Harry Potter In The Witcher

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Triss looked at him in open confusion, her guard lowering slightly now that she had seen him drink. "I'm sorry," she said, finally taking a small, tentative sip of the wine herself. It was, as she had suspected, absolutely delicious. A fine Beauclair vintage, clearly. "I… I don't recall us ever meeting before."

"You don't?" the man asked, a strange, almost wistful expression on his face. "Oh well, perhaps I should have expected that.

You had been very disoriented at the time, and you had, after all, just had an extremely traumatic experience. Plus, I had to leave rather soon after you were stabilized as well," the man said, now seeming to almost talk to himself, lost in a memory.

"I… I don't think I follow," Triss said, her voice filled with confusion as she looked closer at the man, trying to place him. He did seem sort of… familiar, in a very vague, fleeting way, but she could not for the life of her say why.

"Hmm," the man mused, his green eyes studying her intently. "Maybe this will help.

When we first met, you didn't quite look like this. In fact, you didn't have any hair at all. You barely had much skin still stuck to your body, either.

You were covered in more severe burns and deep, ragged cuts than I had ever seen on another living person before, or since. Luckily," he added, his voice turning more clinical, more academic.

"They were all relatively fresh wounds. I had to take stem cells directly from your femur, replicate them extraordinarily quickly using a rather complex growth charm, and then magically reintegrate them throughout your entire body. It was, I must admit, one of the hardest, most demanding medical performances of my entire life. I think you could have legally been declared clinically dead, what was it… four separate times on my operating table? Dreadful, really. I kept shouting rather embarrassing, unprofessional things at you, like, 'I'm not going to lose you!' and 'Come on, woman, just breathe!'. Got a lot of very strange looks from the other healers, I can tell you."

The man finished his shocking, detailed account, and then, as if it were the most normal story in the world, he drank the rest of his wine in one long gulp before casually refilling his glass.

Triss could do nothing but gape at the man, her mind reeling in pure, unadulterated shock.

"You… you were the one who healed me?" she finally managed to yell, her voice shrill with disbelief as she shot up from her seat, her own glass of wine spilling, unnoticed, onto the snow-free ground.

The man looked up at her, a flicker of surprise in his own eyes. "Woah, calm down there," he said, his voice placating. "Man, you spilled the wine. That cost me quite a pretty coin, you know. Oh, never mind. Sit down, sit down, and I'll pour you another glass."

Triss, feeling a little light-headed, calmed herself as she slowly sat back down, picking up her fallen, now-empty cup.

"Now," the man continued, his tone once again calm and friendly, "to answer your question, yes. I was the one who healed you at Sodden Hill. Took five straight days of my absolute, undivided attention to do it, too. You were in a very bad way."

"I… I remember," Triss said quietly, her voice barely a whisper as the memories, the fragmented, nightmarish images of the battle, came flooding back. "The villagers at the field hospital… they told me they had no idea how I had possibly survived. They claimed that the 'Black Mage' had come out of nowhere and saved me. Though others, the more superstitious ones, seemed to think it had been some sort of… ancient forest spirit that had nursed me back to health."

"Well, I guess some of them were right, and some of them were wrong," the man said with a shrug. "I have, indeed, been known by the title of 'the Black Mage' on occasion. And 'Apollo' to some of the more poetically inclined folk I've helped."

Triss looked appraisingly at the man in a completely new, awestruck light. The legendary, almost mythical, Black Mage, right here, in the flesh. She could count the number of credible Mages on one hand who had ever even claimed to have seen him, let alone spoken to him.

"So, it's true then," Triss said, her voice still filled with awe. "I heard rumors that you had come to Sodden after the battle and started healing many of the wounded, but… I had dismissed it at the time as just a hopeful story."

"Indeed," he confirmed with a nod. "I healed who I could, for as long as I could, and then I headed out before the inevitable political nonsense started. Speaking of which," he added, his gaze turning more analytical, "I see you have healed quite well, for the most part. If you don't mind me asking, did the… the rather nasty scar on your upper stomach, did it ever fully heal?"

Triss looked down for a moment, a shadow of sadness crossing her face. "No," she said, her voice a little quieter now. "No, it's still there."

"Ah…" the man said, a look of genuine regret on his face. "I'm sorry to hear that. It had cut extremely deeply into you, and I also had to magically heal your intestines, your stomach, and part of your liver at almost the same time.

I don't know what you were hit with, but it had been a terrible, necrotizing curse." He seemed to be reminiscing, his mind back in that bloody, chaotic field hospital.

"It doesn't matter now," Triss said, shaking her head. "Regardless of the scar, I am… I am eternally thankful for what you did for me that day. Or… or those days, I suppose. If there is any way at all that I could ever repay you, please, do not hesitate to ask." Triss said to the man, her head slightly bowed in a gesture of deep, sincere gratitude.

He just waved her off, though, a dismissive, yet kind, gesture. "Think nothing of it," he said. "And I don't charge people for healing. It's not a commodity to be bought and sold.

So please, don't feel the need to try and 'get even'. You don't owe me a single thing." The man then stood up from his log seat.

Triss looked up at him in surprise. "Are… are you leaving already?" she asked, a pang of disappointment hitting her. She had hoped to talk with her mysterious savior a bit more, to ask him so many more questions.

"Yes, well," he said, his charming smile returning, "as I said, I only really came down to give you a bit of a rest stop from the storm before you reached Kaer Morhen. If you take up your previous rate of travel, you shall probably reach it in about forty-five minutes now." The man, she was just going to call him Apollo in her head, said.

"Wait," Triss said, a little confused. "I didn't say I was going to Kaer Morhen."

Apollo, or possibly Harry, as he'd told Geralt his name was, just looked at her as if she were a particularly simple-minded, though endearing, child. "There is, literally, nothing else except forests, mountains, and more snow in the direction you're currently going, Triss," he asked, his voice filled with gentle amusement. "Where else would you be going in the middle of a blizzard like this?"

Triss felt her cheeks grow slightly warm at that. "Ah," was all she could manage to reply, feeling a little foolish.

He just smiled at her, a kind, reassuring smile. "Have a safe trip, Triss," Apollo, or possibly Harry, said, as he started to walk away from the fire, giving her a casual, backwards wave over his shoulder. "And tell Geralt that Harry sends his regards."

"Thank you," she called after him, "and I will!" she said, as she watched him walk towards the edge of the magical dome and then disappear into the swirling, white sheet of the blizzard.

As she saw him disappear, it had just occurred to her, with a jolt of surprise, that the man had been wearing nothing more than a simple, thin-looking black top and some dark trousers.

What's more, he hadn't even bothered to put up a shield against the biting, freezing cold when he had left the dome. Interesting. Very, very interesting indeed.

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