Verse of the White Wolf

The stench hit her first. It was a familiar, unwelcome perfume—a cloying mix of damp earth, rot, and the sour tang of fear that clung to the living like a shroud. The village of Murky Fen was aptly named. It huddled under a perpetually grey sky, its low-thatched roofs sagging as if weary of the rain that had turned the single muddy track through its center into a hog's wallow.

Ciri dismounted Roach, her boots sinking into the muck with a wet suck. Her silver medallion, a wolf's head with bared fangs, was still against her chest, silent for now, but a cold weight beneath her leather jerkin. The villagers who had gathered at the sound of her horse's approach kept their distance, a miserable clutch of ragged peasants with eyes as dull as the pewter sky. They looked at her the way people always looked at witchers: a volatile cocktail of hope, revulsion, and greed.

A stooped man with a face like a dried apple and the reedy authority of a village elder stepped forward. "You the witcher?" he rasped, his gaze flicking from her ashen hair to the two swords strapped to her back.

Ciri didn't waste words. "I am. You have a contract."

"Aye," the elder said, wringing his hands. "A graveir. In the cemetery, up on the hill. It's… bold."

"Graveirs are scavengers," Ciri stated, her voice flat. Her golden-green eyes, slitted like a cat's, scanned the faces of the other villagers. They flinched from her gaze, muttering amongst themselves, their fear thick enough to taste. "They prefer corpses. They don't trouble the living unless provoked."

"This one does," a woman with a babe clutched to her chest whispered, her voice trembling. "It comes down at night. We've lost two dogs and old Manfried's prize sow. It… it leads others. Ghouls. We've seen them, slinking at the edge of the woods."

Ciri’s attention sharpened. That was wrong. Utterly wrong. Graveirs were territorial and solitary, jealously guarding their boneyards from other necrophages. They didn't lead packs. They didn't hunt livestock. This wasn't just a bold monster; it was an aberration.

"How long has this been happening?" she asked, her focus narrowing on the elder.

"A fortnight, maybe a bit more," he admitted, refusing to meet her eyes. He gestured vaguely towards the sullen, wooded hill that loomed over the village. "It started after the storm. Just a few ghouls at first, snatching chickens. But then it appeared. Bigger. Faster. Smarter."

Smarter. Another alarm bell chimed in Ciri’s mind. She had fought dozens of necrophages in her time on the Path. They were driven by primal, insatiable hunger, not intelligence. This reeked of something more than a simple monster problem. It felt… directed.

"The payment," Ciri said, cutting through the litany of woes. Business was business.

The elder flinched. "Thirty orens. It's all we have."

It was a pittance, barely enough to cover the cost of her sword oils and a few decent meals. But the mystery was more compelling than the coin. A graveir acting like an alpha wolf, leading a pack of ghouls on organized raids? Something had corrupted its nature, twisted it into something new and far more dangerous. It was a knot she felt a sudden, sharp need to untangle.

"Fine," she said, the word clipping the damp air. "I'll take the contract. Keep everyone indoors after dusk. Bar your doors and windows. Don't go near the cemetery. Don't do anything stupid."

A collective sigh of relief rippled through the small crowd, thin and reedy. They saw a solution, a silver sword to solve their problem so they could go back to their miserable lives. Ciri saw only the first thread of a larger, uglier tapestry. She gave Roach's flank a reassuring pat, leaving the mare tied to a rickety fence post where she could graze on what little tough grass there was.

With a final, sweeping glance at the fearful, shifty-eyed villagers, she turned her back on them. The path to the cemetery was a steep, muddy climb, disappearing into a line of skeletal trees. The air grew colder as she ascended, the stench of decay intensifying with every step. Her medallion began to hum, a faint, insistent vibration against her sternum. She drew the silver sword from her back, its surface gleaming with a deadly, otherworldly light in the gloom. The runes etched along its length seemed to drink the grey daylight. This wasn't just another contract. This was a question, and the answer was waiting for her among the tombstones.

The cemetery was a ruin. Not the dignified, time-worn ruin of ages, but a violent, desecrated mess. Headstones lay toppled, their surfaces scarred by claws. Graves yawned open like hungry mouths, the damp earth churned and littered with splintered bone and the tattered remnants of burial shrouds. The stench of rot was so thick Ciri could taste it on the back of her tongue. Her medallion hummed, a low, steady thrum of warning against her sternum.

A flicker of movement to her left, then another. Ghouls. Three of them, scuttling from behind a large, granite mausoleum whose door had been torn from its hinges. They moved with the jerky, unnatural speed of puppets on strings, their long, grey tongues lolling from mouths crowded with needle-sharp teeth. They were a prelude, an appetizer.

Ciri didn’t waste a motion. She flowed forward, her silver blade a lethal arc of light in the gloom. A pirouette, smooth and economical, brought the sword around to meet the first ghoul’s charge. The creature’s head flew from its shoulders in a silent spray of black ichor, its body skidding to a halt in the mud. The second lunged, claws extended, and she sidestepped, bringing the blade around in a low sweep that severed both its legs at the knee. It let out a gurgling shriek and thrashed on the ground as she executed it with a clean, passionless thrust through the skull. The third, the largest of the trio, hesitated for a split second, its base cunning warring with its insatiable hunger. Ciri gave it no time to decide. A blur of motion, a flash of silver, and it collapsed in a heap, its spine severed.

It was all over in less than ten seconds. Clean. Efficient. But she felt no satisfaction, only a cold, sharp focus. This was too easy.

A roar tore through the heavy air, a sound of gravelly fury and deep-chested hunger that vibrated in her bones. It erupted from the largest of the disturbed graves, a hulking shape of mottled grey skin, knotted muscle, and bone spurs jutting from its back and shoulders. The graveir. It was at least a head taller than any she’d seen before, its eyes glowing with a malevolent orange light that held a disturbing spark of intelligence. It didn’t just charge blindly. It feinted, trying to draw her in, its long, powerful arms ending in shovel-like claws that could disembowel a man with a single swipe.

Ciri met its advance with a dancer's grace. She swept her hand through the air, forming the Aard sign. A blast of telekinetic force slammed into the beast’s chest, staggering it. It roared in frustration, digging its claws into the earth and flinging a shower of mud and bone fragments at her. Ciri deflected the debris with a swift spin of her sword, never taking her cat-like eyes off the monster. It was faster than it should be, its movements coordinated, purposeful. This wasn't just a necrophage; it was a weapon.

She fell back a step, her boot tracing a circle on the muddy ground as she cast the Yrden sign. A magical trap, glowing with pale, ethereal light, shimmered into existence. The graveir, in its unnatural, single-minded aggression, barrelled right into it. The magical energy ensnared it, its powerful limbs suddenly mired as if in thick tar. The creature thrashed, bellowing in rage as the sign held it fast.

That was the opening she needed. Ciri closed the distance in two long, fluid strides. Her silver sword sang as she brought it up and over in a powerful, two-handed strike. The blade connected with the creature’s thick neck, shearing through skin, muscle, and vertebrae with a wet, crunching sound. The graveir’s head, its face frozen in a silent snarl, tumbled to the ground and rolled to a stop against a broken headstone. The massive body stood for a second longer, a grotesque fountain, before collapsing like a felled tree.

Silence descended, broken only by the drip of black blood and the soft whisper of the wind through the skeletal trees. Ciri flicked her sword, shaking off the gore, her breath misting in the cold air. The medallion's vibration ceased. The job was done. She turned to leave, her boots squelching in the blood-soaked mud. As she reached the rusted iron gate she’d entered through, her gaze caught on something she hadn’t noticed in her initial sweep.

Freshly carved into the gate's corroded crossbar was a sigil.

It wasn't a witcher sign, nor any alchemical symbol or elven rune she recognized. It was a complex, angular design, a web of sharp lines and unsettling curves that seemed to writhe at the edge of her vision. She stepped closer, her witcher senses on high alert. Reaching out, her gloved fingers hovered just over the carving. A faint, residual thrum of magic tingled against her skin. It felt… wrong. Tainted. Like a sour, discordant note in a familiar song. Someone had been here. Someone with power.

This wasn't a random monster infestation. The creature's atypical aggression, its enhanced size and cunning, the way it led a pack of ghouls—it was all connected to this mark. This was deliberate. An experiment, perhaps? Or a test? Ciri’s jaw tightened. The thirty orens the villagers offered wasn't just an insult; it was a lie of omission. They weren't just afraid of a monster. They were afraid of what, or who, was controlling it.

Sheathing her silver sword, the sound of steel sliding into leather a final, definitive punctuation mark on the violence, Ciri left the graveir’s headless corpse to rot with the rest of the cemetery’s desecrated dead. The head, however, she took. Gripping the foul thing by a knot of sinewy hair, she began the descent back to the village, the monster's dead orange eyes staring sightlessly at the muddy path.

The walk was silent, but her mind was loud. The sigil burned behind her eyes, a glyph of corrupted power. It explained everything and nothing. It explained the monster’s unnatural strength and cunning, but it posed a far more dangerous question: who carved it? And why here, in this forgotten sty of a village?

When she emerged from the treeline, they were waiting. The entire miserable population seemed to be huddled in the mud-caked space between the inn and the smithy. The elder, Ried, stood at the forefront, his knuckles white where he gripped his walking staff. Their faces, pale and pinched in the fading light, turned towards her as one. They weren't looking at her; they were looking at the grotesque trophy dangling from her hand.

Ciri didn't break her stride. She walked directly to the elder and, with a flick of her wrist, sent the graveir’s head rolling through the muck to stop at his feet. It lay there, a testament to her work, its jaw slack and its tongue lolling in the mud.

A collective gasp went through the crowd, a sound of pure, unadulterated relief. But it was followed by a nervous, shuffling silence. No cheers. No grateful cries. Just the wind whistling through the poorly chinked walls of their hovels and the thick, anxious quiet of people who know the immediate threat is gone, but the larger one remains.

"It's done," Ciri said, her voice flat and cold. She held out her gloved hand. "Payment."

The elder swallowed hard, his gaze darting from the head on the ground to Ciri’s impassive face. He reached into a worn leather pouch at his belt and counted out the coins with a trembling hand. The metallic clink of the orens dropping into her palm sounded obscenely loud in the stillness. She didn't bother to count them. She already knew the sum was an insult.

"This doesn't cover the oil for my blade, let alone the work," she stated, her golden-green eyes locking onto his. "But the coin isn't what bothers me. It's the lie."

Ried flinched as if struck. "Lie? Witcher, we told you everything! A monster was plaguing us—"

"You told me about a graveir," Ciri cut in, her voice dropping to a low, dangerous pitch that made several villagers take a reflexive step back. "You didn't tell me it was leading a pack of ghouls. You didn't tell me it was faster and smarter than any graveir has a right to be. And you certainly didn't tell me about the sigil carved on the cemetery gate."

The word 'sigil' hit them like a physical blow. The elder’s face went from pale to ashen. The woman who’d lost her sow let out a small, strangled sob and covered her mouth. Fear, raw and potent, rolled off them in waves. It was a different fear than the one they’d had for the monster. This was the fear of a known entity, a person.

"I… I don't know what you mean," the elder stammered, his eyes refusing to meet hers. "Just some old marking, surely. Vandals…"

"It was glowing with residual magic," Ciri said, taking a step closer. The crowd shrank away from her presence, from the scent of blood and death that clung to her leather armor. "Magic that felt like poison. The same poison that twisted that creature into a weapon. Now, you're going to tell me who was here. Who carved it. Or I'll start asking questions in a way you'll find much less pleasant."

Her threat hung in the air, heavy and sharp as a headsman’s axe. She let the silence stretch, watching them squirm. Their fear was a palpable thing, thick and sour. Their stories, she realized now, had been carefully curated. They'd all used the same phrases—'after the storm,' 'snatching chickens,' 'bigger, faster, smarter.' It was a script. A story they'd been told to tell, to lure in a witcher to clean up a mess someone else had made.

"We can't," a man whispered from the back, his voice cracking. "He'll kill us."

Ried shot the man a venomous glare before turning back to Ciri, his desperation making him bold. "Please, just take the coin and go. The monster is dead. That's all that matters. Our troubles are our own."

"Your troubles became mine when you lied to me," Ciri countered, her gaze unwavering. "Your troubles became mine when I found a mage's mark on a contract. Mages experimenting on monsters tend to be… thorough. You think he's finished here? You think he won't be back to check on his pet project?"

That struck the nerve. The facade of rehearsed ignorance crumbled, revealing the raw terror beneath. They weren't just afraid of the mage; they were trapped by him. He was their monster, and the graveir had just been his dog.

The elder’s face crumpled. The last of his defiance evaporated, leaving behind the hollowed-out look of a man who had made a pact with one devil only to find a far more dangerous one standing on his doorstep.

"He came a month ago," Ried finally whispered, his voice hoarse. The confession, once started, spilled out of him in a desperate torrent. "A scholar, he seemed. Dressed in fine clothes, spoke like a nobleman from the city. Said he was conducting… research. In the old crypts. Paid us in gold to keep quiet and turn a blind eye."

"And you did," Ciri said. It wasn't a question.

"He said the creature would keep the ghouls away from the village," the elder pleaded, his voice cracking. "And it did! For a time. He called it a… a guardian. A success. He said he was refining his methods. But then it started getting aggressive, taking livestock, wandering closer. When it took Martha's boy… we knew we'd made a mistake. We sent word for a witcher, just as he instructed us to if anything went wrong. He said it would be a good test for his creation."

The sheer, calculated cruelty of it settled in Ciri’s gut like a block of ice. This wasn't just an experiment; it was a field test, and these villagers were the unwitting subjects. The mage hadn't lost control; he'd simply set the variables and was waiting to see the outcome. He'd used the village as his own private laboratory and the villagers' lives as disposable data points.

"He used you," Ciri said, her voice devoid of any pity. "He used you to lure me here. He's testing his abominations against witchers."

The realization dawned on the villagers' faces, a new layer of horror piling onto the old. They hadn't just been victims; they'd been bait.

"Where did he go?" Ciri demanded, her focus narrowing. The pathetic village and its cowardly inhabitants no longer mattered. Only the source of the rot did.

"He… he spoke of the city," Ried stammered, pointing a trembling finger north, along the muddy track that passed for a road. "He said he needed reagents, rare books. He mentioned the Academy. Oxenfurt."

Oxenfurt. The name resonated. A city of knowledge, culture, and bards singing sanitized songs. A place teeming with enough people for a man like that to disappear into, a perfect place to gather supplies and plan his next move. It was a sprawling, chaotic hub, the last place one would expect to find the source of such foul, backwoods magic. And that made it the perfect place to hide.

Ciri looked down at the pathetic pile of coins in her hand, then at the terrified faces before her. She could press them, bleed them dry for their complicity, but it would be a waste of time. They had given her something far more valuable than coin. A direction. A purpose beyond the simple slaying of a single monster.

Without another word, she pocketed the orens. She turned her back on them, the silent dismissal more damning than any curse she could have uttered. Their collective sigh of relief was a faint, pathetic sound that the wind snatched away. They were safe from her, but she knew, with chilling certainty, that they were not safe from the man who had used their home as his playground. His work was not done.

She walked to the inn's hitching post where her black mare, Kelpie, waited patiently. The horse nickered softly as Ciri stroked her muzzle, the familiar, grounding contact a brief respite from the filth of the last few hours. She swung herself into the saddle, the worn leather creaking under her weight.

She didn't look back at the village of liars and fools. They were already a memory, a grim footnote in a larger, darker story that was just beginning to unfold. Her gaze was fixed on the northern road, a muddy ribbon disappearing into the twilight. Oxenfurt. A city of scholars and songs. And, somewhere in its bustling streets or shadowed libraries, a mage who twisted life into weaponry.

Ciri nudged Kelpie with her heels, and the mare set off at a steady trot, her hooves splashing through the mire. The cold evening air bit at her cheeks, a clean, sharp sensation that began to wash away the stench of the graveir and the cloying odor of the villagers' fear. The Path had just taken an unexpected turn, leading her away from the lonely wilderness and towards the heart of civilization. But the monsters, she knew, were the same everywhere. They just wore different faces.

The road stretched on, a muddy artery through the heart of the darkening woods. For the first few hours, the only sounds were the rhythmic squelch of Kelpie’s hooves and the sigh of the wind through the skeletal branches of the trees. The farther Ciri rode from that wretched village, the more the anger cooled, leaving behind the familiar, hollow ache of solitude.

It was a cold companion, this loneliness, but a constant one. It had been there in the frigid halls of Kaer Morhen, a ghost haunting the spaces between her and the other witchers. It had been there on the run with Geralt and Yennefer, a chasm of experience and destiny that even their love couldn't always bridge. But here, on the Path, it was different. It was sharper, more profound. It was the silence after the kill, the fear in the eyes of the people she’d just saved, the weight of coins that felt more like a fine for her existence than a payment for her service.

The villagers' terror hadn't been for the graveir. It had been for her. The moment the monster was dead, she had become the new monster in their midst. A necessary evil, a tool to be pointed at a problem and then quickly, carefully put away. They didn't want to know her. They didn't want to understand the weariness in her bones or the cost of the potions that ran through her veins. They just wanted the head of the beast, a simple, clean transaction. And when it wasn't simple, when it was tangled in lies and tainted by a mage’s ambition, they wanted her gone all the same. Your troubles are our own. The words echoed in her mind, a bitter refrain.

By the second day, the woods gave way to rolling fields, fallow and brown under a bruised purple sky. She made camp in the lee of an ancient standing stone, its surface worn smooth by centuries of wind and rain. The fire crackled, a small bubble of warmth and light against the vast, indifferent dark. Kelpie munched contentedly on a handful of oats, her presence a small, solid comfort.

As Ciri sharpened her silver sword, the rhythmic scrape of whetstone on metal was a familiar meditation. Each stroke was a reminder of the life she’d chosen—or the one that had chosen her. She thought of the stories. The ballads Dandelion used to sing about Geralt, painting him as a gruff, swashbuckling hero, a reluctant knight. He’d always captured a piece of the truth, the clever bastard, but he’d polished it until it gleamed, sanding off the rough, bloody edges. He never wrote verses about the silver poisoning that made you vomit until your throat was raw, or the long, sleepless nights spent listening for things that shouldn't be, or the look in a child’s eyes when they saw your own cat-like pupils for the first time.

The world needed its stories simple. You were either a hero or a butcher. A savior clad in shining armor or a monster-slaying mutant, only a shade less monstrous than the things you hunted. There was no room in their songs for the gray expanse in between, the place where she lived every single day. No room for the witcher who negotiated with a sylph instead of slaying it, who felt a pang of pity for a starving griffin, who knew that the most dangerous monsters were the ones who slept in beds and called themselves scholars.

This mage, this Varrick, was a 'scholar.' He wore fine clothes and spoke with a nobleman's accent. He was a man of learning, of the Academy. The villagers had trusted him, listened to him, accepted his gold. She, on the other hand, was the freak. The itinerant killer. It didn't matter that he twisted nature into abominations and she fought to restore a semblance of balance. His story was acceptable. Hers was not. He was a man creating something new; she was a woman destroying things that were old. That was how the tales would be spun, if they were ever told at all.

Ciri laid the sword aside, its edge now lethally sharp. The firelight glinted off the faint, intricate patterns etched into the steel. It was a beautiful weapon. A tool for butchery. She pulled her cloak tighter around her shoulders, the wool scratching against her cheek. The loneliness wasn't just about being alone. It was about being fundamentally, irrevocably misunderstood. It was the curse of the Path. To walk among people, to save them, and to know that they would never, could never, truly see you.

She stared into the flames, her ashen hair catching the orange light. Oxenfurt was close now. She could almost feel the thrum of it, the press of thousands of lives packed into one space. A city of stories. Perhaps there, amidst the noise and the crowds, she could finally find the author of this particularly ugly one. She didn't expect understanding or gratitude. She didn't expect a welcome. She expected only the next step on the Path. And for now, that was enough.