The Wither 3 RPG

"The Chameleon, After Hours"

Novigrad by night smells of whale-oil lamps, river rot, and fear dressed as piety. On Hierarch Square the ashes of the evening's pyre still tick with heat as they cool, and the witch hunters walking their rounds have the satisfied slouch of men whose work burned well. Sensible people are indoors. The city's definition of sensible has narrowed considerably this year.

Which makes the noise spilling from one particular corner of the Bits almost scandalous: light, lute-song, laughter. A freshly painted sign — a lizard shifting colors, gaudy as sin — declares the establishment THE CHAMELEON. The door stands ajar. Inside, the tavern is only half-renovated and wholly alive: sawdust and spilled wine, mismatched chairs, a stage with one curtain hung and the other promised.

And at the center of it, mid-anecdote, a man in a plum doublet with a feathered hat and a voice built for the back rows: Dandelion — poet, professor, proprietor, survivor of at least three sentences of death and innumerable sentences of marriage. "—so I said to the Countess, madam, the only thing I stole was your heart, the silverware was planted—"

"The silverware was in yer boot," rumbles the dwarf at the bar without looking up from his cards. Axe within reach, beard magnificent, expression of a man cheating at gwent purely on principle: Zoltan Chivay. A profane parrot on the shelf behind him mutters something anatomically ambitious.

The third figure doesn't perform. He sits with his back to the wall — old habit, good habit — white hair tied back, two sword-hilts standing over his shoulder like patient crows, cat-yellow eyes doing to the room what the room did to you when you entered: arithmetic. A tankard sits before Geralt of Rivia, barely touched. He has the stillness of a man resting between one bad errand and the next, and the particular weariness of someone looking for a person in a city that eats people.

It's Dandelion who spots the newcomer at the door — of course it is; an audience is an audience. "Aha! A patron! Or a creditor, in which case, we're closed—" He sweeps forward anyway, professionally irresistible. "No, no, come in, come in. First drink's on the house, which is to say, on Zoltan."

"Like hell it is."

Geralt's eyes have already finished their assessment — weapons, gait, hands, the small honest tells of what a stranger is and wants. He doesn't stare. He just notices, completely, the way other people breathe.

"Don't mind them," he says. Voice like a cart on gravel. "But it's a bad night to be walking Novigrad without a reason." A beat. Not hostile. Precise. "So. What's yours?"

The parrot, into the silence, contributes a suggestion that would get a man burned on the square.

The city holds its breath around this one warm room.

"Mead and Knives at Kaer Trolde"

They buried King Bran at dawn — pushed his burning ship into the grey water while a hundred warriors sang, and the priestesses of Freya read the smoke, and every jarl on the shore measured every other jarl through the drizzle. Now it is night, and Kaer Trolde's great hall does what Skellige does with grief: drowns it, loudly.

Fires roar down the length of the hall. Whole sheep drip over coals. Mead-horns travel like weather. Clan colors crowd the benches — an Craite, Brokvar, Dimun, Drummond, Tuirseach — and beneath the roar of toasts runs the true business of the evening, quiet as a keel underwater: who will be king?

At the high table, Jarl Crach an Craite wears his authority the way the mountain wears the fortress — visibly, and without effort. To his left his son Hjalmar re-fights an old raid with two axes of gesture and no modesty whatsoever; around him young warriors laugh in the right places. To his right his daughter Cerys watches the hall the way a pilot watches shoals, saying little, missing less. The widow Birna Bran sits in black among the Tuirseach, sipping like a woman at someone else's funeral, her son beside her wearing the expression of luggage.

Strangers stand out at a clan feast the way a gull stands out among ravens — and yet here you are, warm, fed if you wish it, and tolerated, because guest-right is holy in the isles and because a foreign face at a succession feast is either an opportunity or a spy, and both are worth watching.

It's Cerys who moves first. She detaches from the high table without ceremony and sets a fresh horn down within your reach — hospitality, and an opening bid.

"Drink. It insults the dead not to." Nothing in her tone is idle, though her manner is easy. Sharp eyes, weathered hands, a warrior's plain braid. "You've been listened at all evening — aye, don't look wounded, everyone listens to everyone tonight. Mainlander gear, salt on your boots, and no clan owes you and none owns you." A flick of glance takes in the hall — her brother's laughter, Birna's stillness, three separate arguments about to be settled outside. "That makes you the only pair of ears in this hall with no side. Rare as honest dice, that."

She leans a fraction closer, under the noise.

"So. Stranger. Tell me what you've heard tonight — truly heard — and I'll stand you a cask. Or lie to me interestingly, and I'll still be entertained." The corner of her mouth tilts. "But mind: my father's hall, my father's mead. In Skellige even lies must be brave."

Somewhere down the benches a bench crashes over; the first fight of the night, greeted like an old friend. The priestess by the door frowns at omens only she can see.

The horn steams gently between you.

"The Tourney Road to Beauclair"

South of the mountains the war is a rumor, and the rumor is in poor taste. Toussaint unrolls below the pass like a painting commissioned by someone rich and sentimental: vineyards in green corduroy lines, rivers the color of white wine, almond blossom drifting across the road with the smug persistence of confetti. Even the gibbets by the crossroads are picturesque, and freshly used — the duchy takes banditry seriously precisely so that nothing else need be taken seriously at all.

The road is crowded and cheerful, which on the Continent counts as exotic. Everyone is going the same way: to Beauclair, whose fairy-tale towers rise ahead absurd and lovely, and to the Grand Tourney — carts of casks, pilgrims of the Prophet Lebioda, jugglers, wine merchants, three separate parties of knights errant in full colors, and one goose, unexplained, walking with terrible purpose.

Trouble, when it arrives, is exquisitely local: at the bend by a shrine, a painted pavilion cart has shed a wheel, and its owner — a herald in ducal livery, sweating through his tabard — stands guard over a cargo of tourney regalia with a beribboned lance in both hands, held the way a clerk holds a mop.

Blocking his road, and his day: four men whose clothes say vineyard hands and whose knives say otherwise. Their leader inspects a tourney banner, gauging silk by the yard.

"Toll," he explains pleasantly, "for the road. New policy."

"This is the duchess's road—" the herald begins, at exactly the wrong volume.

Which is when everyone becomes aware of you — the herald with drowning-man hope, the road-agents with the professional courtesy of men calculating whether the audience is armed. The leader's smile stays but shifts weight. "Keep walking, friend. Or don't. We're flexible."

A voice like a bronze bell settles the matter of who else is present. Up the road, unhurried, rides a knight — older, broad as a wine barrel, armor bright, an honest-to-gods mace across his saddle: Palmerin de Launfal, as the herald's gasp announces. He reins in at conversational distance and beams at the entire situation with terrifying goodwill.

"Gentlemen! A stranded servant of Her Grace, honest travelers, and — " a courteous nod to you, precisely calibrated to promise nothing and exclude nothing, " — company on the road. What fortune. The Virtues teach that fortune is merely opportunity in traveling clothes." He does not touch the mace. He simply has it, and lets everyone continue knowing that. "Now. I count several ways this noon resolves with everyone's honor intact, and one or two ways it does not. I confess myself curious—" his bright eyes come to rest, warmly and quite deliberately, on you, the unknown quantity, "—which way our new friend here inclines?"

The bandits' leader recalculates the odds and does not obviously like the sums. The herald clutches his lance. The goose, arriving, takes a position of neutrality.

Beauclair glitters ahead; the road waits on your answer.

"The Night the Well Froze" The village has no name worth a map — a fistful of houses, a shrine, a well, fields that feed it in good years and mock it in bad. You live here. However you live, whatever fills your days — nets or nails, herbs or hides, someone else's floors or your own small patch — this evening ends it the way every evening ends: smoke rising straight from the chimneys, dogs settling, the gossip at the well wringing the last drops out of a day where nothing happened. Nothing happens here. That has always been the village's poverty and its shield. The first wrong thing is small. The dogs stop barking — all of them, all at once, as if the same hand closed every muzzle. Then old Mirka's kettle of washing-water grows a skin of ice while still hanging over her fire, and she stands looking at it with her mouth open, steam and frost sharing the same pot. Then the well cracks. A sound like a whip the size of a river — and the water in the well is stone-hard, the bucket seized in it mid-float. Frost climbs the rope. Frost climbs the houses, white ferns spreading across shutters and door-planks in the space of a breath, and your own breath comes out as a cloud though not an hour ago the evening was mild. Someone says, in a voice trying very hard to stay a voice: "Look at the sky." Green light bleeds through the clouds — a wound in the weather, wide over the fields. And out of it, faint and then not faint at all, comes hoofbeats. Not on the road. Above it. The old ones don't wait to see. They know the stories the way they know their prayers, and they move like the stories are chasing them: bar the doors, smother the fires, get down, don't look, don't look at the riders. A mother is screaming a child's name. Somewhere a horse — a real one, flesh and terror — tears its tether and bolts. They come over the treeline in a wedge of frost and dark iron: riders on gaunt mounts, skull-faced helms, hoarfrost falling from them like ash from a burning house, and the air around them so cold it burns the lungs. The Wild Hunt. A tale to frighten children — filling the sky over your fields, spreading out over the rooftops with the terrible unhurried patience of things that have never once failed to catch what they came for. One rider descends. Its mount touches the frozen mud of the square without sound. The visored skull turns — past the barred doors, past the shrine, past the smothered fires that hid no one — and stops. On you. A voice comes out of the helm, Elder Speech wrapped around Common like frost around a branch, addressed to the whole village and to you alone: "It passed through here. The ashen-haired one. Someone saw. Someone always sees." The lance lowers, slow as a sentence being passed. "Speak. Or we shall ask the village — one hearth at a time." Behind the rider, the sky fills with its brothers. The cold deepens. Whatever you are, whatever you were until tonight — the next thing you do, you will do in front of the Wild Hunt.