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

182. Chapter 182

(A/N: It seems fitting that the Spelling/Grammar checker shits the bed on one of the last chapters. It would seem that my chapters are too long for the precious little thing to be able to cope with it. So I've made do with the onboard Google docs one. Far from perfect but please forgive the odd mistake. Thanks)

I don't want to do this.

I wish I could tell you how long I have been sitting here staring at those words. That first sentence that I have written in Flame knows how long, before taking up a quill again to follow on from them.

I don't want to do this, but the other day, Ariadne told me that I was being quite neglectful and that I should do as I promised. Given that at the moment, I would do anything at all to make that woman smile, I resolved to move to my new writing desk and take out my new quills that I must have someone else sharpen for me nowadays. I gathered some sheets of parchment and some blotting sand and unstoppered a small bottle of ink and then before I could stop myself, I had dipped the quill and written that first sentence.

I don't want to do this and I am really tired.

These are not the first words I have written since you last heard from me. I regularly write letters and read reports as well as writing to the Empress regarding the progress of that small patch of her realm that I govern as well as responses to the questions from Lord Voorhis and people on both Regency councils of which I am a part. I maintain a lively correspondence with several people in the church hierarchy and powerful men and women elsewhere in the realms and I regularly read and write letters to the tutors that have been appointed for the young Count de Angraal.

But this is the first time that I have written here. At this desk. Those things are written in my office. A large room that I feel sure I have copied the layout from some other office that I have been in. In that room, I have a large desk although not as large as some would have had me make it. It is surrounded by chairs for people to sit in while we discuss various things that need to be discussed. There is a fireplace with several comfortable chairs and footstools arranged around it.

There is a large, dining-style table with chairs for other meetings. I have a drinks cabinet, and a platter of snacks for when people need them. I insist upon jugs of water and wine for the quenching of people's thirst and a candle that is always burning with a small stack of tapers next to it for people to light their tobacco pipes.

I have never enjoyed the habit myself as I find it makes a room stuffy. My intolerance for that stuffiness has only grown since everything happened and after such a person has left, then shutters must be opened and I tend to need some time to do something else. But I will not put that on other people and if some people think more clearly with smoke moving through their lungs, then so be it.

I also have a prayer stand where I kneel and deliver my confessions to Father Anchor. Now Deacon Anchor. I am unsure where that puts him in the church hierarchy, but it seems to have been a political appointment more than a recognition of virtue, so certain members of the church hierarchy don't get upset at his youth and lack of convention.

His wife finds this endlessly amusing.

But this, where I am writing to you now, is in a separate room in my still being rebuilt and renovated castle. This was supposed to be where I carried out my scholarly work. It is a place lined with shelves for scrolls and books. The desk is much larger as when it was put together, it was generally expected that I would want to spread the papers out and make a mess. There are other chairs for people who would come to discuss… whatever it was that I was working on at the time, but otherwise, it is just there for the work.

Those shelves stand empty. The desk is all but clear.

I feel cold.

But Ariadne is right. I was given a duty and I must fulfil that duty to the best of my abilities. After all, when an Empress writes to you to remind you of that element of your duty, you would do well to listen.

That is a literal thing by the way. She wrote to me. One of the obstacles to me writing about life at the moment is that everything must go through Intelligence, Ameiko and several other people before it gets to a publisher and when Intelligence read the letter from her Imperial Majesty, he was laughing from his belly and told me that I should publish it.

It was written in a flowing script, typical of one of her secretaries. Not the private secretary that all but runs her life in the same way that Ameiko runs mine, but one of the men and women who write those orders, laws and letters that she just casually tosses aside when the need strikes her. Someone notes it down in a similar shorthand to what I use and then a scribe writes it out using "The Empress' script" which is the way it has been agreed by everyone that the Empress writes. This letter had been written and then given back to the Empress to check. She had then covered the paper in little annotations and comments.

Also doodles and smiley faces including one particularly graphic little sketch where she sketched a figure that was obviously meant to be Lord Voorhis being sodomised by a troll.

To our most trusty and well-loved brother and subject.

Lord Professor Sir Frederick von Coulthard, Duke of the Pontar delta, Lord Protector of Novigrad and the faith, Count of the Northern Forest, de Angral and Coulthard, Knight of the White Cliffs and the Western Downs of Toussaint. Regent of Angraal, Hersir of the Black Boar.

(Ciri: You almost have as many titles as me. We shall have to do something about that. Might have to amalgamate a few or something)

We send you greeting.

First, allow us to express our gratitude to you for the duties that you are performing in the Northern parts of our Realm. Every day we (Ciri: meaning the royal we) receive reports of the good work you are doing securing trade routes and ensuring that people feel safe. Also, your work on the Regency councils of Temeria and Redania has been invaluable.

(Ciri: We particularly enjoy the letters demanding your immediate resignation from both councils in disgrace followed by your immediate and painful execution)

However, despite our knowledge of the immediacy of some of your duties as well as the urgency of some of the others, we cannot help but notice that some of your other duties are somewhat neglected. We cannot help but notice that we are still lacking your opinions on some of the proposed changes to the reintroduction of Witchers onto the continent.

But also your account of the rebellion is incomplete.

(Ciri: I'm sorry Freddie, I know that this is painful and difficult, but the reason why we need your account of the aftermath of what happened is still the same reason that it was back when the order was first given. We must tell people what happened and what is still happening so that we can get… so that you can get the truth out there before the lies start to calcify in people's memory. I am sorry.)

We must insist upon this matter sir.

(Ciri: If for no other reason than if you do this and finish it all off, then people will stop bothering ME about it.)

We look forward to reading your account of the matter.

From there the letter went on to other business that is not fit for public consumption.

She is right though. Not only did I promise her an account of what happened in the aftermath of my brother's rebellion as well as some analysis of it all from the historian's perspective, but I also promised all of you. And whatever else might be true, I still owe that to all of you.

So I apologise.

So here I am. Several months have passed since I last wrote to you and it will probably be some time from now that all of this will be published. So Flame only knows when you will read it. But I think it is safe to assume that it will be the height of summer, making it some three months since I last wrote to you.

The castle is still far from complete. The central core of the keep is rebuilt meaning that Ariadne and I have our quarters and the central offices of the vast bureaucracy that I now command have a headquarters. There is still a lot that needs to be built. We need further rooms for guests of high rank as it is almost certain that when the Empress comes North again she will want to spend at least one night at Coulthard Castle. There is also still a need for the chapel to be rebuilt properly from the mess that the rebellion made of it.

Not Sam's fault this time. It seems that even he, at the height of his madness, didn't desecrate that part of the keep, but some rebel knights sought refuge there and tried to hide behind church laws of sanctuary to get away with their treason. They took hostages with them and it got unpleasant.

I am having the workers concentrate on the important pieces though. We have the centre of our civic rule, even if our great hall is still lined with scaffolding and on those occasions where I must hold court, the petitioners have to yell over the sounds of chisels on stone. But after that, we need a place where we can defend.

Despite the imagery of Coulthard Castle being the centre of the rebellion, refortifying the place makes some people nervous. We need outer walls, we need siege engines, methods of provision and lines of logistics. It also needs to be a place where we can house and train troops, cavalry and infantry.

And there needs to be room for innovation.

I have seen the plans that the Dwarven and Temerian Architects have drawn up and they are deliberately leaving the room so that in the future, when new techniques and engines of war are produced, then Coulthard Castle can move with the times.

I doubt that the place will ever be finished, those men and dwarves will be tinkering with it until there is no need for fortresses like this one.

But I told them that I want at least a couple of outer walls properly rebuilt before they can move back to the keep and civic buildings. Even if walls are no longer the best at providing security in the future, there is nothing like the sight of a big thick wall to provide the feeling of safety.

They nodded sagely and went to work. My Imperial General currently in charge of building the First Northern Army has also seen the plans that they have in mind. At first, he was afraid, but then he remembered that this was his fortress. Then he smiled and started to add to the plans himself.

So that is where I write from. Like the last few efforts, this missive is being written as and when I get the chance. The Empress' opinion notwithstanding, I still have many duties to take care of and although, now that I've started, I want to get the job done as quickly as possible, there are other things that are more urgent and take precedence.

So where did I leave you?

Much to my dismay, it would seem that there are two strands to this entire thing. There is the catching up of the reader with my public life. The lives of my friends and loved ones and the state of myself personally. That is the first strand and it is more than a little bit concerning to me, speaking as a scholar and historian, that this is by far the most popular strand. People want to know how I am doing, how Ariadne is doing, and Emma and Kerrass and Laurelen and so on.

People want to know about the marriage between Lord Helfdan and Queen Cerys as well as the budding romance between Knight Commander Syanna and Knight Captain de la Tour.

I wish I could communicate with you just how painful it all is. The short answer is that things are not going well. The long answer…

Well…

Ariadne and I spent a long time weeping in each other's arms. A long time. We would get to the point that we would tire ourselves out before one of us would start again and then the other would try and give comfort before inevitably the tears would restart.

We were in the dark for a long time. Long enough that the glow from the webbing started to die out. I am pretty sure that one of the spiders was sent to check on us as I seem to recall some kind of skittering at one point but beyond that, my overwhelming memory of that time is of holding an incredibly frail… skeleton really as it shook and trembled with emotion and I was far from in a much better state.

I don't know how long it took us to start to come out of it all, but I remember the moment when Ariadne shifted. She sort of twisted around in my arms and that brought her weight down onto my wooden hand.

"Your hand is hard," she commented in surprise.

"Yes," I agreed, feeling a little stupid. "The hand couldn't be saved. Neither could my feet."

"Oh, Freddie." She tried to shift a little so that she could reassure me a little.

"We can't stay," I told her. "There are people waiting."

"Freddie, I'm not sure I can…"

"Move?"

"No… I… I did so much. I killed so many… People won't…"

I could feel her heading towards tears again and I stopped her.

"Our people, yours and mine," I tightened my grip, "Our people are desperate to see you again. There is always a queue of people around the castle who know what you did for them and what you sacrificed. The people of Angral also miss their lady. I had the courts weigh the matter and they all agree that you were not at fault. Ariadne, listen to me."

I took her head in my hands and tried to stare into her eyes.

"You do not belong down here in the dark. Neither of us does. Let me take you back up. We will help you to be strong again. I will marry you and we will love each other the way we always said we would. I love you. I need you."

There was silence for a long while.

"Apart from anything else," I tried for levity, "if we leave you down here too much longer then Maleficent will decide to dig you out herself."

She gave a little bark of laughter, not quite a human sound.

"The new Count of Angraal asks for his Aunt Spider every day," I told her, reaching for the most telling barb that I could. "Emma misses you and Laurelen wanted you to know how proud she was of just how much you fought." It took me a moment to think of something else. "And the Lodge of …"

"I am afraid Freddie," she told me in a wobbly voice.

"Of what?"

"That someone else will…"

She didn't need to finish. I knew exactly what she was afraid of. She was afraid of being enslaved again and becoming an instrument of someone else's will.

"Then come with me and help us make sure that that happens to no one else, ever again," I told her. I didn't want that to be the reason that she came back though. "Come with me because I love you and if you don't, then I shall stay here with you until…"

"Until what, until you starve to death?" I thought I could hear some of her old humour. "I could make the spiders feed you."

I tried to push that image down, along with my breakfast.

"If that's what it takes to never be parted from you," I told her, "Then bring on the goo, or whatever else it will be that they feed me with."

"You would not enjoy that," she told me. I could almost feel her preparing herself for an ordeal. "And we will do something about your hand."

"I'm game," I told her. "People keep promising that they're going to figure something out but then they never do."

She harrumphed.

"I don't have the engagement ring any more," she sobbed after a long moment. "I would have wanted to leave it for you or make some other… idiotic poetic gesture. But someone took it from me."

I chuckled.

"Then I shall have another one made. I am a powerful man now. Duke of the Pontar no less,"

"Really?" I hoped that I wasn't imagining the interest in her voice.

"Really, from Novigrad all the way to Dol Blathanna, Angral and Angraal are my vassals now, you are marrying up in the world. You should take my offer or someone else will have me married. There has, once again, been a suggestion that I am eligible enough to marry the Empress nowadays."

"You would be better off with her." She was in danger of sinking again.

"No," I told her, "no I would not. I do not love her, I love you. I have always loved you. From the moment that I saw you in that dress in the courtyard of Angraal, no… before that. From the moment that I saw the hurt in your eyes when I accused you of slaughtering that village. Or before that, when I heard the fascination and interest in your voice. You are the woman for me, no other.

"I once joked that one day, one of us would try and give back the engagement ring and the other would finally take it. Well, I am telling you now, I will not take it back. I will marry you, even if I have to drag a priest down here to do the deed."

She giggled at the image.

"And if this is to be my marriage bed then so be it," I told her, making a play of prodding the stone floor. "I could get used to it, some blankets and so on."

"Oh shush," she told me.

We lapsed into silence for a long while.

"I am very weak, weaker than I was in the tower," she whispered.

"Then I shall help you to be strong," I told her.

And I did.

It was harder work than I could have imagined. Even with the help of the spiders. In the end, I was able to hold onto the back of one of the spiders that chittered at me in tones that I hoped were meant to be comforting. Ariadne needed to be trussed up back into her cocoon with suitable cushioning before she was dragged out by the spiders working together. They helped me lift her onto the back of one of the spiders before lots of little spiders ran over her and around the body of the larger spider, lashing her in place.

She probably made the climb faster than I did.

When we got to the top, I was better able to pick her up and carry her in her cocoon which helped to be honest. I had to force myself not to think of it as being "bridal fashion," and even then, I was reminded that I was not long out of my sick bed myself. The journey that had taken me minutes before was enough that I had to stop several times for a rest.

We emerged into the sunlight and I saw that the sun was setting.

The first thing I did, the very first thing I did was to look for Kerrass.

I wanted his help to get Ariadne down the slope, help me get her cleaned up and dressed, the same as I had once done for the love of his life.

Of course, he wasn't there. The two horses were still there, tied to a bush near where the stream was, but of the Witcher, there was no sign.

I remember hearing a whistling noise.

"Freddie?" Ariadne said quietly, everything from her was a whisper at that moment, "What's wrong?"

I came back to myself with a thump.

"Nothing," I told her and realised that I meant it. "I had expected Kerrass to be here to help me."

"Ah," she said. There was a wealth of understanding and emotion in that little syllable.

I took a deep breath and settled Ariadne in my arms a little bit firmer. "This is probably going to take a couple of trips and is unlikely to be dignified."

"I understand," she breathed the words.

And it did. I worked mechanically. I left Ariadne in the cave mouth, making sure that she was in the rays of the setting sun for warmth. First I carried the pack that I had prepared down to the water. I had wanted to use that pack when I found her, but it was clear that she was in no shape for the contents, first I needed to get her clean.

When I returned, I carried the still-cocooned figure of the woman I love down to the water before gathering some bushwork and setting a fire. I was in an odd position of kind of needing help but wanting to do it all alone.

Taking a small knife and without comment from her, I set about cutting the webbing away from her.

I don't think she would be too angry with me if I told you that she looked awful. She was essentially a skeleton wrapped in skin.

The tattered remnants of the old dress that she had worn that night, all that time ago, the night that should have been our wedding night, were still hanging from her arms and shoulders. She was covered in old, dried blood, soot ash and other stains that I couldn't identify and didn't really want to.

It occurred to me then that this was not the way that I wanted to see her naked for the first time. I mean she wasn't, but it was a technicality.

The corpse in front of me examined itself.

"I look awful," she whimpered.

"You should have seen me when I got out of the castle." I tried for levity.

"I did."

I didn't have words for that.

She made some movements towards helping me get it all off her before I carried her into the stream. It was bitterly cold but one of the few benefits of the wooden legs was that I could stand in it and not feel the cold. Ariadne did not complain.

Working together we got her as clean as we could. Then I took out a blanket and dried her off before producing a long, dark green dress. I helped her into the dress and then I had to take a break as I was feeling weak and out of breath.

"I can't travel like this," she declared after a while as she again examined herself and the fact that the dress hung off her frame. "I will frighten children."

"And soldiers," I agreed, again trying to put some levity in my voice. "But fortunately for us both, I am a scholar and a thinking person so one of the other things in that bag is a large, warm, voluminous travelling cloak. It might look a bit sinister in the dark but even so."

I decided that my break was over and produced the garment in question, as well as some socks, gloves, some trews and soft riding boots.

I realised as I worked that she was trembling.

"I thought vampires didn't feel the cold." I joked.

"We don't," she told me, "we know it's there but… Oh, Freddie. I love you."

I stopped what I was doing and put my arm around her until the latest batch of sobbing was done. Including my own.

It took me an age to make camp, longer to take some supplies from Kerrass' horse and make us up a stew. But in doing that, I found the letter that he left me.

It was not long.

"Freddie," he wrote. "I cannot do this, I am sorry," and that was it.

I balled it up and threw it in the fire.

Not how I had wanted a friendship to end.

Looking back, I remember feeling sad but kind of… unsurprised. I had not meant to and it was certainly not the intention, but I realised that I had said goodbye to Kerrass a few nights ago on the journey here. That feeling of general sadness has not gone away. I am angry as well. I needed my friend and he had deserted me out of some kind of misguided…

Dammit, I am still angry.

But he is gone now and the longer his absence goes, the less likely it will be that he comes back. And I find that I care less and less.

Ariadne and I sat in silence until the food was ready. I had to feed her and when I was done, I made her promise that she would still be there in the morning, but that I needed to sleep. She had me lay down next to her and we slept in each other's arms. Again, it occurred to me that this was not the way I wanted our first night together to go.

I did not sleep well, needing to top the fire up several times to keep us warm. Every time, Ariadne would be deeply asleep and not stir.

In the morning we spoke as we waited for Carys to arrive. You couldn't ride a horse out of the little ravine we were in, you could only lead it and Ariadne was not in a state to do that. And I didn't want to leave her to fetch help.

So we sat for a long time, waiting.

Carys arrived with a dozen men and her weapons drawn, teeth bared like that cat that she often reminds me of. She saw the pair of us, visibly looked around for Kerrass and scowled. I could see the flash of anger shoot across her face.

All things being equal, I thought she did very well not to have an "I told you so moment."

Ariadne pulled the hood closer around her face.

There was a delay there as Carys and Ariande had a long conversation. As far as I knew, the two women were not that well known to each other but Carys scowled at me a little before a screen was erected, made out of some tent poles and some blankets before the two women went back into the water and Carys was able to be more thorough with her examination on a female level that I was obviously uncomfortable with.

I took the time to have a look around for signs of Kerrass. More for something to do rather than anything else. I harboured a small hope that he might have been carried off by something to explain his absence or the brevity of his note. Alas, there were no signs of struggle.

I mean, I am no tracker, but Kerrass has taught me a thing or two over the years. And before all those people start… The same people that say that I am a better fighter… or was a better fighter than I think I was, There are more skills involved in tracking someone.

And much to my surprise, tracking Kerrass was actually not that hard. He had clearly waited for a while after tying up the horses before he left through some thick gorse bushes. The tracker with me widened the gap with a long knife and it was plain to see the parts of the undergrowth where a man had forced their way through. We even found some cut branches where Kerrass himself had been forced to cut his way through.

And we found some older cuts.

The story was not hard to deduce.

When Kerrass had first come here he had come in through this gap so he knew that it was here from when he was tracking Ariadne. Then, when he had brought us here, he had intended to leave us the horses and disappear through this gap. The tracker volunteered and went through the gap where he found a narrow, difficult-to-follow goat path but he didn't go far.

My spirits sank even lower. Kerrass had planned this and had planned to leave us all at this juncture.

In the end, we left that place on the second day, Ariande was tied to a stretcher as we led the horses through the gap and then she was more able to ride in the saddle.

She was horrifically weak though. Far weaker than she had been when she had left her tower that first time. She was quiet too, spending a lot of time lost in her thoughts. We would sit together for an evening and talk in stilted phrases, not really knowing what to talk about.

It was painful going and over and over again I had to tell myself what I had been told. All I had to do was to love her and everything would be alright.

She did tell me that the reason for the weakness was that not only was she trying, and failing apparently, to return to a state of long-term vampire slumber…

They call it "torpor" apparently.

… which is a far from easy process in the first place. But she had been using so much magical power that she had damaged herself. Also, she had not been able to properly sustain herself which had led to more damage. She promised me, rather tearfully, that she would recover in time but she didn't want to talk about all the things that she had been through and I promised that I would let her talk about it when she was ready.

All I wanted to do was to put my arms around her and tell her that everything was going to be okay, but sometimes, this made her feel uncomfortable. Sometimes she would accept the embrace and sometimes she would ask me not to.

She would weep at those times and more often than not, I would join her in those tears.

She didn't eat for the first couple of days and then the following evening, she asked Carys and I to carry her away from the camp and to leave her there until she called for us. She also asked us to order the guards not to worry about what they saw in the undergrowth and that the camp was "well-guarded."

She called for us an hour later and we found the remains of a spring boar next to her. She had taken to wearing the cloak that I had brought for her tightly around herself and with the hood down over her face so that we couldn't see it. She was like that when we came back. The boar was stripped of everything, meat and offal were all gone, little to no blood around the place and all the bones were broken, brittle and hollow.

I said nothing as I helped Carys carry Ariadne back to the camp. Nor did I say anything the next night. Or the night after when the remains of a sheep were there instead of a boar. Or the night after when it was a cow calf.

The feeling of Ariadne moving away from me continued when Maleficent descended from the skies in a fury, stalking past to me bodily lift Ariadne into an embrace. The two of them sat together for a long time, talking in a language that I didn't recognise and probably couldn't reproduce with my limited human mouth.

I wept alone that night.

It was a forlorn procession and the only solace was the fact that, because we were heading back, work started to turn up again and I had something to do. I rode next to Ariadne and I tried to sit with her on an evening except when Maleficent banished me. But the truth was that I had little to do other than brood.

I thought about Kerrass and spent many fruitless hours trying to guess what was going through his mind. I alternated between anger and sadness that he didn't trust me to talk through what was happening with him. I desperately wanted to discuss the whole situation regarding Ariadne with him, so…

I sunk into a bit of a depression myself and I have no idea how long it took us to get back to the castle.

But whatever else I can say about myself, my friends or the whole situation, my people did me proud that day and I try to tell them that whenever I can.

The state of the castle itself is vastly different from what it used to be. When you saw Coulthard Castle for the first time before, you would walk to it through relatively idyllic farming and hunting countryside. The road was well maintained to help with the movement of merchants and travellers so that Father could feel smug about things.

"It's in the roads," he would tell me. "There is no glory at all in being a builder of roads, but if you learn how to have good roads then merchants and travellers will bless your name whenever they come into your lands. If you want to know the quality of the man when you enter their territory, then examine the roads."

I may say that this advice has rarely sent me the wrong way.

But as you approached Coulthard Castle, you would see people working in the fields and in their villages. I have said before that villagers are always working and the sounds of that work never stop. And that is the music that you would have heard as you approached Coulthard Castle. The repetitive nature of the hammer and the saw. The singing of the men in the fields and the sound of childish laughter as children played in the villages.

Coulthard Castle itself was built onto a large, rocky hill. It was sited well so that the siege engines of the day when it was built, could only approach one wall and that wall would only let you into the first courtyard. The other walls were protected by Catapult and well-drilled archers and arbalists. My Father ran practices and did his best to make sure that that part of the local area was impassable and as such, no siege engine could be grounded there.

The walls were protected by a large ditch all around which has a habit of smelling in the height of summer and the road goes up the hill, lined with pine trees. At the foot of that road was a large open area for the meetings of traders and the like.

The castle itself was divided into three sections, the outer courtyard was by far the largest and that was the courtyard for the horses. That was where the stables lived as well as all of the other hunting paraphernalia that Father wanted and needed. Our stables were extensive and well-equipped.

The second courtyard was the martial courtyard. There were smaller barracks in the keep and the other two courtyards for the men that guarded that particular bit, but otherwise, this was where the soldiers that kept us safe lived.

The third courtyard was for those places that the keep had needed in modern times but that hadn't been taken into account when the keep was built. There was a bathhouse here and a small hospital that Father had built to house the veterans of the war who had come back wounded. Most of them did some work around the place and the building had been all but deserted except for the most extreme cases as Father, and later Emma had found those veterans who were missing bits of themselves, something to do within the company itself.

And then there was the keep.

As well as this, Sam had added a series of trenches and temporary earthworks and palisades. There were embankments and firing steps and all kinds of things. Mostly it was a maze that was there to distract and upset attackers while also giving a lot of his arrow fodder something to do and somewhere to stand and die.

One of the problems of having a traitor doing things is that you don't like to give them credit where it is due. The science of siege work is large, complex and ever-evolving. When Coulthard Castle was first built, it all but bankrupted the person building it and as such, Father was able to buy it for a vastly reduced sum. Father renovated it and made it as modern and as military as he could. But the castle was still out of date. Over a couple of decades since then, military science has continued to evolve but castles remain stagnant. We pile things on top of them to try and keep up but sooner or later, the castle becomes a residence and administrative centre rather than anything else.

Sam knew this and his efforts towards fortifying the place and putting up earthworks. He hoped to reduce the threat from Imperial war engines, siege towers and the like. The closer range but more accurate versions of some of the catapults and things.

And whatever else can be said about Sam, and I can say a lot, his efforts did have that benefit and they worked. Some of those ideas have even been implemented in more places and on more fortresses than just mine.

At the moment, Coulthard Castle still looks like a blasted landscape. Open earthworks with men working on them. I am reassured that there will be grass and greenery where it will be safe to do so but in the end, at the moment, it looks like a hellscape.

I wanted Coulthard Castle to be a fortress again. Somewhere to protect the locals that they could be proud of.

Emma hired the best military architects from Temeria and the dwarves of Mahakam and the thing that they have built is not what I envisioned but it is terrifying to stand there and imagine.

The castle is no longer the kind of place that will dominate the skyline. There is an element of this but high towers are increasingly easy to batter down with magic and military science. So instead, the building of fortifications is about obscuring the view of the fortifications. The engineers talk about sight lines rather than ranges to target. They talk about hills and gullies as being more important than the walls and I can see the logic, even while my old-fashioned brain wants to see towers and walls with men standing on top of them.

Again, I stress that this is still a thing. Those things still exist, but there is less of an emphasis placed on them. Coulthard Castle is a place of hillocks and slopes. Earthworks that are better able to absorb catapult impacts and ballista strikes. And if you stood on the outside of it all, you would be forgiven for wondering if there was even still a castle there at all. It looks like a little fort with one, lone solitary tower.

That tower will be all that remains of the original keep. The place was battered with everything that had happened to it, combat and Sam's remodelling. The Rage of a Dragon and a Vampire is… telling at the best of times. There are plans for the extension of the keep itself as in the future, Coulthard Castle is going to be an important civic centre. An army is going to run out of this place as well as my domain. And before long I would imagine that it will also be one of the Imperial Residences the next time The Empress comes north.

It is a blasted landscape now, the same as it was then. There were no more piles of bodies by then. No massed funeral pyres that were attended by priests and priestesses of all the religions who were there to see to the souls of those who had fallen. Ranks of religious people, organised into companies and regiments, the same as any army.

Nor are there stockpiles of weapons. Or magic users roaming around the place to ensure that the power that Sam had summoned had been dissipated by the efforts of the lodge. I was reassured that some people even meant that as truth.

What there was though, were a lot of people working. Dwarves and trolls working the walls, men digging the ditches and women seeing to the more practical needs of the place. Everyone was dirty, everyone was sweaty and everyone was working hard.

And no matter how much you try and no matter how much you might pay a weather mage to blow fresh air over the place, it is impossible to completely reduce the funk that always exists around a place where there have been mass graves with lime added to the bodies to prevent the spread of disease before the oil and the fire is applied.

There are still some scents of incense that I don't think I will ever be able to smell again.

Father Anchor even went and found out what they were, the holy scents that had been taken apart to obscure the scent of the dead before advising people not to use those scents in my presence.

But that was the landscape that Ariadne rode back up to the castle in.

Maleficent had flapped off somewhere. I like Maleficent but it is occasionally worth remembering that she is still a dragon and therefore, she gets distracted by shiny objects, metaphorical and literally. She gave Ariadne into my keeping with a wink and a "good luck".

"What do I do?" I asked the dragon who was rooting through a travel pack and casually disposing of everything that she didn't need by tossing it over her shoulder.

"The same thing that you always do." She told me, not looking at me. "The same thing that you whimper to yourself when you think no one can hear you. Just love her Fred, she will come right."

"She doesn't look right,"

She didn't. I hadn't seen her face since that first day. I had expected her to start wearing an illusion of herself, the same as she had when she had first emerged from her tower. The heavy travelling cloak had become her constant companion and she would not take it off for any reason. There were only two people for whom this rule seemed to be ignored which were Carys and Maleficent. Carys had sent forward an order for a tent to be brought, similar to my pavilion. Other than the excursions for Ariadne to go off and eat, she would go into the tent and not emerge. Carys would take the supplies that we had brought with us and she would bring the dirty clothes out before taking them off somewhere to get washed.

I had never imagined Carys doing laundry but I know for certainty that she did it now.

There were constantly large quantities of water carried into that small pavilion as well. The guards and things would carry it all there in buckets before Maleficent or Carys would carry them in along with a large wooden tub.

And then, Ariadne would emerge in the morning, often supported by Maleficent where she would climb onto a horse that Carys would have to hold for her so that it didn't run off.

"She wants to wear her scars," Maleficent told me. "She needs the reminder of everything that happened. If she just heals herself or projects that everything is fine, then she feels that she is dishonouring the people that she killed and was forced to kill."

Then the hugely horned Sorceress would smile at me again.

"Don't worry Fred, you did well finding her and bringing her out. She is on the mend, you just need to be patient."

Then she leapt into the air and I could hear the beating of huge leathery wings.

Maleficent's departure caused a bit of consternation for Ariadne. It would seem that in the same way that Kerrass had left me, Maleficent had left Ariadne, she alternated between anger and a great sadness that she could not explain. It got to the point where it was now me who had to lead her horse as Carys was becoming exhausted at the effort of leading the caravan and doing all of the things that Ariadne needed to feel safe.

We came to that place where we came over a rise and we could see the bones of what Coulthard Castle was going to become.

The road travels along the south of the Coulthard Castle hill before it sweeps North, passing Coulthard Castle on the Castle's Western side before bending west again to get to Oxenfurt. We were just coming out of the trees with Coulthard Castle coming into sight that Ariadne broke.

"I can't do this," she moaned and all but fell off the horse.

I was there and caught her although there was some awkward fumbling to do so. I am faster at getting off my horse now, but there are still moments when I am awkward and I forget that I no longer have feet.

She was shaking violently.

"I can't do this Freddie, I can't face all of those people.

Sure enough, there were people among the hills and ditches who had realised that we were approaching. People were pointing and calling friends and family over.

I held her for a long moment and she clung to me in a way that was both reassuring in that I could still be her rock to lean on but also a little frightening in that she was so obviously still so terrified.

I didn't say anything. What was there to say?

In the end, though, her trembling receded and in what I would later decide was a supreme act of bravery, she gestured for me to get on my horse before she climbed up in front of me so that she could remain inside my arms. I have learned to ride with one hand so the wooden hand and my left arm would normally rest in my lap. She pulled that into her own lap and rested her head against my chest.

We rode slowly and as we did so, it was far from the triumphant homecoming that I had once envisioned. The sun wasn't shining and the sky was grey with drizzle. No trumpets were sounding and no men in bright armour to welcome us home with cheers and roars of approval. Instead, we trudged home, the mud sucking at the hooves of our horses as we walked them on. More and more of the workers in the castle were coming now and lining the roads. Some were leaning on their shovels or picks as they watched the long and slow procession as we walked up towards the inner walls, or what will eventually be the inner walls, and the keep.

We were sombre. How could we not be sombre with everything that happened I could feel Ariadne trembling in my arms, the occasional soft whimper escaping from the cloth-wrapped bundle that I was holding onto.

I could feel the lump in my throat and all the pain that was there. I was looking around and I could see all of my people and all of the things that had happened to them and it hurt me anew. Seeing it through Ariadne's eyes in the slightly damp afternoon I could see what had happened to them all. What had happened to me?

It was enough to make me weep.

The number of people who were watching increased as those men and women who had first seen us closed up behind us. I could hear weeping coming from the crowd and we continued the slow procession through the maze of mounds and embankments that will one day hold siege engines and store-rooms.

We came to the Castle walls with the outer gate, much to everyone's surprise as you wouldn't have been able to tell from the planning, but the outer gate was by far the least damaged of the three gates. And given that it was the most recently built, it was also the most modern so the new architects of the castle had decided to all but leave it where it was and not change anything about it.

A man stepped out in front of our horses and he had a little girl with him. The man was weeping openly.

"Do you remember me?" He called out into the silence.

There is an odd quality to silence in the rain. You can hear the individual raindrops falling onto your saddle or your hooded head. The echo of raindrops into puddles and the like. But all of that conspires to make the world seem peaceful. And that day, it was not a heavy rainfall, it was a drizzle. A light series of droplets that…

Oh, fuck it…

"Do you remember me?" The man called out.

Ariadne seemed to shake herself from whatever thoughts that she had been engaging with. Her hooded face turned towards the man and she tapped me on the arm to get me to stop. When I did, she slipped from the saddle and there was a noticeable squelch as she hit the muddy floor.

I really must see if there is some way to make the mud firmer on the floor in and around the castle, improve drainage or something.

\

I dismounted as quickly as I could but by the time I had arranged myself properly…

There is always a danger in sucking mud that you could lose your false leg in a quagmire of mud.

…Ariadne had approached the man and his daughter. He towered over her as she looked up into his face. I have no idea if he could see what she looked like as she has been working hard to keep the horror of her face from the eyes of other people.

Including me.

But he seemed to nod as she looked at him.

Ariadne tilted her head to one side as she examined the man.

"I do remember you." She said, "I killed your wife while you and your daughter watched. She had come out into the corridor from where you were hiding and one of the guards saw her, ordering me to hunt her down and kill her."

There was a pause as Ariadne's words came out and fell dead in the rain. Her voice was just that, dead sounding. She spoke as though she was just declaring the truth of how the world works.

The man nodded and opened his mouth to speak but Ariadne kept speaking.

"I would apologise to you," she began. "But the words seem to be so small and insignificant in comparison to what I have taken from you. But I am sorry," her voice trembled towards the end. "I am so so…"

She went to kneel before the man but he caught her.

"That is not how I remember it," he told her firmly.

Another thing that rain does, is it steals a person's tears.

"I didn't even see it like that at the time," he insisted. "I saw a weapon being used to kill my wife when she had no choice. But not just that, when the guard asked if there was anyone else in the room, if there was anyone else hiding in the room, you said no and left, closing the door behind you.

"I remember it so clearly, lady. With the blood of my wife dripping from your hands, you looked me in the eyes and at that time, your eyes were glowing with a red power and as I looked, I knew that I was dead and that my daughter was dead and I decided that I was at peace with that in that I could be with my wife. I was sad for my daughter but I knew. I covered my daughter's eyes so that she wouldn't have to see. And then I heard you tell that guard that there was no one else hiding in that room."

I had reached Ariadne's side by that point and I heard her murmured response.

"You weren't hiding, you were standing in the open."

"And because of you, my daughter will live to marry and have a future of her own."

Ariadne sobbed as the big man fell to his knees.

"Do you remember me?" A woman called and Ariadne spun and a peasant girl stepped out of the crowd.

"I killed your man," Ariadne said, her voice just this side of a wail.

"Yes you did," she said. "He tried to shield me from the attention of one of those… muscled… things. They wanted to torture him and do… things to me in front of him before he died. You killed him quickly and in their anger, they didn't see as I slipped away into the crowd. You watched me go as they beat you with sticks, I saw it."

Another man stepped forward.

"I saw you stare at a wall and let us sneak past you as you turned around slowly."

Someone else called out.

"I saw you leave a supply room open so that we could get food and blankets.

"I heard you announce yourself by screaming and because I knew you were coming, I could get my children and me to safety.

"You killed my husband cleanly.

"You ripped out my daughter's heart rather than allow her to be passed around the guards."

The awful gratitude from my people was like an assault. One by one they fell to their knees around her. And they were truly grateful. Grateful for things that no person should be grateful to another for. That sort of thing should never come up. I knew about a good chunk of them and was willing to teach her about them but my people had taken it upon themselves to tell Ariadne about how they felt about her.

They were proud of her and that pride finally broke her as she fell, openly sobbing.

Emma and Laurelen had been waiting. Emma had been at the castle to hold some trade meetings and meet with some of the suppliers who were seeing to it that the castle was still going to be built. They had received word of our approach and the pair of them had decided to wait. It was and is still hard for them although they are getting better, the more that the castle looks less and less like the Coulthard Castle of old and more and more like something new. But Emma still struggles with things that are anything other than trade conversations.

But they had heard the commotion and their guards pushed through the still-growing crowds so that the three women could have their little reunion.

There were tears then, many tears and Ariadne collapsed into Emma and Laurelen's arms. All but having to be carried the rest of the way into the keep.

The people started to cheer and shout and scream.

I have heard some cheers in my life. I have heard the sound that a crowd makes as a hero knight vanquishes the villain on the tourney fields. I have heard the cheers that crowds make when popular people of the state return home. I remember the cheering soldiers as King Radovid arrived to inspect the logistics division and I remember the roars of the Skelligans as the story of the death of the Wave-Serpent was told.

This was different, it was more… raw and it left me feeling wholly inadequate. This was a scream of catharsis. Hundreds of throats screamed and howled and cheered and gave vent to all of that emotion that they had been holding in for weeks or even months until their throats were red raw with it. It was a scream of relief, of determination. Of grief and renewed purpose. It was…

Chilling. That is the word. It was chilling as I stood there and listened to it.

People clapped me on the shoulder and congratulated me, telling me that everything was going to be alright now and that the world was heading back in the right direction.

I wish that I could believe them.

Emma and Laurelen took Ariadne in hand and now, not only do I rarely see my sister, but I rarely see the woman that I love. I know that she needs time to heal and that every time she does see me, she tells me that she still loves me and she begs me to be patient, but even as I promise her everything that I can think of, my feeling of isolation is growing deeper.

And I hate myself for feeling this way. I want to be strong, I want to be stable and able to stand upright so that when the woman that I love and that I still love, as well as my sister and all the rest, need me, then I can be there for them and that I will not falter. But for now, I feel…

lonely.

The other strand of my accounts is that of the history of the matter which, to me, is the most important of the two strands. These are the things that will make a difference in everyone's lives moving forward. These are the events and actions that have changed the lives of so many people in the Pontar regions and will continue to change those lives moving forward. It is important that these actions are documented and careful records need to be collected regarding what was happening at the time.

]

The doings of a Duke and his actions taken to stabilise a realm in the aftermath of a rebellion are far more important, historically speaking than the personal and private life of that same. And in the years to come, I do not doubt that people will skip over these bits to get to the important ones.

And the matter of my life is painful, so very painful.

So normally, I would be the one to get the unpleasant chore out of the way before I move on to the enjoyable part. When I first met her properly and the two of us shared a meal, the Empress commented that I was the kind of man that would eat the vegetables off my plate first before moving on to the meat, bread and gravy. But in this case, I think I will reverse my normal trend. As one strand has an ending in it, eventually, the Empress declared me the Duke of the Pontar. Whereas the trials of the other strand are still ongoing.

And will likely never stop.

The rebellion ended with less of a bang and more of a whimper. Astonishing, to me, a number of the rebels surrendered in the hopes of getting something out of a trial. Those prisoners would often then be marched past those parts of the castle where the fighting was still carrying on and the calls of "traitor" and less kind insults were being thrown around accordingly. I have no comment on the matter.

The Empress moved off to Novigrad to start organising the matter of those trials and the matters of execution. She conferred with the Hierarch of the Eternal Flame as well as Mother Superior Nenneke of Melitele, Lady Vigo and the Lord Commander of Kreve as to the formation of a cooperative inquisition in the matter of this rebellion. She added Knight Commander Syanna to this advisory council as an independent kind of "chairperson" and also as a woman with experience in the matters of hunting out the evidence and testimony needed for the coming legal battlefield.

In the end, of all people, Lord Palmerin was given the overall command of the matter of the gathering of testimony and evidence. What he and his fellows collected was a truly ridiculous amount of evidence that the judicial panels used to soundly thrash all of those conspirators and rebels who had thought that a trial might be the easy option.

It is this vast trove of information that I have used to form my image of what happened during the rebellion and the later stages of it.

The mass of what they collected is being put together and will be collected in a library that is being built near the site of the Battle of Oxenfurt. It will be maintained by students from the university who can monitor and keep the place as part of their pending degrees. Something that they can do for extra credit. Even then, I am expecting the place to be a hotbed of political intrigue and am wondering about the best way to defend it and keep people from going in and "editing" what is there to protect the names of friends and ancestors.

I am not sure I have the answer to that riddle yet.

But that is causing trouble for the future.

As I mentioned in an article previously, if you ask any general or politician about the hardest part of warfare, they would tell you that the aftermath is the hardest part. I refer you to my previous explanation as to why that might be the case but in the meantime, that was the situation that the Imperial-led alliance found itself in after the final fall of the Rebellion. Suddenly, General Voorhis was playing a politician more than he was being a general. He had to exercise influence and move people around. There was honour in that appointment and he was having to fight off those people that wanted to carve up the taken lands for themselves.

No sooner had the victory been declared than people started to produce the proverbial measuring string and wanted to declare where their equally proverbial furniture was going to go in the newly conquered territory.

Temeria wanted Novigrad as it was a centre of trade and commerce, as well as commanding an important harbour and containing one of the most holy sites in the North. The prestige of holding that place was not something that could be contained. They argued that the Redanians were at fault for not containing their own rebellion and as such, they had proven themselves to be unsuitable.

The Redanians wanted Novigrad back for the same reasons while the Imperials thought that they could trust neither "Temerian war-mongering" or "Redanian incompetence" to hold such a vital port and largely spent their time arguing so to the Empress' face. It only took a sense of humour like Queen Cerys of Skellige to casually wonder whether the city should be ceded to the Skelligan crown as they had done a not inconsiderable amount to re take the place, to cause complete madness.

Oxenfurt was also a place of contention. The Temerians wanted it so that they could weaken the strength of that centre of learning, an ambition that is well documented, so that the Temerian military academy can be the most pre-eminent site of learning in the North. The Redanians wanted it back, both for the prestige of having "THE CITY OF OXENFURT" in their realm as well as the centre of learning, but it would also contain an important and strategic crossing between the Temerian territory of Velen and the Redanian territory of Coulthard County.

The Temerians argued that the Redanians just wanted to raid Temerian lands while the Redanins, in turn, claimed that the Temerians wanted the same, citing Count Bernier's attempts at aggression.

Someone suggested that there could be some marriage arranged between the lady of Crow's Perch and some Redanian Lord to provide a buffer zone between the two, but then it was argued that this would also mean that the territory would default back to Redania as both Temeria and Redania recognise the superiority of the male in the marriage when it comes to dynastic affairs.

Again, this is neither the time nor the place to re-litigate that old debate.

That did not go well for anyone either.

That does not include those people who were carving up Coulthard County, the formerly Kalayn lands, Angraal and all of the other places that I now have some measure of control over. All before the Empress had even begun to make any kinds of decisions regarding these matters.

When Lord Voorhis made this opinion felt, that the Empress would make those decisions in consultation with Queen Regent Adda and Queen Anais, he was told things like "Well that's all well and good but the women will listen to the proper advice as it is given and if we have already made the decisions then…"

Lord Voorhis was generally of the opinion that such men had not met the Empress, Or Queen Anais or Queen Regent Adda for that matter and then he would try to move on the important things like being able to feed the assembled troops given that they were, by now, rapidly heading into Winter and the general mobilising of all of the armies meant that the harvest would be poor. The logistical problems were huge and that was what he wanted to deal with.

Things might have settled down for all of that but for the actions of one Lord Spatnuk of Kaedwen.

Lord Spatnuk was a Lord of Southern Kaedwen and his realm was relatively small. There had been the Kaedwenian factions that believed that the so-called "Pontar Valley '' belonged to him. Therefore his realm was quite small as he was supposed to be the Lord of the Valley. He was an angry man… I never met him, I can only speak from what I have been told. But he was angry because he considered himself Lord of the Pontar valley which included Dol Blathanna and the fortress city of Vergen.

But at the same time, Imperial Rule meant that Dol Blathanna belonged to the Elves and that the Pontar Valley, being the richest and most fertile land in the region, was needed to produce crops and therefore was under Imperial jurisdiction. This had been the Empress' long-term solution to the localised famine. Any attack on the Pontar Valley was seen to be deliberately trying to starve out the locals and was therefore treason.

So Lord Spatnuk felt as though a lot of his power had been taken away from him. He was looking at his rents and his revenues and year on year they were falling and his long-term forecasts were such that if he didn't do anything about it, he would not be able to maintain himself in those lifestyles that allowed him to think of himself as a powerful Lord.

He had heard about the problems in the West and had seen an opportunity that he could try and take advantage of. There were several things that he did that could be argued as being fairly wise. His standing army was one of the things that he would have to cut out if the current trend persisted so giving them something to do was a factor, as well as cutting their numbers without having to find them something else to do.

The bulk of his army was kept in reserve to try and take the Pontar Valley when the inevitable, in his mind, Imperial sanctions were lifted. But patience was not one of his virtues and so he decided to go the other way. He intended to advance down the Pontar to take Flotsam and use Flotsam as a bottleneck to prevent a counter-invasion. In the meantime, he knew that the Lord and Lady of Angraal were dead and that the young Lord of Angral was not secure in his seat. He intended to take Angraal on the pretext of "Providing protection for so young a man in the modern tumultuous climate".

Although we don't know, we have little doubt that at some point, the children of the Duke and Duchess would have found themselves either "sick" or otherwise married off to cronies of Lord Spatnuk.

Whatever else can be said of Lord Spatnuk, and I can write a lot, his plan made a lot of sense and worked well. He was able to all but sneak past Angraal by the river route and take Flotsam with little to no fuss. The Redanian Rebel garrison of Flotsam had already fled the Imperial wrath and as such, there was little to no resistance from the people of Flotsam. The Imperials had left little more than a few dozen men and they lost all but those commanded to carry word back to Imperial lines. Lord Spatnuk moved in, installed a crony to run the place and exterminate the Elven population, because of course they did, and then the main body of Spatnuk's forces moved into Angraal.

That was a nasty winter campaign. Winter in Angraal is a cold thing. There is a lot of snow that can drift against the buildings of the place and as such, the greater share of the casualties were against the cold. The old Captain of Angraal led a dogged defence and his main strategy consisted of drawing Spatnunk's forces out until they could not properly reach shelter and then just letting the winter do its work.

I do not doubt that Spatnuk believed it was all going very well despite the casualty rate as he was able to take and hold a lot of territory. But a lot of that territory was empty for the winter in the first place. The campaign was also brutal as Spatnuk's soldiers were properly provisioned with food and water, but what they didn't have was the shelter that was needed to survive.

So they would break into houses and turf the citizenry out into the cold where they would freeze to death.

As I say, it was a brutal campaign.

The Imperial contingent first knew that something was wrong when they received word that Flotsam had fallen and their response was total. Imperial troops had been attacked and that demanded a response. I mean yes, it was little more than half a company that had been given to garrison the small border town, and yes, they had fled when they had seen the enemy troops coming down the hill. But at the same time, such a thing cannot be stood for.

The Imperial army left Coulthard castle and moved towards the attack. Winter was properly setting in now and many of the mages went with them to keep the troops warm and the roads clear. A token garrison was left at Coulthard Castle to keep order and protect the various townsfolk that were around the place and starting to rebuild it.

Emma and Laurelen had already been interviewed by Imperial Intelligence and their stories had been confirmed by the evidence of some of Emma's letters being recovered and the code that she wrote in being translated. Emma started the business of recovering the family business and setting things up so that we would still have a business and that the coming famine, that was all but certain, could be mitigated.

They moved into the residence in Novigrad city while I was moved into Temple Isle because it would be easier for me to both recover and to be guarded against those elements that might seek my death while blaming me for everything that had gone wrong since the beginning of the rebellion, regardless of whether you were an Imperial loyalist or a closeted rebel.

Apart from anything else, I was the last surviving male heir to the Coulthard fortune as well as a not small amount of territory around the continent. But my absence as well as my questionable legal status meant that the avenue was open.

Regarding my legal status, just quickly. There was little doubt as to my innocence in the matter of the rebellion. A person only had to look at me to see all of the things that I had been through. Despite the attention of the best healers on the continent, I was a wreck of a human being and my survival was still, at that time, far from certain. The decision was made to delay my trial until they had all of the information and therefore could prove my innocence definitively.

But my absence left the avenue open.

A Temerian Lord, a commander of Knights by the name of Baron Belleme was in the area of Coulthard Castle with a, not small, number of troops. He had been involved in the fighting and was now part of the general effort to police the many dispersed monsters that were still running and trying to escape as well as the bandits and other problems that always accompany the cessation of military activities.

It is also true that he was one of those men who was smarting at what happened to Count Bernier.

He realised that he had the strongest military force in the local area and decided that this meant that Coulthard Castle now belonged to him. Along with all of the lands and titles. He intended to argue that possession is nine-tenths of the law

Baron Belleme moved quickly. He secured the site of the castle, driving off the remaining Redanian troops and containing the Imperial ones with pretty words and flowery statements. They were prisoners and hostages, they knew it, the Temerians knew it, but there was enough legal cover that Baron Belleme could argue in court that he was just seeking to protect Coulthard County from any remaining threats that might still be in the area. He secured routes of supply to Oxenfurt and to river crossings which he could now contend with.

There was even a piece of analysis of his brief campaign that was written to contrast the two efforts to secure the castle and the lands around it.

"It was as though Baron Belleme wanted to show the rebels how it was done."

That might be unfair to both sides but it remains true. Baron Belleme was a canny man and a canny commander of mobile troops. The Redanians were outraged and quickly responded to the matter, mounting a counterforce. The Imperials were out fighting their way past the Flotsam blockade and so the Redanians mounted an offensive to, in their words "retake Castle Coulthard for a loyal Redania".

It was a mess. Arguably the cleanest part of it all was on the battlefield. Baron Belleme was a cavalry commander and he was good enough at that to know that he needed Logistical support, lines of advancement and retreat and so on. But he was a cavalryman enough to look down on the proper use of infantry. The Redanians were infantrymen through and through and had the scorn of the cavalry.

The two forces met three times in what is collectively known as "The Second Battle of Coulthard Castle." This is a bit unfair as the "battle" took place on three separate occasions for a week while General Voorhis could send Imperial detachments back to retake the castle in the "Third battle of Coulthard Castle". But that's jumping ahead.

The commander of the Redanian forces never saw the battlefield. He was a bit more canny than his counterpart and knew that this was a battle that would be won in the courtroom. His name was Count de Buchon. I have met the man and he is one of those lords that now owes me fealty. He swears to me that his concerns were based purely on what he saw as an invasion by a hostile foreign force. His forces had fought to defend people from the rebellion and the cultists and his men were part of the retaking of the castle.

I also think that as well as that, he was watching to see which way the wind was blowing politically before he committed himself. He is an older man, admits that he hated my Father and had been given no reason at all to love my sister given her flagrant disdain of societal norms.

But I also don't think that he was averse to the idea that he would be given Coulthard Castle and lands to administer in the aftermath.

He assigned command to the military end of his campaign to his second son while he rode to court to make his case.

The political matters are a matter of public record. The Temerians invaded. They argued that the land was not currently being governed. That the previous ruler of the conquered land had been an aggressor against the Temerian state and as such, their actions were entirely legal. He argued that Temeria was a sovereign state, separate from the Empire although allied with that same and he also argued that the common folk of Coulthard lands deserved strong protection. He petitioned Queen Anais to support him and argued that access to the major trade routes between Novigrad and the Eastern parts of the continent would bring in considerable tax revenue and as such, it would benefit the nation as a whole.

"It is a humanitarian issue really," his representatives argued.

On the other end, Count de Buchon was in the Redanin court demanding to know what was going to be done about it. The hated Temerians had invaded Redanian soil. And although some members of the Coulthard family were still alive, the legality of their existence was still in question and as such, it was the duty of any strong Redanian noble to protect the borders of his neighbours while his neighbour was sick or otherwise unable to maintain those borders. He demanded of the Imperial Ambassador what the Empire intended to do about the entire thing and did his best to portray himself as the best alternative to having a stranger govern Redanian lands.

Given that this political fight was being fought in two separate courts of two separate nations, there was no negotiation, just a lot of shouting. Wars have begun that way and it nearly did this time. The Redanians hate Temeria for what they see as the selling out of Redania at the end of the last continental war. To the point that the Redanians hate Temeria more than they hate the conquering Imperials.

On the ground, it ran thusly. Baron Belleme and his cavalry advanced with every confidence while the young knight Buchon was a cautious and capable infantry commander. Again, the analysis of "This is how it's done," was made. There were several engagements before Sir Buchon, whose name I am obscuring, reached Coulthard castle without any decisive action being fought.

I am not as skilled at the tactics of the matter so I don't feel as though I can comment. But I understand that a properly led and equipped infantry unit will hold back a cavalry charge. But at the same time, an infantry force will never force the cavalry to the point where they can be destroyed. The cavalry is always too mobile to make the entire thing possible.

So there were a few engagements with maybe a dozen dead on either side.

Sir Buchon took the castle with relatively little resistance, Baron Belleme being well aware that the castle was in no real shape to hold a siege after the last attempt and that if he tried to garrison a fortification, then he would lose the advantage of the cavalry.

Sir Buchon took the castle, knowing that it would give him a certain amount of legitimacy and it meant that he was, at least, Redanian meaning that he would be more likely to gather support from the locals.

There were two more "battles." I put that in inverted commas because, in comparison to what had happened during the rebellion, it was just a rather nasty hissy fit with some pushing and shoving. The number of dead didn't reach a hundred on either side and although I will admit that this is no consolation to those dead men or their families, the scale of the matter made everything seem a little petty.

The castle changed hands twice. Baron Belleme gained some reinforcement and went to take the castle. Buchon put up a token resistance before he retreated and was reinforced in turn. Belleme, the cavalryman, pursued only to find the reinforced Buchon waiting for him. That battle would have been nearly decisive if it had gotten that far. The two forces were lined up. There were some exchanges of arrows and crossbow bolts. There were certainly some skirmishes between companies but neither man was prepared to commit to a proper attack and neither army was properly trapped so that if it looked as though matters would come to a head, then it would be easy to retreat.

They camped there, in freezing temperatures, for several days losing men to the elements every day, only to hear that an Imperial division was coming back from the Flotsam meat grinder to re-secure Coulthard lands for the Imperial Flag.

Both Belleme and Buchon saw, correctly, what was going to happen and retreated home.

Or at least that was what officially happened.

It cannot be proved what happened. But we know that when the Imperial forces came back, they were attacked by several companies worth of soldiers and were compelled to retake the castle by force. Something that they did easily and the Imperial general in question was quite furious at the number of men that he lost. The attacking soldiers waved no flag and there was never anyone caught who could provide reputable proof as to who was responsible.

This is another ongoing problem. Redanians pointing at Temerians and vice versa. Will we ever know the answer?

I think we will, but it's the kind of thing that is impossible to prove. One of those things where we know who our enemy is, or was, but our hands are tied without proof.

The fight for Novigrad was a political one. After all, the Empress herself was in Novigrad at the time and whatever else could be said about that, she was not going to be attacked. Anyone who tried to go after the Empress herself would see a green flash and know that their target had eluded them. Then there would be another flash as half a dozen scary men dressed in black would turn up with sharp blades in hand. One of them would say "Her Imperial Majesty is very upset" and then you would be in for a world of hurt.

The Temerians argued that Novigrad had been abused by the Redanians, its people had suffered under Redanian rule and as such, it was time for a new ruler of Novigrad. The Redanians argued that the rulership of Novigrad had actually been under the church and as such, should be given to them to properly control it

The people of Novigrad themselves argued that they had been independent before and would like to be independent again. And Queen Cerys argued that because her troop had retaken the city from the rebels, maybe it would be time for a different option. Give the port city to the Skelligans and they would keep it neutral between the two warring nations. That might have all got a bit bleak. As it was, the leader of the independent Novigrad movement was assassinated on his way to an audience with the Empress.

He sold himself to the people as a man of the people and he was walking up the streets with his guards on either side of him, to get to Temple Isle where the Empress was staying in the bishop's quarters, and he was set upon.

He had a couple of guards and was later found in a back alley having been stabbed fifty-two times by various different daggers. It might say something about the attack that he didn't die until the final strike, which was a throat cut. His pain must have been intense, but the locals claimed that they heard nothing.

His two guards were found floating in the harbour. It could be argued that he should have had more guards but that would have taken away from his image as a man of the people.

Just in case you think that the aggression only went one way with Temerians taking Coulthard County. There was an effort to take Velen for Redania. Looking at it from the outside, I wonder if it was an extension of the effort to retake Novigrad and the Pontar for Redanian interests. Had the invasion been successful, this would have been more evidence to those people who were trying to say that the Pontar would be better in Redanian hands, along with Novigrad. If the Redanian crown had controlled both banks of the river then they would have argued "Well, we hold everything on either side of the river and port, we might as well have the rights to the river and the port, before reducing troop numbers in Velen to the point that they could then be seen as being magnanimous in returning the territory to Temeria.

I don't know if that's the case but with all due respect to the people of Velen, the already swampy area was churned into mud the last time that armies marched through the place. And the only strategic value of the place is that it's the buffer zone between Redania and Temeria that no one wants.

There is also the possibility that the attacking Redanians were sore from their defeats elsewhere. Whether they were nascent rebels who were angry that the rebellion had failed and wanted someone to hit has been suggested by several different figures, or that this was a counter-invasion given the invasion of Coulthard County by de Belleme. I can say with certainty that it was not a false flag operation by Temerian forces to reduce the number of powerful women around, although that sentiment against Baroness Strenger is around and remains quite disgusting.

Whatever the cause, a group of young knights were riled up by someone, and it is this "someone" that I don't know who it is. Intelligence is working on it for me. But these young knights had been riled up by the rebellion and had been unable to "see much action". They were spoiling for a fight and didn't want to return home to the tedious lives that their parents had set out for them where they were married to plain wives, living in shacks and having to make their way.

So in looking for a fight, some enterprising soul found them one. They gathered or were given by their benefactor, a small army of soldiers who were exactly the kinds of soldiers that you would expect if you wanted to anger a countryside, and they invaded, making the river crossing and moving into the countryside.

Everything that you have heard about Velen is especially true in Winter. The salty air from the sea as well as the swampland conspire to make winter in Velen a damp kind of place. A far cry from the bitter cold that these young adventurers had been brought up on from the winter invasion of Kaedwen by their hero, the legendary King Radovid the Stern. So the knights found themselves a headquarters in the inn of the crossroads and sent out their men, the glorified bandits that they were, to take the area for the Queen of Redania.

Baroness Strenger reacted to this news properly, she had sent troops to the quelling of the Rebellion although she had not attended the matter herself. So she sent word to those troops to hurry home along with sending a messenger to Vizima to let the Regency council know of this new aggression from Redania.

An interesting thing happened then.

Tamara Strenger is an interesting lady who I consider a privilege to work with and to have in my realm. I doubt that we will ever be firm friends as we have little in common, we even disagree when it comes to the worship of the Eternal Flame. But I am proud to have her as one of my vassals and I will always know where I stand with her.

What I think happened was this.

Lady Stranger's realm is not rich and her seat of Crow's Perch is not vast or luxurious. She likes it that way. But she eschews the trappings of a lot of nobility and one of the things she doesn't have is a scribe or a secretary. She prefers to write all her letters and orders herself. But not being very good at penmanship, nor seeing the importance of proper calligraphy when she could be worshipping the Eternal Flame, or riding out amongst her people, or hunting down bandits and monsters or… I'm sure you get the idea. She tends to write quickly and brusquely to get the job done. So I do not doubt that the message she wrote was something like "Urgent, under attack by Redanian scum, send reinforcement."

But when that message was received by Temerian courtiers who are not as familiar with the lady as I might be received that message, they saw a panicked scrawl as written by a lady in distress who didn't have time to write the thing properly due to the pending attacks by the "Redanian scum" that the message spoke of.

Images of a demure and proper lady of the court being ravaged by Redanian soldiers will have rushed through their heads. They will have realised that the Baroness was not yet properly married and then men were sent to "rescue" her and "liberate" her lands from the Redanian menace.

So what these gallant men found was an angry woman, wrapped in warm clothing and armour with bushy hair when it wasn't covered by a helm and a face that the lady herself describes as "handsome at best". They expected her to gratefully hand over the fighting to their command and were appalled when she started telling them what to do.

Bearing in mind that these would have been the kinds of men that had been left behind to guard the palace rather than being sent up to be part of the fighting to quell the Rebellion. Left behind by Count Bernier, Lord Roche, Lord Natalis and Baron de Belleme in turn. So after all of that, these will have been the people that none of those other commanders, competent and incompetent alike, wanted to have in their corps.

So to hear Baroness Strenger describe it, she found herself in a three-way battle for her homeland between the Temerians, the Redanians and her own people.

It was a mess. Lines of communication and logistics were non-existent, uniforms and banners were often muddy and wet so that they couldn't be read, so numerous actions were fought before the two sides discovered that they were actually on the same side after all.

For her part, Baroness Strenger fought a guerilla action against anyone she didn't know and was remarkably ruthless for it. She was rebuked of course given the fact that some of the people her people shot out of the saddle were Temerian themselves, but she declared those men, just as much of an invader as the Redanians given that, as she said, many of them weren't wearing uniforms.

And it was while this three-way war was going on in the middle of Velen, that the Cidaris/Vergen alliance mounted an attack. This is why the Empress, who has a fondness for the Strenger family and Velen in general for reasons that I do not understand, was able to declare these actions as treason.

Let this be a lesson to those readers that need it, when you weaken the realm, for whatever reason, in this case, sucking Tamara Strenger's forces away from a contested border, even if that border is relatively quiet, then that is treason.

So Vergen now found itself under attack from Redanians, and Temerians and defended by an angry militia that didn't know friend from foe, with an invading force coming in from the west. I think Baroness Strenger is right to be upset and angry. Because all of those forces, including the militia, thought they had the right to the peasants and the supplies that they had.

The invaders took the supplies because they needed them and they thought that depriving the people of Velen of those supplies made sound military sense. Which it is to be fair…

And still, it got worse.

A man by the name of Copeland decided that he would help Baroness Strenger, and marched his forces to meet the invading soldiers of Vergen/Cidaris. So now there was, yet another, armed military force moving through Velen. And when Lord Copeland failed to receive the gratitude that he thought he was owed by Baroness Strenger and the Temerian Crown, lost his temper a little.

According to people who know him, he had a little bit of a crush on Baroness Strenger. It was the kind of crush that can develop when you have only seen paintings of a person, or have heard rumours of them. He fell in love with the holy lady, formerly of the Witch-hunters, who was beset by enemies on all sides. He imagined a virginal saint, a lot like what the knights of Toussaint have made out of Francesca. As a result, he was unprepared for the bushy-haired, heavily armoured thing that emerged from the swamps of Velen, covered in slime and worse.

He demanded to meet the real Baroness Strenger. Refused to believe that this was the real one and drew his weapon in outrage that such a "thing" could take the place of…

And then his words were cut off as things became violent between his guards and hers.

Lord Copeland's Mother protested to the Temerian court and eventually, the matter made its way to the Empress who lost her temper. A temper that she had already been holding onto with her teeth. She declared that she had more important things to do and ordered a division of the Imperial Guard to "deal with the matter". Even the Empress will admit that this was a massive overreaction and that a Regiment would have done the job.

In short order, all the combatants were locked up, including Baroness Strenger, and the invaders were pushed back past the border. The Imperial Forces were brutal and uncompromising and it might be said that what remained of the villagers of Velen loved them for it.

The Empress, realising that she might have overcorrected a little, listened to the complaints before telling everyone off for being foolish. Those knights that survived were sent home and Lady Tamara was returned to her keep along with a few companies of Imperial troops to help her keep order. The threat was implicit, both to Lady Tamara and her nearest neighbours.

According to the Empress, it was around here that she began to realise that the problem was larger than just a rebellion and a rescue of her allies from within that Rebellion while also preventing catastrophic magical and alien powers from finding a toe-hold on the continent.

Lord Voorhis was summoned back from the field and returned to his post as head of Confidential Agencies or whatever they are calling his role nowadays. The pair of them consulted several other advisors. I don't know them all but I know that they included the Hierarch of Novigrad and the Eternal Flame, the head of the local druid's grove and a few other neutral parties. Notable in their lack of inclusion were representatives from Redania and Temeria. I know that Knight Commander Syanna offered a perspective.

Knowing the way these things work, I imagine the solution to the entire thing was suggested early, but also as is the way with these things, it took an age to dismiss all the alternatives to make sure that the first idea was the best. But just in case, The Empress declared that I was to be isolated to preserve my neutrality on all of these political matters.

Not that I could have done much, I was still locked up in Temple Isle, recovering from my various ordeals. It is not overselling to say that I was still close to death, despite my rescue.

Other things happened, of course, the continent doesn't stand still after all. Emma's efforts to neutralise the trading company to prevent it from falling into the Rebellion's hands began to be reversed. Many of those merchants saw their opportunity and tried to challenge Emma's declarations in court. Most felt some semblance of loyalty to Emma and the Coulthard Company, but there are always a couple that gets greedy… Merchants have that reputation for a reason after all. As it is, many of those judgements still need to come through. The courts are busy enough with all of the treason that has happened to get to the small doings of merchant families.

Emma has reassured me that we are not poor and are in no danger of running out of money, even despite my rebuilding projects. But she resents that people are taking advantage of her civic duty.

It might be the only time that I see the light and fire return to Emma's eyes but I wish it wasn't at the expense of everything else.

From there, the battlefield moved. The attacks that were made against Coulthard County, the raids against Flotsam, Velen, Angraal and so on became just that. A couple of dozen people… at most a company of men that would turn up and attack this place or that place. The false flag operation that I described earlier where the Lord has met the headsman and his widow has married one of the Imperial officers that are now attached to my lands.

She seems satisfied and he seems suitably chastened and pleased with his new wife.

But it was things like this that were typical of what was happening at that stage. Men would use it as an argument to try and say that the lands were not being governed and that therefore, it was the duty of neighbours to blah blah blah.

But the majority of the fighting was done in the courtrooms and back corridors of palaces. There was an interesting time when someone turned up to the hall of stone and declared that they had been named as Regent of Angraal and just moved into the palace. He was taking meetings and making decisions as to the young Lord and Lady children of Angraal as to who they would be betrothed to and what to do regarding trade.

He was only found out when the genuine bureaucrats were sent from the Imperial court to take stock of the situation in Angraal after the fighting around flotsam had been finished. We still don't know who he was for real as the name he gave was false. Apparently, he was very charming and his decisions were quite beneficial, or would be if he had been given enough time.

The casualties of the rebellion were still mounting up though.

Quite accidentally, one of Queen Anais' ladies walked into a group of people planning the invasion of Coulthard County and Oxenfurt. Assessment since then has said that the plan would almost certainly fail, but the plan was contrary to Imperial orders so… Heads rolled.

A group of Redanian courtiers produced a map as to how to properly defend Coulthard County from incursions from the south. Again, it was not a bad plan and Padraig has adapted some of those plans into his own and has extended the operation along the border. It was not lost on the Queen Regent that the plan also involved dividing up Coulthard's lands among the nobles who had come up with the plan. The plan was not illegal, even if it was conquering through a back door.

Temeria also tried legitimate means of conquest. One of the arguments made was that war reparations were due. After all, it was a Redanian rebellion carried out by Redanian troops and part of that effort was raiding across the river against Temerian sovereign citizens. Which is true. The effort demanded land in payment but instead, the Redanian court argued that it was a rebellion against legitimate Redanian rule as well. Therefore, the cost of the reparations would be levied against the estates of those nobles who rebelled.

That did still mean that we had to foot some of the bill, but as Sam made a big fuss about being Lord Kalayn rather than Lord Coulthard, Emma successfully argued that the payment should come out of the Kalayn estates. And as Sam was provably not part of those raids and that therefore his share would be relatively small, our share of those reparations was little more than a small pouch of coins.

I tried to suggest some cattle or something to help rebuild but it would seem that the people who were injured are not going to receive anything. I have tried to make it known that we would help and promptly got accused of trying to steal Temerian citizens.

A group of church knights of Kreve turned up at the manor of White Cliffs and started an Inquisition there. I can but suppose that they've started to feel left out after all of the bloodshed that the Eternal Flame inquisition had committed so they wanted to stomp around and burn people. Unfortunately, the people that they needed to burn had long since departed and had either died during the rebellion, died beforehand or are currently being hunted by various factors that work for the Empire. They were quickly declared renegade and Redanian troops saw them off.

There was another effort to take over Kalayn lands by that land's local lordships. Some of them were still sore that so many of their scions had been killed as part of the purge of the first-born cults and others were angry about all of the things that had been done to them by the cult of the first-born and they saw a potential avenue of retribution in the disgrace of the erstwhile Lord Kalayn.

It was all a bit bleak and tumultuous and The Empress spent her time teleporting between Vizima and Ard Carraigh which was the site of the Redanian court at the time. She was tired and angry and also a little heartsick with everything that happened. One day, a proclamation was declared that the lands in question were under Imperial protection and were, essentially Imperial lands belonging to the Imperial throne until such a time as she decided who would be in charge of those lands.

What this changed was that people were now clamouring to have their people put forward as the protector of this place or that. There was a new glut of young knights and younger sons being sent out to make political alliances and marriages. Favours were traded and promises were made. To my knowledge, there were three assassinations, fourteen assaults, numerous raids and similar acts of sabotage that involved various people fighting over the influence needed to have their favourite candidate named into the positions in question.

I know for a fact that several people have tried to appeal to my "sense of decency" when it came to matters where men were promised the rights to Kalayn lands by this courtier or that courtier, and Lady Tamara has several accounts of similar things happening where her hand in marriage was promised and people became irate when she refused to follow through on it.

By this point, I know that the decision had been made about what to do about the various lands and what to do with me. Some people describe this period of politics as being "The Fix is in". I don't like that phrase. I prefer to think of it as being "The decision has been made" but the inertia of a courtroom is such that sometimes it takes time for everything to turn around and come into this new direction. Good rulers know this and take the time to properly steer it in the direction that they want it to go.

For her part, The Empress spent some time making sure that her decision was going to be accepted. This is a tricky balance and I am glad that I don't have too much of a court to have to worry about this kind of thing. She knew what her decision was so now she had to arrange the matter so that the maximum number of people would accept that decision without complaint.

My trials at the hands of the Inquisitions of various churches were certainly part of this process. If the body of the churches agreed that I was innocent of all charges then people would not be able to complain on religious grounds that an obscene amount of power was going to be given to a heretic. The civil trial was also part of this. I don't think anyone believed that I might have been guilty of anything and they would have been quite happy if I had just retired to a quiet life of lecturing at the university, or teaching Knights of Toussaint how to think like a courtier. But what the Empress was seeking to avoid was the arguments and the protests.

She was playing a game of "opposition research." She knew that people would object and she had guessed what the basis of those objections was going to be, both the religious arguments and the criminal ones.

The rest she didn't care about, or so she claims. I am not sure I agree. We have had this argument, she and I and I wonder where it will leave us.

There are always factions in a courtroom and those factions move around. My travels and the things that I have done have made me powerful friends over the years but they have also made me some powerful enemies. And these factions change according to what issue is being decided on any given day. A courtier, which is a catch-all term for anyone who might be attending court on any given day, might be arch-conservative on one issue while being an arch-liberal on another.

That's a gross oversimplification but there it is.

So although the best, in her opinion, governance decision had been made, The Empress now had to sell it to the people involved. I understand that there were many meetings among many different people to ensure that the right people would agree to my appointments on various levels. We will see how all of that plays out of course as it is still moving around. Promises were made and people were overreaching on those promises.

As I wrote, one of the things that The Empress needed to make sure was that I would agree to the appointment, which was far from certain. I do not doubt that there was some planning that went into that too. Things that she could offer me to sweeten the pot and other things that she could use to goad me into that agreement.

And then the deed was done and I took over. There were times of recovery, because of course there were and then as my body struggled to recover, I was given my problem and how to solve it.

So that's it, you're up to date with the politics.

I am struggling to know how to end this all. Because this does all feel like an ending. Not the ending that I wanted but it is the ending that I am left with. I don't want to write but now I am struggling to stop.

There is more politics to talk about but I am struggling to think about how I could write about that politics without giving away a lot of things that I shouldn't be talking about and there is news about my own life and doings that are not fit for public consumption.

So I suppose that this is it. This is how it ends. Not with triumph but with the slow trudge into the next stage of my life, dragging my wooden legs behind me, causing gouges and scuffs in the ground.

This was not the way it was supposed to end. This leads me to a few things.

I still get plenty of letters regarding my travels with Kerrass. I am afraid that I do not have time to read them all by myself and given my position, I must confess that I now have a secretary specifically for that purpose. And it might be said that this secretary also works for Imperial Intelligence so those people that write to me with threats and promises of bodily harm should know that my mail is being read by important, far more paranoid and far more deadly people than myself.

But I think that it might cut some of this postal traffic if I just… answer some of these questions before I go.

I am going to start with one of the big ones but it also means that I can tick one of the other questions off the list. The smaller question is, "How did I expect this all to end, given everything that has happened?"

The tone of that question varies according to who it is that actually sent it. Sometimes, according to my secretary, the question is couched in terms of respect and hope for the future, but other times it is accusatory. "Given everything you have done, and all the harm you have caused, what did you THINK was going to happen?" and words and phrases of that sort.

I was supposed to come home. I was, and am, self-aware enough to know that I would have struggled to settle for quite a while but then there would have been a time of acclimatisation followed by a time where I could expand into my new roles. Namely that of husband and Count of Angral. There was supposed to be a big wedding and all of my friends were going to be there. I was going to dress in my best clothes and Ariadne was going to look beautiful. I would have kissed her in front of everyone and then I would have carried her off to the bridal suite where I would have done my very best to make sure that woman was aware of just how much I loved her.

That is how stories end is it not? With the wedding of the heroes.

There would be other things after that. I imagined a quiet life of feudal duties with Ariadne. Occasional travels with Kerrass when life got too boring, lectures at the university, trips down to Toussaint to discuss this or that academic endeavour with Lady Yennefer, trips to Skellige to see all of my old friends there and yes, trips up to Kalayn lands to see my brother and Coulthard Castle to see my sister and to soak up the atmosphere of that childhood place.

That was the ending I wanted. There were even other things there. Arguments and dramas. I expected to have to work towards repairing the relationship between Emma and Sam. I expected there to be problems with the church that I would have to work through and matters of faith for me to struggle with. I imagined all of the tears over Mark's funeral and death and I had a bleak and unhappy anticipation of sitting by his deathbed reading from the writings of the prophets and singing hymns and psalms to draw him out.

None of that will happen now.

But it does lead me to the next question, the big one about which I get letters from all over the continent. That question is whether or not Ariadne and I still intend to get married? Again, the tone of this question seems to vary according to the sender. Sometimes it is a polite enquiry as to whether or not one or other of us might be open to marriage negotiations given the abrupt shift in social status.

After all, I am a Duke now and she is but a Countess. I noticed that this wasn't too much of a thing when I, a younger son of a mere Baron, was marrying up to being a Count.

There are also questions like "You can't possibly be thinking of marrying that monster are you?" It might be said that I don't read those. One got through the screening early on because the letter was from a very important person who shall remain nameless in their ignorance as the rest of the letter was rather kind. But it drove me into a rage that rendered the rest of the day's business pointless.

By far the largest number of letters though, are the romantic type. Those letters that want to know when the wedding is going to be. They imagine a huge fancy thing with trumpets and processions. Fancy gowns and dancing and laughter.

Much in the same way that I had once imagined that I might be.

Well here is the answer to that question.

Ariadne and I were married, a week after she arrived back at the castle. We spent time with each other every day and I told her that I wanted to have her married. I told her that I wanted it to be so that no one could ever take her away from me. I wanted to stand up before everyone, even despite everything that had already happened and was going to happen and I wanted to declare that she was the woman for me and that I was the man for her. I wanted to say it and I wanted it to be legally true, before the courts and before the Eternal Flame, I wanted it to be true.

She agreed.

It was not the wedding that either of us wanted, or that I suspect, my readers wanted. Apart from anything else, we don't yet have a new family chapel. I spoke to Father Anchor, by this point Deacon Anchor about the problem and he waved his hands as though it was unimportant before riding for Novigrad.

In the end, an altar was erected in the middle of the new Castle courtyard. Right in the middle. Deacon Anchor had heard me talk about how I wanted it all to be done in the middle of everyone and I wanted them all to see it. So he had discussed the matter with his superiors and this is what they came up with.

A small, temporary chapel was erected. Thin cloth made up the walls that were hung from bits of rope and raised torches that stood on tripods at the corners of the square. The altar was in the middle with the traditional bowl of fire in the middle. The Hierarch's gift was that a cup of that oil was taken from the great fire of Novigrad to signify the church's blessings of this union.

The ceremony itself was conducted by the former Bishop of Angraal who, by my reckoning, is one of the more likely candidates to take Mark's place on the council of Cardinals. He wept through the entire thing.

Everyone came.

The Lodge manned the portals so all of my friends could come from Skellige and Toussaint. Padraig, Chireadean and Carys along with the now single remaining bastard joined the surviving Wave-Serpent crew to form a guard of honour. Helfdan, Svein, Ciri, Guillaume and Gregoire stood with me. Emma, Laurelen, Maleficent, Yennefer and Samanatha stood with Ariadne. The Lodge and a few other dignitaries were allowed into the "chapel" as the two of us were married but the truth of the matter was that I didn't see them.

All I could see were the people that were not there.

But everyone else came and stood around the "chapel". We had wanted an autumn wedding but instead, we were married in the spring. There is symbology there but I do not have the nerve or the desire to look into it. Guests were told that rank was not important as they came. Knight and General stood next to stone masons and carpenters and I am told that Lord Voorhis especially was astonished when he found himself standing next to the Blacksmith's daughter who pushed her tiny, grubby hand into his.

I don't remember much of the ceremony. Chiredean, Padraig, Carys, Svein, Kar and a few others that may or may not have included an Empress of the continent, conspired to take me somewhere and get me horrifically drunk the night before and I'm told that Maleficent did the same with Ariadne. A hangover cure was provided, on the day, by an amused Yennefer and I stood in my best clothes and pretended not to notice the fact that Gregoire positioned himself nearby and behind me to catch me if I lost balance and fell.

For herself. Ariadne was still skeletally thin. She was still eating like she was famished and a famished elder vampire is not something that you want to entertain. She has regained some strength physically but it seems that Vampires are a little self-actualizing. As such, she didn't want to be beautiful, she didn't feel that she deserved it, and therefore she wasn't.

I still think of her as beautiful and tell her so whenever I can.

But she came out in a white dress with a thick veil and the ceremony was performed. The Arch-Bishop did well and as I say, he was so moved by it all that he wept, tears streaming down his face as he spoke the traditional words. When he was done, I lifted Ariadne's veil to see the terrified face of the woman that I love and I took her in my arms and kissed her as gently as I could.

I could feel her trembling the entire time.

The roar of approval was enough to make the dwarven architects and builders look at the new walls nervously and I remember being proud of that fact.

Afterwards, the party and feast were held out in the courtyard and work sites of what would one day be the new Coulthard Castle. I thought that this was important too as it meant that the new fortress would be built on a foundation, not just of stone, but of a happy moment where everyone that built it came together for this moment.

But there was no putting off the inevitable. Ariadne and I were pushed together and we went off together to the bridal sweet.

I am sorry.

To those maids and staff and everyone that had put all of that effort into that room. To the people who made sure that the sheets were clean and soft, to the person who built the fire so that we would be warm, to the person who scattered rose petals over the bedsheets.

I am sorry, but it was wasted on us. I carefully set aside the joking gift of a potion to maintain my stamina as I bathed and changed into my nightshirt. Ariadne was similar to climbing into bed and as I looked at her I could see it in her eyes, the same thing that I do not doubt was in mine.

"This was not the wedding I wanted," she said.

I wept then. She wept too and we held each other as we wept for nearly the rest of the night and eventually, we fell asleep like that.

I remember very little of it. I remember it as though I was watching the entire thing from a distance. I remember seeing myself as this happy, smiling man. I remember making jokes and I remember being moved by the gestures, the gifts and the people that arrived to wish us well. I remember Emma telling me that Father would have been proud of me that day and I remember having to suppress a sudden and unexpected wave of rage that almost overcame me. I don't think she saw it though. I hope she didn't see it.

But all I could see were the people that were not there. Mother, Father, Mark, Rickard… Sam.

And Kerrass.

I hated myself for it, and I hate myself still. But I looked at Ariadne and I love her, I do, I love her and I will until the day I die. But all I could see was what was done to her. I want the happy, smiling, relaxed and thoughtful young-looking woman that I know that she was. Maleficent and others tell me that Ariadne will return again but on that day, I remember hating myself because she was still so scared and I hated myself for putting her through all of that. I felt as though I forced her into it for my own reasons.

So I'm sorry. Not the lurid, romantic, sexual longing of two people who have adored each other from afar, coming together like you might have wished. I wish that had been the case. I wish I could have had the traditional witnesses in our marital chambers to witness the consummation but the truth is that neither of us is fit for that.

All anyone tells me is to be the best husband that I can be and the rest will fall into place. I hope so because I don't feel like a very good husband.

Another question that I'm afraid doesn't have a satisfactory answer is "What are our immediate plans for the future?"

I'm afraid I don't have anything beyond continuing to do what I am doing. I am promised that sooner or later, the amount of work that I am doing will start to reduce as those people that I have placed in charge of the various pieces of territory that I have rulership over start to take up the slack of whatever is going on. This process has already begun in Novigrad and Flotsam although other areas are taking longer to get back up to their proper operating status.

I will also admit that it seems to me that, the more work I seem to get done, the more is piled on my plate. There is an old saying that feels quite relevant here which is that the worst punishment that you can have for doing a good job is another job that needs completing and only you can do it.

I wish I could tell you that I am enthusiastic about any of it. I wish I could tell you that I look forward to travelling or going to Skellige or Toussaint or any of the other places that I have visited with my wife and entourage in tow. I wish I could tell you that I was looking forward to getting back towards some academic work. Lecturing in the university and getting on with some writing to do with any of the entities that Lady Yennefer and I have chosen for our studies and that she still intends to carry on.

In the dim recesses of my mind, I am aware that these are all things, but I find that I just don't care. There is an excitement to it all that I am lacking. I remember being interested in these topics. I remember being fascinated with it all and looking forward to meeting these entities and discussing things with them. But now, those things that seemed so vivid to me, so much that was worth looking forward to seem so drab and boring.

It is an old truth that if you are going to study something, then you must be interested in the thing that you are studying. You must find it fascinating and you have to want to study it. No, it's more than that. You have to need to study it. It needs to be a thing where you can't even breathe for fear that you won't be able to study it.

And I just don't care.

One thing that I have put in place after some discussion with the relevant parties involved was that I named Ariadne Regent of Angraal. The people of Angraal accepted that far easier than I thought they would and the young Count of Angraal was especially pleased with his "Aunt Spider" taking charge of certain things. The boy still doesn't like me and resents my presence and I cannot say that I blame him. But Ariadne's return means that he has an old friend, someone who was friends with his parents that he can rely on. Likewise, I was expecting some pushback from the other people of Angraal who must have remembered how close she had nearly been to ruling Angraal but they seem calm on the matter.

Of all the people that was most resistant to that decision, was Ariadne herself. I told her that she needed something to do other than just "recovery" and although she agreed with that. She begged off until I told her all of the things that had happened to her people and her lands, and above that, the realm that she had been part of and she reluctantly agreed. She was installed with a little ceremony and like Emma herself, she seems to come most alive when she is at her hall of stone and making decisions.

Then she comes home, whether to her estate in Angral or here to Coulthard Castle where we dine together and spend some time together and she withdraws back into herself.

All I have to do is love her. And I will and I do, but sometimes, that seems like a big ask.

She still won't sit on the throne though. She has a small chair that she sits in, next to the throne where she holds court but even she admits that she spends most of her time in the offices and meetings.

I miss her when she goes to Angraal and I pace and I worry and I fear that she won't come back. But part of loving someone is trusting them and I have to trust that she will come back. And she does, every time…

So far.

Beyond that, it might only be late spring now but for the future, there is the first meeting of the Regency Council of Redania that I must attend. The Queen Regent can no longer put it off apparently. After that, there is also a meeting of the same council of Temeria. Not the first as there have been others that I have attended but it feels significant this time.

Then there will be the wedding of Cerys and Helfdan to attend in the Autumn along with the next tournament of Saint Francesca which is being held in the Winter of Toussaint. Knight Commander Syanna has assured me that this time I will not be called on to solve a murder.

After that… Lord Voorhis still makes noises about me going south to advise the Empress and… I don't know. It feels like a mistake to plan too far in advance when we have no idea what is going to happen.

Onto the next question.

What, if anything, am I planning on doing with those estates and lands that I own and hold lordship over, that are somewhat remote from my main holdings in the Pontar valley?

Many different sentiments are driving these questions I fear. One of which is interest and I will give everyone the benefit of the doubt by hoping that this is the thing that you are all resting on. Because after that, things are much less savoury.

Because by far, the most likely motive for this question is greed. People are sniffing around Kalayn lands and the manse of the White Cliffs to add to their own holdings.

The last reason, which is the frightening reason and the reason that kind of explains why I am doing what I am doing with those lands, is that people want to take over those lands in the hope that they will find something there that will guide them towards the knowledge that Sam, Phineas, Kristoff and the rest had tapped into. They want those places because they have become holy to them and that is a terrifying thought.

It is for this reason that, although I have no idea what to do with them and although I don't really want them, I must continue to hold onto those lands and will be doing so for some time still to come. As I write these words there is, yet another, Inquisition being called in both Kalayn lands and the manse of the White Cliffs. The military arms of Kreve, the Eternal Flame and the Great Sun have already been through the pair of places. So now it's the investigator's turn.

And they have gone through with the sinister weapons of blankets, medical expertise and kindness.

The people of Kalayn lands are reacting well to this although I don't think that they are going to let go of their little blasphemies and heresy just yet. And the people of White Cliffs? I think that before this generation is out, the place is going to be all but deserted. I think the only people that are going to be left are the old and the dying and a few years after that, there will be spirits and spectres and all kinds of unpleasantness in that area.

I have left word that a Witcher will be welcome to go and clean out the place for me but I don't expect much. The case is not interesting enough for Lord Geralt and the place is too out of the way for many of the others. The ride there and the ride back to collect their wages along with the Witcher's famous aversion to gate travel, is too long and costly.

I have myself been to both places.

I went to White Cliffs for the first time with no expectations. We had to gate some distance away as Lady Yennefer, who came with me, told me that there were problems and concerns with trying to teleport too close. We trudged up the muddy path towards the manse and explored.

There is no way that I could have separated my feelings about the place from my experiences. I remember it being cold and unpleasant. The winds were high that day and the sea was violent, The crashing of the waves as they hit the white cliffs that gave the place its name, drove sea spray high into the air and although it wasn't raining, it felt colder and damper than it was.

The place was bleak and felt desolate. The common folk were watching us with suspicious and fearful eyes. They had been told that the lord of White Cliffs was dead and churchmen were going this way and that way in an effort to try and deal with the matter, but this didn't seem to be helping.

The house itself? If you had picked it up and put it anywhere else, then I suspect it would have made quite a nice place to live. But the grey stone, along with the damp feeling of the air left it feeling cold. I had ordered guards placed there in case anyone came to try and loot or look for knowledge that Sam or Phineas might have left but nothing had happened.

I explored a little. I found the room where Sam stayed whenever he was forced to be in this place overnight. It made me wonder why we had not seen his madness earlier. There were scrawlings on the walls and a repeated motif of a broken and jagged spiral that I recognised but couldn't remember seeing anywhere.

I left there.

We had no way of knowing for certain, but I spent the longest time in the room where I thought Francesca must have died. I stood there for a long time, looking at the chains that hung from the ceiling and those stains on the walls and the floor that could not be removed by even the hardest scrubbing. I closed my eyes after a while and I could hear the sea wind blowing through the cracks in the mortar that kept the house standing. I could hear the chinks in the chains rubbing against each other, causing each other to clink and clank and the moaning of the wind made me think of a woman screaming or moaning in a drug-induced stupor.

"I'm sorry," I said aloud. "I should have seen this, I should have seen what was happening."

And then I left. I turned slowly at first, there was an odd feeling about that room that suggested that I needed to stay there and apologise properly. But I had said all that I needed to say, all that I wanted to say and all that I could say. so I was done.

I made it out into the open air before puking up what lunch I had had into a nearby ditch and then I stood, letting the sea spray wash me clean. But even then, I felt dirty.

I asked Lady Yennefer to take me home. I wish that I could say that I didn't look back. But I looked back often. Francesca had died in that building, I had finally found out where she was and after all the dreams of crawling into dark places to bring her out, I was leaving her in the place that I had found her. There was no grave for her, there was nowhere for me to leave flowers, it was all just so… so pointless.

I wept myself to sleep that night and I could not explain to anyone why I felt the way that I did.

Kalayn lands were a little different, but not by much. There were more administrative things that needed to be done there and there was only a little bit that I could do to avoid them. I would try and go to spend days there with a transport gate to take me back when I couldn't stand it any more. But even then, it didn't quite work and more than one person was left wondering why I wasn't staying in the castle itself.

In the end though, I was forced to go there and I slept in one of the servant's quarters. I didn't want to sleep in anything that might have housed Sam or one of his assorted hangers on. But the truth was, that it barely seemed to have been lived in at all.

There were certainly signs of activity. There had been administrative tasks carried out here. There had been courts held here, meetings and things. I don't think that the ritual chambers of Uncle Kalayn and the rest had even been opened since Kerrass and the members of the church had last been in there to clear it out.

I was persuaded to see Sam's room, or what we presumed to be Sam's room. I found it quite sad. The bed itself was bare and Sam seemed to have slept on a military cot that he had taken in there. He had also slept in the furthest corner of the room away from the door and windows. The most defensible positions. Other than that, it seemed that nothing had been changed.

If I hadn't known what happened in the end, I would have felt sorry for the person that had lived inside that room.

Kristoff's room was more identifiable. The walls were covered in a military standard from the Knight contingent that he had served in during the war. And other than that, the walls were bare but at least there was that expression of personality.

On those days where I was forced to stay and after the business had all been concluded, I would wander the halls. I found myself in several spots. I visited that place that Sam had told me about on the walls, the quiet sheltered spot where no-one could find you. Where the wind was diverted away by the keep and where a strange sense of peace crept over me. There really would have been no need for someone to guard this patch of wall and so…

It was indeed peaceful there and in a side shed, I found some small camp supplies and the chair that I can well imagine Sam dragging out of the shed in order to sit and watch the sunset.

And then, my peace was shattered. This was one of the places where Phineas had set about manipulating my brother into doing what he wanted. There were other places that I visited. I visited the spot where the boy from the bastards had died. I remember it clearly although at the time of writing, I can't remember the poor boy's name. I remember it so clearly as he wailed in his pain and his agony. About how he was apologising to us all for messing up. And about how he called for his mother and he had to be told that his mother was there.

I remembered the terrible rage that had been lit in my belly then, a rage that I had not really gotten rid of, even when I was cutting my way through cultists later.

I also spent time at the lookout post. A small patch of wall where it seemed to me that I could hear my brother. Not the man he turned out to be, or the man that he was. But the man that I still struggle not to think of as my brother. I could hear him.

The conversation that he and I had had on this small patch of wall about a soldier's pride and about how he had desperately wanted another crack at the Nilfgaardians. About how he wanted to show then that he was the better soldier, the better warrior.

I remember that conversation, I have gone over it time and again to see if there was any way that I could have turned that around and changed it into a way forward. If I could have really seen the things that Sam had been trying to tell me and therefore be able to divert the disaster that was coming.

I have no idea. But I stay up nights worrying about that.

It was cold and grey up on those walls and like it had in the manse of the White Cliffs, the wind seemed to want to talk to me and tell me something. I have no idea what of course, but the thought was there.

But damn me, that land is still beautiful.

I visited some other landmarks while I was there. The former dower house where Aunt Kalayn had died, another person that, looking back, had tried to tell me what was going on, still stood and was in pretty good repair. Given the negative feelings about Kalayn castle, I think it's much more likely that I will stay in the Dower house when my duties take me to Kalayn lands. I do not know who I am going to appoint as chancellor to that place. I kind of want to give it to someone local but I don't have any ideas.

The chapel of Father Gardan is still there and is thriving. It is now a multi-building affair and is populated by followers of Kreve. I took Father Danzig to see the place and he wept to see it. He is still struggling with the lack of arm as his arm had to be removed at the shoulder and he still has balance problems. Like me, he knows that he has lost his arm and when he remembers, he compensates for it properly, but then every so often, instinct will take over and he will forget what has happened before losing his balance and tipping over.

He says that the worst moment is the moment as he is falling. He told me that there is always this moment when you start to topple over where you realise what has happened, what is happening and what is going to happen. You wince in the anticipation of the pain and berate yourself for your own foolishness. All before you just kind of… hit.

He hates to feel so weak.

But the two of us went to the chapel of Father Garden.

It is now a walled enclosure where young soldiers of Kreve are trained. There are old monks who tend to the graveyard and the spiritual aspects of it all. Then there are a couple of soldier priests who are, essentially, glorified drill sergeants to the youngsters. And then there are the novices themselves who train and train hard. The graveyard is still peaceful but the rest of it is like walking into an armoured barracks. Inside the chapel itself, there is a portrait of Father Gardan in his prime and before the altar, they have exhumed his body and laid it down in a stone sarcophagus.

Apparently, pilgrims have started to visit the place, especially now that Lord Kalayn is known to be dead. I had wondered if Father Danzig had wanted to stay but he turned away in disgust.

"Gardan would have hated it," he told me before walking off a little distance to come to terms with his own thoughts.

I am not so sure. I think that the old man that he had become would have been flattered but also mortified. He would have demanded to know whether or not there were better people that deserved this kind of worship more than him. He would have told people that he was a soldier, a warrior, not some holy saint.

As for the man himself, when he was in the middle of his prime. I don't think he would have noticed. He might have scoffed a bit before dismissing the entire thing as being unimportant. After all, there were other things to be doing and getting on with.

I took the axe of the man himself and tried to give it back. Even if they didn't want to house the thing in the chapel itself, it rather struck me that it would be more fitting if it was wielded by a man of Kreve rather than standing against a wall, unused in the castle of a cripple.

One of the old men who tended the chapel and kept the candles lit, accepted the axe gratefully. He was an old soldier himself and he showed an appreciation for the weapon in his hands. We looked around and I could see some of the novices, and even some of the drill sergeants…

I call them that because that is what they were really,

… I could see a hunger, a warrior's desire to make themselves worthy of that weapon. I had seen identical expressions in the eyes of more than one Skelligan that I can name.

The older priest had wanted to make something of a ceremony over what was happening and the novices had lined up like they were on some kind of parade ground within a church. Which seemed a little obscene to me.

The priest took the axe and went to lay it down on the altar, in the place that had been prepared for it.

I don't know what happened, but it seemed to me that he lost his grip on the axe. I don't know why, but it is not light but the balance can be deceptive and it can feel light if you hold it incorrectly. But the axe fell and rattled off the side of the altar.

The priest jerked back as the weapon fell, it looked to be an automatic response and so the peculiar way that the axe fell meant that it clattered to my feet.

I bent to pick it up and hand it back to the priest and was astonished to realise that he was pale and shaking.

"No," he said. "The axe doesn't belong here." He told me, swallowing. "It is your axe now, that much is clear. You should take it, learn to use it if you can."

He was not the first person to suggest such a thing and I always wave the wooden hand in their faces. But it was clear that they were not going to let me give them the axe back. I turned and bowed to the reliquary of Gardan, a man who they are already calling a saint, and left. I was astonished at what I saw in the other priest and novice faces.

They were not jealous of me and I found that strange.

I tried to visit the village but found that I couldn't go in. It is so different now, children running around cheerful and delighted. All I could see was RIckard, picking up a child and carrying him on his shoulders. Taylor, dancing with all of the village girls but leading none of them on. There was laughter in that village and I couldn't partake of it. It left me feeling dirty, as though I had soiled something and I didn't want to walk into that place, taking my filth with me.

I also rode out to the hill of Crom Cruarch, the crooked man. I didn't recognise the place. It seemed so small to me and yet it was so huge in my memory.

There is a memorial stone there, talking about Dan and the sun shot. It's one of those things that you find… a Copper plate on a stone that describes what had happened in that place. The names of those Elves and men that had died here in protection of me so that word could get back to the courts.

It did not mention the innumerable victims of the cult that had been driven against us by the whips of those men that thought they were entitled to more than they had been given.

There is also a small camp of mages and other historians as they try to identify what had happened here and the magic that Kerrass had harnessed. I met them and made all the right noises but they were too excited for me. I remembered the people dying whereas they were dismissive of that. They wanted the things that had happened before.

I visited Dan's grave on the crown of the hill and laid some flowers there before I turned and left. I stayed there for a much shorter time than I had meant to.

So yeah, the long and short of it is that morally and legally, there is nothing that I can do with those two patches of land, so kindly stop asking.

There are a lot of questions about what happened to certain people and things so if you don't mind, I will leave those to the end so that I can give you the maximum possible amount of information, but I would warn you that almost all of the information is bad and I cannot tell you to expect a happy ending for anyone that has been involved in all of this.

It is becoming clear to me now, as I write these words, that this is the end of my journals and that if I am to continue writing in some form, then it will be in a markedly different form to this one.

I am not sure how I feel about that. On the one hand, I will miss the routine of sitting at my desk and working on these writings, but on the other hand it cannot be denied as to how much time will be saved by not needing to worry about this.

Bringing things back a little bit. I have a number of questions here that are about the ritual. People are asking technical questions about what Sam was trying to accomplish and what would have actually happened if he had been successful. There is also a regular question of why didn't any of the beings or entities that knew about all of this, why didn't they actually do anything about any of this.

I wish I had concrete answers for any of these but alas, I don't. All I can do is consult the experts in their field and tell you their theories based on experience and their various mathematical extrapolations from the power involved.

First of all, the question of what Sam was trying to do versus, what would the ritual have actually done. I agree that what was happening there were two different things.

I believe Sam in this regard. I absolutely believe that Sam was trying to harness powers so that he could feasibly take on the Empress and the various bands of mages around the continent in order to first, free Redania and later, carry Redania's vengeance into all of the corners of the Continent. Although I think he would have agreed that such a goal was a little extreme, I think that when he was at his lowest points and rocking himself to sleep at night, he was having dreams of a Redanian Empire rather than a Nilfgaardian one. Where the predominant colour of the armour would have been red instead of black.

I think that his plan was to draw as much of this power unto himself so that he would have that ancient and alien magic, that no-one else could have been able to comprehend and that he could then use that power to carry the fight against the armies of those that would have come against him. I think that when he started all of this off, his motives were genuinely perceived, by him, as being noble. But the further and further along the goals went and the darker and darker the methods that he had to use to achieve his goals, the further and further he sunk into madness.

Had he been right, and therefore successful then he would have laid waste to the armies at his gate before leading his much reduced force against the next fortress. There would have been a series of actions where the garrison would be told to surrender to fight in his ranks, or die. This would have continued until more armies could have been raised against him and then there would have been a decisive moment. According to modern political science. If he had been able to beat the big Nilfgaardian armies, the continent would have fractured into hundreds of tiny little kingdoms.

A conservative estimate suggests that there would have been three kingdoms of Redania alone.

After that, Sam could simply conquer them one at a time and then he would have had the Empire that he wanted.

But that was not what was happening.

I maintain that the Sam that entered that ritual circle was not the same Sam that Kerrass and I fought. I think that Sam was deceived by Phineas and many of the scholars agree.

Phineas was a mediocre mage at best. There are numerous witnesses to this. His method was solid but the talent simply wasn't there. He left the schools in an effort to find something or someone that would give him an alternative method.

Eventually, he found it and we still don't know how he did that.

We think he made contact with an entity of some kind. Something from outside our sphere of existence. He found this thing and instead of being a mage, he became a kind of priest. He worshipped the entity and in return, it gave him power that was close enough to magic to deceive him. For all we know it really was magic but the entity was able to control magic in a different way. But if we go down that route, then we are getting into a higher magical theory that I do not comprehend.

Eventually, Phineas became a fanatic for this entity and the power that the entity gave him. People that have had experience with his form of power say that the power feels tainted and unclean somehow which, had he been a better mage, he would have felt and better understood. We theorise that constant use of this magic meant that the mind was subsumed by the entity. So the figure, Phineas was still Phineas but it would have been a long time since he had an original thought.

It is very important to think of Phineas as being like a religious Zealot rather than a mage. It is very easy to think of him as being a mage who just wanted more power. Quoting Lady Eilhart.

"Mages like us want more power so that they can feel more secure. It is a weakness of our society that we equate power with intelligence and we base our internal rank with that power. I too have been guilty of working on that kind of equation. We want power so that we can lord it over our rivals, so that we can parlay that power into wealth and influence. We want power to secure ourselves and sometimes, in the manner of some particularly worrying people, we want power so that we can have access to more power."

Phineas did none of these things. He wanted power, and did the things that he did in order to empower the entity that he worshipped and that, in turn, empowered him.

This difference explains why he was more than willing to sacrifice his own life for the cause. There are many people who don't believe that Phineas is dead and believe me, that is a nightmare that I still wake from occasionally. They argue that he was a mage and mages tend towards narcissism which means that they are far less likely to sacrifice their own lives.

So that is why we argue that he wasn't a mage, he was a priest.

The ritual that Phineas gave Sam, was nothing to do with giving Sam magical power. It was to allow the entity more access to a person with more power in that figure than Phineas had.

The ritual was to create an avatar of that entity. Something or someone that could walk around on this sphere of reality and influence it to further empower the entity so that, eventually, the entity could break free. Had the ritual worked, Sam would no longer be there, it would just be a fraction of the entity with a fraction of the entity's power, walking around in a body that looked like Sam's body.

I find this a great comfort. Kerrass and I didn't kill Sam, the entity did and we destroyed the instrument of the entity rather than killing Sam.

So what would have happened had the ritual succeeded?

According to those people that have worked on this particular question, there are two possible outcomes. The first is the reason why the entity doesn't exert more control over this sphere in the first place. There is some law of nature here that is not true in the entity's own sphere of existence that means that it, and its power, doesn't work here, or at least, not as well as it should.

There is a reason it didn't come through during the conjunction.

So one theory, the optimistic theory is that the new avatar of the entity would have destroyed itself simply by existing. It might have survived for a little while but eventually, the laws of nature would simply cause it to decay and die. Before you get to comforted by this notion though, it is generally believed that the resulting magical explosion would have been just as explosive as if Kerrass had just murdered Sam without the lodge taking their own precautions during the battle. The magical explosion would have been enough to, at least, level the Kingdom.

The other theory is that Sam would have survived and this is, by far, the most terrifying option for me. I refer to him as Sam but we are as sure as we can be that it was not Sam.

For Sam, by that point, he no longer cared about the Rebellion. There is even evidence to suggest that Sam was heading down this pathway before the ritual started. This version of Sam would have used the soldiers and monsters that were defending him, to fuel as many sacrifices as he could get away with before circumstances forced the ending of the ritual. At which point, he would simply have left.

Then he would have had the opportunity to rebuild his power base. This figure would have made the amount of entity given power that Phineas had seem insignificant in comparison. We would have started to see cults like the cult of the first-born spring up all around the continent, and every single one of them would be fueling the entity. There would have been a man hunt around the continent to find this elusive figure as he built his augmented cults and armies and then, eventually, a monarch would be on a throne who would have been a puppet for Sam and therefore the entity and then…

The continent would become a very dark place. Shadows around every corner and men creeping from place to place, locking their doors at night. It would be a return to the early days of the settled continent. Of walled towns and villages but even then, you wouldn't be safe because now, the monsters would be the men that worshipped the entity and now, they would be everywhere.

I am glad that I do not have to live in such a world. So think about that. If you are one of the people that secretly wishes that the Rebellion had been successful, think about where they might have led. More than just the war that would have restarted between the North and the South… But think about what a successful Sam might have led to.

Not a nice thing to think about.

So onto the other, more metaphysical question. Why didn't all of the other entities and things just… help me. Why did they lead me around on a metaphysical and metaphorical harness? Why didn't Crom Cruarch just tell me what kind of magic it was that was causing all the problems. Why didn't Life in Death just tell me where Francesca was? And why, why WHY did so many of them tell me "You already know the answer, you are just blind to it," rather than much more easily and much more simply just saying "IT'S YOUR BROTHER. DOLT. YOUR BROTHER DID THIS. PEOPLE HAVE BEEN TELLING YOU THAT HE'S A CREEP FOR MONTHS. JUST GO AND SEARCH HIS ESTATES AND YOU'LL FIND WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR."

And when I answered with "But Sam says…" They could have said "SAM IS LYING TO YOU. HE'S A VILLAIN, DON'T TRUST HIM. STOP THINKING OF HIM AS YOUR BROTHER AND REALLY LOOK AT HIM. LOOK AND LISTEN TO WHAT HE'S SAYING."

So many of them could have just solved all of the problems and if the problem was as bad as they suggested that it was… It would have solved so much.

The Schattenmann, Jack, Life in Death, the Goddess, Crom Cruarch, all of them. Why didn't they just help me instead of hanging a carrot in front of my nose on a piece of string so that I was always chasing after it?

I have an answer for this. It is not a nice answer and there is no way that we can prove it. I would suspect that if I tried to gain answers from any of these entities, or any of the other entities that we know about, I would not receive a proper answer and that is if we would survive.

The Beast of Amber's Crossing isn't there any more. No-one survives a second venture into the Black Forest. Life-In-Death will not come back to our shores, Crom Cruarch steadfastly refuses all efforts to summon him, and the thought of trying to summon either Jack, or the Goddess is laughable.

But we have spent some time thinking about this. And here is what we have come up with. When reading this answer, please bear in mind that we have no way of knowing if this is true and to reach this answer, we have to assume that some of the things that we have been told are true. And you know how I feel about assuming things.

So let's assume that what we have been told is true. Let's assume that there really was a war across the heavens. A war that was fought between beings and entities of untold power that might as well be Gods. And for all we know, those are the actual Gods and Goddesses that we worship. Beings that could not reach out to affect those that opposed them due to the physical laws that bound them and so they used proxies. Soldiers and puppets of which we know of several. The Unicorns, the Vampires, the Elves and those… proto-Elves, the Aen Aelle or whatever it is that they're called.

Let's assume that all of that is true. Now let's assume that all of these Gods…

I call them Gods because I find it easier to use that term. In trying to imagine something so vast, so powerful and so… all consuming , it starts to take on more meaning.

Now we have been told that these Gods stopped their war through an unspoken, mutual agreement that continuing to pursue the war was going to result in the destruction of… well… existence. Not just the physical ground that we stand on. But time itself would simply… cease. The very fabric… the very…

I struggle to wrap my head around it.

Everything would be destroyed. There would not even be a person called Freddie to tell you what that looked, or felt like.

So they stopped fighting. This was not an armistice situation. There were no peace talks or treaties. There was no drawing up of borders or lineation of who was allowed to worship what. The war just stopped.

And bear in mind that this wasn't a war of borders, trade or any of the other factors that we think of. None of the reasons that we know or understand. This was a war that was fought because it was unfeasible that the other beings exist.

This is something else I struggle to get my head to understand. I can understand hatred and fighting to kill the thing that you hate. I can understand that, but this was more a case of… There was no conscious thought behind it. As though instinct and base drive meant…

It was as though war with their enemies was as compulsory as breathing is to you and me, or… as compulsory as living is.

So imagine that stopping. But you would still know that they are there. There is still this thing out there that your entire being yearns to fight. But you know that if you did, then you and everything that you protect and hold dear would also die.

Now let's assume that the peace is tentative. And that both sides are secretly just itching for an excuse to have another crack at their enemy, in the same way that Sam was desperate to have another crack at the Nilfgaardians.

If I was in charge of such a force. If I commanded, or led those people I would institute rules. Laws. And Guidelines to keep my people in check. And if my people could not be trusted to keep existence safe, I would imprison them.

I believe this is what happened to the entity that Sam and Phineas worshipped and wanted to empower.

And then… if I detected the movements of my enemy… After all, both sides have used proxies in the past… And I wasn't able to interfere myself due to the rules that have been put in place to stop me.

Even Jack once commented that he never lied and that his word was his bond.

Wouldn't you then leave breadcrumbs to guide your own proxies into place in order to combat the proxies of the other guy.

And why were they so cryptic? Because if they were more direct, then they would be seen to be being direct and that could trigger another war, or the wrath of their superiors. Or maybe they simply couldn't.

Anyway, if you can detect my reasoning behind all of that waffle, then I hope you can understand just how terrified I am of that question. So terrified that I must set those thoughts and theories aside so that I can function, let alone sleep.

I mean… If all of that is true, then beings, powers and entities like the Eternal Flame, Kreve, Hemdall and the rest. Do they all serve some other, higher power, or powers. And if they do, what could they possibly have been fighting against.

What kind of horror would want the destruction of all of that? And if there is something like that out there? Then what kind of things would serve that kind of thing. All we know for sure is that Jack and The Unseen Elder were on opposite sides at some point. But who's side? Are they on ours? Both of them seem a little bigger than the mere concept of "sides".

It is a vortex that sucks at the mind and I can feel it pulling at me even now. So I hope, dear reader, that you are not too upset if I leave this subject here and move onto other factors.

I am told, anyway, that if this theory is correct… And it has been suggested that, although the theory does fit all the facts, it does rather assume mundane motivations of things that are more powerful than entity's that we call Gods. So it might be something completely different after all of that.

But even if this theory is correct, there is nothing that we can do about it. If we, as a species, are forced to come together in a giant war that crosses spheres then all we can do is fight. Fight, or be otherwise destroyed.

Cheery thought isn't it.

So we are finally coming to the end of things.

I have decided that this will be the last time you all hear from me. I believe that my duty in the regard to recording what happened around my brother's rebellion is done. Both the rebellion itself and the immediate aftermath around it which led to my elevation.

All that is left is to tell you what happened to the remaining players.

We will start with the news about my informants, the people that contributed the most to my account of what had happened.

After his duties around Coulthard Castle were complete, Thierry, my logistical and strategic analyst was reassigned to the front with Vergen. The last I heard from him, he spends his days on a small boat, mapping the currents between the islands that make up Western Velen.

Possibly not this year, what with the rains, but I'm told that in the height of summer, the water recedes from those island inlets and it will be possible to cross that area without getting your feet wet and Thierry is one of those Imperial troops that is tasked with coming up with a way to defend that area.

I didn't like Thierry. He had a condescending air about him. Quite possibly one of, if not the, smartest person that I have met that doesn't have some kind of magical factor to their makeup. But he has a tendency to expect other people to keep up with him which is all but impossible to us mere mortals. I don't think he cares. He is happy so long as he has some intellectual puzzle to work on. I understand that he's married, which astonishes me if we're honest.

According to his Colonel who recommended him to me in the first place, she is a large, sensible woman who orders him around and keeps him in line.

I know that men like that are absolutely necessary to the running of the world and I am glad that men like Thierry are on my side, and I am afraid that there is someone just like him on the opposite side. I have no doubt that he would die for whatever cause he chose to follow and his bravery cannot be questioned.

But I still don't like him.

The castle blacksmith who told me something of what life was like inside the castle decided that he couldn't stay. He tried, and stuck to his forge, working hard for several weeks. He was there when Ariadne returned and I know that he and she spoke about the things that he saw her do. It wasn't her that drove him away. He told me that it all looks so alien to him now. He looks around and all he can see are those faces that are lost, or something there that shouldn't be there.

I gave him my best wishes and a promissory note that he could use to set himself up with a forge, wherever it was that he ended up. He walked away, leading a mule and a small cart which was laden down with his anvil and those tools that he was too attached to, to discard while his daughter rode the mule.

I wish him well, wherever it was that he ended up and I completely sympathise with his standpoint. At the moment, there are regular days when I wish that Ariadne and I had stayed down in the depths of the cave, in the dark.

I am pleased to relate that the dockworker is still around. His wife and he seem to have reconciled in the face of the crisis. Something about the whole thing teaching them both what was really important to them both. Through distant strings I was able to get him a job with one of the merchants that have ties to the Coulthard trading company. This came with a move to Oxenfurt which pleased both of them, along with a substantial boost in pay, which pleased both of them even more. This means that she no longer has to turn the occasional trick on the docks when times are slow and he doesn't have to break his back lugging too heavy crates around for ungrateful ships masters. He runs a small dock crew now and is learning to read and do formal maths with a view to taking on more responsibility.

He knows about maths, but struggles to apply that to slate and parchment which is what he would need to do if he had that responsibility.

I liked the pair of them. They argue fiercely with each other but woe-betide anyone that gets between them, and the love between them is obvious to everyone involved.

Unfortunately, that's the last bit of the good news.

The Skelligan man who leapt overboard, the man who I am fairly sure was some kind of pirate rather than the honest trader that he pretended to be, survived the procedure to remove the parasite that had lodged itself inside his bowels somewhere. But he wishes he hadn't.

I wasn't there for the procedure and only visited him because I was passing.

He was another man that I didn't like very much. I remain convinced that he was a pirate and that many innocent traders and villagers have fallen to his blade over the years. He had that hunger in his eyes the way he looks at a person. But when I went in, he was a pale shadow of the man that he had been. The violence of the purging had robbed him of much of his strength and he tottered about the place, tiny little steps and when he did sit down again, he was struggling for breath.

I sat with him for a while and tried to speak to him and for a while there, he seemed to recognise me but then a strange dreaminess crossed his eyes and I lost him.

The Doctors at the hospital where he is staying tell me that the parasite tried to claw its way deeper into his bowel when it realised that it was under threat and when it came out… I will leave that image to the imagination… But even when it did come out, it was still trying to claw its way back in.

The doctor that I was speaking to had little sympathy.

"This is the illusion that the warrior casts on themselves." He told me. "They convince themselves that they can survive anything and that their elders don't know what they're talking about. We tell them, 'don't swim in the harbour' and they see their friends doing it and they emerge unscathed before they try it. Then they ignore the symptoms that they suffer for whatever reason and then when the inevitable results occur, they come to men like me and expect us to just fix it for them.

"Sometimes, there are things that cannot be fixed."

He fixed me with a baleful glare and left me with the impression that some of that was meant to hit home for me as well.

Another doctor was more charitable.

"He would have been better off dying with his friends. But leaping into the harbour water is a perilous passtime. There are things that live in there and given all the blood and things, they came to the surface to feed. He was unlucky, but even then, if he had gone to an apothecary, he would have been saved. But he told himself that it was just the bad food he was eating while avoiding everyone."

The doctor shrugged. I gave him a pouch of coins and told him to contact me if the hospital needed anything. Emma has some interesting ideas about what to do about all of that but I will leave that for another update

As I say, I didn't like the man. He made me want to be armed. He made me want to know where the door was and just how I planned to get out of there should everything go wrong. He was dismissive of the lives of the people that he had fought with and lived with and worked with. He was the kind of person that would only look after himself. If his ship was caught in a storm, then he would make sure that he survived, tying himself to a floatable device and kicking other people away when they tried to join him on that same floatable device.

But even then, I would not wish the fate that has befallen him on anyone. Occasionally, there are efforts to clean up the harbours and canals of Novigrad but it never works. You can never stop the cattle pissing in it, you can never stop the citizens throwing their rubbish and leaves in it. Never stop the alchemists and the healers throwing their dried up herbs in it.

And you can never stop the criminal element from dumping their victims in the river. And at the time that the Skelligan leapt into the water, there were a lot of dead already in there.

He is a shadow of that man now, listless and vacant. When he does become aware of himself, he rails at himself for his weakness and has to be kept from damaging himself. He will be moved to a Sanitorium soon and I don't think that there's anything that can be done to stop it.

Moving onto another great tragedy of what happened with it all. The gate-guard.

There is no doubt in anyone's mind that the man is a hero. At the time of Novigrad's greatest need, he rose up and led men against the rebels. He led an effort to take one of the arms of the harbour and rendered their harbour defences useless. Without him and the men that also took part in that effort, the retaking of Novigrad, or the liberation of Novigrad if that's what you prefer, would have been a much bloodier affair.

There were elements of his character that didn't speak well of him His Philandering, the low-level corruption that all of the gate guard seemed to partake in, the fact that he just could not resist a pretty face, no matter how committed he might have been elsewhere, he just couldn't keep himself from a pretty face, a mischievous smile and a pair of pretty eyes with glints in them.

But regardless of his heroic efforts and the small piece of gold painted metal that the new Lord of Novigrad pinned to his chest for his heroic efforts. He can't get a job.

Why?

Because he turned his coat. He actively threw his uniform away so that he could take part in the rebellion. He did it in disgust because he could no longer bring himself to wear the uniform. But now that means that he can't get a job. Because everywhere he goes to try and get a job in the trade for which he is most suited, he is forced to admit that he left his last employer by virtue of turning his coat when he no longer liked the orders that he was being given.

Such a quality is essential in a guard, or in the army, or are a sentry or any of the other more military professions for which he would have been suited for.

You can't have a soldier working in your ranks that will turn coat when he decides that he doesn't like the orders that he's given. Part of the make-up of a soldier is the need to answer those orders automatically and without question. You can't have soldiers asking why we are protecting this hill, not that hill. You can't have guards giving things away because they don't like the nature of what they are guarding.

In short, despite him being a hero, no-one trusts him.

I mean… I trust him but I am not the person that he is going to have to work for.

I tried, Flame knows I tried. He was not convincing enough to join any of the church guardships where a sound moral stance and sense of virtue might have carried the day. He is simply not devout enough and he was unable to hide the fact that he would be joining the guard of the Eternal Flame or the soldiers of Kreve out of a need for money so that he could eat and find a place to live.

He could not rejoin the guard of Novigrad because the friend that stayed in the guard to help the resistance, ironically a more acceptable course of action, could no longer vouch for him as he had died during the fighting. He could not join the Imperial Military because he had turned his coat and served in the Redanian guard and he couldn't join the Redanian army because he had thrown away his Redanian uniform in disgust.

That's the kind of thing that even recruitment sergeants frown at.

After that, he tried to hire on as a guard mercenary but every merchant caravan that was passing didn't want him. There were two reasons for this. The first was because he had often been one of the guards that had caught the less reputable merchant wagon trains from being able to smuggle their goods past the gates of Novigrad, and the more reputable guard companies who guarded the more reputable wagon trains didn't want him because of the turning coat thing.

Even Emma wouldn't take him as she deferred to the decisions as made by Padraig who oversees those people that guard our local wagon trains. And the others, she leaves to the people that command those trains. She told me that if she started overruling those people then she would soon lose the trust of the people that work for us. She would start being seen as someone who threw her weight around in places where it wasn't welcome and interfered in things that she didn't know anything about.

"And they would be right Freddie," she told me. "You yourself are a proud proponent of trusting the professionals to do their job. They don't want him. I agree that it would be nice to employ all of the war heroes, but war is an extreme circumstance and who a person becomes in war is not the same as who he is."

She would not be pushed further on that.

I did try and talk to Padraig about him but the Skelligan was having none of it. We have a good working relationship and it is worth saying that he defers to me and to the Imperial Generals that we have built the First Northern, but on this he wouldn't budge.

"I am a Skelligan and a soldier," he told me. "As a proud Skelligan born in the isles, wielding my Grandfather's sword, a sword that I have carried through a significant part of the continent and letting the blood of so many of my enemies… I can understand what the man went through. I have not seen my homeland since I was twelve and I look forward to going back now that I am a grown man, but I still remember it. I remember the snow-capped mountains, the wind in the branches of the trees, the cries of the gulls on the shore and the screams of the Eagles as they stoop to capture their prey. I can still hear the chanting of the druids and the cadence of the Skalds who taught me about my ancestors and I remember the roar of the longboat crews as they pushed the ships out into the freezing water to raid a shore that I would later come to protect.

I can feel Skellige pounding in my veins and that… that feeling begs me to let him join us. I want to have him with us. I want to agree with that honour. I want to laud that and help him be proud that when his own honour told him to do something, he put that above other considerations. He was pushed until he could be pushed no further and the part of me that is Skelligan loves that in him.

"I joined the army at fourteen. I was a beggar, a thief and a… well. I joined the army and I became a soldier. And that part of me hates him. I cannot tell you how much of a crime it is to turn your coat and fight for an enemy. Even when you might have had a good reason.

"As a soldier, Rickard taught me that most soldiers don't fight for a flag, or a nation or a cause. They generally fight for their wages and for their friends. They fight because their friends are fighting. That loyalty is at the root of it. So when a friend deserts to go and fight for an enemy?"

The big Skelligan shook his head.

"Battle formations have been disrupted because units have seen deserters in the ranks of our enemies and gone after them. And if he is willing to do that once?"

He shook his head again.

"The Skelligan in me wants to have him join us, but the soldier in me wants nothing to do with him. And you don't pay me to be a Skelligan."

"Wait," I tried to make a joke, "I am paying you?" I was dismayed at the depth of feeling that had been drawn forth about a man who, to my eyes, had done the right thing.

Padraig gazed at me levelly for a moment.

"There are other payments than coin. Rickard taught me that too. You give me food, shelter, respect, honour and so much more that I value far more than I ever would gold."

He glanced to where Carys was studiously not watching us.

I decided not to say anything.

The last time I saw the guard was at the medal ceremony. He still looked relatively well and I guessed that there were various other people around the place that shared my sentiments. He accepted the medal and I caught him sitting in the reception that the mayor threw for the medal recipients. He had a cup of wine next to his elbow and was admiring the medal in his hands.

"Pretty thing innit," he told me.

"They are," I pulled over a chair and sat. I had meant to apologise to this man, to tell him how sorry I was that I couldn't find him a job, that he was being destroyed for the crime of doing the right thing but now I was sitting in front of him, I didn't know what I was going to say.

He looked at me through his eyebrows.

"Pity," he said after a while. "I'm probably going to have to sell it. You can't eat bits of tin painted with gold."

I made some small noises of commiseration and offers of help but he smiled and left.

I have no idea where he is now. Apparently, he was seen shouldering a pack and with his sword at his belt, joining a procession of people heading south.

I wish him luck.

And then there is Aleksi, poor Aleksi.

It would almost be easier if I had met him before all of this had happened. He remained relatively sure that if we had met each other before the Rebellion, then we would have hated each other and he is probably correct.

He was a noble of the old school, the kind of noble that remembers the glorious, halcyon days of their Kingdom and the way that it used to be without actually remembering when that time was. He was a man of principle and duty and steadfast belief in the correct order of things. He believed that nobles had the divine right to rule and that everyone else should bow down before that right and worship at the noble's feet.

But he also believed that the nobility had a duty to the people that served them.

"It's a double edge-sword isn't it old cock?" He once told me. "In that it cuts both ways. People forget that part of it. As nobles we have an obligation to the crown and the nation. Not necessarily the King, or so my tutors always told me, but we have an obligation going up and we also have an obligation going down. Down to the lowliest muck farmer that is on our grounds.

"It is our duty to protect them and it is our duty to fight for the nation."

He and I shared many different sentiments, like me he hated those people that served in name only. People whose family pulled strings to be stationed well out of the way of the combat…

Now before you accuse me of hypocrisy, which would be fair, let me finish. I served where I would have been most useful. But those people then make a big deal of their veteran status and walk around, expecting all of the other people around them to kiss the ring, to bow and scrape. As though we are trying to hold them to the same level that we would hold those veterans of the Battle of the Line, or the Battle of White Orchard.

Or the miracle of Brenna.

He told me his disgust of men who had let their keeps become places of beauty rather than what they were supposed to be, which were fortresses to protect themselves, and their people. What is supposed to happen is that when an enemy army is seen on the horizon, the locals rush to the nearest fortress or castle so that the nobles and guards can protect them. That is what is supposed to happen. But increasingly in this time of gentle settling down where neighbours look at those people next to them and try to detect even the smallest amount of weakness so that they can be raided with impunity…

He told me stories about castle walls that are smothered in ivy. Hunting forests that could be used to hide invading armies until they're right up against the walls of the castle. He told me about walls that were falling into disrepair because the owners wanted to use that stone for other projects.

"If we know that Nilfgaard isn't going to come north again," he complained, "Then why won't Kaedwen come. Those men of Northern Kaedwen who still remember that we went over the mountains to get at them in the depths of winter. It wouldn't last long but if some enterprising Kaedwen noble decided to, they could be most of the way into Redania before we even noticed.

"The same with Kovir & Poviss. The Hengfors league and all the rest. The state of the Northern defences, manned by the vassals of lords who are too busy fighting for position at the feet of the Queen and taxing their people white so that defences are neglected, guards are badly equipped and undertrained and the workers in the fields kill themselves to bring a harvest in. All so that they can buy a nicer frock when it comes to the next ball that they all want to attend. Flame's bollocks old man but I hated all of those assholes."

"So why rebel?" I asked once. "Those were the same people that were part of the rebellion. They are the same people that, even now, are queuing up to argue that Sam coerced them with magic and claiming that they deserve to be spared. Even if you hate Nilfgaard, which I know you don't…"

"It's true, I don't like them and I hate that we bow the knee to them but…"

"You hate Temeria instead."

"You know me better than I know meself old man."

"But you had to know that you would be working with these bastards and that their selfishness would mean that they could not be trusted. So why fight with them. You could have hung them all out to dry, clearing the way for a new breed of…"

"First of all," he began.

A lot of our discussions went like that when I wasn't properly interviewing him. We would cut each other off and finish each other's sentences.

"First of all, they wouldn't," he told me. "They would not learn, they would not pursue other things. There would just be more assholes to replace the assholes that had died. And I would have been a traitor. But the second thing was…"

He sighed and stared into the distance.

"The truth old boy?"

"Always,"

"It just didn't occur. We were rebelling against Nilfgaard and we were going to carry our vengeance against those that betrayed us. Temeria and the like. That… unifying factor was the death of all thought, all reason…" He sighed. "You are right of course old friend, you are right and it is easy to see why you would think that. Oh, if only you could have been there to point it all out to me, but the truth is…"

He leant forward,

"The truth is that the Rebellion was a madness. At first it was a happy one, an energising one. One that made all of the problems of the world go away. My sight became golden and I didn't see the muck on your brother's cloak or the darkness in his eyes. I didn't see the flaws in my comrades and I didn't see the problems with our plans. All I could see, all I could think was the freedom of Redania. I imagined seeing it again, the red flag and the white eagle flying over the turrets of the North, without that unsightly Black square with Yellow sunburst…

"And it is yellow old cock, don't let the fuckers tell you different. It might be gold when the Empress rides around and it might be gold on the armour of the Generals and the rich, but when you really look at the Imperial flags, the paint is yellow."

He sighed and became unhappy again.

"Just as the real flags of Redania are a kind of… pink with a grey eagle."

He shed a small tear.

"It was a madness old man, a madness that pushed away reason and thought and it made us blind to the faults of the people standing next to us."

I agree with him, I don't think we would have liked each other if we had met before the rebellion and I hated that we had only become friends afterwards. He has never treated me as anything other than a really close friend. He is always overjoyed to see me, rising to his feet and throwing his hands wide before taking my hand and embracing me. Even the first time we met.

He walked around with an Imperial escort at all times but he walked free, and although he was never armoured, he was allowed to carry a sword and kept himself well trained. He told me that it brought him comfort.

When the castle was more built we had enough space for a guest room, he came to live at Coulthard Castle. There were still many lords that were trying to weasel their way out of the coming consequences of their actions and Aleksi was an important witness in those proceedings. There were regularly people coming to see him to ask about this person or that person and whether or not they had been involved in all of the horror, and if so… to what degree.

As far as I know, he answered quickly and truthfully. Just as he had been so determined to fight on behalf of Redania against the Nilfgaardian now he seemed determined to wipe out any semblance of loyalty to the rebellion.

"Why?" I asked him.

He sighed and scratched his chin.

"What I want to tell you," he began carefully, "is that I do it on behalf of all of those poor villagers, farm workers and the rest who died as part of the stupid, ambitious nonsense that we were all part of. I want to tell you that. I want to tell you that it's out of vengeance for the people that died, who should have been the first people that we were doing this to protect.

"I also want to tell you that I am doing this to preserve the future of Redania. If even one of those snakes walks away with anything close to lands and titles then they will live to poison Redania again. They will live to victimise their people and regain their power and their… rightness and then they will be back again and nothing will have changed. That is how I protect my people is by killing those men now with the only weapon that I have left."

"The truth?"

"I see you know my weapons well. Both of those answers are true old man, do not doubt that. Both of them are true. But also, I do it out of vengeance."

I saw where this was going but you still need to ask the questions.

"Against whom?"

"Against those bastards that looked down on us and hung us out to dry. We could have really hurt the Nilfgaardians and the Temerians but they wanted their own safety and then they looked down on us for what they saw as our failures. Well fuck em, it was their failures old boy. It was their failures, not mine and I want them to remember it. I would have died with my mouth shut for my comrades but they weren't my comrades. Not really."

"No," I agreed, "they were not."

He attended my wedding as my guest and was welcomed by the Skelligan and Toussaint contingent who are more used to drinking with an honourable enemy than others. He left early though, after forcing himself to dance with the bride. He was still Redanian enough that he thought of her as a monster and was also uncomfortable around the magic users that were present.

He even managed to make Emma laugh.

I found myself standing next to Ciri at one point.

"You want to ask me to spare him don't you?" she didn't need to say who "he" was.

I took a deep breath, I had been dreading this conversation, even though I hadn't realised that it was coming.

"I really do," I replied. "Even though I know that you cannot."

"Why don't you?" She wondered, taking a nonchalant swig from a bottle of expensive Est Est that she held by the neck. "I mean I won't, but why don't you try to save his life?"

"Because he would hate me for it," I replied,

"He would," she agreed. "The last of the old Redanians, he would not live in the new world and he would hate you for trying to force him to do that. At the moment, he is free, a freedom he would not find elsewhere"

I nodded and sighed.

"Oh Freddie," she said, "I know he is your friend and I know your… You have been let down by other friends and still others are bewildered by your change in circumstance. But you still have friends."

I managed to avoid a petulant cry of "Then where are they," but she heard it anyway.

She smiled.

"We are here," she told me. "All around you."

And then she was gone.

The word came down that he was to die a fortnight later in the main square of Novigrad. We rode together through the increasingly summary countryside and he alternated weeping and laughing at the sights that he saw. We spent the night in the Rosemary and Thyme where he ate, drank and made merry although he declined the offer of a woman. In the morning, he was not hungry. He made his confession to Deacon Anchor and we walked to the square. We were under escort of course but Aleksi tried to pass it off as a morning stroll. He fell twice and we had to pick him up, but all told I thought he did well. We came to the main square and the guards cleared an avenue for us as I walked him up. His legs betrayed him again a couple of paces before the steps.

I have seen uglier crowds. But not many. These people knew that this was one of those that had been part of the rebellion and was therefore part of those that had tortured and executed their friends and family. No rotten fruit or eggs because people were taking what food they could. But dung? There was still plenty of that.

Aleksi righted himself, furious that his legs had betrayed him. He told me to stay behind and find a space so that he could see me.

He walked forward and embraced the Axeman and handed over a pouch of money. The headsman of Novigrad is new to the trade, the previous one being torn apart by the mob after the rebellion, but the new man has had plenty of recent exercise and practise.

There was a brief argument as Aleksi wanted to kneel at the block himself without having to be tied but when I asked later, they pointed out to him that his body had already tried to betray him on the way to the block. They compromised and although his hands were tied behind his back, he could kneel himself.

He stood there, looking proud, having removed his collar so that the headsman could get at his neck unhindered. And the crowd quietened.

He took a deep breath.

"LONG LIVE REDANIA." he shouted. I saw his eyes find me. "LONG LIVE THE KING," He added before kneeling.

It took two strikes to get his head off due to the neck muscles of his training. The first strike definitely killed him and the second was for the form of the matter.

Aleksi's last words are interesting. The cry for Redania is obvious but yelling "Long live the King '' has been dissected a bit. He had not told me he was going to do that.

On the one hand, it was a cry for loyalty to Radovid, but it was also a gesture of support for the boy King, and a cry of condemnation for the Queen Regent. Men still call "Long live the Queen," when she passes so…

Knowing Aleksi, it could have been a last joke.

I miss him every day. Almost as much… no I will be honest. I miss him more than I miss Kerrass. I don't know why, but I remain convinced that Kerrass and I are not done yet. But Aleksi has been a real friend in the time since the end of the Rebellion.

Which makes me more than a little sad. That I find that I have more in common with a former enemy than I do with the people around me. I don't know what to make of that. Ariadne suggests that I am lonely and that the reason for my upset is that I miss having friends.

Then she has a tendency to get sad and descend into self-loathing. I try to help her through these episodes of hers but it almost always seems to make the matter worse. She cannot tell me why. I love her fiercely but I find that I miss her too.

So what's left?

Padriag and Carys are now the foremost couple of the castle and Coulthard County. Padraig is everywhere at the same time, inspecting troops and fortifications, riding this way and that way as he carries out surprise drills on those lords that owe me fealty. He demands that they be ready to defend these lands at a moment's notice and wants to know what efforts they have made towards readiness.

There is the potential for friendship there, him and me, but I think he is wary of that. He still sees me as a contemporary of Rickard and as such, above his social strata. He has a tendency to fall back onto his soldier's stance, to stare straight ahead and answer "Yes milord" and "no milord" to all questions that I might level at him. Then he realises that he is not performing his duties in acting like that, looks a bit sheepish and then answers the question properly. He admits that it is something that he needs to work on and he works hard, I will not let anyone suggest that he is not working hard. But firm friendship is still a little way off. He still hesitates before he tells me that he thinks I am making a huge mistake.

But he is growing into a real leader, a leader that Rickard would have been proud of. He does have a tendency to use Rickard's style on a regular basis and I still occasionally have to ask him "What would Rickard do?" But that is nearly always the goad that will get him back on the right track.

For her part, Carys is taking the responsibility of being the Captain of my personal guard really seriously which, at the same time, is highly gratifying, but also mortifying. She has mastered the ability of being in front of everyone and refusing to allow access to my person without express orders from me, while also fading into the background when needed. She rarely offers her opinion, but she seems to have a habit of moulding herself to whatever the social engagement requires. She is just at home in fabulous gowns that do nothing to prevent her hiding several weapons around herself, as she is at home trailing through the trees and the mud.

As I say, she and Padraig are becoming the first couple of Coulthard County and I cannot begrudge them for it. It would almost be enough to make me jealous, but people need someone to get behind. They need a symbol and a man and a woman that they can believe in. They have not yet been mistaken for the lord and lady of the land but I think that that time will come if Ariadne and I take much longer to sort ourselves out.

Unfortunately, Padraig and Carys are the last of the good news I have to share.

Chireadean never found his family.

There was about a month of his searching where we saw him on a fairly regular basis. He would come in, take on some more provisions, catch us up on how he was getting on with visiting friends and relatives and anyone else that might have taken in his wife and children. Then he would spend a night, maybe two with us before he would take to his horse and be off the following morning. He always greeted us with a smile and a wave and would depart with the same.

There was still just the edge of mockery behind his voice and a haunted look behind his eyes. Pretty much the same expression that he used to wear back when we were fleeing from the North.

After that month though. He came less and less. A week would go by before he would turn up, change horses, get some provisions and then head off again the same day. Then he would be back a day later before leaving for a fortnight and that was the way it went. He made sure he was back for the wedding and then he departed again after that. Then he came to Padraig, Carys and I with several bottles of strong spirits which he proceeded to drink and that we just supped from so he wasn't drinking alone.

For a long time during that visit he was still the slightly laconic and funny life of the party that he always was until it got to the point, early in the morning when he put his cup down on a table with the exaggerated care of the extremely drunk and then he just crumpled.

Carys caught him and Padraig was not far behind her. I was delayed by wooden feet and hands and also needed to find somewhere to put my own drink.

"THEY'RE GONE." He wailed and abruptly he was like a little child that we had to whisper kind things to while he wept, wailed and screamed. Eventually he subsided to whimpers and sobs and then later, he passed out asleep where Padriag carried him to a bed.

He stayed a couple of days after that before he came to see me and told me what had happened.

He was more step by step than I will be, but essentially it was clear that his wife and children had fled and didn't want to speak to him. They had gone with her parents and had headed North to be with a distant family. Then they had heard that Chireadean had been looking for them before they fled again.

"Love was not enough," Chireadean told me sadly. "Love was not enough, they saw me as inextricably linked with politics, my friendship with you…"

"Chireadean, I'm so sorry."

"Not your fault Freddie, Gods above and below but it was not your fault. Because the other thing that they saw was that they were never going to get around the fact that I have pointy ears rather than round ones," He sighed again, he was doing that a lot. "I mean, I could be quite bitter about it if I put my mind to it. It was the very fact that I was slim and had interesting ears that she liked in the first place rather than "Big fat and hairy men that would just slobber over me," she would say. She liked to flick the ends of my ears, and bend them to see if they would stay in different shapes. And then, it was you and your sister that got me an inn in the first place as well as the money to sort it out. So it's the bits of me that she loved, that have also driven her away.``

I grunted at that.

"I blame her parents," he muttered bitterly. "I've pretended not to hear them before, telling her that I am an elf and what would I be in forty years time when she is old and wrinkly and I am still young and beautiful."

"Which you would be,"

"Which I would be of course, heh. I told her then that she would still be beautiful to me. That we would love every wrinkle and that I would kiss every grey hair. I would nurse her through her frailty and that when she was gone, I would make a nuisance of myself with our children, doing my best to scandalise them."

He gave a little sob.

"She always laughed at that image."

Then he sighed at that image before pinching the bridge of his nose and dismissing his tears with a smile.

"What are you going to do now?" I wondered. "I mean, if you want to try again with an inn then we owe you one. Your wife is not completely wrong when she says that at least some of what has happened to you is our fault. You would not have associated with Sam or been caught up in his reach if it wasn't for us."

"Kind of you Freddie," he said. "And it is tempting. But I look around your lands now and all the changes that you are making only serve to show me all the things that I am missing. Gods Freddie but I miss her. Miss her and the two little idiots."

He laughed sadly.

"I could help you find them," I said. "It turns out that Imperial Intelligence works for me in the North. Your parents in law might be working against you but I would bet my remaining hand that she still loves you. You could talk to her when she's alone, let your kids know that you still love them and… I don't know."

"Kind of you Freddie," he said again. "Very kind of you. But if I took advantage of that…?" He shrugged. "At what point does looking for my wife turn into stalking her creepily. She doesn't want to see me and if I force the issue? At what point do I become the bad guy in more ways than just her parent's heads. At what point do I become the sinister Elven criminal in the eyes of my kids. They're less than two years old. They probably barely remember me now and in a little while, they will hate me for giving them slightly more pointed ears."

"They will always know." I told him. "And one day they will come looking for you."

He smiled sadly.

"I wish I had your confidence," he told me.

"So that returns us to the initial question," I said. "What will you do now?"

"I don't know, but I can't stay here. I might travel east and see how much it is true that Dol Blathanna keeps City Elves out. Or I will go south where the protection of Elves is more certain and set in stone than it is in the North. Then I might set myself up again, who knows."

We threw him a little party then, to say goodbye. Old friends, surviving patrons of his inn and people who were nearby. He left the following day with a full pack of supplies and his horse with my best wishes. We also gave him a banker's draft that he could cash in when he wants to settle down so that he can re-establish himself.

I know that he has the urge to distance himself… He once told me that when life gets hard or that the world points out that it hates him, he always wants to burn his life down around him and start again. So it is possible, even likely that that banker's draft is torn up and in some river somewhere, or a midden heap or whatever. We know that it hasn't been cashed at time of writing but if you are reading this Chireadean, then please know that the gesture was sincerely meant.

Another friend for me to miss.

Ariadne and I work at our relationship every day. We make a point of eating breakfast and dinner together but being a person with the duties that I have and the duties that she has, lunchtime is a movable feast and it often means that I am eating at a point where I can still taste breakfast in the back of my throat, or that I am not particularly hungry for dinner given that my lunch was so recent.

We talk and we try to make plans for the future, but the truth is that there is something missing and neither of us know what it is. We talk about it and we work at reconnecting. There is no problem with us hugging each other but there is a sense that we are both just going through the motions. There is a distance between us that both of us want to bridge, but neither of us can really find a way through. Everyone around us just tells us both to give the other time but… that's not what either of us want and there is no way of knowing how much time.

As I say, we are both aware of this problem and we are working on it together, but that doesn't take away from the fact that there is a problem and that it is something that needs working on.

Part of the problem is that neither of us are well, physically or mentally so neither of us have the strength to support the other through what they are going through.

I want to be strong and I want to console Ariadne through her pain. I want to tell her that it doesn't matter and that I love her and I do tell her all of those things. But while I am saying these things I need what strength I have to keep my own head above water without also having to worry about supporting Ariadne as well. I want to take her in my arms and tell her everything will be ok, but she will often ask "How?" meaning 'how will it be ok? When will we get there and what do we have to do to get there?' and then I feel guilty because I have no answers.

Ariadne is the same. She tells me that she wants to be there to comfort me through the nightmares which I still have with alarming frequency. She wants to hold me in the darkness and soothe away my pain with comforting words and embraces but she can't, because she knows that she is the root cause of some of that pain. Then her own guilt will well up and she will be in tears.

Then I want to comfort her rather than caring for myself and keeping myself going and so the cycle continues. People that are close to us both tell us that we are doing better but I just don't see it.

We hurt each other by being around each other, but we can't bear to be apart. In her, all I can see is the harm that I have visited on her. I introduced her to Sam, I didn't see the evil to which Sam was sinking and in her, I see every victim of Sam's from all over the continent. Every time she sees something, or a memory occurs to her of all of the things that she did while under the thrall of the rebellion, it hurts me and I blame myself that she must go through that pain anew.

And when she looks at me, she sees in me the face of every victim that she ever tortured on the orders of lesser men. She sees the men and the women and the children that she tortured and tore apart. She sees me, lying in my own filth, sweating with the illness from my injuries that is burning its way through my body. She sees it all and so, to see me, she is hurting herself and neither of us know what to do with that.

We are handing each other roses and trying to pretend that the other person's rose is not covered in thorns. And that those thorns are not tearing our hands apart and causing us to bleed our lives away.

I love her, I will never stop. I refuse to set her aside. I repeat the same mantra to myself, over and over and over again. All I have to do is love her. That's all I have to do and everything will be alright.

I just wish that "alright" will hurry up and get here. I am getting really tired of waiting for the rest of my life to begin.

I want to love her in the same way that we always said that we would, sitting by the fireside, or taking walks in my mother's rose garden (which has been rebuilt and replanted). I wanted to walk across open fields and go to dinner in one of the fabulous restaurants. I wanted to watch her dissect professors that lecture on the genealogy of Vampires and the origins of that species as they insist that Vampires are merely cursed humans and any attempts to say otherwise are merely propaganda.

I want to see how mussy her hair looks in the morning after she wakes up. I want to watch her bathe and I want her to look at me with that hungry look that I have only been privileged to see in the eyes of women a handful of times and even rarer when it is directed at me.

I want to work on our problems with her. I want to sit in council meetings with her. I want to ask her advice about many of the problems that are plaguing me and I want to be there to help her with the riddles of having to govern Angraal and Angral.

I see her every day and yet I feel as though we are further apart than we had ever been while I was travelling and she was reestablishing herself as part of the society of the continent.

I don't know what to do about that and it is breaking my heart, just as it is breaking hers.

All I have to do is love her and everything will be alright. So many people have told me that and I believe them, but by the Eternal Flame it is hard. Harder than I ever thought it would be. We hurt each other just by being around each other and…

Dammit.

I am also terrified that I am losing another family member. But instead of it happening quickly and cleanly, Emma is dying by inches. She is trapped and although I meet with her and with Laurelen regularly, we can't see a way out of the trap.

Things are too much for Emma. She gets overwhelmed and… I don't have the words for it.

You know what, I'm going to keep the Rose bush metaphor.

She is trapped in the middle of the rosebush. The flowers are beautiful but they are getting further and further away. She can't move for fear of the thorns ripping into her flesh, but at the same time, the bushes are growing and increasingly getting to the point where she must shrink herself to remain safe.

In the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Rebellion, Emma sprang into action untangling the knot that she had made of the Coulthard trading company. There was a lot to do as she had tangled the entire thing so effectively that the only person that could untangle it was herself.

And then people started to fight her. There were legal challenges saying that she was part of the rebellion and as such, she had no right to reclaim her control over those elements of the company. There were people that claimed that because she was sick, she was unable to properly administer everything that she was responsible for. She was hurt, badly injured and desperately frightened by everything that had happened.

But she fought.

You will have possibly noticed that, during my recording of everything that happened, I did not record Emma's point of view at all. There is a reason for that and it is simply that she was simply unable to give that point of view. She has little memory of those events now. She remembers the night that Sam declared his rebellion and she remembers Laurelen being collared and restrained, but after that, she remembers little. She says that it comes to her in flashes of dreams and nightmares but that she couldn't tell you which was which. She knows that she has woken up from what she remembers to be a pleasant dream and found herself being shaken awake and finding herself sobbing.

Likewise she has nightmares that seem rather pleasant when she wakes up and moves on.

We know that she was one of the prioritised rescue targets by the teams that assaulted the keep. Indeed, she was one of the last hostages to be rescued and no sooner was she out of the castle than she was calling for pen and paper. She was tried almost immediately and found to be innocent while her bravery in the face of the enemy was one of those quiet things that people struggle to celebrate. But she took back the reins of the trading company almost straight away and then she got on with the work.

But as is the way of things, efficiency means that she eventually ran out of work and would be able to fall back to a more leisurely maintenance standpoint.

She struggled with personal things from the start and only came alive when it was regarding matters of the trading company. She lived in the Novigrad family residence that had been locked down early. At first on the orders of the Rebellion and later on the orders of the Imperial troops and the guards of the Eternal Flame.

So it was as intact as it could be and Emma worked out of there. She emerged to go to court to argue her case, she received trading partners and things. She was the element of charm, she still is on those matters. But then, as things started to die down, Lauelen started to notice a decline.

She would go out less and less, insisting that the meetings be carried out in the residence. From there, the meetings could only be carried out in the office itself.

Then Emma started not wanting to leave the office at all. Not to eat, not to get dressed, not to sleep.

Laurelen tried to be firm with Emma, insisting that my sister accompany her lover/wife to go shopping, to eat at restaurants and to attend poetry and musical recitals. But increasingly it was clear that Emma was becoming more and more distressed by these outings.

And one day, Laurelen found Emma hurting herself in an effort to galvanise herself to go outside because she knew how important it was to Laurelen.

The best doctors in the continent and that the trading company can find have attended upon my sister and I may say that the good ones are the ones that don't recommend that we just pack her off to a hospital to live in a sanitorium. It cannot be denied that some of those recommendations might be politically motivated as well so we have to take these things with a pinch of salt.

There are herbal remedies and sometimes they seem to help for a while but eventually, the result is always the same, Emma continues to sink while the trading company continues to flourish.

Even if I don't have all my ducal levies. Even if I wasn't taxing the people and the Lords in my province, an amount which advisors (including Emma) insist is fair if not outright generous, then I would never want for money. It has been suggested that I could probably fund the first Northern Army out of my own pocket and I would not really notice the difference.

I mean I won't do that. I can't.

We pay a fortune into the Imperial, Redanian and Temerian coffers anyway through taxes and I have a small army of accountants that keep my books for me so that I can defend myself against any accusation from any of the three treasurys of corruption.

I am expanding my investment into the local lands and my other provinces. Doing the boring things like building proper roads, rebuilding villages and erecting fences and walls. Installing proper mills and helping out smithies but all of that turns out to just be investment in trade, which means I make more money.

I have ideas. I intend to carry on funding academic things in Oxenfurt and become a patron of the arts in Novigrad. There are other ideas that I can't really discuss as well but it seems that no sooner have I spent the money, then I make more.

And all of that is down to Emma. But the part of that person that is my sister is getting further and further away, leaving an abacus that walks in her place.

The pain that this causes Laurelen and I is unspeakable. Not least because neither of us saw how bad the problem was getting until the problem was already really bad.

She won't talk about it though and we have no idea why she is becoming the way that she is. All we can do is defend her from attackers and from herself while giving her reasons to keep going and being there to catch her when she emerges.

What this all means is that, when it comes to dealing with all of the private matters when it comes to my family, I am alone. I don't mean to sound all melodramatic or anything but it is true. Our parents are dead and so the only remaining members of the family are Emma and myself. Emma is not capable of doing anything outside of her existing trading concerns so when it came time to organise the final funerals for those that we had lost with the finality of the rebellion…

I had to do it. Emma wept as she admitted there was nothing that she could do and she promised that she could be there when she could and when it came time to inter people.

And then things started to go wrong. Why?

Because these people don't belong to me anymore.

We have no idea, no way of telling which bones, if any, in the manor of the White Cliffs belonged to Francesca. I am told that priests went and made their best guess but they came back with a couple of skulls and little else. But there couldn't be a public funeral. There couldn't be a grand thing where we all mourned and then she was interred in the family crypt because she is now "Saint Francesca", the virginal saint of purity for Toussaint. There are churches and chapels to her now in Toussaint and people go there claim to have received visions of a beautiful young and pure woman that comes to them and advises them, heals them and leads them away from disaster.

So it was out of my power. I tried to protest. I tried to tell everyone that she was my sister first, she was a Coulthard long before she was a saint and I was told that such matters were unimportant. That she belonged to the people that worship her now, the people that look up to her as a paragon of virtue. There is going to be a state funeral for her in Toussaint. There is going to be lace and a stone coffin that will be placed… somewhere prominent so that people can visit her and pray at her feet.

By the time you read these words, I might even have had to go to pay my respects myself. Something to which I will have to go alone as Emma is in no way able to travel and Ariadne is not…

In her current guise she would not be welcome. She looks like a vampire now and it would be clear to all of those people in Toussaint and Beauclair that still fear Vampires as to what she is, there would be no going around it. She would come if I asked her to, but she is too fragile as it is and when she looked at me when the matter of our attendance came up, there was real… fear in her eyes.

So I have to go. I have received my official itinerary and there are almost more people going to that interment than there were that went to the coronation. There are going to be processions and singing. There is going to be a tournament because of course there has to be a tournament. There will be more of that infernal artwork and sermons and gifts and well wishes and…

I wish Kerrass could be beside me. I will be bracketed by Guillaume and Gregoire at all stages but I know both men well enough to know that Guillaume will be just as moved as the rest of them and Gregoire will want to stay silent, still concerned about the way people perceive him in such matters.

There are going to be veils, and handkerchiefs wrapped around people's fingers as they carefully dab at the corners of eyes so as not to smear makeup. There will be gloves and little bursts of stifled laughter.

And I am going to have to keep my temper through the entire thing. I will not be able to challenge anyone as I will not be able to fight and after all, this is how these people grieve.

I did meet with Mother Nenneke regarding what to do regarding Mother's body. As was the initial agreement, I discussed with her whether Mother had earned the right to take holy orders and Mother Nenneke's response was a snort.

"I understand the penance my son," she smiled as she said it but her tone was withering. "I understand why you did it and why you told her the things that you did, but that woman should have been in a cassock and a wimple long before she died. She was more holy than I am," she sniffed, "and I am pretty damned holy."

I sighed and the old woman put her hand on my shoulder in sympathy.

"So does she get buried in my family crypt or in your graveyard?" I wondered.

"What do you think?" the old woman asked as she skewered me with her gaze.

"I don't know," I told her. "On the one hand, Father loved her and I think she loved him as well. But on the other hand, with everything she said before… before. She has never been happier than when she was serving in your order."

Nenneke watched me carefully.

"Send her body to the abbey," I told her before fleeing so she would not see me weep.

But the one that finally got me, the thing that finally caused me to lose my temper was when I received word that the church of the Eternal Flame intended to canonise Mark. Therefore he will be Saint Mark and he will be interred in the vault of saints on Temple Isle. Like Francesca, although with far more an austere ceremony, less open to the public. Mark will be taken off, mummified and placed inside the sarcophagus. He needs that preservation so that should a time come where he becomes more powerful as a saint, then he can be removed and given his own chapel.

Yes, for my southern readers, there is indeed a hierarchy of saints as well as a whole list of things that need to happen to you before you can be called a saint. A lot of them can be fudged and pushed aside on the whim of the Hierophant if they so see fit. But it's to do with "How much do they answer the prayers of people," and "How often do people perform miracles in their name."

If that happens then he will be removed, sarcophagus and all before he will be placed in a chapel that is there for the purpose so that people can pray to him easier.

I'm afraid that I lost my temper then and as is my wont, I rode to the Temple Isle and demanded a meeting with someone. I didn't really care who. Much to my shock and horror, as well as the shock of Father Anchor who had been nearby and had therefore come with me in an effort to calm me down, I was escorted into a meeting with the Hierarch himself.

The Hierarch is an older man now, I would put him somewhere north of seventy five. Chosen by the cardinals when it became clear that Hierarch Hemmelfart would have led the church into destruction when the Empire had conquered the North. Hemmelfart wanted to denounce them all and castigate the new Empress and stir up trouble. The Cardinals and the elders of the church were not stupid and knew exactly what that would lead to, which is a general holy crusade against the Eternal Flame which would have been joined by all of the other smaller religions that the Eternal Flame had stepped on in their mission to get to the top. Lords and things would have joined the crusade and then, the Eternal Flame would have lost all the ground that it would have made.

There was a general culling of the top officers of the church. Mark was not shy of explaining that this was how he managed to secure promotion after promotion so early in his career, but one of the advancements was right at the top. Hemmelfart was quietly told that he needed to retire. This was put across with his recent lack of health…

Critics can't decide if this was due to his massive weight issues in that he was monstrously fat, or was it the fact that he was poisoned at some stage so that he could make way for the next model.

The new Hierarch was chosen and he made no delay in making the Eternal Flame into a more acceptable modern alternative. There has been some pushback. The Knights of the Flaming Sword as led by Sansum were good examples of this as they tried to return the church to what they saw as more traditional values. In and of itself, this is a joke given that the more traditional values are what the church has been going back to. The more militant interpretation has been a relatively recent thing. But that's beside the point at this stage.

He presents as a tall man, not particularly overweight but even he would admit that he has put on some padding around his middle since his elevation. One of the few luxuries that he has been unable to set aside was to have his own cook and be able to sample all the delicacies that Novigrad, being a port town, can bring.

Other than that, he agreed with Mark on a lot of matters. He dresses in a simple cassock which, I do not doubt, shares a certain level of personal armour with the best dresses that Ciric wears and owns. He belts the cassock with a dark sash from which hangs his holy symbol. He also wears a cap on his head and has a chain of offices. Upon his hands there is the single ring of his office.

Like Mark, he was appalled at the level of opulence that was offered him in his new rank and removed a lot of it, but found that he was unable to get rid of the servants because "what else were they all going to do with their lives," and the last thing he wanted them all to think was that the Hierarch didn't like them.

He received me graciously that day and arranged for us to be seated and served something hot before he asked us what the trouble was.

He listened carefully as I ranted. The Hierarch has that gift of being able to look as though he was listening. He didn't really move as I spoke, other than to lift his cup to his lips and take a drink or to grimace in dismay when he spilt a bit of that drink down his cassock. He brought his brows forward and otherwise clasped his hands together and he gazed at me with this intensity that was both off-putting and rather intense.

I finished my diatribe and I'm afraid that I honestly cannot remember anything that I said.

He sat there for a long time just staring at me. I glanced over at Father Anchor who was sitting back in a chair looking annoyingly serene. To be fair though, he had heard this rant or something like it fairly constantly over the last few days.

"I do not understand," the Hierarch said after a pause. "Do you not want your brother to be a saint?"

"No I do not," I snapped.

The Hierarch said nothing for a long moment, just staring at me.

"No, I don't want him to be a saint," I said. "My brother was not a saint. He wasn't. He was just a man. A good man to be sure but only when the law of averages evens out. He was an angry man, an ambitious man. He would give out harsh penances when he thought Father wanted the punishments to be harsh. He dismissed my best friend and the woman I love when all they were trying to do was to help him. He hated… Flame but he could be so cruel, so locked in his ways."

The Hierarch said nothing.

"And he was funny too. People claim that he was wise but he wasn't. Not until he was dying and then he became wise. Only in the last few years. Before that…"

I laughed.

"He used to fart at the table when he knew that it would make people laugh and then, when Father got angry, he would blame someone else, or a servant so that the blame would not fall on him. He kept sweets in his pocket that he used to bribe me into happiness when he had made me cry in confession because then Mother would not be as upset with him. He knew that he was being too harsh or he would have felt the need.

"He used to beat us over the head with his holiness and how powerful he had become. He would give us sermons about bullshit little things that we didn't… And the level of hate that he gave to Emma and Laurelen when he realised what was going on between them. My brother was no saint."

I realised that I needed to wipe my face.

"My brother was no saint. He was just a man. He came to his revelations late in life but he was just a man. He farted and drooled and got drunk like the rest of us. He had a talent for remembering scriptures, had a good singing voice, speaking voice and he never looked at a woman sideways so he was well suited to the church, but he was a man. He got jealous and he got angry. He was proud and… ambitious. I remember talking with him and how angry he got when he realised that he would climb no higher in the church hierarchy because of Father's position. I remember how disappointed he was."

I ran out of words.

"So you're telling me that your brother was just a man," The Hierarch began.

I said nothing, hearing my petulance in the words of the holy man in front of me.

And my anger rose to meet it.

"And my mother," I began."She murdered her eldest son. She admitted it. She stood there and admitted it. But worse than that, she could have stopped all of this. She could have dealt with it all, in advance, without anyone having to be in pain, or suffer or…

I wiped my face on the back of my sleeve, a habit from childhood that used to be the bane of my mother as I left tears and snot trails up my sleeve. With the added wrinkle that nowadays, I have a wooden hand so I'm just as likely to give myself a black eye.

"She could have told everyone everything. The moment she came south. The moment she was out of the power of the cult, she could have told everyone what was going on. The Eternal Flame would have gone north and the cult would have been no more. Edmund would not have been corrupted and therefore, Sam would never have become….

"She could have done something. She should have done something. But now she's dead and she did her best to die a martyr's death. She forgave Sam when she died. She apologised.

"WELL IT'S TOO FUCKING LATE NOW ISN'T IT."

I staggered a bit, not remembering when I climbed to my feet and needed to take a moment to catch my breath.

Neither the Hierarch or Father Anchor did or said anything. They just sat there and I made myself sit down in an effort to calm myself.

"My mother," I began again, quieter. "Mmyyyyy Mother. She ignored Sam. He said it and I absolutely believe him. He tried to tell her what the problem was and she ignored him because she was too busy watching Francesca run around and scrape her knees in the flower garden. I can absolutely believe that. Just as she used to ignore the pain that Father caused me because to do otherwise was to lead her into a confrontation.

"And now she's dead. She's dead and she's going to lie in the place that she wants to be laid. Mother Nenneke tells me there's a little orchard where the dead nuns and healers get to be laid to rest. Then they can fertilise the fields and the fruit and help to feed the next generation, even in death. She's dead and that's what she gets. She gets peace after all that she has done. She gets peace after all she did NOT do. She gets peace."

I forced myself to breathe in and out and realised that I was weeping.

"Flame curse me," I muttered as I examined the ruin that I had made of my left sleeve. Finally, belatedly I pulled out a rag and blew my nose.

"It will not do that my son," The Hierarch said softly. "It will not do that. Tell me though, do you wish you could join them? Your Mother, Your brother and the rest."

"No," I lied and knew it for a lie the moment I said it. "I mean… sometimes. Life would be less complicated and what's so great about living anyway. I've lost… so much. And people tell me all of the things that I have gained. I have money, wealth and power but in doing so I've lost my friends.

"Kerrass is gone. He wouldn't stay, he can't stay and I don't know why. He promised me that he was going to stay with me and that we would work through all of this together and now his actions have made a lie of that. I don't know what he's going through or what he's thinking. But I wish he would have told me, I might have been able to help.

"Ariadne is so far away from me now. I mean, she sleeps a couple of rooms away and we see each other in the morning and the evening but she's so far away and I can't reach her. I can't. I've tried and she flinches away. My presence hurts her and I don't know what to do about it. There are days where I bid her good night at her door where I honestly think it would have been better for everyone if I had left her in her cave so that she could sleep and heal and do… whatever it was that she needed to do. I love her desperately and want nothing more than to talk it all out with her. I want to be held in her arms and have this rant to her rather than the highest churchman in the land."

We all managed to chuckle at the levity.

"I love her and I remember the words of all of the entities that I have met. That all I have to do is love her, but Flame, sometimes loving someone is supposed to be about letting them go isn't it? Should I let her go? There are days when it seems like she's halfway out the door as it is. Is it my own selfishness that keeps her here?"

I shook my head at the question.

"I don't know, I don't….

"Emma is going too. I don't know how to help her. In the same way that people told me that all I have to do is to love her… Were they talking about my sister not Ariadne? Which of the two do I love?"

"Both," suggested Anchor.

"OF COURSE BOTH," I snarled. "Sorry, sorry. But Emma is fading. Did you know that they have to take her knives away at the end of the day. When she's done they have to search her desk and things to make sure that they have all of her knives that she would normally use for sharpening quills. She has three normally but she's recently tried hiding them because she wants to feel safe? But at the same time, Laurelen caught her holding one differently and examining her wrists, or so Laurelen thought. Scared the life out of her."

The two churchmen shifted their weight in discomfort.

"Emma swears that she wouldn't do anything, but Laurelen is afraid which means that I'm afraid. My sister. She used to be so full of life. I once said that all of the women that have shared my life get compared to my sister in some way and that is no longer true. I compare them to who my sister used to be. I remember her being so full of life and happy. I remember her laughing and smiling and confounding our parent's attempts to get her married while looking after me and telling me that our parents love me.

"I miss her. I miss my sister and she hasn't gone anywhere. Someone else that this whole fucking thing has taken away from me.

"Francesca is gone now. We've known it for a long time but she's really gone now and I don't know what there is left for me to bury. Not that it matters. Toussaint has already taken her away from me and made her a saint. This virginal thing that I do not recognise. I loved my sister, I did, I still do and although I remember the image that she presented, the virginal, perfect flower of a young girl. The pretty dresses, the jewellery, the wit and the charm that could reduce anyone to a gibbering wreck. The way that she could just smile at someone and they would be swearing that they would do anything for her.

"And that is true, that was there. I remember that. But it takes away the mischief. The humour. The faces that she would pull when she thought no-one was looking. The way that she knew how to diffuse a family argument by acting out because she knew that she was favourite daughter and therefore, could get away with it. I have been saved from a whipping or three by her ability in that.

"The way she would be standing there, in a perfect dress with her hair done up and her makeup perfect as a young man came to meet her, long before Father would even get close to allowing her to be courted and then she would turn and reduce everyone into hysterics with a dirty joke.

"And then I remember the woman that she was becoming. Armoured, fit, lean, muscled… Strong. But my sister was still there. Happy, kind… loving… mischievous. There is none of that in what Toussaint has made of her and now, if I try to tell some of them, even my closest friends, even people that met her, about a dirty joke that Francesca once told me while we were waiting… something, I don't know… They will tell me that I am being disrespectful to the memory of the saint. Fuck that, it was my sister. She was my sister. Not this… thing dressed in white with her hands held to the heavens with a look of supplication."

"She has become a symbol, my son." The Hierarch said. "People need symbols. They need them to guide themselves forward, there is no shame in that."

"Then they can use someone else." I growled. "Use a flag for fuck's sake, that's what everyone else does. But they've taken my sister from me. I have to go south soon to attend her official funeral and I don't want to go. People are going to come and offer their condolences but I don't know the woman that they're burying. That's not my sister. That's not… She would have hated it."

"No she wouldn't," Anchor said. "You yourself have admitted that. You wrote that she would have found it funny, then she would have found it an honour. Then, eventually, she would have decided that if that is what they needed of her then that is what she would be."

I glared at him. He was right, I do remember that being said although I thought it was Emma that said it.

"That doesn't change that my sister is being taken away from me and turned into something else," I argued. "And now you are taking away my brother as well. Mark. The man who would sneak me sweets when he thought Father couldn't see. The man who would hold out his finger to be pulled and then when his victim did pull on the finger he would give the longest, most musical fart that you've ever heard. My brother… He was not a saint, he is not a saint. He is not a symbol."

I shook my head in frustration. The tears had come back again and were obscuring my vision. I am the most powerful man in the North of the continent but I didn't want to wipe my eyes again for fear of what my laundry people would say.

"I know that things have changed," I all but whispered it. "I know that Mark was dying anyway and I know that Mother had left a long time ago, long before she actually left the castle. I know that Francesca was going to be the confidante of the Empress and eventually marry someone in the South and I knew that she was dead a long time ago. Long before I knew she died. Emma has always been more powerful than me, stronger, more intelligent and Mark… Poor Mark."

I gave a little sob.

"But they are all becoming something that I do not recognise. Something else. Something so vast and frightening. Francesca is a Saint already in the South. People talk about her visiting them as visions. People have been healed for the Flame's sake when they are placed on the statue's base. She comes to people in dreams… WELL WHERE'S MY FUCKING DREAM?"

I took a breath.

"Emma is a shade of what she was but she is still making money and we are still becoming richer faster than I can spend it and I can spend money quickly now. Mark… Poor Mark… A Saint?"

I shook my head.

"I don't recognise these people any more," I all but whimpered.

Silence fell for a long moment that seemed to spread out. I was watching the Hierarch who was watching me with what I imagine to be a very similar kind of expression to... Like a Witcher who has thrown a bomb and that bomb hasn't gone off. He looked the same way that most churchmen do. He looked stern, gentle and if an expression could be described as being "benevolent" then he was wearing that expression.

Then a voice came from a quarter that I don't think either of us expected.

"Yeah… Do you not think you're being a bit hypocritical there My Lord?" Father Anchor asked in a genial tone of voice while scratching his chin.

I sniffled and stared at him, again committing the cardinal sin of scuffing the tears and snot from my face with my left sleeve.

"What?" I asked, incredulous at this unexpected attack from an unexpected place. It was like being savaged to death by a rabbit. "I don't understand, what are you…"

"I mean, and I don't think I'm wrong here, but what the basic nature of your complaint seems to revolve around, to me, is that you don't want the people around you to change.

"You want your sister to remain your rock. You want her to be as funny, charming and beautiful as you ever remember her being. You want her to be there for you when you are overwhelmed by this thing or the other and you want her to take you in her arms and tell you that it's all going to be alright. Just as she used to do when you were young and she was trying to protect you. Isn't that it?"

Can you be both gentle and scornful at the same time? If so, that was what Anchor was doing.

"Ariadne is pretty much the same. She has been a power in your life. You describe her as this supremely beautiful and powerful being. Intelligent, wise, charming, funny and all the rest of it. Your perfect woman and now she is struggling to be that.

"And you also resent the fact that death has claimed those that you love and yet they are still changing.

"You want your mother to be the same aloof, distant, neglectful, remote… I'm running out of words that essentially mean the same thing. You want the mother back that used to ignore you, the terrified little girl that fled from the north into your Father's arms who found love and fulfilment there for a while until she changed again and sought holy orders. You still want your mother to be mooning around the castle and feeling a guilt that you assigned to her. And even more than that, you resent her for finding some measure of peace in the penance that you set her.

"Are you so surprised that she found her peace there? Are you so surprised that she found a measure of comfort in what she was doing and so became more than she had ever been before. She learned so much in that period of time at the abbey, including how badly she had treated all of you. Yes she could have done more at the time. And yes, I will agree that she could have solved the entire situation if she had just listened to your brother Sam in the first place. But how often had she heard tales being told about your elder brother. And she was looking after your youngest sister, which is what she was supposed to be doing.

"I never knew your youngest sister, but yes, she is changing in the aftermath of what has happened and yes, it is also true that she is a saint. I have read the reports and there are honest to flame factors that prove that she has ascended in some way.

"And yes, your brother changed. He was dying. Sickness and pending death can change a man. It can. The idea of pending mortality is a perspective that not many people get the time to come to terms with. But your brother took that and changed it into something for the positive and it was that that is making him a saint. And you cannot tell me that you would have loved the man that he used to be.

"You seem to forget that I have read your works too. The man that we first met as your brother despised your sister for her preferences towards female lovers. He hated your best friend and was actively working to have the woman you love declared monstrous and heretical. It was only in the confirmation of illness that he let that go and rose to be a better man.

"Everyone changes milord. Everyone. And you are sitting there because everyone has changed into things that you do not recognise. Living and dead."

I just stared at him, tears threatening to fall.

"But I call you hypocrite, not because you have a desire to return to a simpler time, when you were a disappointment to your Father, your mother neglected you and all the rest of it. But because you also expect all of those people to put up with the changes that you have put them through."

I was aware that I was gaping at him but I couldn't stop.

"You were the youngest son. Literally, the spare one. The one that no-one could control. Smarter than they wanted you to be, uglier than they needed you to be. Too clever to be a priest or a courtier, not strong enough to be a soldier. Not hard enough to be a politician and too honest to be a seducer of noblemen's daughters. Too poetic to be a merchant, too down to earth to be a poet. Too lazy to gain rank, too angry to settle in one place, too romantic to settle for something… lesser. Not even determined enough to become a famous drunk and gambler. Too curious, too romantic, too interested in tiny unimportant things.

"There was no expectation on you. Everything that your father tried to turn you towards failed. You could not find a wife, could not find a task to fulfil you, could not find a topic to interest you at university. You were doomed to be your parent's greatest fear. The shiftless nobleman's son that had no prospects, no future and even worse than that, no ambition to be anything other than a little nobleman's son, living off his Father's wealth while he descends into obscurity and dies early from some pox or some kind of sickness of the liver after you try and live like a student. Still trying to be a student long after you are twice as old as any of the people that you try to live around.

"But then you decide to follow a Witcher around. Not just any Witcher, a Cat Witcher at that. It is no exaggeration to say that they are the scariest Witcher school. Not because of their skills or their powers, but because of their mental… I'm going to call them "issues".

"And again, I remember something else. You fell on the topic of Witchers purely because no-one else was working on them. It was an open field so you would have no-one to compete with on the subject. And suddenly… you're off. Like a race-horse being released onto the course."

A thought visibly occured to him.

"Or a hunting hound released at his prey."

He nodded his satisfaction at the point before starting again.

"You were the one that changed first. Before Francesca, before Emma, Before Mark, your Mother, Father and everyone else involved. You changed. Suddenly, there was a fire underneath you. You had ambition, your rage and your frustration were levelled at other targets. You started to see what was real in the world. You moved out there, you saw what life in the continent was really about and you started to become a man, leaving the boy you had been behind.

"Suddenly, everything was different. You became a fighter, a killer even. You became the kind of man that leapt into collapsing buildings to rescue children. You became a hero. Even while you are humble enough to admit that you pissed yourself while you were doing it. You became a lover too, you became confident. You had a field of study in which you were becoming an authority and because you had chosen that particular field of study, you started to become famous.

"You were standing on the shoulders of a giant in the figure of Professor Dandilion to be sure, but without your work, your sister would never have been noticed. She would have just been one more other young girl that had been sent to the Imperial court to gain the eye of the Empress. After that, have you ever wondered how many avenues opened up for your sister's mercantile endeavours due to your efforts, the contacts you made and the favour that your sister gained in the court.

"Would Sam have been allowed to keep Kalayn lands if he hadn't been part of such a famous family? The Kalayn name is old and prestigious whereas the Coulthard name is new and… kind of tarnished by your new money influences. Would someone have challenged that will, especially given the heretical nature of the person that gave the will, or the suspicious nature of how your brother inherited?

"Would the manhunt for your sister have been quite so all encompassing if your… It goes on and on.

"So the people that know you, your mother, your friends and siblings, all have to contend with the fact that their shiftless layabout, student of a son, friend and brother comes home. He's made himself famous by the fruits of his own labours. He walks with a confidence of step enough so that trained warriors step aside from him. He has secured an engagement with a noblewoman of higher rank than any of the rest of your siblings could even dream of before you had started.

"You are friend and adopted brother of the Empress, you have the gratitude of several members of the Skelligan court and the Lodge of Sorceresses for your interdiction in her determination to board the skeleton ship. You are chosen as a comrade of the newest and arguably most powerful of the Skelligan Jarls. You have the ear of multiple monarchs. You are instrumental in the founding principles of the Knights of Saint Francesca. You have unearthed and uprooted the single greatest heresy in the North, a heresy that has quietly been spreading its roots right under the noses of both the Eternal Flame and the Sky Father Kreve. And to cap it all off, you travel into the heart of the Black Forest of the South and converse with a figure of legend. Not to mention bringing a long lost colony of Dryads back into the modern world.

"You have elevated Elves, openly employed Dwarves and Gnomes while loudly declaring the benefits of their craftsmanship. You have loudly championed the rights of the common folk, castigated the more militant members of my religion, you have loved multiple women including non-humans and now you stand as the most powerful single man in the North of the Continent.

"Who has changed more? You or them?"

I had nothing to say to that.

"You have changed yourself and in doing so, you have changed the lives of those people around you. Not everyone is going to be comfortable with that. And you have the temerity to demand that they stay the same? Shame on you Milord, Shame on you."

His tone of voice made it funny and I saw the hierarch hide a smirk behind his hand.

"The world has changed Freddie," Anchor went on. "Do not resent people for changing. Sometimes people change for the better and sometimes people change for the worst. Also, change is scary. It's ok to be scared but it is not ok to be angry at people for their own changes. Some people are changed by the world and some people change the world themselves. You have done both. Do not be resentful of other people when they do not catch up as quickly as you would like them to, or that the world changes people in ways that you do not appreciate.

"Things change. It is one of the few constants on the continent. Do not resent change or you will be forever resentful. And that resent is poisonous."

There was another long pause as I think all three of us realised that Anchor had stopped speaking.

The look of horror that started to cross Father Anchor's face was comical and I would have laughed if I wasn't feeling so raw.

"Sorry Holy Father," he bowed towards the older man, "did you want to say something?"

The Hierarch very carefully reached to one side and poured himself a drink.

"Tell me," he began, "what rank did we give you so that you could be a confessor to the Duke here?"

"Uhh, Deacon… Holy Father."

The Hierarch set his cup down and pulled out a notepad on which he made a small note.

"We shall have to do something about that." He said. "A young man of your talent should be at least a Bishop by now."

"But… I thought that the whole marriage thing… I thought…"

"Yes," the Hierarch raised a bushy eyebrow at the younger priest. "You have done entirely too much thinking." He set the notebook aside and picked up his cup which he used as a cover so that he could wink at me. "As for the marriage thing? I look forward to meeting your wife. If everything I have heard of her is true, then she seems like a most sensible young woman. Other than marrying you of course. I am pretty sure that she would make for a better priest than some others that I could mention. We are all thinking of certain names I am sure.

"But you are telling yourself lies if you think you are the first priest to fall in love and be married."

"What?" Anchor's moth was opening and shutting like a fish.

I perked up, this was news to me as well.

"Naturally, priests are only human after all. More often than not though, they tend to call these women other things. Housekeepers are often the term used. Always seemed a sensible arrangement to me. A woman's touch, a woman's perspective can keep a man grounded and sensible in the wake of... All of the rest of it. Still, after you have served the relevant amount of time, we will see to it that you are in a position to influence things. A voice such as yours should be heard."

Father Anchor sat back, dazed.

"Another life that has changed in your passage." The Hierarch told me with a smile and another wink before gazing at me shrewdly. "Tell me though, Lord Duke, who else has changed, is being changed beyond your recognition?"

"What, I don't know…"

"Who do you miss that is not who they used to be? Who was missing at your wedding?"

"Kerrass was…"

"Not Kerrass. I rather think that Witcher is the one that has changed the least since you first started your travels. Who else?"

It took me a long moment to realise who he was talking about. But when I did I went through the full range of emotions. I was enraged, I was terrified, frustrated, self-hating, but most of all a terrible grief welled up in my chest and I didn't know what to do with it.

I have never had a heart attack but that is what it felt like.

"It's alright Lord Frederick," The Hierophant told me. "You can say it aloud, you are among friends and priests here and your word will be protected."

I couldn't say it though, the pain in my chest had spread out to my throat and I couldn't force the words out. I wanted to scream but I had no breath to do so.

"Lord Duke… if I may… Freddie, you need to say it. You need to know that this feeling exists. Let it go, let it out. Tell us… who do you miss?"

"I miss Sam." I wailed, "Flame preserve me but I miss Sam. I miss my brother."

The rage came back.

"Not the thing that he became, not the traitor, the torturer and the heretic, my brother."

I struggled to breath and I couldn't sit still. I fell.

"My brother could never do those things. Not Sam. I was there. I saw what he did, I heard what he did and Flame knows that I felt what he did but I don't believe it. I still don't believe it. That wasn't Sam. It wasn't…"

I sobbed and wept and howled for a moment.

Father Anchor came to help me and I threw his hands from me.

"He was my brother." I wailed. "He wouldn't hurt me. He wouldn't hurt anyone. But now he's the arch traitor and heretic. The raper of women and the torturer of … me for the flame's sake. Oh Sam…

"He was my brother and he was going to stand next to me at my wedding. Along with Mark, and Kerrass and fucking Ciri for the flame's sake. He was going to be there and he was going to make jokes and tease me for the rest of the night. He was going to tease Ariadne too, asking if she had a sister or something and then he was going to give me lots of lewd tips about how to treat my wife on my wedding night before running off and spectacularly failing to seduce one of the Sorceresses.

"That is my brother. That was Sam.

"Oh Sam. Why did you…"

I wept again for a while.

"I miss him. I miss that Sam, THAT Sam. And I know that all of it is a lie. I know that it was some deception, some grand deceit that he wove and threw at all of us but all I want right now… I want my brother back."

I swear that I could see Sam standing next to the Hierophant, looking down on me sadly. He was wearing a plain shirt, trews and riding boots with his sword strapped to his waist. He was looking at me sadly.

"He was my brother. He was my comrade in arms. Emma always objects to the idea that the castle in our childhood was a warzone, but on that battlefield, Sam was my comrade. He was the man that stood with me elbow to elbow against the tyranny of our Father. We were just kids but we saw the unfairness of it all and we tried to help each other, he was my brother.

"Edmund was just a bastard, Mark was more of a Father to me than Father was and Emma was more of a Mother. Francesca was my sister but SAM WAS MY BROTHER and now he's being taken away from me. How do I grieve for the brother that I lost when I'm not allowed to say his name? How can I properly say Goodbye to the brother that… that I helped kill if I can't say his name? He was my brother.

I lapsed into silence for a while.

"More than anyone else, that is the face that I miss. That is the person that I want to turn to. That…

"I still, even now… I still go through all of my old interactions with him. I still want to see if there is something that I missed, something that I could have used to try and help him. I go over childhood events and Flame damn it… I want my brother back."

I sobbed again. Dimly, in the back of my mind I can distinctly remember looking at myself and telling myself that I was just throwing a tantrum and that I needed to pull myself together.

But instead I got worse.

"Do you know," I said aloud. "That there are such things as demons. I mean the real ones, not the scientific terms that I talk around in writings. Yes, I know that the term classically means "beings that come from other spheres of existence" but given that we, meaning humanity, came from another sphere of existence then I don't think that means very much.

"But the real demons, the ones that take possession of people and make those people do evil, horrible things to other people. Those kinds of demons. The ones that evoke images of people tied to beds and stakes while holy people throw holy water and things at them while brandishing holy symbols and muttering archaic spells that we call exorcisms.

"Those demons. They do exist but they hardly ever do what they are supposed to do.

"I've been waiting… I've longed for it. I've been waiting for someone else to say it first and I want it to be true so very badly.

"Sam was possessed. I mean, I know that he wasn't but I want him to be. Sam was possessed. That wasn't Sam, that wasn't my brother. He didn't do these things. He didn't kill…. Flame… I so badly wanted to believe that he had been possessed."

I stuttered to a halt.

"And he's declared Anathema now. I can't even legally say his name, let alone mourn him.

"And I know, I know that the only way that I can reconcile these things is if my Sam is my brother and the other, real Sam is… whoever or whatever… I know that I can mourn the man I lost while hating the man that…

"It's just…

I stopped talking abruptly, just stopped. There was another long pause.

I could hear the distant sounds of the city outside the Hierophant's shutters. I could hear city stall holders selling their wares and city watchmen calling the time with the legend "All's well".

Then I started to weep. Proper tears. What I would almost have called "healthy tears". I slumped against whichever piece of furniture was leaning against and fell, lending on my ass and fell backwards. Covering my face.

I lost a bit of time after that until Father Anchor came and helped me up and held onto me as I wept my grief for the man that I had not allowed myself to grieve.

"Well," the Hierophant said when he was sure I was calm and sitting back in my chair. "The Great Duke of the Pontar is human after all." He smiled as he spoke.

"Lord Frederick… Freddie. Look at me."

I did as I was told. When the head of your religion tells you to do something, you damn well do it.

"You are only human. You are supposed to love your brother. Samuel deceived many and the fact that you were deceived by him makes you one of those people. Even those people that were on his side were deceived by him. And for all any of us know, he had been the victim of dark magic for a while and maybe he was possessed, or was not himself anyway.

"It seems to be your nature to take on burdens that you do not own. That is understandable given your situation and your history. But remember that none of this is your fault. None of it. The person that did these things was Samuel. He knew the difference between right and wrong but he did it anyway. We know this because if he had been truly convinced of his cause, he would have told everyone about it and his followers would have included some of the truly powerful of the North. But instead, he was followed by weak, ambitious men.

"And just because he was evil and dark to a lot of other people, that doesn't mean that he wasn't your brother all the same. And that doesn't mean that he didn't love you in his own way.

"What he did was monstrous and there were a lot of things that were done to him to make him that way. He was made into what he was.

"I agree with you, treasure the man that you remember and vilify the man that did these things. Remember your brother in your heart while the traitor burns in the cleansing flame. Just take care not to get the two confused. It is no sin to love your brother. As the prophet once said, 'Love the sinner, hate the sin,' and for you, I hope that takes special meaning."

I nodded, accepting the point.

"I, and others," he continued, "think that you are doing well, better than you might have done otherwise. You are without corruption, just keep your head, trust your closest advisors, especially the remarkably wise young man that you have chosen as your confessor and I agree with those other entities. Love your wife, she will return to you in time. She loves you, Lord Frederick, do not fear that."

We spoke for a little while longer before I left.

I spent a couple of nights at the Rosemary and Thyme after that. I felt the need to retreat to a place of safety and security before I struck out again.

I think that this is the last time that I will put pen to paper to talk to you all now. I have spoken to the Empress and she has agreed that I might be permitted to grieve for my brother. So I can tell you that I can grieve for my brother. There are now two men in my presence. Lord Kalayn who led the rebellion, and Sir Samuel who was my brother. That might not be true in the courts of the rest of the land but it is true in my lands so I will thank you to remember that.

I attended the formal funeral of Saint Francesca. It was a very beautiful time. I was the only member of the family that was well enough to go. Emma, Laurelen and Ariadne stayed in the North to continue their duties and their hopeful path towards recovery. It was good to see Guillaume and Lady Vivienne, Gregoire and Lady Anne. I enjoyed watching Knight Commander Syanna and Captain de la Tour needle each other and I may say that Toussaint as a whole, did my family much honour. I was able to cheer the jousts and I was honoured to speak at the funeral to tell people how honoured I was, how honoured our family was and how honoured my sister would be given the great works that had begun in my sister's name. I attended the parties and avoided those people that did their best to try and insinuate themselves into my company when it was not wanted.

I did not visit the Belles of Beauclair, no matter what you have heard from other people. I am still not well enough to act on any… of those activities.

Although I was welcome at the palace and I did spend the night on either side of the formal service, I spent the rest of my time there in Corvo Bianco where the servants, Lord and Lady of the house looked after me by virtue of just leaving me to it. It was nice not to be treated as an invalid and to just be treated as Freddie for a while. I looked over some of Lady Yennefer's notes and expressed some opinions but beyond that, I just rested.

A similar fuss was made about Mark's internment. I managed to hobble behind his coffin as it was placed in its niche inside the chapel of the saints and I knelt in prayer for a long time. Again, Emma was not well enough to emerge and Ariadne didn't think it would be entirely political to stay there. There were many church services performed throughout Novigrad and I attended a couple and I shed many tears. I could almost feel Mark getting further and further away from me and the pain that this caused me was immeasurable.

I didn't stay in the city that night.

Mother's body was taken away by the priestesses of Melitele and my advisor Iona went with them for a while to witness the burial. I gave them the permissions and my mother was interred as a full priestess of the Goddess. I am… proud that she was able to achieve her measure of redemption. And along with the symbol of the Eternal Flame around her neck, there was the symbol of the Gryphon there as well.

The historian in me laughs at this. In years to come, long after I am forgotten and these writings are dust, when some future archaeologist digs up that grave and finds the Witcher pendant there as well as a holy symbol, I can only imagine the confusion and the arguments that this will start about whether or not Witchers could be female.

Rickard was buried on a hill near a large chestnut tree which Padraig claimed to be Rickard's favourite kind of tree. There weren't many of us there. Myself, Padraig, Carys and the other surviving members of the men and Elves that came from the North. Shani was there too although we didn't speak.

Shortly after my recovery, Shani came to see me with tears in her eyes and told me that she could not forget that my brother had killed the man that she loved. She knew that I was not to blame and forgave me my part, but whenever she looked at me, she saw my brother and she couldn't help but hate me.

I miss her.

It is a nice burial site and when I am better, I intend to visit that site often.

Anchor performed the service but apparently, Rickard would not have wanted the grave marked. He was buried with his sword, his bow and a quiver full of arrows and a long hunting knife so that he would be properly prepared in the next life.

Shani was dressed as though she was the bride at a wedding and laid her flower wreath at the feet of the small mound of earth before she went and knelt next to the grave while Anchor performed the service, the tears spilling down her cheeks.

Afterwards we all went to a nearby river and the bastards along with Carys and a couple of the Elves that had accompanied us in the North took bows and lit flaming arrows. The arrows were fired up in arcs that emulated the sunshot until the arrows themselves fell into the river with a small puff of steam and smoke.

I wept, I don't mind admitting that I felt ashamed that I could not fire an arrow of my own. Rickard would not have minded, nor would anyone else notice or particularly care. But I couldn't help but look up at the hill and the tree under which Rickard will sleep until the world ends.

Shani was standing there. I felt that she was watching us and she turned away to stare into the distance.

I no longer love Shani, I have not done so for a long time but for a moment there, I mourned the loss of that feeling. I wished that I still had it in me to go up that hill, take that woman in my arms and comfort her.

I also hated Sam again that day. There are many days when I remember the man that I thought he was and miss that man with all my heart. But then there are other days like that day when we mourn the death of a better man when the rage and hatred turns into acid in the depths of my belly.

When we were done, We went to the nearest tavern and drank it. We would have liked to have gone to Chireadean's inn but as that was burnt down and the Elf himself was nowhere to be found, we just picked a nearby one that Padraig recommended as not caring whether or not they served their beer to Elven patrons.

If you read this Chireadean, then know that we missed you that day.

You too Kerrass.

When all that was done, I went to the family crypt. It was the last thing that I wanted to do. When everything else was done, that was the bit I reserved for when it was all finally over. I wanted it to be my last farewell. The last thing to be done. Emma, Ariadne, Laurelen and I will be living with these events for the rest of our lives. Despite this, I wanted a line in the sand. A line that we would be able to move past and look back on so that we could know that we were moving past it.

It was just a small gathering really and it was deliberately kept that way, so please don't be offended that you weren't invited. I mean nothing about it. This was a party for old friends of the family. Men and women that were around since long before other relationships were formed. Old friends of Mother and Father. Francesca's old friends, A couple of Mark's old teachers and students in the church. That kind of thing.

Emma made it there and she seemed comforted by those people that were there. Old friends, business colleagues and lawyers that had known her since she was a child. She was not the Emma of old but she was certainly better than she had been in a while.

Ariadne came down and Ciri came rather than The Empress, going so far as to ride up to the castle in a shirt and trews with a hood hiding her hair and a sword on her back along with another one of the court ladies that Francesca had been close with at one stage. She wept along with the rest of us. All told, it was maybe twelve of us as we went down into the family crypt, the other guests waiting back at the castle.

But there was no-one to bury. Instead of the ceremony that accompanied Father's burial, there was no Family guard carrying a coffin. There was no procession, nor did the workers in the fields line the way to say farewell to the Lord. I had not wanted a fuss but a small part of me regretted that there wasn't a fuss despite this. I wanted people to turn up spontaneously and I was sad that they didn't.

As was proper only the close members of the family came into the crypt. In this case that meant Emma, myself and our spouses. Ariadne came in and sat on the central chair while Laurelen was Emma's shadow.

We sat for a while in that place. Contrary to popular belief, the Coulthard family crypt is a well lit and ventilated place. Father had insisted that this would be the case when it was built. He wanted it to be easily maintained so that when people came to visit, as he hoped they would, they would not struggle, nor would there be any unsightly Necrophages or anything to come in.

Before everything happened, Emma also ensured that the place was regularly visited by priests and mages to ensure that no wraiths rose and Kerrass would go down there at least once per visit.

I had dreaded the thought that someone might have desecrated the place when everything was going on, but if anyone had, the place had been well cleaned up.

I examined the plates that were already there.

For the uninitiated, in our part of the world, the corpse goes in head first so that if the body does get animated by something then it will struggle to get out. I mean, that never happens without obvious external stimuli but even so… The fear and the superstition is always there. But then the grave is sealed up with a foot plate. As well as the usual name and date things, there is often something there to symbolise the person that lies in the grave itself and I examined the ones that had come before. As a family, we had kind of decided that these pictures should symbolise how we prefer to remember the dead.

My Grandfather and Mother had been here for some time. Grandfather… Father's Father I mean, was portrayed as a man who had been a farmer and had grown that into a merchant empire. He was a nobleman setting aside his rich overcoat and jewelled chain in order to take up a farming tool of some kind from an unseen person.

I never asked Father what he had meant by it when he had ordered that plate. I suspect some kind of joke at my Grandfather's expense because as far as I know, there was little to no love lost between the two.

Grandmother's plate was just how I remember her. A short woman, slightly given to the rotund but dressed in the finest silks and jewellery. She was also mixing something in a bowl with vigorous movements. She was looking at the observer with a look of conspiracy. Having seen this scene many times, she was just short of offering the observer a lick of the cake batter smeared spoon.

I remembered talking to Mark about how we were going to portray Father. I remember that more than I remembered the picture itself.

"He was a hunter," Mark said. "He was always happiest in the saddle with a falcon on his wrist and a hound between the horses hooves."

"He should look up," I agreed. "I remember him always being happier when he had spotted his prey, or an opportunity or something."

"It was all the same thing," Sam had said. "Whether it was his quarry, a merchant deal or an errant child that was stealing another biscuit. He was always happiest when he had seen something no-one else had seen."

The three of us had laughed and the dwarven smith that specialises in this kind of thing nodded and made some notes.

The eventual result was of just that, a man on horseback with a falcon just taking flight and the hound at his feet just turning as it scented something. Father was leaning forward, eager to start the horse forward and towards its prey. Father's face was hungry. The face was younger than I remembered and I wondered when I had last been down here to pay my respects.

Edmund's plate was something Mark had chosen for himself. Of all of us, it was only Mark that had any fond memories of the eldest son of Lord and Lady Coulthard. And it showed a man that I hardly recognised. I remembered Edmund as an oily, handsome thin man with a goatee who always had some obscenely beautiful but classless thing on his arm that he had brought home to scandalise Mother and outrage Father. When he died he was gaining weight and had expanded his beard to hide his double chin. And he was going bald.

The footplate depicted a man sitting behind a table in, presumably a tavern. It was a man happier than I had ever seen Edmund being. He was dressed well but the ties at his neck were undone and hanging loosely, his waistcoat was unbuttoned and his legs were stretched out in front of him. There were Gwent cards on the table in front of him with a half eaten chicken. He was raising a tankard in toast towards the viewer.

Mark told me it was Edmund as he was supposed to be. There was truth there to what Mark said. I could have liked the figure in the carving.

We had a cup of the funeral wine without saying anything. Emma and I exchanged glances and I nodded to the masons who came in to fit the footplates in place and Ciri came in with them. I didn't protest. She once declared herself our sister and asked me to be her brother.

Mother's plate depicted a beautiful young noble-woman who was in the process of fastening a symbol of the Eternal Flame around her neck.

I remember the portrait of Mother that Father had kept in his chambers and I remembered being startled at the beauty of the woman depicted. I suppose it's the place of a son to think of his mother as being beautiful but not in that way. So when I had seen that I had been given an insight.

This carving was based on that portrait. The woman was either getting prepared for the day ahead or getting ready to retire to bed. She was looking up at the observer with a small, shy smile. There was hope in that expression and it was all too easy to imagine that she had once looked at Father in that way.

I had not expected that one to affect me the most, but For a while there I could not stop the tears. There were many times that I disliked both my parents and there are colossal amounts of resentment that I still hold onto, but I would give anything, absolutely anything to speak to either of them again. I desperately want to be told that it's all going to be ok in only the way that a parent can.

Mark's was the easiest. Exactly the man that he was. When all of the ambition and learned prejudices and hatred had been stripped away. The carving portrayed a physically powerful man in a priest's robe, kneeling in prayer. He had been startled by the appearance of a group of children and he was happily tousling a youngster's hair and welcoming them to the prayer line.

I thought Mark would be proud of that.

Francesca's plate broke Ciri.

I don't know how the carver did it but it was just a standard portrait of Francesca. Hair done up in the latest style, there was a pendant around her neck. She looked beautiful but she was stifling laughter and was unable to keep that amusement from dancing in her eyes.

I could see the scenario in detail. She was sitting for a courting portrait. One of those portraits that would be sent out to would be suitors to attract proper suitors. Francesca was sitting there, having gotten herself all dolled up to look as beautiful as she could, something that she never found hard. But she could not help but be amused by the absurdity of the entire exercise.

I could see it. I could hear it. The echoes of her laughter were still in the air and someone, maybe the painter or our mother or a governess or someone had just admonished her to stay silent and to take this seriously.

Ciri collapsed next to the plate and bawled her heart out. I sat next to her and wrapped my arm around her while she wept. Emma joined us and Laurelen sat on the other side of Emma while Ariadne put her hand on my shoulder.

It took us a long time to recover from that moment.

But there was another plate to be put in place.

Even though she knew it was coming Emma shifted in discomfort as the masons put it in place. Ciri left before she saw it. I had had to ask her permission to have the carving done but even then, if she had seen it, she might have had to take steps.

Ariadne stared at it with a hard expression.

Sam stood there, looking out of the stone at us. He was the image of a Knight returned from a mission that someone had just handed a cup to. He was toasting the viewer, his hair plastered to his head. He was wearing a Redanian symbol.

Laurelen's face crumpled for a moment before her face hardened and she spat so that her saliva ran down his face. She turned and left. Emma said nothing, just touched my arm with a sad smile. I don't think she had even looked at the carving of Sam. She left to follow Laurelen.

Ariadne and I stood there for a long while.

"Fascinating." Ariadne said after a while as I stood there looking down at Sam's plate. "I would have thought that traitors and everything would be forbidden from having a place in the family crypt. Surely a family would want to expunge the shame."

Her tone was curious more than anything else.

"On the contrary. We have to keep the same close to us to remind us that it exists."

Ariadne nodded.

"How he should have been?"

"How he should have been." I agreed.

"You are a good man Freddie, and I love you very much" she said, touching me on the shoulder. "I will be outside."

I nodded. When I was sure she was gone, I bent down and used my sleeve to clean the carving of Laurelen's spit. Then I stood and nodded to the mason who was carrying a large chisel. With two large strokes, a gouge was carved across Sam's chest. I noticed that the carver avoided the Redanian crest though.

I found that funny.

Afterwards the word "Traitor" was carved crudely in the plate above Sam's name.

When that was done, the carver left, leaving me alone.

So that's it. Nothing else to say. This is the end of these chronicles as moving forwards, there are things that I am unable to discuss due to secrecy and privacy concerns. I hope that this is not the last that you hear from me. I am promised that life will slow down so that I can start returning to other things. Even if I can't see that light yet. So I want to return to academic work. When I was in Toussaint, Lady Yennefer threatened to teleport to wherever I was and scream until I started work again and that was a threat that Lord Geralt told me I shouldn't take lightly.

I miss those people that I have lost, including the Witcher that changed my life. I hope he is alright, wherever he is and if he is reading this. Come home Kerrass.

But other than that, I must now devote myself to those people that are still here. Especially the woman that I love.

I want to thank everyone reading this. I hope that you have learned something about this continent that we all share but if not, I hope that I have entertained you a little. All that I would ask is that you be nice to the other people that we share this continent with and respect those in a different station than you.

Thank you for reading.

Farewell.

(A/N:This is not the end, but Freddie does think it is. Don't worry, I will not leave you like this. Time jump epilogue to follow, then my farewell to the world. See you in the next chapter. And echoing Freddie, thank you for reading)