Geralt of Rivia

Since The Iron Bull had wandered onto his camp in the woods, matters had only gotten worse.

It was as if the woods were twisting and rotting around Geralt, starting from one central location and feeding outward like a pestilence of reality itself. It affected nearly everything, but Geralt found himself more and more susceptible, more and more changed.

Soon enough, he told Nina to stop coming. That had been at about the time everything he ate had stopped satisfying. When he began looking at human flesh with needy and feral desires.

The witcher kept busy. He had to. That was the only small kindness in any of it, and even then, he felt sick and guilty at times about what he'd had to do, some of the things he'd had to put down. Geralt wasn't the only thing in the woods being twisted.

But the worst had just wrecked his camp, and nearly trampled Geralt with it. It was only luck and superior intuition which had woken him just in time.

Fleeing on wolf-swift feet, quiet as an owl, Geralt ran to the only place he thought he could turn for help. Possibly understanding.

The lights were still on at the farmhouse, though some eerie blanket of discomfort, of unnatural quiet, lay around the property. Geralt didn't know what it was, only that here, more than anywhere else, set the hairs on the back of his neck on end.

He made certain that his boots made a noise as he opened the barn door, peering inside. His eyes flashed in the dark, every glimmer of light reflecting out of them again. It was no problem to find the Bull in the dark with his yellow eyes, even if he hadn't been able to follow the smell to the man. Musky, almost draconid.

Geralt cleared his throat and called to Bull in the dark. His skin was paler than it had ever been, gone from a healthy pinkish alabaster to something closer to Regis' unnatural greyish palor. He still bore the outward manifestation of his mutations, dragged out by strange magic. Long canines, sharp black claws. The general appearance of a panther waiting to pounce.

"Hey. I need you."

There was something wrong happening.

At first Geralt had avoided the woods, because it felt like that off-ness was concentrated there. The birds and insects had gone quiet at first, and soon after they'd started to flee to the forest's edges. Though autumn had barely begun, in some areas Geralt found trees turning rusty, leaves dying off.

That had been at first, and from there things had gotten wronger.

When Geralt realized what was happening, he went to the woods. He worried it had no longer become an issue of protecting himself until he managed to leave Darrow, but of protecting Darrow potentially from himself.

Whatever corruption existed in the forest, growing and spreading, it affected his body, and his mind. It had twisted itself around the witcher mutations, had expressed them in new ways, or simply more.

And so Geralt was back at his old camp. Hiding, biding time, and keeping a baleful eye on the situation. He ought to do something about it, but what? What could he do, when he didn't even understand what was happening to himself?

He sat beside the fire, hunkered over an evening meal in a foulest mood. His skin was paler than usual, dark veins standing out against the white. All of his senses screamed. He gripped his dinner in hands that had begun to end in blackened, pointed nails, that reminded Geralt too much of Regis. That was the bruxa in him, no doubt, a fact that he wanted to put little thought into, if he could avoid it.

The canines that filled his mouth too much more than they used to, those were likely more attributable to a manticore mutagen.

And the fact that he had made dinner of a squirrel, and had not felt the bother or desire to cook it, that Geralt wanted to put thought into even less.

It became habit, slowly.

Geralt still spent most of his days traveling, and most of his nights camping. He would run across Amalthea, on occasion. But mostly, he spent his time alone. He would not admit that he was lonely, but the truth was, he was just that. He'd gotten too used to having Ciri at hand, Yennefer and Triss, Dandelion and Zoltan. And now, he had none of his people, just their memory.

But he did have people in Darrow that he knew. He did have people he might even consider friends, though it felt presumptuous.

And so, it became habit, when the loneliness started to build, that he would find his way to Nina's apartment building instead of his own. He would sneak a nap, a meal with a conversation, a shower, laundry to do. Nina was always kind, and always pleasant.

Tonight, he showed at her door with an ulterior motive. Though, also, simply to see her face, and remind himself of the way her hair smelled. Which was lovely, especially in comparison to trash skips, asphalt, exhaust fumes and storm drains.

"Hey." He rapped with his knuckles again. "Anybody home? Brought you something."

Geralt went to the beach to think.

He didn't necessarily want to think, but he couldn't stop himself, and it was important that he did, if he ever wanted to think his way out of the situation he'd found himself in. So, if it was going to happen regardless of his will, it may as well happen at the beach.

The water there was cold, if not as cold as it had been in the Gulf of Praxeda off the Koviri shores. The night sky seemed cleaner and clearer than it was inland here, though he still, even with his eyes, could not make out as many stars in the sky as he remembered, and they were not in the arrangements he was accustomed to.

But it was, mostly, peaceful. Ideal enough for meditation. And that was what he was looking for.

The gritty sand crunched under his feet as he approached the gentle lap of the waves. But he paused, frozen like a hunting fox. Something was off that night.

He could scent it in the air before he understood what he was seeing -- the unmistakable crispness of ice, of a chill in the air.

And there she was, in the near distance, a young woman with hair nearly as white as his own, silvery in the moonlight. She manipulated the cold with her hands. His medallion gave a leap.

Geralt sensed, somehow, or recognized something in her -- something that reminded him only too keenly of Ciri. She was not a sorceress, she didn't seem to use magic in the way a trained woman might. She was not a witch either, or a Source, though he sensed there was something terrible and powerful about her magic that had her here, alone, at night, trying to leash it and let it out at the same time.

"Averse to an audience?" he asked, hoping he wouldn't startle her. His voice was a low growl, although it was open enough. "I could move on down the shoreline."