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He was no stranger to odd occurrences.
Of course that was the case. Geralt was a witcher, so that much was a given. He’d accepted contracts for the weird and the outright ridiculous in his time. It took a lot to surprise him, given that he’d taken enough contracts with some sort of twist to them to end up half-expecting to be surprised whenever there was even the slightest sliver of an opportunity for ambiguity.
The world was just like that.
This, however had managed to throw him for a loop, and it wasn’t even part of the contract.
Well. Not technically. But the lord of the manor was the one who’d wanted the griffin slain, and Geralt had - not, to his mind, unreasonably - expected that the manor would still be there when he’d done it.
Rather, he’d expect the manor to still be in one piece, but the damn thing was in ruins, stone walls crumbled, pieces of its inside furnishings scattered across the moor, rotten and withered as if they had been there for hundred of years.
And the bones.
They looked as if they’d been there for a veritable age, given the discolouration and the texture, and the flowers that had sprouted their way through them in their thousands, growing up through cracks in the yellowed bone, torn through the faded, rags that had a few hours ago been the livery of the manor’s various occupants.
It was odd - he knew the curse wasn’t on him, the village still visible and bustling with life in his periphery, the same people who had been there this morning going about their business and gossiping about mundane things as though nothing had happened to the manor at all.
Time had passed as it usually did, was the point. Whatever had happened, it was concentrated on the manor.
There was no noise around to be heard, beyond the ambience of nature and the eerie thumping of the faintest sliver of... Something, something unnatural. It was the kind of low, slow rhythm, so utterly out of place, that might accompany a slow ballad, but certainly not the sound of something natural. Not the sound of something that lived. It resonated across the moor regardless, the only indication beyond the circumstances themselves that something was not right.
Geralt was careful as he picked his way through the flowers adorning the field, not wanting to disturb anything that might be of importance.
He thought he could make out the different servants he’d seen scurrying through the halls - there was one man who’d had a deep scar over his eye whose skull Geralt was reasonably sure he was able to identify, with forget-me-nots sprouting through the line where the bone had once been split.
The irony was not lost on him.
It was all withered, decaying - the corpses and the building, the furniture alike. Whatever had happened, it had been ruthless to the manor, mimicking the onslaught of time to the point where, had Geralt not known that the manor had in fact been standing that morning, he wouldn’t even have guessed that anything other than the usual decay that the abandoned things of the world usually experienced was at play.
A bed, royal blue sheets frayed and withered, fragile, wooden posts rotten and deformed. One of them snapped. Pillows musty.
Scattered. Not flung, there was no sign in anything’s position that it had been travelling at any kind of speed - everything looked like it was placed there, by design - as though it had simply been put asides, having been in the way elsewhere.
An oven, the charred remains of what must have been bread still crumbling within it. It must have been cooking when whatever had done this occurred. A tub, still filled with water, water that had been replenished by rain. The stablehand’s bones arranged around a tack.
It was.
It was so eerily perfect.
The near-silence that stretched around the moor - the moor that had once been thrumming, alive with the manor’s sounds not that morning - enough that Geralt could, beneath the wind and his own footfalls, hear the sounds of the village in the distance.
The manor was gone, rotten into the ground.
But.
A coppery scent, blood, so out of place amongst the withered remains.
And, crescendoing, centred in the last stall, the eerie thumping, resonating far too slowly... It was there. Odd. It wasn’t where Geralt would have guessed its epicentre would be - with such an elaborate curse, he’d have expected a place of some significance to be its origin, perhaps an altar - but there it was.
And it was accompanied by the quietest little huffs of breath.
Fuck.
Geralt drew his sword, silver glinting in the cold, morning sun, and advanced on the stall, steps tentative. Technically, this wasn’t a contract, and given that he didn’t know what the fuck had happened anyways - well. He should, by all rights, leave well enough alone, but whatever this was, it had destroyed a whole manor with seeming ease. He needed, at least, to know what it was. Just as assurance, that it wouldn’t do the same thing elsewhere.
He’d been told, on occasion, that he was a bit too risk his own hide for little reward, but if he was supposed to protect people, he might as well do that. What with how often he tended to get stiffed on payment, it wasn’t that much of a net loss anyways.
Last winter, back at Kaer Morhen, he’d said as much, and they’d laughed and called him naïve. Geralt had bristled at that - he was twelve years on the Path, hardly new to it - but in the end, it didn’t matter. A witcher was a witcher, a monster was a monster. There wasn’t as much room for philosophy in that as the more jaded witchers liked to pretend.
He stepped, light as a cat, towards the stall.
He could hear the huffing of breath under the eerie pounding, smell blood - congealing, a few hours old - and the faint, salty scent of tears... Tears?
Geralt peered, as best he could, into the stall.
There shouldn’t be tears.
There shouldn’t.
Fuck.
There were remains in the stall, of course there were - but not a horse’s. The rotten garments hinted at what the heavy golden rings confirmed - it was the lord of the manor, the Viscount who’d paid him for the griffin that morning, who lay there.
And a picture began to form.
Slightly less hesitantly, but no less softly, Geralt stepped towards the stall, and there it was.
The source of the slow, thumping beat, shaking and curled up in the corner - it definitely wasn’t what Geralt had fucking expected, but the pieces were sliding into place.
A small boy sat, shaking and curled up in the corner, face pressed to his knees, his heartbeat ringing louder than it should, slower than it should, just behind the remains of the man who had been the Viscount. The curse, the spell, originated with him - it had to. It was the blood thrumming through his veins that kept pace to the silence of the moor.
Even if that hadn’t been a dead giveaway, the fact that he was the only living remnant of the manor’s past in the dead expanse of the moor only cemented it.
The boy looked up, the smeared, dried blood tracks from his nose to his lips telling Geralt everything he needed to know even before scanning for the bruises. One around his eye, his neck - undoubtedly his shoulder and arms too, under his silk clothing, maybe his abdomen.
Grey-blue eyes, like a storm at sea, locked with Geralt’s.
“You alright?”
The boy whimpered, and Geralt belatedly realised he still had his steel sword in his hand.
Shit. That was hardly the impression he wanted to give.
“I’m not going to hurt you.”
Telegraphing every movement, making sure that he was being as non-threatening as possible, Geralt sheathed his sword.
He could almost hear Vesemir yelling at him, letting know exactly how stupid he was being, sheathing his weapon, how he was falling for the trap... But gods damn it, the faint hum of his medallion betrayed exactly what the child was - the ambient, idle warning an indicator of his nature and nothing else.
A witcher was a witcher, a monster was a monster, but sometimes, damn it, a boy was just a boy.
And if this one meant harm, he wouldn’t have been crying over everything. The tear tracks had long-since dried, but Geralt could taste the salt on the air.
“Are you alright?”
Maybe it was the tension, maybe it was the, who knew, the sword-wielding, cat-eyed mutant witcher that had just walked up to him, but the boy’s whimper turned to a full-blown sob, choked down the best he could.
He’d take that as a no.
The boy was fucking crying on him - this was not a situation Geralt was prepared to deal with.
Especially when that boy had just made an entire manor crumble to the fucking dust when he felt threatened.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said again, holding gloved hands up in surrender, talking and moving as he did with Roach when she was scared - it was a tactic that worked with skittish creatures, skittish people, sue him - trying to be reassuring. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
He needed the boy to know he wasn’t going to hurt him, he’d say it till he was blue in the face. Partially because he wanted the kid to be reassured that he was safe, and partially because Geralt didn’t feel too inclined to bear witness to a repeat performance of whatever the boy had done.
“I’ll stay over here,” Geralt said, crouching down where he stood, a way away from the kid. “I won’t move unless you say I can. Okay?”
The boy choked another sob, and let out a shaky breath. “You promise?”
“I promise.”
“You really won’t hurt me?”
Geralt hummed. “I won’t.”
“But you’re-”
“I’m a witcher,” Geralt said. “I kill monsters. Not little boys.”
At this, the boy choked up again.
Fuck, Geralt was bad at this.
“But I- I-”
“Did you want to kill them?”
“No! I- I just-”
“He was going to hurt you.” It was a statement, not a question - it was obvious what had happened. Geralt inclined his head minutely towards the skeleton between them. There was no room for misunderstanding.
“I- I’m sorry,” the boy babbled, tears trickling down his face. “I didn’t mean to, I just-”
“It’s normal. To lash out when threatened.”
And it was - Geralt could hardly count the times he’d done the same thing in his youth. It was something of a fixture among the youths at Kaer Morhen to Aard first and ask questions later - there were always a few trainees known for their less-than-merciful tendencies towards their peers.
The boy looked at him, wide-eyed. He was still scared - obviously - but less so, as if he were hesitantly realising that the big, scary witcher was perhaps genuinely not about to change his mind and run him through with his sword.
Geralt supposed that was a good thing, but he didn’t know for sure. He’d never dealt with a destructive, magic child before.
“Do you have anywhere to go?”
Shit. Wrong question. The boy was tearing up again.
“Can you tell me your name?”
That was a better question, apparently - that was one that was easy to answer. “Julian. Julian Alfred Pankratz.”
“Fancy,” Geralt said, letting the tiniest smirk creep onto his face - something Julian notice right away.
“Are you laughing at me?” he demanded voice less wobbly now that he had something to distract himself with - or so the witcher assumed, he’d never much been good at understanding children, even as a child.
“Never.”
“You better not be.”
Geralt floundered for a moment, before speaking again, trying to articulate his thoughts without alarming Julian. “You can’t stay here. In the stables. There’s no supplies.”
Julian’s lip trembled, and fucking hell, Geralt was not cut out to be dealing with children. Especially not children who could decimate entire manors when provoked.
“You’ve got no food or water. You’d starve.”
“I’ve got nowhere to go,” Julian blurted, and Geralt kept his gaze level and even.
“Nowhere at all?”
“I don’t know! My father never told me where anyone else lived! Not my uncle, not his friends, and they don’t like me, and what if- what if?”
Yeah, Geralt was in over his head here. Not that he was going to admit that to the child.
“Who’s you’re uncle? You’re family’s nobility, I can find him.”
“But what if I-” Julian twisted his hands.
He was nervous. Scared that he would hurt them. Not an unreasonable worry, all things considered.
“We can talk to him,” Geralt invented, because he had no fucking clue how to deal with a potential time-bomb of a child either, but he needed to get him to someone who could take fucking care of him, because like fuck was he abandoning a child. “See if he can find out how to help you not... Do this again.”
He half-expected Julian to start crying again, but to his surprise, the boy pressed his lips together and nodded, a determined set to his jaw.
Fuck.
He’d just made the child his responsibility, hadn’t he? And he hadn’t even been paid for the griffin - yes, there were extenuating circumstances, but it was still annoying - but fuck it. He could get the damn kid to his uncle, who might, in fact, know exactly why his brother’s son was creature enough that a witcher’s medallion would pick up on it.
“Alright,” Julian said. “We’ll go to my uncle. He lives in Kerack, he’s the royal instigator.”
Geralt tried very hard not to let his utter dismay show on his face.