I wish I may, I wish I might, Have this wish I wish tonight.

Sunset: Isle of Spikeroog, Skellige Isles.

Solitude

CHAPTER V.

Caring for someone isn't always grand.

Sometimes it's making tea for two.

Bringing back the feathers they asked for.

Lighting the fire before they have to.

Remembering.

Now on AO3.

Chapter 2: The Living Forest

Eskel was caught in a deep, restless sleep—far deeper and heavier than it would normally be when he camped in the open wild. He had drifted into REM sleep, but his mind was trapped in an unusually disturbing dream, causing his limbs to twitch beneath his furs. Soft, whimpering moans dragged themselves up from deep in his throat as his calloused hands clutched his bedroll with white-knuckled tightness. Suddenly, a choked, frantic yelp tore past his lips, jarring him fully awake.

He bolted upright, his chest heaving, his cat-pupils wide in the dark. He stared unblinkingly into the dying embers of his campfire before reaching out to shove another large, resinous stick into the coals. Visibly shaken by the lingering shadows of the nightmare, he forced a steady breath into his lungs, shrugged off the phantom dread, and dismissed it as just another bad dream born of the road.

As he sat there watching the flickering flames send glowing sparks drifting upward into the freezing night air before fading into nothingness, he tuned back into the familiar cadence of the forest. The wind sighed through the high canopies of towering pines, making their heavy limbs creak in protest. Nocturnal life carried on beneath the boughs: horned owls hooting in the upper branches, snow hares skittering across crusty drifts to forage, and the faint, muffled pad of wolf paws in the snow as a pack hunted in the distance. They were all old, familiar sounds—a reassuring symphony that slowly wrapped around Eskel like a warm cloak, calming his frayed nerves after the shock of the nightmare.

He remained cross-legged in the mouth of the small cave for a long while, listening to the dark woods and watching the embers die down to a dull, pulsing red. He let his mind wander back to Kaer Morhen, picturing the jagged peaks and the sweeping valley where he loved to hike alone whenever the fortress grew too quiet. He thrived in the embrace of nature, even if it almost always meant experiencing it in total solitude.

Then, a sound cut through the night. A distant, rumbling roar.

Eskel froze, went instantly rigid, and then scrambled to his feet. He stepped out from the overhang of the cave, lifting his chin to catch the wind.

Another roar echoed through the peaks, closer this time, vibrating through the stone beneath his boots.

And then...

Chaos.

Eskel’s enhanced witcher hearing was instantly assaulted by an unimaginable explosion of sound, shattering his senses under a deafening cacophony of groaning timber, snapping branches, and a million screaming, terrified woodland beasts crying out in unison. His medallion whipped into a frantic, violent dance against his chest, clacking frantically against the studs on his jacket. The sheer volume of the noise struck him like a physical blow, driving white-hot needles of blinding agony straight through his temples.

He couldn't focus. He couldn't filter the agonizing tide of overlapping frequencies. His muscles locked tight from the sudden neurological overload, every nerve ending screaming in protest. Disoriented and blind to the world around him, he collapsed hard onto his knees, slamming his palms over his ears as if he could physically cage the sound.

"Please, stop!" he choked out, the cry lost entirely beneath the monstrous roar of the forest.

The chaos and its ensuing agony dragged on for several endless minutes, forcing Eskel to writhe in the snow as he fought to block out the overwhelming din. Then, the beast in the distance let out one final, earth-shaking bellow—and as abruptly as it had begun, it ended.

The only lingering sound was the frantic, desperate fluttering of startled birds scattering into the night sky.

Instantly, the forest plunged into an absolute, suffocating silence. It was a vacuum of sound so profound it made his ears ring. Eskel remained frozen in the snow for several agonizing heartbeats, gasping raggedly for air, his broad chest heaving as the high-pitched whine in his skull slowly faded and his overloaded senses painfully recalibrated.

Once he could control his breathing and force his eyes to focus, Eskel forced himself up onto shaking legs. Still unsteady, he staggered back into the shallow shelter of the cave and collapsed heavily onto his bedroll. Breathing through his teeth, exhausted by the sheer neurological drain of the episode, it took barely a minute for absolute exhaustion to drag him back down into a heavy, dreamless sleep.

When the pale light of dawn began to bleed over the jagged horizon, Eskel awakened to a morning of utter, peaceful quiet. Only a dull, lingering twinge behind his eyes remained as a reminder of the night's torment. He peered out at the glittering, snow-covered landscape, cautiously stepping out of the cave to inspect the perimeter. Nothing out of the ordinary was immediately visible, and his medallion hung quiet and dead against his chest.

What the hell was all of that?

It was an unspoken question, but the memory of the agony burned fresh in his mind. A witcher's enhanced senses could, at times, be as much an agonizing curse as a vital asset.

Without wasting daylight, Eskel packed his gear with practiced efficiency, snuffing out the remnants of his fire with a short, controlled burst of Aard. He uncorked his pouch, swallowed a measured dose of Swallow to clear the last of the headache from his temples, and set his sights northeast—the general direction from which the beast's roars had ripped through the night. To steady his pulse and anchor his stride, he muttered the cadence of an old hill-folk song under his breath:

De ole hen she cackled, she cackled on de fence.

De ole hen she cackled an’ she ain’t cackled since.

Once he settled into his long-distance marching rhythm, he made rapid progress through the drifts, covering two miles before encountering the first twisted sign of last night's horror.

Spread across a trampled snowdrift were the remains of several deer. They weren't just killed; they were mutilated almost beyond recognition, torn apart with savage, indiscriminate force. Eskel knelt in the snow, his cat-like eyes scanning the carnage. Wolves? No. This was no wolf pack's work. There were zero signs of canine tracks anywhere near the carcasses, and wolves simply did not behave with such wanton waste—they killed for sustenance, taking what they needed and leaving the rest to freeze. This was a brutal, frenzied massacre.

A fresh layer of snow had fallen after the slaughter, dusting over the site and obscuring the deeper prints. Eskel leaned close, squinting as he focused his enhanced vision on the faint, distorted depressions beneath the powder. While he couldn't make out the exact morphology of the creature due to the shifting snow, the sheer scale and erratic drag marks gave him a trail to follow.

He tracked the disturbing path for over thirty minutes, winding deeper into a dense thicket of pines until he broke into a small, frozen clearing. Here lay two wild boars, killed and mutilated with the same terrifying, wasteful fury. But it was the surrounding environment that caught his attention: a bizarre, chaotic tangle of grasping, thick roots and leafless vines had erupted from the permafrost, forming a natural cage that looked as though it had tried to hold something massive—something that had violently shattered its way free.

The roots served no purpose in nature. They made no sense. But pausing to decode an inexplicable botanical anomaly in the middle of a frozen wasteland was a waste of daylight.

Interesting, Eskel thought to himself, standing up and dusting the snow from his knees as he resumed tracking the invisible trail.

A few meters past the shattered root-cage, a new set of tracks caught his eye. Partially drifted over by the fresh powder, they were unmistakably humanoid—and small. Delicate.

A woman?

Intrigued and hyper-vigilant, Eskel pressed on. Whoever she was, she was tracking the beast, and now he was tracking them both. Another hour of steady, silent movement through the timberland paid off when the trees parted into a wider, devastated clearing.

Dominating the center of the space was another tangle of roots and vines, dwarfing the previous one tenfold. It was a colossal, woven mass of ancient timber. Eskel set his heavy pack down carefully in the snow, unsheathed his dagger, and began to cautiously examine the structure.

A heavy, sickening odor of rich, dark beast blood hit the back of his throat.

He stepped up to the wall of woven wood and began poking gingerly through the tightly bound roots and vines with the tip of his blade. Suddenly, the steel struck something dense and unyielding. Flesh. Moving to another gap in the lattice, he wedged his dagger in and used the leverage to pry the stubborn mass apart.

His blue eyes widened.

He was staring directly into the open, blood-flecked, toothy maw of a massive manticore. Dead.

Pushing his way further past the hideous, terrifying face of the beast, a cold jolt of shock hit him. The manticore’s head had been literally ripped entirely away from its muscular shoulders. The massive, headless body was suspended mid-air, tightly lashed and throttled within the center of the living wooden cage. It looked as though the very forest itself had reached up from the soil, snared the apex predator, and ruthlessly torn it apart.

Stepping back slowly, sliding his dagger back into its sheath, Eskel let out a measured breath. This one is female. Likely the mate of the one I came across yesterday, and the mother of the young one I killed.

A cold wave of realization washed over him. But what manner of magic, what horrifying entity on the Continent, could possibly do this to an apex predator?

As Eskel stood in the clearing, turning the impossible sight over in his mind and coming up completely empty, his medallion gave a short, gentle, questioning hum against his chest before falling dead silent once more.

At the exact same instant, the faint, unnatural whisper of a boot crunching on frozen pine needles sounded just behind him.

Moving with the instantaneous, fluid reaction of a witcher, Eskel slowly pivoted on his heel. Standing between the trunks of two towering pines, half-veiled in shadow and dressed in practical layers of softened leather and thick fur, stood a stranger.

Her hair was a striking, luminous silver-white, her skin porcelain-fair against the winter backdrop, and her eyes burned like brilliant, unearthly emeralds. She stood entirely at ease, watching him with an unreadable, quiet intensity.