A Scholar's travels with a Witcher

Hello.

My name is Kerrass of Maecht and I am a Witcher of the Feline, or Cat, school of Witchers. Anyone who refers to us as being from the Pussy school of Witchers will be throttled.

And by throttled, I mean stabbed.

By me

With my sword

Repeatedly.

So I am a Witcher. To borrow the famous phrase, this does not mean that I am a Witch, nor does it mean that I am a Witch-hunter. I am both a Witcher and I make my living by being a Witcher.

I am struggling to think of where to start with this whole thing.

Frederick, my hanger-on, has advised that I speak as though I am speaking to the group of people who he refers to as his “dear readers” or, depending on his mood, “Adoring Public”. He tells me that he has received letters from people that suggest that these essays of his are useful and well-received.

I am not sure I believe him.

The story of my life is a long and sordid one and were I to tell it in detail then Frederick and I would still be sat here this time next year and he would have worn down his quills, used up his ink and covered every spare piece of paper on this ship.

He has just smirked at me.

I know him well enough now that I can almost hear him saying something along the lines of “I'm game if you are,”

Arrogant little snot.

I say that with some rough affection of course as I'm aware that the “dear reader” might not be able to read my tone of voice nor appreciate my somewhat dusty sense of humour.

I'm told that a dry sense of humour is one of the symptoms of being mutated.

I realise that I'm procrastinating. This is not due to reluctance but is more to do with the fact that I don't really know where to start.

So let's start with my profession Being a Witcher.

But the problem starts there. What is a Witcher?

A Witcher is two things. It is both the name of my profession and my state of being. In the same way that a person might be an elf, a dwarf or a human. I am a Witcher.

But, as I say. It is also my profession.

So I shall take that line of things first.

Being a Witcher is, well it's a little boring if you want to know the truth. 98% of the time (yes I know what a percentage is. You have to be fairly well educated to understand alchemy and the Lore that is required to be a Witcher. Stupid Witchers tend to die really quickly.) you are looking for contracts or preparing for the fight itself. By which I mean tracking the monster, trying to identify the monster, interviewing the victims, trying to find out it's habits and so on. The other 2% of the time is filled by terror, adrenaline and fury.

But, if I've done my job right, it's actually not that scary. From careful observation you can tell which way a griffin is going to leap, what the habits of a ghost are and the difference in stench between a ghoul feeding ground and an Alghoul feeding ground (It's in the ammonia levels). So when you actually perform the hunt, you're fully prepared and it becomes more of an execution rather than a hunt.

Not that it isn't dangerous mind.

Some people might be saying, “Well can I be a Witcher then?”

By this definition, yes you can. However I have certain advantages that you do not. Which goes back to the physical or racial description again.

We also have a guild of sorts. But it might give you a common frame of reference for how you can tell a real Witcher from a fake.

Or if you prefer, how you can tell an amateur from a Professional

We wear medallions and have vertical pupils.

The different medallions denote which schools we come from.

The ones I know about are the Feline school (obviously), the Wolf school (who you will have heard of if you've read the works of Dandelion the poet regarding the famed “White Wolf” of Rivia), The Bear school (sometimes called the Ursine school), The Griffin school, The school of the Viper and the Manticore school.

As far as I know, these are the schools of the northern Kingdoms as well as the northern parts of Nilfgaard. There may be others though. I've never actually seen a Manticore Witcher and have only met a Viper Witcher in passing when very young and another more recently. There might be more schools from further south or over towards Zerrikania where I would be astonished if there wasn't some kind of “Dragon school” given how much they like their dragons over there.

.

This is harder than I first thought it would be.

Where was I?

Oh yes.

Witchering as a Profession

There are lots of terms for Witchers. Derogatory terms for us. We are called mercenary, freak, charlatan, thief, assassin, murderer and other such things that I won't mention.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of these things are true to one extent or the other.

I myself am less than entirely virtuous and there are things in my past that I am definitely not proud of. In my time, as well as hunting monsters, I've hunted people. I've been a bandit, Mercenary, Road Agent (Frederick has just looked at me strangely for some explanation. A road Agent is kind of like a professional bandit. You get given a target, a specific item or person that the employer wants you to steal from/kill as well as the time and route of their travel. You attack, take the stuff back to employer. Get paid and move on. Bandits set up camp in a specific spot and pray on passing travellers.). I've been an Assassin, a hunter, a body-guard and a guardsman.

I've managed to avoid soldiering though as my feelings about politics in general are not complimentary.

I have killed many people. I will not lie to you, or to any of the people who might read this. I am not a nice person and I would struggle to describe myself as a remotely good person.

I have killed men, women and children. I have crept through open windows and assassinated entire families in their beds. I've broken into buildings, barred the doors and marched through the entire place turning it into a red ruin with my sword.

There are dark truths about why I did these things. The first and most obvious one is that I did it because I was being paid.

The more uncomfortable reason is because I enjoyed it.

Frederick has just recoiled from me. He tried to hide it and tried to restrain that urge and I cannot say that I blame him for it, indeed it proves that he is a good person and a nice person and sometimes I find that I hate him for having that integrity that I lack.

I can justify my actions.

I can argue that I was simply being a Witcher, that a Witcher is supposed to kill monsters and that what I was doing was killing monsters. After all, why do we carry a Steel sword if not to kill people as well as magical beings?

The castle belonged to a man who, if his villages did not produce adequate goods for his liking he would kill two people. He would crucify an elder so that workers didn't have to stay at home to look after the elderly and then he would place a young person on a spike to be impaled so that care of the young would not be an excuse either. The rest of his family were killed to prevent any future rebellions or the possibility of the evil spreading through a bloodline although it is entirely possible that the client was just clearing the way for their own ambition.

But I didn't ask questions. I just wanted to be paid.

.

I've even tried to leave the path on several occasions. One time I made a ridiculous sum of money from a job and I bought an inn which got burned down around me by some men who were hired by my immediate local competition. I defended myself and my customers but when the ash had settled it seems that in fighting to protect myself and the people around me I had frightened a number of other people and I was forced to leave town.

I have been a merchant and a caravan guard.

I've supplied herbs and potions for a shop.

I do not have the patience for farming but I've made a fairly good living as a hunter before now.

I've also been married.

Twice.

The first time was the time where I bought that inn I mentioned. She was a nice girl and I sometimes still miss her although I can no longer remember her face. She died in the fire that ran me out of town about sixty years ago.

The second time was to a girl called Margaret. She fell in love with me at the age of fourteen and declared to all concerned that she was going to marry me.

Naturally I fled, with her parents blessings, understanding and well wishes.

When her father died two years later I received a message to say that Margaret had not forgotten me and was declining all other suitors until I returned. Her mother pleaded that I return and try to talk her out of it.

I did so but she held firm and she was growing into a fine young woman. The kind of woman that you would be proud to stand beside, mature for her age, kind, clever, funny and she had a knack for knowing when I wanted company and when I needed to be left alone. In the end I told her everything her mother wanted me to tell her. I tried to scare her, bore her and otherwise drive her off. But Maggie was clever enough to see through us both. It was one of the things I liked about her. In the end it was agreed that she should wait another two years until she was 18 after which she could do what she liked and her mother would give her blessing.

We married. I would spend the year working around that area before coming back and spending the Winter with her. But the truth of a Witcher's life got to her in the end. The truth that she wouldn't be able to have children broke her heart and she left me.

I had seen it coming for a while and we parted as amicably as we could. I was always welcome at her home when I stopped by. She married a widower and died in childbirth six years later.

.

.

Could you just?

I just need a minute.

.

So what's my perspective? How do I feel about, or what do I think about all of these things?

That's complicated.

By my reckoning I'm roughly 90-95 years old. I stopped counting some time ago and lost track so I don't know any of these things for certain but I guess that's what it is and it certainly feels about right.

But 90 years is a long time to be alive by anyone's reckoning and I am definitely not the same man I was when I left the Feline fortress on the path for the first time. What I thought then and what I think now are definitely two very different things. Now I think of some of the things that I have done and I am ashamed, appalled and disgusted, even though I can logically say why they all happened and what led me to that place.

If I think about it logically it can even be said that some of those disgusting things were not really my fault. I know that that sounds like an excuse and it is but it's also a truth that no-one exists separate from their circumstances. A man is taught how to think by their parents and their tutors and their masters and I am no different.

I was born, as I say, about 90-95 years ago in a village about three weeks ride north of Novigrad. Yes I am aware that my name is Kerrass of Maecht and Maecht is one of the regions of the Nilfgaardian empire nowadays but we were told to pick a name that sounds realistic but is also from a faraway place to make us sound more exotic. There is no point in looking for the village as it is no longer there and I suppose it was ruined by one war or another when I wasn't looking. The site is now wooded and unrecognisable. Even the Small river that my mother used to teach me to fish has been diverted some distance away to provide irrigation for some nearby fields.

It's peaceful there though. Sometimes I think that I might build a house there.

But then I remember that I wouldn't know the first thing about how to build a house and give up on the idea.

The village was not an entirely pleasant one to live in. I remember thinking that my mother was extremely beautiful and cannot disentangle that from my more grown up thoughts that every child thinks that their mother's beautiful. The memory is borne out by the fact that she had many children and my cynicism is that she was the town whore as there certainly weren't many women around.

The men cut down trees and shipped them off while the small number of women worked together to mind the children and cook a large meal for everyone. People would gather, out in the square or in one of the bigger houses to be fed as best they could to keep warm and entertain each other. I suspect the women would be passed around although I would often be put to bed before such things would start to happen.

I remember it as being an affectionate place, even though to modern eyes it must have been horrific. The atmosphere was full of men being men. Hard-drinking, hard-working and hard-playing. Fights were regular, injuries were as regular but there was never any bad blood. If someone wasn't pulling their weight then they were taken away in the night. The children would be told that “Uncle Ivor had gone away” but I suspect it's much more likely that he was taken into the woods and quietly murdered.

A Witcher recruiter came by from the cat school. Witchers were becoming a rarer sight by then although there were still plenty of monsters to go around and his arrival was viewed as an excuse for a bit of a party. At the time he did some work around the place as a village like ours certainly attracts the monsters and before he went he demanded payment. I'm only vaguely aware of the terms as I was too busy larking about in the rivers and the trees but the payment turned out to be a couple of lads to go and become Witchers.

I remember that we were all lined up in front of the Witcher wearing our best clothes which, for the majority of us, meant that they were the cleanest rather than the newest. He joked with the adults as they discussed our various virtues but knowing what I know now he must have just been making small talk.

In the end he walked along the line and stared into our eyes from so close a distance that it made me uncomfortable. Then he seized our hands, stuck a pin into a finger and applied the blood to a piece of orange paper. Once the blood had soaked in properly he would sniff it before tossing it away.

In the end he selected three lads including me. Some of the elders objected to one of them and I remember being hurt that not even my mother raised her voice in protesting that I shouldn't go.

Not that I wanted to stay you understand, being a Witcher sounded dreadfully exciting.

The Witcher lead us out, now leading his horse so that we all walked behind him.

.

I laugh because, no sooner had we got out of the village the mask fell from the face of the man. He shifted from a kind of genial uncle to a hard, distant, remote kind of man. I recognise now that this was his Witcher face that tends to be hidden from villagers that he wanted something from. A good hours march away from our home he sat us all down next to the river and sat facing us. I'll never forget what he said.

“My name is Tendril and I am a Witcher. It may come to pass that in the relatively near future you will come to hate the day that you and I ever met. I have chosen the three of you to be Witcher candidates as I believe that the three of you have what it takes.”

I remember that he spoke slowly and clearly, his gaze flickering from young pair of eyes to young pair of eyes, making sure that we all understood what he was talking about.

“Becoming a Witcher is hard. It hurts. It will probably kill you. But if you are determined? Work, train and fight hard? The three of you will make it past the trials and be given your swords and your medallions and you will take to the path. But make no mistake. You will not die in your beds. Your training will kill you, your missions will kill you, some random passer by will kill you when you least expect it. You will lie awake at night, your body a sea of pain from what we are doing to you, you will cry yourself to sleep at night due to the horror of the things that we will show you. You will beg us to stop torturing you and we will not stop.

“Ever.

“Until we think you are ready or until you are dead.

“I tell you these things now so that all three of you know this and will never be able to say that I lied to you. You will never be able to say that you were not warned about how hard it will be.”

He checked our eyes again to see if we believed him. He must have been happy with what he saw as he moved on. For my thoughts, I remember being scared but I also remember being determined to be ready, determined to fight.

“If, at any point you think you can't do what we tell you to do. If it becomes too painful for you to bear, the answer is simple.

“Quit.

“This is the first of your trials. The trial of choice.

“Once you pass through the trial of choice you will no longer be able to leave and if you try, we will find you and bring you back.

“Do you all understand?”

We all nodded earnestly.

“Do you all still want to become Witchers?”

We nodded again.

“Then let us being. Who wants to go first.” A smile came back then. Tendril was not a cruel man. He just did a necessary and unpleasant job. Truth be told he was kinder than many of my “uncles” to the three of us.

He told us to strip naked as he produced a razor-blade from his saddle-bags and set to shaving our heads before ordering us into the river to bathe using some herbs that he gave us as soap. When we came out he threw some white powder at us, front and back that stung our eyes and our freshly shaved scalps.

What was he doing?

Probably delousing us. We were undoubtedly filthy.

Then he gave us each a shirt and pair of trousers that were tied down with a leather strap. He was not harsh but he had no patience for wasted time. We piled our old clothes together and they were burnt, almost ritualistically.

Then our trials began even before we had seen a sword.

We ran behind his horse. He rode us hard. Never faster than we could reasonably go at a jog. But the pace was relentless. He stopped us often, insisted that we ate or drank before marching us on again. We travelled day and night, at night he would tie a lantern to the back of his horse so that we could see where he was and jog towards that light. When he let us sleep we would throw ourselves flat and be asleep almost immediately although it would only seem like seconds later before we would be roused again to continue on.

Truth be told though we ate better in those two weeks than we ever had at home and although exhausted, we could all feel the difference and before long we were jogging and moaning and joking and getting cross. At which time he increased the pace.

It took us about two weeks to get to the Feline keep, by which time the three of us were beyond exhausted into a strange kind of null-state that exists beyond that point. We moved like golems, only awake by habit as our bodies ached in places that we had never ached before despite our childhood having been fairly active. We were fed but we were far too tired for much more than to be thrown into a dormitory room where we all fell over onto the nearest unoccupied bed and slept.

Before I go much further I should say that Feline Keep is, or rather was, not really a castle or fortress at all. Those of you that have heard of Kaer Morhen from the bards tales will know that that place, ruined though it now is, was once a massive and terrifying edifice that attacking armies must have been terrified of. Feline keep is more like a series of caves and tunnels in a gorge where it looks as though the land had cracked. What little outside structure there is is to protect the approaches but they are little more than towers and some small walls. To find all the nooks and crannies to get in and out you need either a guide or a map and so it would have been a besiegers nightmare when it was devised as you would set up your siege-lines but defenders would burst out and attack your rear or your supply train before disappearing into the night and returning to the defence.

It was a dark place, full of walk-ways that we called “cat walks” where the older Witchers would watch us train and study which was how we spent our time. It was nearly always dark and we learnt to fight in almost pitch darkness. Sometimes we would be taken outside into blinding sunshine where we continued our training before bags would be put over our eyes and suddenly we were fighting in darkness again. We fought in pairs, one blind, one able to see, 2 on 1 with a combination of blindfolds. We fought drills were everyone was told to swing their swords in patterns and the trainee had to make it from one end of the hall to another.

As a result of the darkness, even before we were mutated we had learnt balance, we could see with our hands, our feet, ears, skin and nose. A gust of a breeze could tell you the size of the room and whether we were being attacked or not. I myself learnt to climb to the point that I could hang off a ledge by my fingertips and still be able to fight off an attack hanging 20 feet off the ground.

While blindfolded.

Injuries were common. Indeed they were expected but they didn't stop our training. If we were so injured that we couldn't move we would be drilled on our monster or Alchemy knowledge. If our arms and hands could move then we practised signs. Feet meant that we could run, or practice footwork or moving quietly.

To my shame, we were also taught to hate.

I don't know where it started, or who it started with. I was taught to hate because my tutors were taught to hate, same as they were taught to hate and so on.

But I think, now, all these years later, that I can guess why.

You see, one of the things that none of the Witcher schools seem to know about any more is how we all started. What was the basic intention behind Witcher schools. What was the organisation? How were they put together and so on?

We know that originally we were created to fight monsters. OK. Why us, why not any number of other possibilities that could have been used in the north that were available to a people that had harnessed magic?

One thing that we do know is that the schools are fairly well spread out. The Bear school was far to the north, North-West, up among the mountains. The Wolves make their den in the North-East, up in Kaedwen. We were around where Novigrad is now. The Griffin were further south of us, somewhere around the Yaruga river with the Viper school being in the area that was once around Central Nilfgaard and the Manticore where further south than that.

By anyone's estimation that is a good spread over a map which suggests that there was some form of planning in the placement of the schools but at the same time that is far from certain.

We also have a difference in method from once school to another.

We all have things in common. The two swords, silver and steel. The boxes full of potions, the signs and the lightish armour that means we won't be encumbered in confined places. We're all mutated in roughly the same way, eyesight, immunity to disease and poison, heightened metabolism, faster reflexes, quicker healing and so on. But after that things start to change. Not just our methods but also regarding our characters as well.

The Feline school is all about movement and flexibility with quick highly accurate cuts. We study where the arteries are, where the blood vessels are, where the weak points are. We are trained to strike with lightening speed and just enough force to do the maximum possible damage in those struck before moving away like, well, like a cat. We're also incredibly vicious and will use whatever tools that we have available to us to get the job done. We are one of the two schools that teach the use of a crossbow. The other school being the Bear school.

The Bear school are my favourite as they are almost the exact opposite of the cat school in looks and methods. Whereas the Cat school tends to produce slim, lithe and quick men. The bear school produces giants. Seven foot tall walls of muscle. Their swords and armour are bigger and heavier than anything that the other schools use. Some people argue that this makes them vulnerable against the faster monsters like Kikkimores or Arachnomorphs but to those people I tell this story.

Before things went sour between the schools they used to gather together to swap notes. You know, discuss the migratory patterns of the monsters, any new variations of existing creatures that required different methods and things. Swapping forging techniques and potion recipes that kind of thing. When I was an apprentice it seemed like an excuse for all the old men to get together and get drunk but now that I'm older it seems like it would be quite a good idea.

.

That ship has sailed though.

.

I never went to one as the practice had stopped by the time I had gained my medallion. But there was one time where the other schools sent their representatives to the Feline keep.

The Bear had sent one Witcher, he was never introduced to us but he struck me as a quiet, taciturn man but for two occasions. The first was on one of the opening nights, I think it was the first time all the attendees had gathered and the hosting school (us) were throwing them a party. None of us are experts in any kind of artistic display but I remember laughing at the jokes, singing along with the songs and enjoying getting slightly tipsy with the ale that old Nayhan, the master of Apprentices, had allowed us that night.

But then, towards the end of the evening. The bear stepped forwards. In his hand was a beautiful harp. It wasn't golden nor did it have any other ornamentation that I could see. But the careful way that this huge man carried it suggested that it contained great wealth. He sat on a stool and started to play. Then he started to sing.

I am unashamed to admit, sat here now that that song moved me.

You have to understand that we were all still relatively young men. I myself was maybe fourteen by this point and we had all been taken from our homes rather abruptly. The other members of the school were our families now. The keeps were our home and every single man in that hall had that one shared experience. From the robed and cowled Griffin, to the grim-eyed Wolf, this was the one thing that we all had in common and there he was. This hugely muscled, frankly ugly human being with a face covered in scar tissue, his beard patchy around the scars, sat on his stool with his beautiful sounding harp and he sang with a startlingly pure voice about the joy's of coming home after a long journey.

The hall was silent after he had finished as we all came back from wherever the song had transported us to before applause began slowly and stole it's way across the room.

The other time was during training. We were outside playing this game. The idea was that there were wooden approximations of various monsters and targets. What they were were shells that contained fairly fine sawdust and they were designed to be at their weakest where the monster was weak so that if we struck the wrong part of the monster then the wood would be scarred but if we struck the correct part of the creature then the sawdust would begin to flow. So a human target would be weak around the neck, armpits and groin. The object of the game was to empty the target of sawdust as quickly as possible. I had never seen it done. There was always some sawdust left in the dummy and we would be told to do it again with the more times the dummy was struck, the more sawdust would fall out. There was also a time limit of thirty heart-beats that Nayhan would call out, being an even bigger distraction. So the real test was how many times you could hit the dummy accurately.

Now the bear, I find it shameful that I can't remember his name, had come out into the daylight and he was maintaining his equipment. He sat with a cup of ale next to him as well as a cloth, brush and several small tubs of grease and cleaning fluid. First he went over his armour which looked massively heavy to me. The heaviest armour I had seen a Cat Witcher wear was thick boiled and hardened leather with some small patches of chain-mail around those weak points I mentioned earlier (groin, neck, armpits). This stuff was made of small plates of steel attached to a chain-mail shirt that was made to be attached to a long leather coat. He would peer at the armour, every link of the mail, every plate, ever stitch and strap. Even the slightest blemish was scrubbed, cleaned and polished. It took him hours while we trained. Then he put the same amount of effort into his swords which were half again as long and wide as ours were.

The trick to teaching young men to fight is to balance frustration against improvement. We had spent hours at these things and yes we had improved but we still weren't getting it right according to Nayhan's experienced eye. In the end, an urchin who was a year younger than me and was made of wiry muscle piped up to the huge bear.

“Do you do this exercise Master bear? How many times can you hit the target in the time limit”

The bear scowled while still scrubbing at his sword.

“Do as your tutor instructs, boy. My school is not yours.” His harsh and gravelly voice was ins stark contrast to his singing voice.

“Aww but please.” The lad's voice turned scornful. “I bet you can't do it either. Cat's are better than bears anyway.”

I'm possibly giving you the wrong impression here. The urchin wasn't any better or worse than the rest of us. He was just tired, grouchy and wanted to fight something. Plus it was a good ploy. We had already been told how much we were supposed to hate the Bear school (Actually not as much as many of the others. They weren't as stuck up as the Griffins, nor as arrogant as the Vipers and certainly not as filled with superiority as those cursed Wolves. Arrogant pricks that they were thinking they're better than anyone else) and as such the urchin was clearly trying to trigger Nayhan's lecturing response in an effort to tell everyone how much better we were than the bears. There was another possibility that there would be some violence between the two men which was even more exciting.

The Bear sighed and looked over at Nayhan who was grimacing in a way that I learned later was him trying not to laugh.

The huge man lumbered to his feet. Slung his sword on his back and rumbled over to the dummy. He stood at the starting point and took a while to stretch his limbs and settle himself. At the time I thought he was delaying us which made me as cross as the next apprentice. Now I think he was stretching out the show.

He looked over at Urchin and said “Watch closely.” before nodding at Nayhan.

Nayhan began the count.

Which stopped at two.

The Bear had drawn his sword and struck the dummy at the top of it's head which had split the target down the middle. The man then twisted his sword and withdrew it from the mess of the dummy spilling saw-dust out as it came.

It was obvious that there was no sawdust left and that we would need a new dummy.

“I only need to hit the dummy once, boy. Now mind your master.”

The bear lumbered back over to his cleaning equipment and got back to work.

At the time I was furious that this bear had come in and mocked our practices and that fury was fed by others but now I look back and wonder if that lumbering beast of a man was trying to tell us something.

I never met him again.

The Griffin we saw as aloof and arrogant. To be fair we saw everyone as arrogant. They would turn up to these meetings un-armoured wearing robes and cowls similar to the way monks dress. I never saw one of them hunt but they would apparently trust to their signs a lot more than the rest of us and their signs were also incredibly powerful. When they did wear armour it was bright and almost gaudy, bright greens and golds announcing their presence to the world so that all could see them. I have heard it suggested that the Griffin were closer in attitude to knights and churchmen than they were to the rest of the Witcher schools. They vanished from the face of the Northern Kingdoms rather abruptly and we never found out why. One year there were plenty of them out on the path and the next...

Nothing.

Not bumping into a Witcher is not uncommon so we didn't notice at first but then gradually it came to be proven that they had gone. I don't know where they went although I suspect that the then Sorcerers council had something to do with it and not necessarily in a sinister way. The Griffin put all the energy that I put into my sword work into their signs which, and I cannot overstate this, were incredibly powerful. In researching better versions of these signs they must have come to someone's attention and then be gobbled up. The attempts of Vilgefortz to recruit Witcher Geralt are well-known to readers of Dandelions saga's so such recruitment efforts must have come up to the Griffin as well. I just wonder if the Griffin felt they could do more good as Wizards rather than Witchers.

It is seductive, the prospect of putting down your swords and knowing that you don't have to pick them up the following day.

Anyway.

I know next to nothing about the Manticore except that we derided them for copying our methods. They were stereotyped as wearing little more armour than a light leather jacket and as such must have depended on speed and agility, same as us. I never met one so I can't comment.

The Viper school. I only one met them more recently and I have only ever met two of them. They were hounded to extinction by the old policies of The Emperor of Nilfgaard. It is possible that the new Empress will relax those policies and help rebuild the school but I think it will be too late. Of the two men that I met, one died, caught up in those machinations that surrounded the Loc Muinne disaster.

It was said, correctly, that the Viper school have forgotten more about Alchemy than the rest of us have ever known and I have seen this to be true. It was a Viper who designed the twist and shake Grenades that we used on those Nekkers way back when. It was even said that the Viper Witchers had discovered a way to forge steel and silver in a way that could embed oils and poisons in the

metal meaning that they never had to oil their blades.

Heh.

They also share the harshest and most brutal sense of humour that you would ever know. They were both the kind of men who would hurl an insult at you to get you back into the fight and clap you on the shoulder when it was done. Hard men, brutal men.

I liked both of them and regret the one's death.

No I won't say their names.

We were taught to hate them because they kept important knowledge from us.

Then there was the Wolf.

.

.

Ah the Wolf.

.

.

We hated each other the Cat and the Wolf. I don't know why but we hated them with a fierce and undying passion. I wish now that I had asked Nayhan why we hated them as now I find myself wondering. The cat had done more than enough to deserve to be hated but the wolf?..

They are arrogant certainly, sure of themselves? Definitely. Aloof? Secretive? Proud? All of these things but. I say these things about them and I examine myself in a mirror and see the same things reflected back at me.

There are rumours of course. It is rumoured that the Cat school was actually an offshoot of the Wolf and that in leaving we stole some of their mutagens. Defective ones as it turned out and we hated them for the defects and they hate us for the theft.

I don't believe this. The elven heritage requirement of the Feline mutagens seem to suggest otherwise.

I wonder if we hated them because they hated us and by my time it was so bad that no-one knew

why.

The other rumour is that well.....

.

.

It was a Cat Witcher that guided the Mob to Kaer Morhen that all but destroyed that school. The great keep is a ruin now and every time I go there I find it incredibly melancholy to see the once proud towers lying in ruins, their bricks strewn at the bottom of the gorge.

I don't know if that was true. But looking back it was the sort of thing that we would have done and it shames me. But inherited guilt is not the worst of it.

There was a tournament organised.

I wasn't part of the organising as I had only been on the path a few years by that point and as such I was still seen as a green novice. But the idea was that the Witcher schools would send their best and their brightest to a central location and have a tournament. I think it was some kind of attempt to bring the schools closer together due to recent events (The Kaer Morhen massacre). If that was the idea it was a spectacularly bad one. Competitiveness is not a good method towards making friends. Personally speaking we would have done a lot better if we'd all just been locked in a room, had our swords removed and fed a load of beer. The casualties would have been a lot lower.

I'll never forget it as it haunts me to this day but not for the reason that you might think. The first night of the tournament when all the delegations had turned up we had been told that we were going to deal with the cursed Wolven school once and for all. We were woken up, we strapped swords to our backs and used the skills we had learned over those years of training as we stole over to the Witcher camp and started slitting throats.

It's as simple and horrific as that.

But what makes my skin crawl with shame now as I look back on that night. The thing that keeps me awake is not that I committed those murders. But that I enjoyed it. That I laughed afterwards with friends and comrades.

We laughed at the magnificent prank that we had played on our hated enemies.

I absolutely understand why people hate and fear us.

We deserve it.