“There, that should be tight enough,” Vesemir grunted as he fastened the straps over my forearm, and I grimaced as I felt the metal buckle in the leather dig into my skin. “Never thought we’d have to create a stronger variant of steel, and stuff it in enchanted leather just because one of the initiates was stronger than five men.”
“It is—fuck—six men you barmy codger,” I grunted out as Duran, another Witcher tightened the straps on my calves and ankles, “Take care of the steel you sadistic fucks! I don’t want to bleed out while having my whole body gets mutated!”
“He was good when he simply used to keep silent and sulk in the corners,” Duran snorted, smirking at me as he deliberately tightened the cords, “Do try to come alive of the Trial Rhaehal, I don’t want all those hours spent teaching you tracking and shit to go to waste.”
“Go check on Ezikel, Duran,” Vesemir nodded towards the man’s apprentice, “This might be the last time you do so.”
His smirk gone in a flash, Duran nodded at him and walked away, and I saw Ezikel’s face brighten up as the man who was his father in all but name and blood talked to him. “He will survive the trials,” Vesemir grunted, sitting down on the stool and looking at me, “and so will you.”
“I know,” I muttered back, moving my eyes about the room as I watched the mages set up the apparatus around each and every table. In the center of the room, three pots bubbled and simmered with colorful fumes boiling off them, the cauldrons containing the potions that were going to be administered to us. “How old were you when you underwent the Trials?”
“I don’t remember exactly, but I think I was fifteen at the time,” he chuckled, “You should have seen me back then, women all over the keep were left awed and wet when I used to swing my blade in the yard.”
“Were all women blind then?” I asked with a chuckle. Before I sighed as the mages started to pour the bubbling, fuming decoctions into the vials…the Trial of Grasses was about to start. “Well, see you after a day or two, Vesemir.”
“Good luck, Rhaehal,” he said, his eyes glimmering with pride as he laid his hand on my shoulder, “I will see you clad in the Wolven School’s armor soon.”
“Master Vesermir,” one of the aides came to my table, his hands wringing together nervously as he looked from my face to the Witcher, giving him the three bottles that were going to be connected to the ducts inserted in my arms, “The Potions.”
Vesemir took the three bottles without looking at the aide, turning them over in his scarred hands the way another man might weigh coin. The liquid inside caught the firelight—one the green of pond scum, one a dark arterial red, the last a clear that wasn't quite clear, oily things turning slow circles in it like oil refusing water.
"Decoctions of the Grasses," he said, his eyes fixated on the bottle, and I had a feeling that his words were not really for me specifically. "Mutagens drawn from a dozen beasts, suspended in plant venom calibrated to almost kill you. Almost." He set them in the rack the mage had bolted to my table, beside the ducts already threaded into the crooks of my arms, and gave me a sharp smile, "The almost is the whole art of it."
"Comforting," I said, watching as around the hall, the same ritual unfolded at seven other tables. I could hear it more than see it—the clink of glass settling into iron, the low murmur of mages reciting checks over their apparatus, the wet sound of one of the younger boys being sick over the side of his table before they strapped his head. Ekizel was three tables down. I couldn't turn my neck far enough to find him, but I could hear Duran's voice over there, low and even, the way Vesemir would talk to a spooked horse.
Across the room, the three cauldrons breathed their colored fumes toward the rafters, and mages crowded around them, chanting in Elven tongues and splaying their glowing hands over them.
Soon, one of them came to my side—old, narrow, ink on his fingers and something definitely worse under his nails—and connected the first bottle to the duct in my left arm with a click I felt in my bones.
'Here it is,' I thought, and was distantly, clinically grateful that I felt nothing larger than that. Gamer's Mind sat over the fear like a stone over a coal, keeping me from the worst of the heat.
Then the green potion dripped into my blood, and I stopped being grateful for anything at all.
It wasn't pain at first. It was wrongness—a cold that ran up the vein and into my shoulder and kept going, into my chest. It found my heart and curled around it, and I let out a gasp as goosebumps erupted across my body. My pulse stuttered, caught in the mutations and magics being forced upon my cells, and the numbers I had lived by for eleven years flickered up unbidden at the edge of my vision, pale and unwanted.
Toxicity: 41/130. Rising.
I dismissed it with a thought. I did not want to watch this happen to me in tidy figures. Whatever else the Trial of the Grasses was going to be, it was going to be mine, not this game’s.
It held that thought for a few moments, feeling the coldness creep across my limbs as my limbs started to become numb…and then came the red potion with a turn of a knob.
The cold became heat in the space between one heartbeat and the next, as though someone had thrown a torch into a frozen well. It went off in my chest like Kiyan's dimeritium bomb and bloomed outward—down my arms and up my throat as if liquid fire. My back arched against the steel as something tore through my guts, heat and pain left in its wake. The reinforced buckles Vesemir had cursed about an hour ago bit down and held, and somewhere very far away I understood that they had been right to forge them, because the thing my body did then would have torn ordinary leather like wet parchment.
I did not scream. Not yet. Gamer's Mind held the scream in check for now, but I could feel it slipping, breaking under the stress the Trial of Grasses was putting upon my body.
"Eyes on me, Rhaehal." Vesemir's voice cut through the haze descending on me, and my neck twisted slowly, finding him right by my side. He'd pulled the stool close and sat with his forearms on his knees, his slit yellow eyes level with mine, unbothered, patient as stone. "You don't get to drift off. That is how you die when these potions are coursing through you. You stay here, with me, and you count the breaths. Can you do that?"
"You're—" my jaw locked as I clenched my fists, "—a sadistic old—"
"Aye." A flicker of something tugged at the corner of his mouth. "Count."
“--Cunt” I completed, and Vesemir’s hand twisted the third knob.
I have tried, since, to find the words for it. I have a perfect recall and a stolen library of two lives' worth of language, and I have never found them. The green had been cold, and the red had been fire, and both of those were things a body knew how to be afraid of. The clear was something the body had no name for. It went into me, and it began, very methodically, to take me apart, as if the previous two had just tenderised me, and this one was the acid meant to dissolve me down to the bones.
And then the fever took the room away.
I do not have clean memory of the days that followed. Only fragments, lit wrong and out of order, the way you remember being sick as a child—oversized, cavernous, the ceiling too far and too close at once.
I remember the screaming. I know I screamed because my throat was ruined for a week after, and because at some point my voice joined a chorus, and the small cold ledger-keeping part of me—the part that survived everything—understood that the chorus was thinning. Table by table. I understood, too, that thinning did not mean rest.
I remember my bones moving. Not breaking—moving, the long bones of my arms and legs bowing under a pressure that came from inside the marrow, lengthening, the ends grinding in their sockets as they were remade to carry loads no elf and no man was built for. I felt my ribs creak wider around my heart. I felt something behind my eyes shift, and the firelight that had been warm and orange went suddenly, surgically sharp—every mote of dust in the air picked out, the cauldron-fumes resolving into individual curling threads.
I remember Vesemir's hand. Through all of it—the bowing bones, the boiling blood, the fevers that came in waves like a tide trying to drown me from the inside—there was a rough hand on my shoulder, or pressed flat to my sternum when the convulsions came. An anchor I couldn't see and couldn't lose. He didn't say much. When he did it was nonsense, mostly—a whorehouse in Novigrad, a Wyvern he'd skinned in the rain, Barmin losing three fingers to a frost giant and growing them back crooked so they ached every winter since. Things to count my breaths against.
And once—only once, deep in the worst of it, when the fever burned the wall between me and that muted coal down to nothing—I remembered my mother.
Not the blood. Not the small claw in her throat. For the first time in eleven years, I remembered her before. Sea-green eyes shining down at me in the dark of the tent. The weight of her hand on my head. Her voice when she finally gave me a name, when she'd decided at last that I would live long enough to carry one.
Rhaehal.
I don't know if I said it aloud. I know the coal burned through to the surface for one unbearable heartbeat—grief and love and a child's pure animal terror, all of it, eleven years late—and then the fever crested and took even that, and I went down into the dark, almost grateful for once.
When I came up out of it, the hall was quiet.
Grey morning light fell through the high windows. The cauldrons had burned down to cold ash. My whole body was one deep ache, the soreness of meat that has been torn open and grown back stronger overnight, and my mouth tasted of copper and something foul and herbal. The steel was still on my wrists.
Vesemir was still on the stool. He looked like he hadn't moved in days, which, I'd learn, he hadn't. His eyes—yellow, slit, like mine, now—found me the moment I opened my own.
And in the corner of my vision, pale and unhurried, the system spoke for the last time.
Trial of the Grasses: survived.
Integration complete.
I waited for the rest. The EXP tally. The level chime. The neat blue character sheet I had read myself to sleep against for eleven years, the Hasbro script, the bars in their assigned colors—red and white and purple and that dark, sullen green. All of it. The furniture of my second life.
It didn't come.
The two lines hung there a moment longer, and then they didn't vanish so much as settle—sinking inward, the way the last light goes out of a coal when you finally stop blowing on it. And where the screen had always been, that faint constant glow at the edge of perception I'd stopped noticing the way you stop noticing your own pulse—
—there was nothing. A silence in a place I hadn't known was ever making noise.
I lay there and took stock the only way I knew how. Status, I thought, the reflex of a decade.
No screen answered.
But I knew, anyway. I knew the toxicity was draining out of me the way you know a fever is breaking—not a number ticking down, just a wrongness leaving by degrees. I knew my own strength was sitting in my arms, banked and enormous and badly miscalibrated. I knew, without a window telling me so, the shape of the hall around me past the edges of my sight—Ekizel's empty table, the mage by the door, the cold cauldrons—as plainly as I knew where my own hands were.
The game hadn't died. It had stopped showing itself to me, because I no longer needed to be shown. It had crawled down under my skin and become me, or I had become it, and somewhere in the fever I'd stopped being able to find the seam.
I should have felt something about that. A boy who'd just lost the one thing that had been with him since the void, since before he had a name in this world. But I guess Gamer’s mind—and a Witcher’s now, were both to blame for that.
"There he is," Vesemir said quietly, smirking widely as he stood up, raising his mug of ale towards me, “Drink?”
I tried to speak, and coughed out a rasp instead.
"Don't." He reached over and worked the strap at my throat loose first, then my wrists, peeling steel away from skin gone raw beneath. "You lived. The Grasses is probably the worst, and it is now behind you. There'll be more—the Dreams, the rest—but the worst is done." Something moved across his weathered face, and for once the sardonic old bastard let me see the whole of it. Not relief. Closer to pride, and banked under the pride, the grief of a man who'd sat through this too many times and not always had a boy open his eyes at the end.
I made myself ask, and it came out as little more than air, but to Vesemir, it might as well have been a shout.
"Ekizel?"
He was quiet for a moment. Outside, somewhere in the keep, I could hear Duran's voice—low and even.
"Three tables held through the night," he said. "Yours was one."
He didn't say which of the others. He didn't have to. I was already counting, the way he'd taught me to count breaths, and the arithmetic settled in cold and clean. Nine boys had made the Choice while Barmin drove his swords into the stone.
Three of us had eyes like Vesemir's now.
I let my head fall back against the table and stared up at the rafters where the fumes had curled all night, and did not let myself feel any of it.
"Right." Vesemir hauled himself off the stool with a groan, every one of his years in it. "On your feet, witcher. Slow. The world's going to look different now—you'll want to be standing when it does. Stand up, the Path calls."
He held out his hand.
I took it.