until that moment, it had still not occurred to me that my brother was in that house and then I realised that that was why the Schattenmann was here. It was here to take his vengeance on my brother.

I tried to get up. I tried to charge towards the man of Shadows but the Shepherd that I was with knocked me down and held me still. I struggled, of course, I struggled but he held me back desperately.

He would claim that he loved me, something that caused him no end of grief with his wife but I never spoke to him again after that.

The Schattenmann came out of the Smithy, dragging my brother behind him by the ankle. I could see my brother struggling and fighting to get free and his struggle gave me new strength. I remember ramming my head back into the face of my captor before stamping on the shin of his leg. It didn't break, but it must have hurt because he let me go and I charged across the village to try and rescue my brother.

During the scuffle, a bear had come and laid down next to the Schattenmann. Using the root… I dunno… rope… whip… cage…. Whatever it was, the Schattenmann picked my brother and started to lash him across the back of the bear the same way that I would lash a prisoner to a cart.

It wasn't the same as lashing a prisoner across the back of the horse. That was very different. A bear is much larger than a horse after all.

I charged towards the Schattenmann. I tried to shoot first but the wind carried my arrow wide and my second arrow simply missed. So I threw my bow and arrows aside and drew my hunting knife as I charged towards my brother, bellowing in fear and anger.

The Schattenmann turned and saw me. Fucker didn't even move.

Something hit me in the side and I was sent sprawling. I rolled, not the first time that I have been taken out by a flunky that I hadn't seen before. As I fell, I rolled and lashed out with my knife in an effort to drive my assailant back. A foot of razor-sharp steel in my fist as I came to my feet and looked for my enemy.

I had never fought a wolf-pack before.

One wolf clamped its jaws around my wrist that was holding the knife. Another rolled into the back of my legs and knees while a third jumped and hit me in the chest, bowling me over so that I fell backwards.

There comes a moment in any fight where you know that you have been beaten.

I still fought though, if I was gonna be eaten alive then the least I could do would be to try and fucking give them indigestion.

But they didn't, they just held me there.

The ground shook when the Schattenmann approached though I could only see that sucking shadow and that awful skull.

It… He… came towards me and leant down to peer at me in the eye. I could hear it move. There was a… creaking noise. If it is a Leshy, then it was as though parts of him were snapping and regrowing as it moved to come down to look at me.

It seemed to look at me really closely. I could see through the eyes of the Deer skull and I looked for something in the depths of those eye sockets. Something, anything. Stars maybe, small pools of light. Reflections of deep amber from the tree. But there was only darkness and I could feel that darkness sucking at the edges of my eyes as though my own eyes were being pulled out of their sockets in order to replace his.

The wolf on my chest left me. Then the one holding my wrist and I did what I wanted. I slashed at him. I wanted to hurt him and get to him.

My blade lodged into his arm lodged deep and it felt like wood that I was cutting,

The Schattenmann's hand slammed into my throat and lifted me up. It was still looking at me as the branches seemed to wrap around my throat. It looked like… It looked like a man picking up a kitten and looking at it, the kitten scratching about as it tried to work itself free from the grip of the man, but the man ignored it as it peers at this kitten to see how it works.

Then he threw me away negligently. He didn't even care. He just tossed me aside like so much garbage, as though I was no threat to him and that I had nothing to offer.

Which was true I suppose.

He tossed me aside and I flew into a nearby house, the wind rushing out of me so that I could not land properly. I fell and my ankle broke. Even despite that two wolves lay on top of me. A third came over and fastened its teeth around my throat and growled. Just enough to let me know that ripping and tearing could be an option for the future if I made a nuisance of myself. What with the pain and the water running into my face and up my nose so that I couldn't breathe,

I passed out.

I woke up the following day.

She seemed to run out of story after that and we all sat around looking at her before we started to look at each other in the awkward silence.

Kerrass cleared his throat which seemed to act as the tension breaking movement.

"What happened then?" I asked.

Trayka shook her head as though waking up from sleep.

"Not much to say," She told us. "I woke up to find that I had been exiled. Apparently my attack on the Schattenmann, as well as the fact that it had been my "standing at the stump" that had started people taking "liberties with the Schattenmann". So I was blamed.

"My brother was not the only one that had been taken. Anyone that had actually been over the line of ash was taken that night. A dozen people all told. A dozen children. Most of the children left behind had been content to just stand at the stump and didn't feel the need to prove their courage. They were the lucky ones."

"Or the wise ones," Piotr commented.

"That's what I said." She snapped. "So Terraince was not taken. He was still on the line of ash technically. He told a story for a while that the Schattenmann had come to see him. He told a tale about how he stood his ground and stared into the eyes of the Schattenmann. I didn't believe him for a second. It reminded me too much of the Terraince that he used to be. The man that would pretend to trip, trapping me beneath him before he would pretend that it was the tripping that would push his mouth into mine.

"People argued my case, including my father. Curse him."

Kerrass clutched his medallion at that. It never pays any cause to curse someone offhandedly. Sometimes, you might actually curse them. He didn't seem too unhappy though so that seemed to finish that.

"But he and others argued that I was defending my brother and that no-one should have been angry that I had beaten everyone when it came to be my turn to stand on the stump. It was not supposed to be a race, nor was it supposed to be a contest. It was a test and I had passed it. I had not forced others to insult the Schattenmann.

"My shepherd former lover also put his thoughts in. Not that I wanted him to. I was furious with him for holding me back. Even despite arguments that he saved my life.

"Still others argued that my work for the Baron brought prestige and wealth to the village and that that should not be thrown aside so easily. That might have won the day except for the fact that I told them all to fuck off.

"It was my injury that kept me in town. I had broken my ankle and banged my head against the ground and it took me some time to heal. The local herbwoman insisted that I was not well enough to travel and that if they wanted to sentence me to death then they should just slit my throat then and there.

"Father rose to the challenge though and nursed me back to health. Damn him but he took every ounce of my disgust and anger in the face and let it wash over him. I daresay that he knew that I wasn't angry with him. But Sun damn me if I didn't want to make him feel it.

"When I was well enough I went to work for the Barony and built my name as a bounty hunter. In reality, though, I was travelling. I wanted to find out what the Schattenmann was. I looked for similar stories about him and when he had been angered and tried to take the stories to local scholars. Only to be told, most often, that the Schattenmann is a myth and a peasant superstition. I wanted to destroy him and find out where my brother is. I refuse to accept that he is dead. I refuse it.

"And then, a few weeks ago, a little over a month. I received a letter from my father asking me to meet him. Apparently, there was a Witcher looking to mount an expedition into the Black Forest. The first Witcher to try it in living memory. Word was that he wanted to speak to the Schattenmann rather than destroy it and so Father and I set out to join the party. I have questions for the Schattenmann. Why not come for us all straight away when we started to go against the tradition that he had set out. Why not come immediately. Where was my brother? Why was he taken? Why wasn't I taken? What happened to my Knife?"

She shook her head. "I have so many questions for the man of shadows. Like why does my village have a line of ash and so many other villages don't? Did the tradition of standing on the stump come from him or from others? Was it just boys playing games.

"But above all. I want my brother back."

She had got angry and upset during that little speech and she glared around the stable into all of the shadowy corners rather than looking at us.

I desperately looked for a way to calm her down and to break the tension. If she was anyone else I might have offered a drink, a hug or some kind of physical gesture, but I was moderately confident that Trayka would take my hand off. Then a joke occurred.

"So wait." I began. "You want to go all of this way, through all of this hardship and danger. In order to ask an ancient monster about your old hunting knife?"

A bark of laughter escaped her mouth and the tears flowed down her cheeks as though I had burst the dam.

Kerrass saw what I was doing and laughed himself. Stefan was next and Piotr joined in eventually.

"Hey," Trayka smiled at me, she actually smiled at me. "It was a good knife."

"It would have to be." Piotr joked. Another sign of the old Piotr showing through.

We all laughed again.

"HELP ME." The hanging priest cried out. "PLEEEEAAAASSSEEEEE. KILLLL ME."

"Oh for FUCK's SAKE," Trayka screamed as she launched herself like an arrow from where she was sitting. She stole my spear as she went and we listened as she gutted the priest with it.

The brief moment of hilarity and companionship had passed.