Work Text:
Geralt would have expected this discovery somewhere significantly more, well, significant.
Perhaps in the Blue Mountains, in the ruins of Kaer Morhen. Or in the ashes and rubble of Kaer Seren, burned for its library and the content within. Even in the personal library of some king or noble, preserved carefully behind glass.
Instead, he finds the parchment tucked away behind volumes of beastiaries and spellbooks, in the home of some long-dead mage or other in the ass-end of Toussaint.
He hadn’t even been hired to come this far inside, just to clear out the centipede nests in the courtyard so the land could be repurposed or sold, but one of his fatal character flaws is curiosity, so here he is, in a personal lab behind two fake bookshelves, staring down at a piece of parchment even older than he is. Maybe older than Vesemir was, cracked and yellowing and seemingly preserved only by the ambient stasis charm on all of this mage’s bookshelves.
The writing on it is faint even to a Witcher’s eye, which would explain why it’s tucked haphazardly in the back of the bookshelf rather than being pored over by whichever mage discovered it. The words are more easily read by the impressions the quill left than by any ink that might remain. Likely the page was written off as a novelty, a collector’s item based solely on age rather than any of its contents.
The handwriting on it is spidery and hard to parse, providing an extra layer of challenge on top of the faded ink. The spelling changes from word to word, the grammar is inconsistent, and there are some terms that he wouldn’t recognize if he hadn’t read every bestiary and treatise on Witchers in the library back-to-front several times over after his second round of mutations, desperately searching for a reason that he had lived twice when so many of his brothers hadn’t even survived one.
Slowly, though, he makes his way through the script. Dhampir. Endraga. Chort. Troll. Alchemical equations beside them - distillation percentages, ratios, administration timing.
This is a recipe for making Witchers. And judging by the age of the parchment, it might be The Recipe, the first ever notion of creator protectors for the world after the Conjunction.
His first instinct is to crumple the yellowed parchment in his hand and cast Igni, and watch the last remnants of the first Witchers burn to ashes. His second instinct is to drop the thing like it’s burned him, which, given how brittle the page feels under his fingers, might make it crumble to dust anyway.
His third, which he gives into, is to blink, then read it again, and again.
Any memories he has of his Trials are clouded, fuzzy at the edges with pain and fear and grief. But he has enough of them to pick out major differences. This recipe appears to have the Grasses and the Dreams combined, one big melting pot of mutations instead of several smaller rounds of them.
Idly, Geralt wonders if they were split for mortality reasons or as a result of divides between factions of mages and druids. Not that it mattered, in the end.
He’s also fairly sure that some of the changes were made for scarcity reasons - there aren’t enough leshens in the Continent to provide enough bark for the generations of witchers that passed through the Wolf school alone. Sirens, while plentiful enough, are only found on Skellige, and their fresh vocal cords wouldn’t make the trip back to Kaedwan before rotting into wet slime.
The skeleton of a recipe is here, though. And with enough samples from current Witchers and a skilled enough alchemist, the mutagenic recipe flowing through their veins - or, Melitele willing, an even better, less lethal recipe - could be synthesized.
“Fuck,” he rasps out loud. “Fuck!” He yells, louder, when that doesn’t seem like enough.
And maybe, if it was just him in a sunny vineyard in Toussaint, he could put this recipe down and walk away. He’s all but retired, after all, having seen Destiny’s bidding to the bitterly cold end. He’s probably not even a skilled enough alchemist to do the work necessary to revive the recipe.
But he knows one.
Three thorough readings are enough for any Witcher to perfectly commit any ordinary passage to short-term memory, though this one is anything but. He knows that if he destroys this here, never speaks of it again, it will sit in the back of his mind forever, nagging at him like a stranger just at the edge of Yrden, asking what if, what if, what if ?
What if - a keep full of brothers again, like the old days? Coming home to a feast, constantly refreshed until the snows had closed out the mountain passes for good, tables laden heavy with fresh-caught boar and White Gull and all the other foods too poisonous or too dangerous to acquire for anyone else? A training yard ringing with dozens of swords clashing together, lightning-fast, and the heavy thump of Aard and the clear, ringing, bell of Quen?
“Fuck,” he says, one more time, just for good measure. Then, he takes two of the other rare books without bothering to read the titles, carefully positions the page between them, and binds the bundle in a spare bit of cordage before gingerly placing it on top of his pack.
The last time she saw this much nervous energy in one room, Ciri thinks, is before the White Frost itself fell upon Kaer Morhen.
She’s fairly sure nothing so catastrophic is on the wind. Nobody’s tried to kidnap her or kill her in recent memory, and that usually precedes those kinds of world-ending events.
Letho, Kiyan, and Gaetan also don’t seem like they quite know what’s going on, but Kiyan and Gaetan are playing some complicated game with a look of string wound around their fingers and Letho’s paying a fair amount of attention to them, so whatever it is, they can’t be too involved.
Geralt, on the other hand, is deathly still at the head of the table. His eyes are glazed over, fixed doggedly on a spot in the ceiling, but every line of his body screams tension.
Eskel’s glancing at him worriedly. It’s a bad sign when Eskel’s rattled enough to show it. It’s an even worse sign that Yennefer’s not in the room for him to exchange glances with. Something big is happening, and it’s bad enough that Yennefer doesn’t even want to be involved.
Geralt’s head snaps towards the door a moment before Lambert and Aiden tumble in. Lambert’s got his usual cocky smirk on, in the middle of some remark about Geralt scaring B.B. enough to make the man jog, but at the look on Geralt’s face, his teeth snap together with an audible clack.
After a moment, Eskel lays a hand on Geralt’s shoulder. “That’s all of us, Wolf.”
There’s another moment of silence. Then, faster than Ciri’s eye can track, Geralt has produced a piece of parchment and slapped it on the table, fingers spread widely over it like it might fold itself into a bird and fly away of its own free violition. He’s still not looking at anyone, eyes fixed into the middle distance.
Ciri looks around for clues. The parchment looks almost blank, to her, with maybe a few faint words here and there, and it would be too far away to read for her anyway, tucked into the corner like she is. None of the other Witchers seem to recognize it on sight, but Gaetan has tucked away his loop of string and Lambert’s eyebrow has raised to an impressive height.
Well, get on with it, she can almost hear on the tip of his tongue. Or maybe it’s on the tip of hers.
By his side, the leather of Geralt’s glove creaks with how tight his fist is clenched.
“This,” he grates out, “Is the original recipe for Witcher mutagens.”
He finally looks at her. He’s got cat-slitted eyes. Witcher eyes. Eyes she’s resigned herself to never seeing on a new face, never seeing on her own face, and good riddance, if you’d asked any of the Wolves, even her, before today.
“What in the thrice-damned fuck ,” Lambert says, deceptively mildly, “Do you expect us to do with this?”
“Nothing. Something. I don’t know,” Geralt breaks her and sits down heavily, hands sliding down the table to grip its edge. The wood groans, mildly, with how hard he’s gripping it.
Aiden puts a hand on Lambert’s sword arm. There, too, the leather creaks ominously. “Say what you mean to.”
There’s a moment as Geralt visibly gathers his words. “We made a Choice,” Geralt says slowly. “Each of us. To become Witchers. But it wasn’t much of one. Become a witcher or be turned out, half-mutated, to die in the wilderness.”
He gestures, emptily, at the page. “This is our chance to make a real Choice. To let us, and everything we stand for, go extinct, or to bring back an Order. To make more brothers.”
Lambert whips around and punches the wall behind him. The force of the blow shakes dust loose from the rafters even as he turns back around and hisses, “Fuck the Order. And fuck you too, if you’re actually thinking of this!”
“Our work’s never done,” Eskel puts in, a crease between his eyebrows. “But I’m not sure this finishes it.”
“Humans need us. Need more of us?” Kiyan rasps.
Lambert snorts, but Aiden elbows him in the side. “Doesn’t seem like they’d welcome more of us,” Gaetan mutters darkly.
“Exactly!” Lambert shouts, throwing his hands in the air. “Us old geezers’re treated enough like shit wherever we go, can you imagine if some bright-eyed new fopdoodle traipsed up to ‘em with a ghoul head?”
“But we’re none of us getting any younger,” Aiden retorts. “We can’t do this forever-”
Lambert brings his hands back down onto the table with a thud, and that seems to be the signal for a verbal brawl to properly begin. Each Witcher seems to be holding three or four conversations at once, bouncing from person to person and argument to argument until the room sounds like it’s filled with fifty people, and Ciri’s head spins with the speed of the cross-talk.
Then, with a swoop in her stomach, like the floor falling out from under her, she realizes what they don’t know that she does, deep in her bones: the very foundations of the debate are flawed.
“They’re dying out,” she says suddenly. Her voice cuts through the cacophony. “The monsters. I’ve been to every corner of the Continent, and some places beyond. There’s plenty of work for a couple of Witchers - a wraith of a spurned wife, a clump of drowners in a remote stream, but...”
She trails off as seven sets of amber-gold, cat-slitted eyes silently bore into hers. How does she explain how she knows? The feeling that the lightning that races through her blood, the Chaos that every monster and the Elder Blood within her is made of, is burning out? That the ambient Chaos around and inside her is settling, like a banking fire, into the earth beneath them? That the fissures that created monstrosities and mages growing wider and deeper and quieter until they, like any great relic, become quiet ruins, echoing with nothing more than the voices of new watchers? That every time she blinks from one place to another, through the spaces in-between, that the ever-present humming of magic she feels is cascading towards a final harmony?
“Humans have been battling monsters since the Conjunction,” she starts again. “But with the White Frost at bay, I think, they’ve won that war. Each city makes the world a little smaller. I talked to some dwarves that found a way to harness steam to pump water from their mines, and were working on using that same machine to send ore down the river faster and more reliably than any sailboat could. Once the cities get large enough, and the trail between fast enough, well.”
She can’t make herself voice her last thought out loud. You don’t need an army to safely walk across town.
“No more work in Nilfgaard,” Letho says, quietly. She realizes with a jolt that this is the first time she’s heard his gravelly bass today. “We were banned from the cities. Just shit little jobs in villages. Nothing worth going back down there for. Not anymore.”
Kiyan wraps his arms around himself. “No good, no evil,” he mutters, almost too quiet to hear. “Only pain.”
“So that’s it,” Eskel says. “We walk away.”
“I won’t stand between this and any Witcher who wants it,” Geralt proclaims.
“I will,” Lambert mutters. Aiden silences him with a glare.
Geralt rolls his eyes, then continues like he was never interrupted. “But so far, I’m the only one who’s read it. And I won’t use it.”
One by one, he looks at each Witcher in the room. And one by one, they meet his gaze. Nobody glances down. Nobody reaches for the parchment.
The last person Geralt settles his gaze on is Ciri. Seven pairs of cat-slitted eyes stare at her. She looks back for one breath. Two. Then lifts her chin. “So that’s it,” she says, the air ringing with a heavy sigh of finality. “It ends here.”
When everyone’s filtered out, Ciri lets herself collapse against Geralt’s chest. His heart thrums steady under her ear, one beat for two of hers, as his arms come up to hold her.
“I was worried you’d want them. That you’d push for them,” he says, and his voice vibrates through her bones. “Don’t know if it would be worse to strap you down to Sad Albert or watch you storm off, maybe forever.”
She pulls back, shaking her head. “Maybe I wouldn’t’ve understood, when I was younger. But you taught me to make my own choices. To make my own Path.”
Geralt hums, face softened by a crooked grin. As one, they look at the parchment, sitting innocuously on the table. It doesn’t even have the decency to flutter with their breathing.
“You have any plans for that?” Ciri asks.
On the third strike of the flintstone, the tinder catches fire. The clearing that Vesemir’s swords are planted in doesn't have much in the way of firewood, but she doesn’t need much for the centuries-old parchment to catch as well.
The ashes of the page are carried away by the howling wind. No Witchers have a proper resting site, no grave and headstone, nor casket under the soil. Just ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
“I’m sorry you weren’t able to make that choice,” she says, to the snow-dusted swords that stand for Vesemir’s memory.
The swords don’t hear her, of course. She lets a wry smile twist her mouth. Vesemir probably would have done the same.
A green flash and the setting sun reflect off the pommels as Ciri blinks away. The wind whistles through the Blue Mountains, settling flurries of snow in the empty, ruined halls of Kaer Morhen, blanketing the cracked grey stone in white once more.