Jorstadt the Owl

## Jorstadt

The Owl

“*This one's too timid to be half-eagle. More like an owl of a Griffin.*”
―Erland of Larvik
When one conjures up visions of a mutant monster-slayer, one would hardly imagine a figure like **Jorstadt the Owl**. Bookish and reserved, this witcher of the Griffin School is found stalking libraries and castle record halls as often as a dark forest. While he has followed his school's emphasis in refining his control over the simple spells called signs, Jorstadt's personal approach to monster-hunting entails meticulous study of his quarry, preparing every possible edge he can gain over his opponents. While this tends to make his employers and fellow witchers think him hesitant, Jorstadt's collection of successful contracts and continued survival as witchers become fewer with each passing year speak volumes more than he himself often will.

## Biography

### Early Life and Witcher Training (1142-1159)

“*I should know better by now. The scrawny, clever ones always give me hope we'll send someone more than a brute out on the Path, but they never survive the Trials.*”
―Old Keldar laments Jorstadt's chances as an apprentice.
Jorstadt recalls very little of his childhood by now. What he knows must be true is he was born in one of the small fishing villages along the coast of Poviss, where the western end of the Dragon Mountains meets the sea. Only these would have been close enough to Kaer Seren for his earliest memory to make sense: standing in the snow outside its gates, hand held by a girl Jorstadt can only imagine must have been his older sister. The witchers of the Griffin School took in the boy for training, but having no use for the starving and frozen girl, sent her away. While he might have kicked and screamed to be parted from her, Jorstadt's training to follow would so fill his days that he forgot her name soon after.

From his earliest days at Kaer Seren, Jorstadt was thrown into a punishing physical training regimen, conditioning him for the trials to come. Outside this training, he and the other students would be tasked with the menial chores necessary to maintain the Griffin School's keep, leaving his only respite the hours spent learning to read, write, and eventually study the compiled tomes of monster lore the witchers curated under Master Keldar. Jorstadt came to love this facet of his training, which the Griffin School's extensive library plentifully supported, and was often reprimanded for reading in the midst of classes. Under the senior witchers, Jorstadt became fluent in Northern common, Elder Speech, and even the Ofiri tongue. Though some of his teachers thought it a waste of time, Jorstadt continued to eagerly await each visit of Grandmaster Erland's friend Nylah, an Ofiri merchant who would bring new tomes for Kaer Seren's collection.

As Jorstadt withdrew further into reading, however, his mentors noted he neglected to form bonds with his fellow aspiring witchers. Determined to break him of this habit, they paired Jorstadt with a surly apprentice named Rhys, hoping each would be a mediating influence on the other. The two indeed got along famously, Rhys drawing Jorstadt out of his shell while the bookish apprentice encouraged Rhys to apply himself to his lessons. But only a year after their friendship began, the boys were subjected to the Trial of the Mountains. Left stranded deep in the Dragon Mountains, the boys had to cross leagues of wilderness to return to Kaer Seren, hunted all the while. More than half the aspirants fell to the depredations of monsters, but Rhys was stronger than most and led Jorstadt through the worst of the trial.

Before they reached Kaer Seren, however, Jorstadt fell into a Barbegazi nest, and while pulling him free, Rhys was snatched by a passing griffin and torn apart. Traumatized by the loss of his only friend, the boy stumbled back to Kaer Seren alone long after the Master Witchers had written him off for dead. While recovering from the trial, Jorstadt asked many of his instructors what the point of the trial had been, and received no satisfying answer. Thereafter, the youth drew back into the isolation of reading, and his masters despaired of him as a lost cause. The Trial left one other lasting mark on the boy: a lingering hatred of the heraldic animal the School had been named for.

When the time for Jorstadt's trials finally arrived, his masters feared him unready. His time spent studying had made him less developed than his brothers, but Grandmaster Erland overrode any objections. The mutations would fail if he were any older, Erland cited, aside from which the process would prove if Jorstadt's emphasis on study made for a worthy candidate. His Trial of the Grasses went poorly, the boy's body struggling to cope with the induced mutations, and his recovery lasted much longer than most, but Jorstadt did eventually heal. Given his near-rejection of the processes, the Master Witchers lobbied to put Jorstadt through the Trial of the Sword. Fortunately, as he faced one of the Griffins' fencing instructors, Jorstadt proved his speed and strength were worthy of any witcher. After the final trials, Jorstadt's graduation was declared, and the young witcher was bidden to set out on the Path.

### Starting on the Path (1159-1163)

“*Dark things still lurk in the corners of our world, and they must be confronted.*”
―An adage of the Griffin School repeated to Jorstadt upon his graduation.
By the time Jorstadt left Kaer Seren on the cusp of the 1160s, the Golden Age of Witchers was coming to a close. The Northern Realms had been settled by humans for almost four centuries, and since their creation, the witcher orders had all but eradicated many native monster populations. Humans villages which once cowered behind wooden palisades now boasted stone walls. Nations saw one another as greater threats than the remaining untamed frontier, and the roving monster slayers were looked upon as vagabonds or—thanks especially to the School of the Cat—spies and assassins instead of saviors. Cults to local deities saw opportunity in denouncing them, ingratiating themselves with rulers by branding these potential threats as outcasts alongside non-humans. These trends would set the world stage Jorstadt stepped onto.

#### First Contract (1159)

“*Species: warg. Distinctions: unusual size, especially for a loner. Without a pack, canis varieties tend to become scavengers, avoiding injury with larger prey. Something must be drawing it in.*”
―Excerpt for Jorstadt's earliest journal.
With the Griffin School's seat so close at hand, Poviss at this time seldom had need of more witchers, and Jorstadt elected to venture east to the Continent's mainland in search of work. To his surprise, however, he had difficulty finding a captain who would accept his coin for such a voyage. Beginning to understand his mentors' warnings about the wider world, Jorstadt did eventually find a small berth for himself on a fishing trawler bringing North Sea crabs to Redania, and braced himself for a two month voyage to the coast.

Arriving a weeks later than scheduled and thoroughly sick of crab, Jorstadt bid his shipmates farewell and went in search of work. He inquired with innkeeps and scoured noticeboards, but for his first contract passed over a generous bounty on a forktail—Jorstadt unaware how scarce such a reward was in that time—in favor of a more modest start. A notice had been posted about a lone warg roaming the village of Blennen by night. Despite attempts to trap it or drive it away, the beast refused to stay away from the village and had attacked its first man weeks ago. Knowing most wargs feared humans and kept clear of their settlements, the unusual behavior led Jorstadt to suspect there was more to the contract than met the eye.

Arriving in Blennen, Jorstadt learned from the village ealdorman their worst fears about the beast had come to pass only two days before. The same man who'd been attacked had been killed, attacked during the night after he'd left his door open. Though a poor reward for a witcher, the bounty on the beast had gone up since the attack, and Jorstadt took the contract. Investigating the hut, Jorstadt met Blennen's healer, Alma, who had prepared the body for burial and was seeing to the deceased's empty home. To his surprise, all signs the beast had left behind pointed to a genuine common warg, not a werewolf as he might have suspected. Purchasing a few ingredients from Alma, he brewed a dose of Cat potion for night vision, set up a few simple snare traps, and waited for nightfall.

Sure enough, the beast wandered into town shortly after dark, but somehow avoided all Jorstadt's snares. Encountering it digging through a rubbish heap for scraps, Jorstadt attacked at once and wounded the beast, only for it to retreat immediately. Jorstadt gave chase, but nearly knocked over Alma before he could catch it. The healer had left her hut far outside town to check on him, and frightened by her close encounter with the beast, asked Jorstadt to stay with her that night. Sure the beast would not return that night, Jorstadt accepted and retired to her hut. They stayed up late together, and Alma admitted to feeling no grief for the dead man, whom had made unwanted advances toward her. Despite Alma expressing an interest in him, an exotic witcher whose sterility removed the possibility of consequences for her, Jorstadt found he could not rid himself of the warg's smell and declined, turning in for the night.

The next morning, Jorstadt left a jilted Alma to investigate his snares, and found they had all been intentionally disarmed. Certain the animal wouldn't have so methodically disabled each one, Jorstadt concluded someone or something was helping it, but was lost as to what until he realized why he couldn't rid his nose of the smell in Alma's hut. Returning, Jorstadt found Alma gone—along with his swords—when the door slammed behind him. Through the door, Alma explained she had raised the warg from a lost little pup, and that she wouldn't allow him to kill it. Thus, she'd locked him in with it. Attacked in close quarters, Jorstadt had to fend off the warg's jaws with his arms and had difficulty targeting it with a sign. In the struggle, however, he managed to cast an Aard in the direction of the door and stumble outside.

Jorstadt retrieved one of his discarded swords and prepared to face off against the howling beast only for Alma to stand in his way. She begged him to spare the creature despite his warnings it was not a tame animal. Seeking to prove him wrong, Alma reached out to calm the agitated beast—which in its frenzy turned on her in an instant. Rushing forward, Jorstadt slew the creature, but not fast enough to save the healer. Explaining to the ealdorman afterward, Jorstadt lingered to help with Alma's burial, accepted his promised reward, and moved on along the Path.

#### Botchling of Eddysburg (1161)

Wherever Jorstadt rode, he found himself treated as a stranger and outcast, despite the dangers he rid the towns he visited of. In keeping with the witcher guild's code, however, Jorstadt took what contracts a village would offer and move on in search of further work. As he ventured south in the direction of Tretegor, however, he was first accosted by someone seeking a witcher: a midwife from Eddysburg, a thorpe along the Duppa River. The woman explained she'd been called upon from a neighboring village to help with a difficult pregnancy, and found her patient suffering from nightmares, fever, and soon exhaustion and delirium. At once, she'd recognized the signs: the expectant mother was the target of a botchling. Collecting the reagents for a dose of Cursed oil, Jorstadt set off with her at once for Eddysburg.

Upon setting foot in the home and meeting the afflicted woman, bedridden by that time, Jorstadt agreed with the midwife's assessment. He asked where the botchling could have come from, but the midwife was from another town and couldn't say. When the woman's husband returned, he took unkindly to the strangers in his home. The midwife explained, but when Jorstadt offered to kill the cursed creature for a sum the man balked. Despite the very lethal consequences which could befall his wife if the monster was left unchecked, the man refused, even when the witcher suggested the town could take up a collection. Claiming they would make him a debtor to his neighbors, the man accused midwife and witcher of being frauds and thieves, and threw them out.

Though Jorstadt proceeded to ask about the monster and where it might have come from around town, he found none willing to speak with him on the matter. Without a promised reward, Jorstadt made ready to accompany the midwife home and seek work in her village, but that evening at the inn was approached by a ragged young woman. Introducing herself as Hanna, she took an interest in the witcher asking about a monster around town, and soon offered to pay Jorstadt's fee to rid Eddysburg of the monster. Mildly surprised when the destitute-looking woman produced enough coin to meet the advance they haggled for, Jorstadt accepted the contract and staked out the expectant mother's home that very night.

Drinking a dose of Cat potion to aid his night vision, Jorstadt hid himself in view of the only window into the hut. But when his Griffin medallion vibrated after several hours of quiet meditation, Jorstadt could not spot the monster. Upon hearing distressed sobs from the sleeping mother, however, he realized it had already gotten inside. Terrifying the man and wife as he forced his way inside, the witcher overturned half the house before realizing the creature lay under the bed. As he dragged the frame aside, however—the weakened and disoriented mother crying out in fear—the husband lit a lamp. His potion-enhanced eyes stung by the change in light, Jorstadt was too slow to stop the botchling from escaping through a hole it had chewed through the floorboards and down a tunnel beneath.

Furious with the witcher for tearing apart his home and failing to kill the monster, the husband pushed Jorstadt outside and began to argue loudly enough to draw a crowd. Upon exclaiming he'd not agreed to pay the witcher, Jorstadt stated someone else had paid him. The man angrily said the help wasn't asked for, and demanded to know who had made the offer. When Jorstadt pointed out Hanna in the gathering crowd, however, the man only laughed. Hanna, he claimed, was destitute and could not possibly give Jorstadt the promised payment. What's more, she was entirely at fault for the situation, as the botchling had been born of her. When Jorstadt asked how he knew this, the man revealed Hanna was his own daughter. He'd thrown her out of his home for the sins of promiscuity and abortion, for which the gods had punished her by returning the child as a botchling.

Hanna fled the crowd in shame, and Jorstadt followed to the dwelling of a poor fisherman with whom she stayed. Begging her pardon for entering, the witcher asked if all the man said had been true, and Hanna admitted it was. Though her lack of coin no longer bound him to the contract, Jorstadt asked how the botchling had been created, and she reluctantly answered. Hanna had been courted by a young man, and at her beloved's pushing gave up her maidenhood to him before their wedding. After learning they'd conceived a child, however, her intended had run off and left her to bear the child alone. Without income of her own and barely an adult herself, Hanna feared she would not be able to provide for the child or herself. She sought out Eddysburg's midwife, who advised taking poisonous berries to terminate the pregnancy.

As the midwife made preparations for the burial, however, Hanna's father—a convert to the Church of the Eternal Fire—learned of her intentions. As abortion was forbidden by the Church, he brought it to the village priest and branded the midwife a sinner. After driving the midwife from the village, Hanna's father forbid her to leave his house, where he could keep a close eye on her. Seeing the person she'd counted on banished left Hanna all the more frightened, and all the more desperate to be free of her situation. Her father, naturally, could not watch her all the time, and she escaped one night to find where the berries grew on the Duppa's banks. As she had never learned how many to take, however, Hanna experienced terrible pain soon after eating just a handful.

Hanna spent the most terrifying night of her life not knowing if the agonizing cramps would kill her as blood and tissue flowed out of her body. Alone in the dark, her screams might have attracted a monster had a fisherman from the village not found her first. Taken home to recover, Hanna's condition was soon well-known to their neighbors. When she tried to return home, however, her father forbid her to enter his home. Publicly humiliated by his daughter's disobedience, he disowned his daughter and left her penniless and infirm. If not for the kindness of those who'd taken her in, she likely would not have survived. When an expectant mother was found dead with monstrous bite marks, all knew Hanna's would-be child was the cause. The priest declared it a divine punishment to be endured and appeased. Thus, after learning her mother was its next target and a witcher had appeared, Hanna used what little she'd saved for herself to pay Jorstadt's advance.

Though she'd lied about being able to pay him in full, Jorstadt—quick to recall his studies—pointed out the botchling's curse was born of the improper burial, not divine retribution. Thus, as her father and the priest had prevented the midwife from safely carrying out the appropriate rites, he found them at least as complicit in the monster's creation as she. Recognizing her willingness to sacrifice to make things right, Jorstadt offered her a new contract. Because Hanna shared blood with the monster, another option was open to them: laying the botchling to rest by performing the Aymm Rhoin. With her life at risk in the process, Jorstadt offered to complete the task for a reduced fee.

No sooner had she accepted, however, than a commotion arose outside. Stepping out, they were each surprised to find a number of Eddysburg's women had taken up a collection for the witcher. After they'd left the crowd at Hanna's old home, the villagers had started discussing amongst themselves. Some of the women were trying for children with their husbands, others family to those soon to be expecting, and all feared to learn whom the botchling might target next. When they urged Hanna's father to pay the witcher, he reminded them it was a manifestation of the Eternal Fire's punishment. The priest, however, who sensed the mood of his congregation turning, urged him to forgive his daughter to spare the village. Angered by the turn, the father had accused the crowd of interfering in his household affairs and shut them out, after which some of the women had agreed to pay for it themselves.

Accepting their offer, Jorstadt instructed them to lock their doors the following night and began to prepare. After dark, Jorstadt let Hanna guide him to the point by the river where she had found the berries, and the botchling soon appeared. Casting Axii to calm it, Jorstadt instructed Hanna to carry the hideous creature back with them to the fisherman's home. As they passed through the village, however, Hanna's father accosted them. Despite Jorstadt's warnings, he shouted at them for interfering with righteous retribution and slung degrading epithets at his daughter. Finally, he tried to wrest the botchling from Hanna's arms, and Jorstadt's already strained control over the creature broke. With only time to pull one away from the maddening creature, Jorstadt chose to save Hanna and could only look on as her father was torn apart by the monster.

Transforming into a large, necrophage-like creature, Jorstadt was forced to draw his silver sword and kill the botchling. Though it proved a harrowing fight, Jorstadt landed enough profuse cuts to weaken the monster enough to land a final blow. His recovery after was aided by the midwife who'd brought him to Eddysburg, as were the two burials which followed. Hanna returned to her family home, helping her own mother back to health. Having been paid by the village—and having failed to lay the botchling to rest per their agreement—Jorstadt declined to take her coin and even shared some of his own reward for her help to ensure their well-being. After saying his goodbyes, Jorstadt accompanied the midwife home to the next village as promised.

#### Birds of a Feather (1163)

“*We were made for the task of killing monsters. The why of it was settled long before we were born. Someone wants the job done, then you slay the beast, take the coin, and be on your way. None of this debating about it.*”
―Ivon of Gladsko
As the work of his predecessors had eradicated monsters in the heartlands of established kingdoms, where lords and monarchs paid handsomely to keep trade routes safe, Jorstadt was forced to seek a living in more remote areas. Marches, borderlands, and unclaimed wilds where monarchs left problems to one another became his most reliable sources of coin. While people on these frontiers usually had little gold to spare, the lack of support from distant rulers made a witcher more welcome in desperate times. Even when they couldn't pay in coin, the hospitality of these marcher lords and common folk would keep Jorstadt fed and sheltered in the winters.

When sizable bounties did appear, however, competition for them was inevitable. Jorstadt would cross paths with several witchers of the Griffin and Wolf Schools in these years, and while partnerships did rarely occur, most of the time Jorstadt was convinced to cede the contract to witchers with more seniority. While traveling the eastern foothills of the Kestrel Mountains in 1163, however, Jorstadt happened upon a contract which promised to supply him for years. As he waited out the last of the snow in a Kaedweni village, a knight arrived to summon Jorstadt to his liege the Duke of Daevon, having heard of the witcher's slaying of an ogre which plagued the town. His reward for the ogre running thin after the season, Jorstadt found no reason to refuse.

Jorstadt was taken not to a ducal palace in Daevon, but north to an army camp at the eastern end of the pass carved through the Kestrels by the Buina River. While winter had yet to lose its grip on the Kestrels, war had once again been declared between Kaedwen and Redania, and the Duke intended to strike early. By taking his host through the Buina Pass, the Duke could strike at Ghelibol while Redania's army was unprepared and deny King Vizimir staging grounds for a counter-invasion. The only snag in this plan had cropped up when the Duke's scouts attempted to cross the pass: a powerful monster prowled the woods near the mountain village of Mossyrock, and slew the scouts which set foot in its territory. While his army might have been able to deal with it, the Duke did not wish to risk losing a critical part of his relatively small host. For the swift removal of this obstacle, the Duke offered to pay the young witcher enough to sustain himself without work for half a dozen years.

Marching into the cold mountain pass, Jorstadt reached Mossyrock and received a surprisingly warm welcome, as travelers seeking refuge were one of few sources of coin for the town. When asked about the presence of monsters, however, the townsfolk suddenly grew hesitant and deflected his questions. The only exception proved to be the village ealdorman, who was himself not much older than Jorstadt's mere twenty years. While Jorstadt was initially suspicious when his medallion began to vibrate upon meeting this ealdorman, Kacper, the man dismissed the cause being a magic ring gifted to his predecessor years earlier by a traveling mage as a symbol of his office.

Kacper took an interest in Jorstadt's questions and expertise with monsters, prompting the young witcher to stay up late into the night explaining monster ecology and hunting techniques. In his enthusiasm for sharing knowledge, Jorstadt mostly forgot to gather information from this one willing source. He did ask, however, why the village chose one so young as an ealdorman, and about the seeming lack of elderly denizens he'd observed throughout the town. Kacper reluctantly explained life in the mountains was a struggle at best for even the heartiest folk, dependent on older methods of hunting and gathering rather than farming or trade, but alluded to a few infirm elders who generally remained in their homes. Sorry to bring up the unpleasantness, Jorstadt hastily apologized and accepted the answer.

The next morning, with no leads in town to follow, Jorstadt elected to venture outside the village in search of clues. Most of his efforts proved fruitless, as the mountain snows continued to fall in the early spring and quickly obscured even the most recent tracks. As he approached the town's cemetery, however, a woman from the village began to shout at him, demanding he not poke around their families' graves and leave their dead in peace. As Jorstadt tried to depart, the woman tripped and fell upon a cut sapling hidden in the snow. Impaled by the sharp trunk, she had lost consciousness by the time Jorstadt freed and carried her back to the village for tending by healers. With only one midwife in Mossyrock, however, hopes for her survival soon dimmed.

Though Jorstadt apologized for his part in it, Kacper was quick to understand that it'd been an accident. When the woman passed away the next day, however, the ealdorman asked the witcher to remain in his hut for the duration of the funeral, as the other grieving villagers may seek to blame him. As he waited, however, Jorstadt noticed the magic ring Kacper held had been left behind—and failed to garner any response from his Griffin medallion when close by. Stealing outside in the cold night, Jorstadt watched the funeral procession from afar as they brought the woman, still alive, to the cemetery and left her there in Kacper's sole care. After the villagers were gone, however, Kacper underwent a monstrous transformation and revealed his true self as a Nosferat, then began to feed on the defenseless woman.

Unarmed and unarmored, Jorstadt knew he stood no chance of facing the vampire head-on and retreated, leaving the victim to her fate. Gearing up, he instead waited for Kacper's return to the hut, lying in ambush. The nosferat's sharp senses, however, detected Jorstadt's trap. Instead of entering, Kacper called out once more in human form, pleading with the witcher to talk. Having lost the element of surprise against a powerful foe, Jorstadt thought it better to hear out the vampire and seek a new advantage.

To his surprise, however, Kacper revealed he'd struck a bargain with the folk of the mountain town. After decades of preying on humans in the wilderness, the vampire had taken up living in the burgeoning city of Vizima and adopted a human persona to be closer to a source of prey. In pretending to be human, however, he had developed relationships with many of them and come to feel for them as more than cattle. Departing the city after his hunger led him to kill one he'd considered a friend, he'd arrived in Mossyrock to find its people starved and facing constant threat of raids by Kaedwen's restless knights. Kacper had agreed to fend off the attacks and drive game near the village for them to hunt, in exchange for offerings of life to sustain him. The nosferat had proposed, however, that he would feed only on those lives already on death's door: the elderly, the sick, and the mortally wounded when such accidents occurred. Kacper had not needed to seek out unwary victims this way, and the village had come back from the brink of abandonment.

Jorstadt, for his part, was at first disgusted by the villagers' choice to willingly be culled, but Kacper pled for him to understand they had chosen this path willingly, preferring it to eking out a living on scraps. When Jorstadt brought up the contract he'd taken was caused by the deaths of Kaedwen's scouts, Kacper revealed Mossyrock would be subject to punitive pillaging and its inhabitants slaughtered if the Kaedweni marched through. Seeing Jorstadt conflicted, Kacper allowed the witcher to remain alone in the hut for the night to make up his mind. By the time the witcher finally allowed himself to sleep, however, Jorstadt had yet to choose a path for himself.

As it happened, however, the choice would be made for him shortly. The following morning, another witcher arrived in Mossyrock: Ivon of Gladsko, a fellow graduate of the Griffin School and Jorstadt's senior. Learning of the Kaedweni duke's generous contract, he'd made his way into the mountains and fully expected the younger witcher to provide what he'd uncovered in his hunt. Thus, it came as a surprise and an insult when Jorstadt proved reluctant to share his information. Only when Ivon accused him of keeping potentially life-saving knowledge from his brother out of desire for coin did Jorstadt share what he'd learned, and his uncertainty in how to procede.

Rather than sympathize, Ivon vehemently dismissed Jorstadt's indecision, declaring the vampire's attempts to feed only selectively were meaningless. An argument followed, and when Ivon stood up to leave and hunt down the vampire, Jorstadt tried to block his way. The senior witcher assaulted his brother and left him unconscious, then headed out with oiled sword in hand. By the time Jorstadt regained his senses, the deed was done: Ivon had slain Kacper, and sent a messenger back to Kaedwen. Dropping the nosferat's head at Jorstadt's feet, Ivon contemptuously told Jorstadt to claim he'd done the deed and keep the reward for himself, and to remember witchers were made for killing monsters, not befriending them. Then, without waiting for a reply, Ivon rode off for Redania alone.

Surprised to find himself grieving for a vampire, Jorstadt waited in Mossyrock until the Kaedweni army's arrival, who quickly began rounding up villagers and putting huts to the torch. The Duke fulfilled his promise of a generous reward before bidding the young witcher, no longer needed, to be on his way. The coin, however, did not satisfy Jorstadt. Thinking on the right and wrong of the slain vampire and the black-and-white code of his school's knightly approach to hunting, Jorstadt finally resolved to better his understanding of human morality, and how it might apply to the non-human. Taking the payment with him, Jorstadt set out for the best place he could think to study the subject: the Academy at Oxenfurt.

### The Difficult Student (1164-1168)

After sailing down Redania's coast and up the Pontar River to Oxenfurt, Jorstadt found himself not immediately welcome at the Academy. While the reward from the Duke of Daevon proved more than enough to pay for enrollment fees, the university's directors had reservations about admitting a witcher. For one, many assertions of the witcher schools clashed with those of the university's biology and medical departments, whose faculty brought in much-needed funding through their clout and published works. Agreeing to take in a witcher could be seen as endorsing their beliefs, and would inevitably lead to conflict. But a counter-point was raised by the Dean of Trouvereship and Poetry, one Professor Hieronymous Ridcully, that the Academy should have enough confidence in its own teachings to dispute and correct even the misguided beliefs of a witcher. Seeing this potential student as a challenge to overcome and make an example of, the university allowed Jorstadt to begin study in the College of Arts and Sciences in 1164.

#### Adversarial Instruction

Jorstadt's lecturers expected him to be trouble, and were proven right the first day. While an exceptionally capable pupil, he proved stubbornly attached to ways of thinking outside the university's orthodoxy. In mathematics, he insisted on using Ofieri systems of quickly deriving sums, while in biology he blatantly contradicted his professor on a point about cockatrice pinion feathers. Discussion with their colleagues led many of Jorstadt's teachers to develop a bias against the witcher, becoming harshly critical of his coursework and actively discouraging his participation in classes. Jorstadt, for his part, reacted to the frustration of feeling singled out by becoming antagonistic in turn, hindering his studies. The only field in which he flourished, ironically, was under the auspices of Professor Ridcully in audited classes on epic poetry and oral histories of Ofier, Skellige, and other distant lands.

Having decided to sit in on Ridcully's literary lectures to study ancient stories of heroes struggling against monsters, Jorstadt was surprised to feel the love of stories he'd held in his youth reappear. Taking note of his enthusiasm and well-articulated essays, Professor Ridcully soon struck up a rapport with the witcher and listened to his concerns. Hearing of Jorstadt's fraught relations with his other teachers, Ridcully encouraged him to sacrifice his desire to be right so he could take as much of value as he could from the classes he'd paid for. The approach paid off—as Jorstadt ceased to antagonize his instructors, he fell into the silent middle ground of students and was mostly forgotten about. Despite still disagreeing with the inaccurate assumptions of his professors in biology and chemistry, Jorstadt better learned how to apply the scientific method and form an argument. While penalized for his supposedly incorrect conclusions, his teachers did begrudgingly admit the claims in Jorstadt's papers were well supported.

As he'd done during his training in Kaer Seren, however, Jorstadt seldom socialized outside of group assignments. Often, his day would consist solely of waking, exercising, attending classes, and returning to his room to study alone. Professor Ridcully took note of the behavior and soon pushed Jorstadt to attend his poetry circle, claiming it made for a more well-rounded educational experience. While he at first felt uncomfortable and out of his depth, Jorstadt was soon approached by the others and made friends with John of Brugge, one of his anatomy classmates who took an interest in the witcher's experience with the creatures they studied. John at first clung to the beliefs instilled in him by the school, but through dialogue with Jorstadt began to come to his own conclusions. The pair soon developed a circle of friends who enjoyed debating both artistic and scientific topics outside scholastic hours.

#### Oxenfurt's Witcher-in-Residence

**Jorstadt:** *"Got something here... sample number five, blue mass forming. What's the variable in this one?"*
**John of Brugge:** *"A simple sugar solution, glucose. Blue precipitate... would mean the creature's saliva contains copper hydroxide! What creature might be nibbling pennies and cleaning solution?"*
**Jorstadt:** *"Think I might have an idea. Come on!"*
—Jorstadt and John apply their chemistry lessons to identify a monster.
While classes and study filled most of Jorstadt's days and many of his nights, he still required a source of income, as tuition had wiped out most of the coin he'd saved. Fortunately, even inside the city's walls, folk had no shortage of problems with monsters. Jorstadt reliably found work hunting down errant drowners near the culverts leading to Oxenfurt's sewers or lurking around the harbor, but these were far from his only contracts. As humans grew and changed the North to suit them, its native monsters adapted to them in turn. Oxenfurt, haphazardly built as industries grew up around the needs of the Academy and full of naive aspiring academics, proved the ideal place for monsters to learn how to blend into human civilization. While those which continued to prey on humans necessitated a silver sword, some Jorstadt found proved open to peaceful coexistence.

Shortly after joining Ridcully's poetry circle, John of Brugge asked to follow the witcher on his next contract, interested in field study of the necrophages he usually hunted. Though Jorstadt was hesitant at first, John promised payment in picking up his next tavern tab, which quickly changed his mind. Delving into Oxenfurt's sewer system through the elven ruins the city had built over, Jorstadt soon had to save his incorrigibly curious friend's life from lurking drowners. When the fighting was done, however, and they found the week-old body of a dock worker, it was John who noticed fang marks on the victim's neck in addition to the expected feeding of the necrophages. The pair then embarked on a tangled series of investigations in which they clashed with Oxenfurt's guards, proved the innocence of a doppler framed for the crime, and finally confronted the alp responsible who lived in the city as a salon owner, whom Jorstadt was forced to slay.

Thereafter, Jorstadt and John worked together more often than not on unusual cases, from missing persons to the occasional escaped specimen from the Academy's zoological collection. One of their more prolific projects was helping the city guard chart the ruins underneath Oxenfurt to help improve their sewer system, finding ideal points to install gated grates to keep drowners and other monsters from taking up residence so near the population. While this won them the unflinching trust of Captain Vimes of the Oxenfurt City Watch, most of the credit was stolen by one of the city's magistrates, Sir Robert Kotik, which earned him an honorary position at the college. While John was incensed and vowed to one day expose the fraud, Jorstadt contented himself with the payments for their work and looked forward to their next adventure.

#### Expulsion

**Albin Bartosz:** *"He's a surly, disagreeable pupil with no respect for this institution! And I have it on good authority he murdered Miss Livingston, proprietress of the boutique on Spring Street!"*
**Hieronymous Ridcully:** *"Didn't she turn out to be a murdering vampiress?"*
**Albin Bartosz:** *"Well... yes. But that's beside the point!"*
—Heads of the Academy's faculties discuss Jorstadt in a disciplinary meeting.
Unfortunately, despite the positive reputation Jorstadt was making for himself around Oxenfurt, his rapport with his teachers went from bad to worse over the years. Professors who had yet to meet the witcher spoke with those who'd already had negative experiences, making expectations which their own resulting conduct would provoke Jorstadt to fulfill. Worst of these would be Albin Bartosz, Dean of Natural History. As Jorstadt's most bitter disagreements had been with the faculty leading his department's undergraduate courses, Bartosz was well-prepared by the first time they met in a classroom. While a faulty scientist and lazy researcher, Bartosz had climbed to his position through a quick wit and clever manipulation, and turned his talents against the socially inexperienced witcher. Jorstadt proved easy to goad into arguments when Bartosz made erroneous claims, in which truth would become irrelevant as the professor browbeat Jorstadt into silence.

At last, two years into Jorstadt's studies in 1166, Bartosz took Jorstadt's frustration too far. During a lecture on the nature of alghouls, Bortosz made the plainly false claim that they were indistinguishable from normal ghouls, and when Jorstadt objected played his usual games. This time, however, Bartosz remarked it was little wonder the witchers were in decline when this sole learned one could not grasp even basic facts. Infuriated, Jorstadt stormed out of the lecture and left college grounds, leaving Bartosz to think the Academy was finally rid of him. He would soon be proven wrong. The next day, as morning classes began, Jorstadt entered the lecture haul carrying a fresh alghoul corpse, which he lay on Bartosz's desk. The witcher then proceeded to dissect the specimen in front of the class, agitating nerves to extend its spines and remarking on other features such as its stripes—like those of a Zerrikanian tiger—which set it apart from common ghouls.

Shortly afterward, Bartosz called a meeting of the Academy's deans to review the incident for disciplinary action. While Professor Ridcully argued the witcher's case, Jorstadt had made enemies of more than enough faculty to carry a vote. Over the objections of many fellow students, John of Brugge first among them, Jorstadt was directed to gather his possessions and escorted from the Academy's grounds. Any who expected him to leave Oxenfurt, however, would be disappointed. Finding a meager room to rent near Thinker's Park, Jorstadt continued to study with help from the Academy. The circle of friends and fellow students surrounding Jorstadt and John, which had since come to be known as The Silver Quills, continued to meet even more regularly for discussion and debate on their own terms. Assignments and test copies were smuggled to him by his own classmates, and some even suspected Professor Ridcully of having a hand in the business.

Finally, after four years of study, Jorstadt completed the equivalent coursework to earn degrees in both biology and alchemical science—had he not been expelled. While no certificate attested to his achievements, the witcher had gone beyond merely completing a list of work and bettered his understanding of art, science, and human nature in his time there. His friends from the Silver Quills, however, ensured he would have the chance to prove his abilities to himself. John, having been the witcher's classmate in biology, copied the final exam questions to bring him, while the doppler they'd befriended, Cheery, impersonated a professor to steal a test copy from the faculty of Chemistry and Alchemy. Administered by his friends in their usual haunt at the Alchemy Inn, John himself reviewed his results and declared to rousing cheers that Jorstadt had passed. While they couldn't offer him anything official on the Academy's behalf, the band did each sign a degree they'd written themselves and presented to him. Honored by the gesture, and confident he'd learned what he'd come to Oxenfurt for, Jorstadt waited to leave the city until the end of the 1168 school term when several of his friends would finish their own studies.

### The Scholarly Witcher (1169-1171)

#### Service to Gedimin Vegelbud (1169)

**Jorstadt:** *"I've not heard of anyone paying to keep a witcher on retainer before."*
**Gedimin:** *"And why not? Kings and lords employ mages for dealing with magic, and I have monsters which need witchering."*
—Jorstadt negotiates with his new employer.
Upon leaving Oxenfurt, Jorstadt was eager to experiment with the theories he'd developed and quickly took a contract from the village of Alness for an elusive water hag. By taking water samples from various points along the nearby river, Jorstadt found the area where his samples ceased to contain a chemical secreted by the hag, and reasoned the chemical was washing downstream from its lair. Jorstadt located and slew the monster shortly thereafter, and with it gone the village's fishing boomed. Their liege lord took notice, and learned of the witcher's work upon speaking with the ealdorman. So impressed was this nobleman, Gedimin Vegelbud, that he sent for the witcher to consult on a problem of his own.

Jorstadt arrived at their estate in the Gustfields to find it and its surrounding lands in decline. When the noble house was founded near a half-century before, roads through the estate they were granted had been valuable trade routes, but expanded shipping on the Pontar River had undercut this reliable source of income. Gedimin had sought to turn their efforts to farming, as many acres in all directions belonged to them, but drowners, water hags, and worse fiends routinely hid in the interweaving swamps fed by the Pontar Delta. Farmers would suffer attacks, their fellows would refuse to work for fear of the monsters, and the lack of funds started the estate on the road to decline. Gedimin agreed to pay a fair rate for the heads of any monsters Jorstadt killed on his lands, but offered a much more sizeable reward for finding a more permanent end to the problem.

For the next few months, Jorstadt worked at finding a solution and partook of the Vegelbuds' hospitality. He identified the monsters making the bogs their home, located their favorite nesting spots, and even studied ecological relationships shared between each species. After first slaying the individual monsters most prone to leaving the swamps to hunt—mostly those which larger beasts out-competed and drove out of the bog—Jorstadt began developing a plan. He learned the swamps, while fed by streams on the Vegelbuds' lands, actually received most of their water from the Pontar River through channels dug out and regularly dredged by glustyworps. The standing water these channels brought in then became the ideal home for other monsters.

Once he was sure of his findings, Jorstadt delivered a proposition to Gedimin. If the witcher were to slay the glustyworps within the swamps, constructing dams in a few strategic places would rid the drowners and water hags of their habitat, forcing them to leave the estate once and for all. While the earthworks would be costly, Gedimin was willing to attempt anything, and agreed to the plan. Jorstadt then turned to the unpleasant task of hunting the giant insects through acres of swampland, a dangerous and filthy task which Jorstadt—having spent his last decade in Oxenfurt's halls—thoroughly disliked.

As a guest of the Vegelbuds for the whole of this time, Jorstadt also became acquainted with the habits of Redania's nobility. While the Vegelbuds were not exorbitantly wealthy at the time, their few luxuries were novel to Jorstadt, including everything from the grand organ Gedimin's wife played to the genuine silver tableware they used in place of woodwork. Jorstadt, in turn, was something of a novelty to the aristocrats. He and Gedimin would often spend their evenings discussing history, while their daughter took a romantic interest in him, which Jorstadt politely deflected. As he spent most nights out hunting, when Jorstadt mentioned his nickname as an apprentice at Kaer Seren they came to call Jorstadt "The Owl"—a name which would stick with him and continue to spread throughout his career.

The process of emptying out the bogs lasted months, dragging into the late summer. As the work would need completing before winter, Jorstadt employed numerous tricks including bombs for the monsters' burrows and pheromones to drive them away. Even after declaring the work done, he then remained as a guard for the earthwork crews, ensuring no stragglers or new arrivals attacked the engineers Gedimin hired and interrupted the construction. By the first snowfall, however, the work had been completed, and Jorstadt was invited to stay with the Vegelbuds through the winter. Better still, when the spring melt arrived, the earthworks proved successful; the former bogs remained dry as the swelling Pontar's waters were held at bay. In decades to come, this would help turn the Gustfields into a productive breadbasket for nearby Oxenfurt and Novigrad, while Gors Velen on the Pontar's south bank remained a mire.

As Jorstadt's reward was greater than he could easily carry, Gedimin sponsored the witcher's application to the Vivaldi Bank in Novigrad. With the account shrewdly invested by Gedimin, its interest would swell in coming years, while Jorstadt was given bank notes which could be exchanged at any of their branches across the Continent. Financially secure for the forseeable future, Jorstadt was able to purchase enhancements to his armor and blades, including magical fortification through glyphs and devana runestones. While contracts became somewhat rarer now around the Free City, Jorstadt himself was able to live comfortably through the summer months of 1170. Feeling at last accomplished enough to present himself to his fellow witchers with pride, Jorstadt used some of his coin to purchase accommodations on a ship bound north for Poviss, intent on returning to the School of the Griffin to contribute all he had learned.

#### Unorthodox Teachings (1170)

“*I don't understand. We were made to kill monsters! What difference do the means make?*”
―Jorstadt pleads his case to the master witchers.
While a few adventures came up along his way, Jorstadt eventually arrived in Kaer Seren as many of his fellow Griffins returned to shelter for the coming winter. The gatherings Jorstadt recalled from his training had been joyous occasions; this reunion, however, proved somber. Instead of boasting about whom had slain the fiercest beast or made the most coin, most of the Griffins had few notable feats to report, and even fewer crowns to show for their troubles. Seeking to restore their cheer as they feasted the night of his return, Jorstadt spoke of his success in the Gustfields, showed off the armor his reward had enabled him to order, and offered to share the methods he'd developed using what he'd learned from his time at Oxenfurt.

His words, however, had far from the effect he'd hoped. Many of the younger witchers—those who'd chased scraps year after year in the North, heavily patrolled as it was by their seniors—became jealous of their long-absent brother. By contrast, the older witchers were growing concerned with diminishing monster populations and the decreasing numbers of contracts, were troubled by Jorstadt's eradication of a monster habitat which might've been reliably lucrative. As his brothers derided his successes and questioned the value of these new methods, Jorstadt turned in desperation for help from the most senior of their order, the Grandmaster Erland of Larvik.

But Jorstadt would find no help from Erland. The Grandmaster, having survived the bloody schisms of the original Order of Witchers, had set up the School of the Griffin to adhere to tradition by design. He began to fear that, should his comrades abandon the straightforward, knightly facing of one's enemies in favor of Jorstadt's tedious pragmatism, they might also lose sight of the noble principles and other traditions Erland sought to pass on. While he briefly praised Jorstadt's inventiveness, the Grandmaster made clear his belief in the methods witchers had used for centuries: might and magic, silver and steel. Red-faced from his chastisement, Jorstadt was pushed again to the fringe of his peers where his life as a witcher had begun.

Though the other witchers returned with little in the way of fame or fortune, many had come bearing young wards. Picked up through the course of the witchers' travels on the Path, these boys had, for one reason or another, been chosen to become the next generation of witcher aspirants. While the master witchers reviewed trends collected from stories of their brothers' travels—work Jorstadt wanted desperately to be a part of—the junior Griffins were tasked with the cruel work of breaking in the candidates, Jorstadt among them. Mocked by his fellow instructors as a vain fop, citing the pride he'd taken in his new armor, Jorstadt was saddled with the least promising adepts and took an immediate loathing to the task. With his mind on other matters, he showed little regard at first for the children he'd been burdened with, even while subjecting them to the same trials he'd so hated himself.

Through the following winter months, however, Jorstadt began to know the trainees better. The boy Ctibor would take punishment upon himself to protect the other adepts, Klement had a wonderful talent for sketching the beasts they studied, and Vaclav remained rebellious in ways which reminded Jorstadt of his young friend Rhys. This familiarity made the trials inflicted on the candidates—some as young as six—hard for even the instructors to bear. The children were hounded through dangerous and brutal obstacle courses, subjected to the sheer cold of the Dragon Mountains, and denied food or otherwise punished for disobedience or failure. Among these punishments were beatings by their frustrated instructors, which only left the children weaker than before. Yet, all this was approved of and even encouraged by the masters, all of whom had once gone through the same to become witchers themselves.

While his fellow instructors turned to drink or denial to fend off the guilt of carrying out these punishments, Jorstadt remained conflicted. He began to ask after the purpose of some of these practices, and how well they contributed to the end goal of producing viable witchers. But already unpopular, and prodding at unpopular topics, Jorstadt's attempts to discuss the issues were quickly shut down by the other Griffins. Reluctant to put himself in the spotlight again, Jorstadt began to quietly abide by the uncomfortable norms of the School again until the Spring of 1171, and the return of a friend of the Grandmaster: Nylah, the Ofieri merchant.

Pleased to see the boy she'd once brought books to had survived on the Path, Nylah made a point of seeking him out and quickly picked up on his discomfort. Asking what troubled him, she forced Jorstadt to admit he saw no point in much of the suffering inflicted on the school's trainees, and that more effective methods of developing the candidates physically and mentally were possible. While he couldn't convince the Griffin School to change, Nylah encouraged Jorstadt to start where he could make an immediate difference: with the witcher trainees under his instruction.

Over the course of months, Jorstadt began to steadily deviate from the lessons planned by the master witchers. While still running his students through rugged game trails, where the risk of broken legs or other injuries taught students to mind their surroundings, Jorstadt no longer used clifftop trails which might send a candidate to their death for one misstep. In the yard, balance training took place on the lowest posts set only a few feet above the ground, and standard weight lifting replaced backbreaking work hauling stones to and fro. No longer terrified for their lives, the students under Jorstadt began to develop confidence where before they'd felt destined for death as they fell behind their classmates.

These new methods were quickly noted by the senior witchers. By not putting their students in mortal danger, they believed, the young adepts were not experiencing the life-or-death decisions a witcher would need to make to survive on the Path. Thus, Jorstadt was first told to cease these deviant experiments, which he agreed to do, only to be found continuing them once the masters thought the matter resolved. The other instructors then argued to take Jorstadt's pupils away from him, which was only halted thanks to a plea by Nylah to Grandmaster Erland directly. As the master witchers themselves believed these least-promising recruits would have perished by now if subjected to the Griffins' training as normal, she reasoned, why not allow Jorstadt his experiment?

Still, Earland feared the complaints of the other witchers might have their roots in truth. An unworthy witcher sent out on the Path would soon meet his end, and the Griffins' resources would be wasted on them. Thus, Earland made a point of routinely testing Jorstadt's pupils against their comrades being trained by other witchers. These contests ended up resolving little, however; Earland's tests were arbitrary, and failed to provide clear winners. Those who lifted weights were as strong as those who'd lifted boulders, yet suffered fewer injuries. Those who'd run on game trails were as swift and sure-footed as those who'd run on clifftops, but displayed hesitation when dealing with heights which their classmates had overcome.

The most telling of the Grandmaster's tests was administered with help of one of the school's resident mages. Each adept was pitted against the illusion of a Ghoul, and while the rival trainee overcame his opponent whole minutes ahead of Jorstadt's pupil, he'd suffered so many wounds the evaluating masters judged he would have bled to death shortly after the fight without the aid of potions. Jorstadt's pupil, by contrast, took longer to best his foe, but would have survived the fight. Only further troubled by the result, the master witchers had yet to pronounce whether Jorstadt would be allowed to continue or stop with his methods by the time winter returned to Kaer Seren.

#### Banishment from Kaer Seren (1171)

“*Sparing them hardship might feel good now, but will a necrophage be so kind? Will a vampire slow its bite because this pretender calling himself a witcher was once a child? A quick death now is more merciful than letting an unsuited boy succumb to the Grasses, or endure them only to be torn apart by the first drowner they meet. We subject our adepts to pain because only those who resist it can be witchers.*”
―Ivon of Gladsko
Throughout the year he spent at the Griffin School, Jorstadt's continued prodding at reforms to both monster hunting and witcher training made him an agitation to the other witchers. He was careful, however, to only go so far with his tests, keeping the master witchers from halting his experiments altogether. This uneasy status quo ended with the arrival of another Griffin coming home to winter for the year: Ivon of Gladsko. Remembering the cross of their Paths eight years before, Ivon was quick to call Jorstadt out upon learning of the disturbance his new methods had caused.

Retelling what had happened between them at Mossyrock, Ivon quickly gathered support from many of their brothers, all of whom called for an end to Jorstadt's alterations to the young Griffins' training. Jorstadt, on the other hand, stood alone, but argued his case fiercely. The boys he'd trained stood just as much chance of success on the Path, he asserted, as any other within Kaer Seren. All he had done was remove needlessly lethal risk from their training. Erland's tests of his trainees to date had proven they were no more wanting than any other adepts of their ages, and survived longer than most expected. While Ivon conceded the point, the number of voices opposing Jorstadt began to drown him out until the Grandmaster himself called for order. Though the matter was laid to rest for the time being, Ivon intimated there were other trials the adepts would yet be judged by.

Days after their debate before the council, Jorstadt woke to rouse his candidates for morning exercises only to find them absent from their barracks. Searching their usual haunts and hiding places, he came to realize they were no longer within Kaer Seren's walls and knew immediately to confront Ivon. Finding him in the hall with their brothers, Ivon revealed he and the other instructors had pushed the master witchers to put the trainees through a traditional test: the Trial of the Mountains. Vividly remembering his own experience in the Trial, Jorstadt was furious, but the master witchers stated it was a fair test for which the candidates were at an appropriate age. The boys who survived the treacherous wilds and returned to Kaer Seren alive would continue their training.

Jorstadt departed Kaer Seren's great hall to the sounds of mocking laughter, but did not return to his own quarters. Unwilling to stand for the Trial's random culling of the students they'd poured so much effort into, Jorstadt donned his armor and blades before riding into the mountains himself. Tracking the steps of the brothers who'd taken his unconscious adepts into the wilds, he soon located the first of his trainees, saving Klement from a flock of harpies, but was unable to stop them from carrying off Ctibor. Hour after hour, Jorstadt scoured the mountain valleys and sea cliffs for his students, fending off monsters which sought to prey upon him and the defenseless adepts alike.

Not all his attempts at rescue were successful; many had been slain already by prowling monsters and treacherous terrain. Those wounded but alive Jorstadt attempted to stabilize as best he could, but in his haste had brought no bandages or other medical supplies. To their credit, however, some of the students remembered their own first aid training, and scavenged what they could for makeshift poultices and splints for their brothers. As they went on, Jorstadt realized he could cast igni to serve as a signal fire, driving off monsters and drawing the trainees to them at once. While too late to save many, Jorstadt refused to turn back until he'd either rescued or confirmed the deaths of every trainee.

As they finally turned back toward Kaer Seren, Jorstadt would be forced to square off against a persistent young griffin who took the witcher for something like a mother deer, incapable of defending so many young. Remembering the one who'd taken his friend Rhys so long ago in the same forest, Jorstadt fought back ferociously, bringing the hybrid to ground with a blast of aard. Not satisfied with merely driving off the beast, Jorstadt cut off the creature's escape and stopped only once he'd removed the creature's head. Covered in its blood, he had a brief moment to reflect on his improvement, having fled from the creatures during his own training. This time, he would turn back to Kaer Seren having truly overcome their trial.

Despite saving the majority of trainees, Jorstadt's return was met with no celebration from his brothers. In their eyes, he had intentionally interfered with the trial, saving those whom it was meant to weed out. His authority over the adepts' training was immediately revoked, and a council was convened to judge Jorstadt's actions. With no allies among them, a verdict was quickly reached and left to Grandmaster Erland to pronounce. Jorstadt would be exiled from the School of the Griffin, denied its resources for the study of monsters, armor, or weapons, and the hospitality of Kaer Seren to endure the winters. Only too happy to be rid of the place, Jorstadt gathered his belongings and departed the fortress the following day.

With the peculiar Griffin gone, Kaer Seren returned to training students in its traditional ways. Even as they were exposed once more to more dangerous methods of instruction, the candidates Jorstadt had mentored displayed greater resilience than before. When they were finally subjected to the Trial of the Grasses, the candidates suffered a casualty rate in line with previous generations. Due to their higher rate of surviving the trials before, however, more candidates than usual underwent the mutations that year, and more Griffins would set out on the Path afterward as a result.

### The Lonely Owl (1171-1190)

Intending to leave Poviss and the homeland of the Griffin School behind, Jorstadt gladly accepted Nylah's offer of a berth aboard her merchant cog on its return voyage south. Spending most of his time on deck watching the passing coastline, Jorstadt admitted to Nylah the uncertainty he felt toward his future. Having enough coin invested in the Vivaldi Bank to live on quite comfortably, exiled from his witchers' guild, and with monster populations in such decline, he was no longer sure he wished to pursue life as a witcher. While she asserted there was nothing wrong with changing trades, Nylah counseled him to not yet hang up his swords. Witchers, she believed, had skills and abilities granted to a rare few, and he might still find himself able to help at times when no one else could. Though unconvinced, Jorstadt disembarked once the ship reached Novigrad with the promise he wouldn't yet try to sell his silver sword.

#### What Lurks in Dreams (1172)

“*I'll be fine. After all, no witcher dies in his bed.*”
―Jorstadt before imbibing a sleeping draught.
The witcher remained in Novigrad through the following year, settling down in a modest apartment in the portside district. The Free City, at that time, had yet to so zealously adopt faith in the Cult of the Eternal Fire, and Jorstadt was left relatively in peace, albeit still the subject of hushed scorn and suspicion among the human burghers. Making a modest living as a clerk balancing books for one of the shipbuilding firms, Jorstadt spent most of his time reading tomes and scrolls of all kinds, though biology remained his primary study. With few monsters to slay within the city's walls, however, Jorstadt's swords remained on a shelf to gather dust.

One of the few places to draw Jorstadt out was a tavern called the False Queen's Envy. Despite its human owner, Tanek, the establishment employed a non-human staff and most of its regular patrons were likewise of the elder races. While its fare was cheap, Jorstadt could spend the coin he'd earned from Vegelbud there without bothering to cook for himself and generally remain undisturbed. After helping throw out a sizable gang of humans looking to pick a fight after they'd spilled Jorstadt's beer on his book, he became a welcome regular alongside the elvish craftsmen, dwarfish traders, and gnome merchants who crowded the establishment.

That autumn, however, a plague struck the city, killing hundreds—including Tanek. The Envy was willed to an elf named Siobhán, the tavern's most senior serving girl, and her children. After Tanek's funeral and the wake held there, the Envy continued to operate much the same as before, until a week later Siobhán arrived on Jorstadt's doorstep in the middle of the night, begging for a witcher's help. The tavern, she would explain after being invited in, had been cursed. Folk who stayed in its rooms were plagued by nightmares, herself included. While she'd written it off at first, she'd come to Jorstadt when her children awoke with their backs covered in long cuts.

The most likely culprits, she believed, were the human residents or other tavern owners of the city who hated to see the business fall into nonhuman hands. While reluctant to involve himself in witcher's work again, especially with racial tensions in the mix, Jorstadt detested more the idea of losing a place which had come to be part of his daily routine. After agreeing a modest sum—on top of a reasonable number of free meals—Jorstadt agreed to rid the taphouse of the curse and prevent those responsible from ever doing harm to the establishment again.

The witcher's first step was to visit Siobhán's children, firstly to see to their health as Siobhán could afford no doctor, and secondly to inspect the wounds they'd received to determine a possible cause. While the elder girl was old enough to work in the tavern and no worse for wear, the younger boy was terrified. Both reported the same nightmare of being chased and struck by tendrils from shadowy figures, an experience Siobhán also shared. Their wounds, however, neither could account for, having woken up with them in the morning. As Jorstadt inspected them, however, he found the long cuts had developed bruising along their lengths as if struck hard, almost consistent with the lashes of a whip.

After treating them with antiseptic salve and clean bandages, Jorstadt continued his investigation at the tavern itself. Despite a thorough search with his enhanced senses, Jorstadt could find no marks on the door, bags of black magic, or other signs of a peasant's typical attempt at a hex; only dust, beds left unmade, and dead insects. His medallion, however, would vibrate at random as he swept the building, with no apparent cause. Electing to stay the night to see if the curse would manifest after dark, Jorstadt tried to enter a witcher's meditation for the first time in nearly a year, and found he had difficulty with it.

To his surprise, by morning no wounds had appeared on his body, nor had any other symptoms of a curse appeared. Weary, he returned home to rest and come up with a new plan for the following night. Returning with a few talismans and charms, for the next three nights Jorstadt tried and failed to find the cause of this plague of nightmares and wounds, though his vibrating medallion told him its effect was still in place. Each passing day, his client grew more distressed; every day the tavern remained closed, it earned no revenue, and Siobhán owed rent to the unforgiving human members of the City Council. Promising only to do what he could, Jorstadt returned the following night with new components for common curse-breaking rituals.

Past midnight, however, Jorstadt's vigil would catch a more material phenomenon. As he waited, a rattle of the door told the witcher's enhanced ears someone was attempting to pick the lock, and Jorstadt hid himself behind the bar. The intruders were revealed to be three humans, carrying muted lanterns. Ambushing the trio, Jorstadt's mutated strength won out, and before long only one remained conscious and begging for mercy. In short order, the witcher learned the three had each stayed at the tavern over the previous week, and experienced the same nightmares and awoken with the same wounds as Siobhán's children. Believing it to be a curse cast on them by the non-human owners, they'd come to sabotage the tavern in revenge.

Inspecting the vandals, Jorstadt confirmed they indeed bore wounds akin to those of Siobhán's children—and even as he watched, skin split and fresh cuts began to appear on the backs of the unconscious pair. This evidence led Jorstadt to two conclusions: whatever was causing these wounds affected only sleeping persons, and that it was inflicted on humans and non-humans alike. The evident lack of racial hatred as a motivator, and his recollection of the many dead insects—moths, particularly—he'd found throughout the Envy prompted Jorstadt to realize he was likely dealing not with a curse, but a specter. Sending the ruffians on their way with a promise not to return, Jorstadt went in search of a herbalist.

“*Witchers are light sleepers. If I toss and turn, it means something's wrong. If that happens, you need to throw me out of bed as if you caught me with a paramour. Er, because the sensation of falling involuntarily prompts the body to wake, you see.*”
―Jorstadt instructs his assistant.
The following night, Jorstadt returned with a sleeping draught brewed and in Siobhán's company. Explaining to her he needed to dream to see the entity, he asked the innkeep to wake him if he appeared to be in distress and subsequently drank the potion. Rapidly drifting off, Jorstadt entered a lucid dream. Around him was a burning village, filled with shadowy figures fleeing or cutting one another down. One of these shades, thicker and obviously stronger than the others, soon confronted him, bearing a whip. Jorstadt attempted to make contact with the entity, asking their name and what they wanted, but its only response was to lash out at Jorstadt with a shadow whip. Though the witcher attempted to fight back, the shade had control over the dream and mocked Jorstadt for his failure in the eyes of other witchers. Taken by fear, Jorstadt was turned to fleeing and struck across the back again and again.

Waking suddenly with his face wet, Siobhán explained she'd been forced to wake Jorstadt with a pitcher of water to the face when even throwing him from bed failed to waken him. Thanking her for the help, the witcher revealed he'd recognized the specter haunting the False Queen's Envy: an Umbra, a spirit driven to remain in this world by immense guilt they bore in life. Siobhán wanted to know at once how Jorstadt planned to kill or banish the ghost, but Jorstadt explained such a spirit could only be released permanently if the reason for their guilt was found and forgiven by the injured party. For that, Jorstadt would need a way to communicate with the specter while awake, outside the dream it controlled.

In those days, fortunately, the common greytop was an easy enough fungus to locate, and Jorstadt was able to brew a hallucinogenic philter which would allow him to see the spirit. Imbibing the potion the following night, Jorstadt found he faced a shadow in the shape of a knight in full armor, bearing a greatsword. Fleeing when it realized the hunter had seen it, Jorstadt gave chase through Novigrad's streets and outside the city, all the way to a temple and crematory dedicated to the Cult of the Eternal Fire. Cornered in this den, the umbra at last stood and faced the witcher.

A deadly battle ensued, the witcher's silver blade crossing one of solid shadow. Unlike most monsters, this creature had martial training, countering Jorstadt's fencing with a heavy blade meant to be used in open battle. Its armor, too, proved as strong as real metal, making it difficult for the witcher to inflict real damage to the specter. Fortunately, however, Jorstadt's use of specter oil disrupted the umbra's ability to maintain its form even when striking blade or armor, and in time the umbra's strength was spent. Falling to a knee, the shade knight called out for mercy.

When the witcher stayed his blade, the umbra removed its helmet to reveal a face Jorstadt recognized: Tanek, former owner of the Envy. Always knowing the innkeep to be a jovial man, Jorstadt asked what cause his spirit had to remain, and Tanek related his sorry tale. The man had once been a knight of Redania, in service to King Vridank. Two decades before, he'd fought against the rebellion led by Princess Falka, and was outraged by the unruly rebel army's lack of respect for the nobility's laws of chivalry, honor, and war. The rebels tortured prisoners who'd agreed to lay down arms, refused fair ransoms for family members, and ambushed comrades of Tanek's after the rebels had feigned surrender.

Thus, when Redania's knights at last had the chance to regroup and counterattack, Tanek had shown no mercy. In open battle, the armored cavaliers had smashed the poorly-equipped rebel mobs, killing many times their number. After one battle, however, the commander of the surviving non-human detachment had taken shelter in a village and offered terms of surrender. Recalling the friends killed by such false offers of surrender, Tanek opted to use the rebels' own tactic against them. As soon as the rebels appeared to lay down arms, Tanek's cavalry launched their assault on the town, burning it to the ground.

Unknown to Tanek until after the battle, however, the offer of surrender had been true. Instead of fighters, he discovered, the buildings had been occupied by the rebels' camp followers; squires, tradesmen, wives, and children—civilians, all. Sickened by the consequences of discarding his own honor, Tanek thereafter retired from knightly service to his lord and king, and with the plunder he'd received from the campaign, left to set up his tavern in distant Novigrad. Thereafter, he'd treated the non-humans he hired fairly and honorably until his dying day, but no fair pay could make up for the death he'd sown. In death, he was cursed to repeat his greatest shame.

Having heard the umbra's story, Jorstadt promised to free the man's soul, and returned to Siobhán. He retold the story in full detail for completeness, and asked Siobhán to go with him to forgive Tanek, freeing his spirit and lifting the curse on the inn. To his surprise, however, Siobhán outright refused. Hearing of what Tanek had done during the war, she could no more forgive him than could the corpses he'd made. Further, members of her own family had died in that war on Falka's side, and may have been among the very men whose slaughter Tanek had led.

Confused by the elven woman's spite, Jorstadt pointed out it was the only way to rid the tavern of Tanek's ghost. Siobhán, however, responded she'd rather the inn close than let such a murderer rest in peace. Paying the witcher a third of their negotiated sum for his trouble on the unfinished contract, Siobhán bid him farewell. Unable to comprehend why Siobhán wouldn't simply say a few words to get her business back, Jorstadt stepped out and prepared to leave when Siobhán's daughter quietly slipped out behind him, asking for his help. While her mother might allow resentment to control her, Aisling vowed not to. While she couldn't pay the witcher, she volunteered to help him lift the curse, and Jorstadt agreed.

“*I was too young when the war ended to remember any of it. I know you did terrible things in it, but you were sorry for them. And now you've died. Suffering just to hold onto hating you doesn't help anybody. So for those you'll now lie beside, I forgive you.*”
―Aisling addresses Tanek's umbra.
Returning to the False Queen's Envy that night, Jorstadt and Aisling both imbibed a dose of the greytop brew, and in moments found themselves confronted by Tanek, once again in full knight's armor. Standing before him, Aisling forgave him for the scars she'd suffered, and on behalf of those he'd killed so her own family could move forward. Finally at peace, the umbra thanked her and dissipated, its nightmares haunting the inn no more. Jorstadt congratulated her, though Aisling admitted she'd only said what she did to lift the curse, and wasn't sure she'd really understood what Tanek had done well enough to truly forgive him in her heart. Though he wasn't sure he understood the distinction, Jorstadt recommended she think most on having the inn back.

The next day, on Aisling's recommendation, Jorstadt returned to Siobhán with the news he'd managed to banish the Umbra by other means, for which Siobhán paid him the full reward. Reflecting on the experience over a beer at the Envy's re-opening, Jorstadt came to the conclusion monsters would never fully disappear. While species of hybrids or relicts might one day go extinct, magic and its resonance with sentient beings would always be a source of specters, curses, and other problems which only a silver blade and expertise in such phenomena could solve. Yet, Jorstadt considered no longer his problem to solve, as the Griffin School had rejected him and his ideas. He would, however, begin keeping a sharper eye thereafter on the noticeboards and public postings of the city.

#### Paying Respects (1181)

Jorstadt spent most of the following decade in Novigrad, living quietly as a bookkeeper and occasionally taking on a contract when lives were obviously in danger. He even considered formal retirement from the witcher's trade, but could not bear to part with his swords or armor. Each time he considered it, a tempting contract would turn up, someone with little means begging for help with some specter or a loved one lost to drowners in the elven sewers beneath the city. How long this might have continued is difficult to say, had Jorstadt not chanced to meet with a Povissian merchant captain selling salt to the False Queen's Envy.

The captain remarked upon Jorstadt's medallion, regretting the school's fate. Asking what he meant, his countryman explained the School of the Griffin had been destroyed several years back. From him, Jorstadt learned Kaer y Seren had been demolished in an avalanche, and the merchant had heard nothing of survivors to recount what had happened. At once, Jorstadt set down a large sum of crowns to charter the merchant's koch back to Poviss, determined to learn the truth of the story for himself. Though they left in haste on the next morning's tide, the voyage would still take two months back up the coast and across the Gulf of Praxeda, during which Jorstadt could only worry about the fate of the Griffin School, and how late he would be to help.

Put ashore leagues away from the stronghold's hidden fjord to preserve its secrecy, Jorstadt trekked along the coast alone until he came upon a ruin where the Griffin School had stood. The castle's demolished remains at first appeared lifeless, but as he picked through the rubble Jorstadt soon came upon the destruction's lone survivor: Old Keldar, curator of the Griffins' knowledge of monsters and the only teacher Jorstadt had been close to. Around a fire in Keldar's makeshift camp that night, the master witcher explained a circle of mages had coveted the Griffins' acute control of simple magic, interested in applying their knowledge to more complex spells. When the Griffins refused to share their expertise, however, the sorcerers had called down an avalanche which destroyed Kaer y Seren.

One of only a few to survive the castle's collapse, Keldar had found the mages picking through the rubble to take what hadn't been destroyed, and attacked them with the other surviving witchers. Driving the mages off at the cost of more of their own, the few remaining Griffins had parted ways—either in pursuit of the mages, returning to the Path, or simply leaving without explanation. Keldar alone decided to remain in the ruins of their former home as its guardian, fending off monsters wishing to make it their home, mages coming to pick through its remains, and repeatedly laying to rest the restless, vengeful wraiths of the deceased witchers.

Grieving to know his guild and its collective knowledge and traditions had ceased to exist, Jorstadt vowed to follow his example and remain. For several following nights, the two witchers fought the same wraiths together over and over, their opponents reanimated each time by the confluence of air magic still running beneath the debris. Despite the hopeless nature of their task, Jorstadt only seemed to further dedicate himself to the fight with each passing night. After a week, Keldar finally forced them to rest, and asked why his former pupil would want to remain in a place he'd never seemed happy.

Jorstadt's first answer was guilt, regretting not having been at Kaer Seren to help fight against their enemies, wondering if he might have done something to help. Expecting this, Keldar helped the younger witcher work through it by reminding him the elders had banished Jorstadt, and even if present, there would have been little the other witchers had not done. His second answer, however, surprised Keldar: to join the elder witcher in what was certainly his intention to rebuild the School. Keldar surprised him, however, by discouraging the idea.

Already, Keldar said, the monarchs and nobles of the North had severed ties with the witcher guilds. Monsters had long since yielded the dominant species role to man, and their greatest chance for growing power became preying on one another. The mages and sycophants who served them used witchers as easy scapegoats, which created the opportunity for Kaer Seren's destruction. Keldar neither wished nor saw need to create further witchers to serve them. The best course now, he believed, was for the remaining Griffins to live out their lives as they saw fit. For Keldar, whose life had been the School, it would only fit for him to remain in its ruin. But it need not be Jorstadt's fate.

Knowing all too well some strains of monster would never cease to exist, Jorstadt came to see the wisdom in Keldar's words. He decided to take to the Path once more, seeking out the places where his skills were needed. Before leaving, however, Jorstadt would aid Keldar in recovering numerous tomes from the wreckage of their former home, using runes recorded in them to dispel many of the wraiths permanently, and then burn most of their contents to prevent them falling into the hands of those who'd murdered their brothers. At last, with a few of the pages he considered invaluable stashed inside his own journal, Jorstadt took his leave of Kaer Seren to fulfill the purpose the Griffin School had trained him for.

### Hard Times for the Trade (1182-1241)

As the 12th century drew to a close, the reputation of witchers as lechers and vagabonds had become widespread. Witcher schools, which once entreated with monarchs and noblemen to dispute the lies about them, had mainly disappeared in the late 1100s. Without their influence, mages and priests were free to scapegoat them whenever convenient. As result, Jorstadt would sometimes find himself confronted by peasant mobs or nobles' guards when arriving in a town and forced to move on. He soon learned it was safer to loiter on their outskirts and let potential clients find him, riding on if none approached. Frequently, however, desperation drove nobility and commoners alike to break the taboo of employing a mutant monster slayer.

#### The Moatdweller (1188)

For several years after departing Kaer y Seren's ruins, Jorstadt traveled mainly around the Gulf of Praxeda, following the routes formerly patrolled by the Griffin School. The presence of the nearby witcher guild, and the growing wealth of the nobility from Poviss to Redania, meant native monster populations had been culled nearly to extinction. There were, however, a few exceptions—exceptions which became Jorstadt's principle source of income. The first were the pervasive common species whose populations quickly bounced back, such as ghouls and drowners; second, the powerful monsters even a witcher could not overcome with steel and brawn alone, from higher vampires to elementals; and third, those protected by circumstance, which proved even more difficult contracts than those with strength alone.

Venturing into the then-Kingdom of Talgar, Jorstadt found many contracts of the first type, dealing with the verminous monsters that sprang back into the ecological niches left without the predations of witchers, but few that paid enough to be worthwhile. Tensions between the furthest Northern Kingdoms were on the rise, with powerful Kovir seeking to expand its domain. Its neighbors, naturally, developed a healthy paranoia and started to gather coin and defensive measures accordingly. Even an errant monster slayer like Jorstadt could not help observing these trends, though they had little to do with his trade. Frequently, however, he was called on by high nobles and army officers to clear monsters from bridges, fords, and other infrastructure of strategic significance.

Finding himself short of potion reagents after a number of smaller contracts, Jorstadt visited the kingdom's capital to resupply. Despite the city guard being on high alert due to the ongoing threat of war and requiring the witcher turn in his blades, Jorstadt noticed few men patrolling the city itself. Seeking an inn as evening approached, he found himself set upon by a local gang looking to beat a quick profit from the isolated stranger. Their mistake in attacking a witcher was soon obvious, as the brawl resulted in several broken limbs and bodily throws against stonework. Before the fight was over, however, one of the townsfolk came shouting with a lantern, further encouraging the thugs to flee. Apologizing on behalf of his city for bringing a traveler such harm, the poor tanner generously offered the mutant a place in his own house to stay the night.

Over a meal of meager pottage, their conversation turned to why an ably-trained and well-equipped city guard didn't patrol the streets at night to discourage such thievery. The tanner, Dvin, explained they avoided the districts surrounding Castle Talgar and its moat because of a monster: a Bloedzuiger of enormous size. The giant leech was strong enough to attack a full-grown man, its bites ceaselessly bleeding for days on end, while unaware pets and children it had been known to swallow whole. When asked why Talgar's monarch allowed such a creature to live so close to his home and family, the tanner claimed King Ardashes didn't want to waste men of his army fighting the creature when Kovir's ruler had eyes on their border. As the monster only preyed on those in the poor district near the moat's shallower edge, it was a problem beneath his majesty's concern.

Given hope by the witcher's evident interest in the monster, Dvin offered to take up a collection from his neighbors to pay for the monster's head. While the townsmen could hardly raise enough for a real reward, Jorstadt bartered instead for the supplies he needed and the work of a few tradesmen on his worn-out gear. Setting to work, Jorstadt inspected the shallow shore of the castle moat and quickly found drag marks in the mud where the giant leech slipped in and out of the water. Driving stakes upward toward the shore in each, the witcher set out a pail of offal borrowed from a local butcher, waited for nightfall, and downed doses of Cat and Petri's Philter.

Sure enough, the stench of blood brought the bloedzuiger to shore. Hauling its slime-slick bulk across smooth cobblestones, it made a mindless dash for the bait and began suckering the fetid meat scraps into its fanged proboscis. Jorstadt had no trouble springing his ambush, but gave the apparently-blind creature's senses too little credit. While it couldn't move quickly enough to avoid the witcher's blade entirely, the bloedzuiger was able to turn and sucker its fang-ringed mouth on his thigh. Driving back the amphibious monster with bursts of igni, Jorstadt found himself giving chase as the opportunistic predator made for the moat. Waiting for it, however, were Jorstadt's stakes.

Pointed up the bank, the stakes had been easy enough for the bloedzuiger to slide over on the way up, but as it rushed for the familiar way into the water, the sharpened points pierced its soft belly and rooted it in place. Writhing in blind pain, the wounded witcher easily aimed a strike through the monster's defenses and sank his blade deep beneath its hide. After a few final spasms, the bloedzuiger stilled and lay dead. Stepping back, however, Jorstadt found the fight had tired him more than he expected. The bite he'd taken, Jorstadt noticed, was not clotting and instead seeping rivulets of his blood on the cobblestones.

Though Jorstadt was quick to down a dose of Swallow potion, the wound kept flowing to his increasing concern. It was then some of Talgar's guard appeared, drawn by the monster's shrieking. The witcher called out for help, only to receive the first of several bludgeons from the men. Taken by surprise and weary from exertion and blood loss, the witcher was quickly beaten unconscious by the guards and hauled off the street. When he awoke, Jorstadt found himself chained in the dungeon beneath Castle Talgar, awaiting trial for treason, espionage, and destruction of military property.

The first explanation behind these facts came when he was visited by Lady Maral Markrid, enchantress and advisor to King Ardashes of Talgar. The bloedzuiger, it seemed, was not beneath his majesty's notice at all. With Kovir's increasing interest in their neighbor's lands, however, the creature had been regarded as a defensive asset, something which would make the moat more difficult to cross in the event of a siege. While Jorstadt protested the idea was ridiculous, both for its predation of his subjects and the fact most sieges had historically been won or lost by surrender rather than storming, Lady Markrid pointed out his majesty felt something of value had been taken from him, and had the right to demand recompense—by blood, like as not.

While Jorstadt fumed at the unjustness of his situation, Lady Markrid proposed a solution. Jorstadt had deprived the king of one monster, but could perhaps make up the difference by taking its place. A mutant warrior such as Jorstadt would be a formidable addition to King Ardashes' forces, able to cut down invading Koviri soldiers as easily as any common ghoul. Were Lady Markrid able to reverse engineer even a few of the witcher guilds' legendary mutations from him, they could be applied to mass produce superhuman warriors for Talgar, and establish a new great power in the North.

Though Markrid's apparent enthusiasm made clear how she'd react to dissent, the socially-ignorant Jorstadt couldn't help pointing out flaws in her plan. Even if the kingdom did accept the taboo of mutation, or forced it upon its soldiers, the loyalty of these new mutants could not be guaranteed, and any mutations to enforce it would be rightly considered abominable. Taking offense, Lady Markrid took her leave after a lengthy shouting match, departing with a warning she might dissect him even if King Ardashes did agree not to execute her potential test subject. Left with only one option, Jorstadt quickly worked toward his escape.

Known more as monster slayers than magical practitioners, Talgar's soldiers had neglected to employ dimeritium to prevent the witcher from using signs. Using the famed techniques refined by his Griffin School instructors, Jorstadt managed to chill his cuffs with Aard enough to turn the metal brittle and smash them against the stone floor. Dealing with the cell lock by similar means, Jorstadt fled the dungeon and engaged in a chase through the castle halls. Though Lady Markrid joined the pursuit, Jorstadt narrowly escaped by diving from the castle walltops into the moat below—a feat his pursuers were hesitant to duplicate on account of living so long with the Moatdweller below.

Coming ashore, Jorstadt made his way quickly back to the tanner's home to collect his reward. With his swords still locked away in Castle Talgar, he reasoned picking up enough coin to start working on the replacements made sense. Ducking patrols, he found his arrival took Dvin completely by surprise, and that no reward had ever been gathered. In short order, Jorstadt reasoned out that Dvin had never intended to raise the sum. As the monster was protected by the king, the ignorant witcher would be killed by Ardashes' men, leaving the poor of Talgar free of the monster and the tanner out no coin for it.

Though Dvin cowered in anticipation of the witcher's vengeance, Jorstadt found himself only disgusted with the tanner, the king, the sorceress, and the whole of Talgar. Taking a handful of coin Dvin had in his home as payment, the witcher escaped the city and departed the kingdom that very night. Jorstadt would of course be declared an outlaw in Talgar and an enemy of its crown, with a hefty bounty offered for the witcher's head. Lady Markrid, among others, would use the witcher's flight as further evidence of the obsolete guilds' untrustworthiness, furthering their own positions as they did so. For his own part, Jorstadt decided it would be wise to spend a few decades away from his homeland, and after stopping in Novigrad to replenish his funds and replace his blades—at no small cost—turned further south in search of contracts.

#### Dying Breeds (1189)

“*I remember a time when I could walk into any smithy in the North, and have my swords sharpened just for being a witcher.*”
―Rollo of the Crag
With no intention of returning to the Arc Coast any time soon, Jorstadt turned south and paid for passage on a ship to Cidaris. Upon disembarking, however, he scoured noticeboards only to find them as empty of contracts as Redania had been. His attempts to inquire with innkeeps and stable hands met with everything from suspicious looks to open hostility. Chalking the Cidarians' dislike of him up to popular rumor regarding witchers, Jorstadt eventually heard from a fellow traveler about a village plagued by a blood-sucking nocturnal monster year after year. With his stock of vampire oil topped off, Jorstadt trekked inland toward the farming settlement of Penrith.

To his surprise, Jorstadt would find he was not the first witcher in Penrith. Though the village had no inn of its own, its ealdorman played host to a witcher of the Bear School, Rollo of the Crag, as Jorstadt learned when he sought the ealdorman to form a contract. Rollo quickly showed himself a boorish guest, threatening the ealdorman and his family to bow and scrape before him. Despite briefly commiserating with the Griffin about the dearth of witchers' work, the Bear seemed displeased with Jorstadt's arrival. Declaring he would see to any monster troubles in Penrith, Rollo bid the ealdorman to see Jorstadt out of the village. Complying for the sake of peace, Jorstadt and the ealdorman spoke once they were outside and a picture began to form.

Two years past, Rollo had arrived in Penrith to take up the contract for a nocturnal monster plaguing the village. He'd determined the creature was a broucolaque, one of the last of a rare species of vampire, but with regret reported the creature was impossible to permanently kill, only banish for months at a time. Fortunately, Rollo agreed to stay in Penrith as its defender. The longer he stayed, however, the clearer it became he was no benevolent guest. He made free with the wives and daughters of the farmers while they worked the fields, took what food and drink he pleased without coin, and charmed the minds of any who opposed him. The Bear's deeds had soured the reputation of witchers throughout Cidaris.

Appalled by his colleague's actions and seeing through the lie that a broucolaque could not be killed, Jorstadt offered to kill the monster for a low sum. Elated by the prospect of ridding the town of both monster and witcher, the ealdorman agreed at once. Jorstadt set out that night, following the trail Rollo had worn through the woods with repeated visits to fight the broucolaque. Staking out its lair, Jorstadt soon found the creature in a sorry state. Despite the vampire's regenerative ability, the creature was covered in so many scars they'd begun to fester. Left barely alive after each bout with the Bear witcher, the monster had been driven to insanity by pain and hunger. While this made it fight with wild abandon, it was far too weak to overcome Jorstadt and succumbed to the Griffin's silver sword.

“*There aren't contracts enough left for any of us, and the Schools are all gone, now. No agreement between them's going to protect you.*”
―Rollo voices his displeasure with Jorstadt.
As luck would have it, however, Jorstadt had a worse foe yet to face. As he removed the beast's head for proof of his deed, Rollo came upon him. He'd learned of Jorstadt's intentions as the ealdorman tried to scrape together coin, and come to stop him. Furious the broucolaque was dead, Rollo ranted he'd gone whole years in recent decades without a contract, and when he found the vampire haunting Penrith, it provided him the most security he'd had in years. Robbed of this stable income, Rollo demanded the broucolaque trophy in compensation. Still livid with Rollo for taking such advantage of Penrith's inhabitants, Jorstadt refused, at which point the Bear School witcher drew his sword.

The clash of two witchers became a fearsome battle. Jorstadt at first tried to use his School's knowledge of Signs to give himself an edge, but the older witcher anticipated this and disabled Jorstadt's spells with a dimeritium bomb. In a straight fight, the Bear's greater strength quickly began to tell, forcing Jorstadt to retreat into the caves of the broucolaque's lair. As Rollo downed a dose of Cat to follow him, Jorstadt soon hit upon an idea. Emptying his own vials of Hanged Man's Venom and manticore poison, he left the vials for Rollo to find. Recognizing their former contents, the older witcher drank a dose of golden oriole potion to protect himself from poisoned blades.

Chasing one another through the complex of caves, Rollo grew increasingly frustrated as Jorstadt refused to fight head-on. After fending off a hit-and-run attack where Jorstadt tried to break his supply of potions, he staunched the wounds left by Jorstadt's ambush by downing vials swallow. At last, he cornered the Griffin down a collapsed passage and used a draught of thunderbolt for the strength he needed to dig through the rubble and reach his target. As they finally faced off, however, Rollo's strength began to flag. The many potions he'd drunk flooded his veins with too many toxins. Losing his feet, he struggled to reach his vial of white honey to clear the toxicity, only to find it shattered: the only true target of Jorstadt's attacks.

As the poisons he'd willingly ingested sapped the life from him, Rollo admitted his defeat. Rather than curse Jorstadt, however, he warned the Griffin he would probably suffer a worse fate. With witchers no longer needed, their kind were destined to struggle for meager coin and be despised wherever they went. Accepting the older witcher's wisdom, Jorstadt honored Rollo's last request to ease his passing and sunk his blade through the old Bear's heart. After taking Rollo's potions and blade oils to restock his own supply, Jorstadt burned his body according to the witchers' custom and returned to Penrith to make good on his contract.

#### A Hunt by Moonlight (1219)

For nearly three decades, Jorstadt kept to lands south of the Pontar River with modest—yet uncommonly reliable for those times—success. In coastal Verden, the displaced Griffin was routinely paid to defend fishermen from drowners, sirens, and other aquatic monsters, which his upbringing and experience in Poviss had well prepared him for. He lived through the founding of Kerack by the pirate king Osmyk, and had little compunction offering his services in the upstart kingdom after his treatment by the Talgar crown. In Cidaris, though spite of witchers had become widespread, Jorstadt was still consulted by nobility on monster issues due to their ties with friends of the Vegelbuds among Novigrad's merchants.

While employed as a water guide for one of these merchants in 1219, Jorstadt made a trip up the Yaruga River, bringing coastal oysters and spices from beyond to the town of Riedbrune in exchange for honey from the surrounding lands. The merchant, unfortunately, found a rival had beaten him to market, rendering his costly goods almost worthless. His business in ruins, the man had nothing to pay his entourage with, and broke his standing contracts to buy himself passage home—leaving the witcher stranded. Resolving to get his promised dues in future, Jorstadt looked to ply his own trade to raise coin and soon heard tell of a renowned local monster: the Ghost of the Amell Mountains.

The Ghost, as Jorstadt learned from drinking with a band of dwarvish loggers, was said to be the avatar of an old god worshiped by fringe cults in the remote valleys of the Slopes. Though the loggers argued loudly on whether the god was called "Sootheblood", "Saveblade", or various other pronunciations which had twisted over time in the isolated mountain settlements, their description of the spirit as an enormous wolf led Jorstadt to conclude each was derived from "Saovbleidd", or "spirit wolf" in Elder Speech. The creature had risen to prominence within the last few years due, according to locals, to increased logging brought on by humans adapting dwarven industrial practices and labor to the Slopes. The angered forest spirit had thus manifested the Ghost in retribution.

Their reports of the spirit's attacks, however, soon led Jorstadt to doubt there was any truth to this explanation. The Ghost had, according to the loggers, moved up from leaving behind the half-devoured carcasses of lone woodsmen it ambushed to approaching human settlements. It was intelligent enough to attack watchdogs first and whittle away whole herds of pigs and sheep at a prodigious rate, proving even unafraid and capable of killing the armed shepards who rushed into the night to defend their flocks. The pattern suggested to Jorstadt a large predator with a ravenous appetite rather than a vengeful spirit, potentially a chort or bumbakvetch.

Inquiring after contracts on the monster, Jorstadt learned of an old notice which had offered 500 Cintran denarii for the Ghost's head—corporeal or not—which was enough to charter a riverboat back to the coast and keep him afloat through the coming winter. Taking directions from the woodsdwarves, Jorstadt set out and within a few days arrived at Jensmill, a lakeside village where timber from the camps deeper in the Slopes was floated and cut before continuing overland. Speaking with the mill's owner, who also served as the town's ealdorman due to the wealth the mill brought him, however, Jorstadt learned the contract had been cancelled. Though the beast remained at large, the miller explained, he saw no need to spare coin when another had offered a much larger purse of his own accord. Pointed toward this generous new benefactor for the town, Jorstadt made the acquaintance of one Thierry de Salvat, a trader hailing from Assengard.

Thierry, as it happened, was keen to meet one of the storied monster slayers, and inquired after his trade in detail. Jorstadt, for his part, hoped the merchant hadn't learned of his criminalization in the North, and turned the conversation to the merchant's interest in a monster far from his homeland. Thierry made a pretense of claiming cedar wood from the Slopes was coming into fashion among Nazair's nobility for carved doors, lintels, and other decorative features of their villas. Soon, however, he admitted his interest came from the monster itself, and the reputation it had garnered. Thierry had invited several renowned hunters from many countries in the South, each a proven slayer of monsters, to compete for a prize on the creature's head: a thousand Novigrad crowns.

Typically, hunting a monster in a stable environment for mere recreation—and risking his life to do so—would have been distasteful to Jorstadt. The coin, however, would keep him financially secure for a year or more, and the monster had already attacked and killed many humans and dwarves in the Slopes. As a reward had been offered, it was a witcher's duty to try and remove the threat. Jorstadt agreed to join the hunting expedition, to the delight of Thierry, who placed a modest bet with his hosts on the witcher claiming the prize ahead of his rivals. Joining the merchant and his guards, Jorstadt set out to meet Thierry's other hunters at a small manor in the Slopes' foothills.

Waiting for them, with weapons and equipment prepared, were half a dozen veteran hunters, none of whom were pleased by Thierry's avowed certainty Jorstadt would be the victor. Especially insulted was Oyvind the Bold, a huntsman known beyond even his native Skellige for slaying a werewolf with only his two-handed axe, and promptly challenged the witcher to determine the better fighter. Fortunately, peace was quickly restored by Red Hallia, a Mettinese hunter wanted in her homeland for poaching. The better hunter, all agreed, would be decided by who brought the Ghost's head, hide, or spectral dust to Thierry.

Resting up for the day ahead of them, the hunters spent the evening drinking and trading stories. Dimka, huntsman to a Kaedweni lord, boasted of using silver arrows to strike down forktails in mid-air, much to the amusement of their hosts' child. Competing to excite the boy, the dwarvish brothers Frederico and Ferdinand Molari told increasingly tall tales of trapping shaelmars in Mahakam. Their exaggerations grew so absurd that, when Frederico alluded to destroying a swarm of ghosts with Mahakaman mix, Jorstadt felt he had to object. Though he expounded at length about the incorporeal nature of spirits and the inability of explosives to harm them, Jorstadt had—typically—spoiled the mood, and was rudely told to remain quiet.

The lull in their conversation, however, allowed Myfanwy of the Moulderwood—one of few elven archers to offer her services in human realms, and among the far fewer of such skill to be successful in it—to express her distaste for her comrades' enthusiasm. Hunting, she professed, was an act of sacred significance, removing living creatures from an interdependent web of life. Killing merely for the acclaim of the kill was repulsively perverse. Hallia, however, then questioned why she had accepted Thierry's invitation, upsetting the elf. When the farm boy, bored with the conversation, then asked Jorstadt about whether vampires could really be killed with garlic, Myfanwy berated him angrily for believing such blatant superstition.

Frightened by her outburst, the child fled the house, drawing ire from the other hunters. Yet, only Jorstadt left to see to the boy's well-being—uncomfortable as he was among the company. Finding him in the stable, Jorstadt tried fumblingly to comfort the lad, who was unimpressed by the attempts. Instead, the boy asked the witcher about vampires once more, and Jorstadt was all too happy to share his knowledge. As they talked, the boy—whose name, he revealed, was Lucjan—admitted he'd grown interested in monsters since his father's death hunting in the Slopes, likely at the claws of the Ghost. His mother had remarried, but she too disappeared despite his pleas not to go out under a full moon, as there'd been when his father was killed. Left with a stepfather who barely tolerated him outside work as a farmhand, Lucjan clung to Jorstadt's stories, and the two talked long into the night.

Waking blearily before dawn, Jorstadt was called to gather his gear and join the other hunters as they made their first foray into the Ghost's known territory. The hunting party was led by Dimka and Red Hallia, who held themselves to be the best trackers. Though they managed to find abundant trails of a large canid creature, the ages of the trails varied widely, and the trails they chose to follow led only to rivers, dead-end ravines, or circled back on themselves. Tired and with nothing to show for their work, Dimka swore the next day he would use the hounds he'd left at their appropriated lodge. While the Molari brothers took to the idea, Oyvind, Hallia, and Myfanwy expected the dogs would only spook their quarry, and each elected to go their own way—over Jorstadt's advice to stay together.

The following day, Dimka, the Molaris, and Jorstadt set out with near two-dozen hounds held by a few of Dimka's retainers while the other hunters found trails of their own. The dogs, to their credit, did quickly sort more recent trails of scent and markings by the Ghost, despite their baying driving all game and other creatures in front of them. They found many sites with obvious signs of the monster's repeated activity—fords in streams, hidden dens and burrows, and the remains of several human and animal kills—but no monster.

While Dimka grew ever more frustrated, Jorstadt put their findings to good use. The need for food and water confirmed for him the monster was no specter. The bodies evinced long claws able to rend flesh from bone, but the killing blows had been bites from a long, fang-filled muzzle. And in the jagged bark of a tree the Ghost had apparently used to scratch an itch lay a tuft of sienna-colored hair. Taken with the large canid tracks they'd found, Jorstadt became certain the Ghost was in fact a lycanthrope, albeit one with paws bearing greater resemblance to an actual wolf's than most werewolves.

Having fallen behind the rest of the hunting party, Jorstadt was first to hear a scream from one of their comrades. Though given pause by the thought he lacked the ideal regimen of potions for fighting a therianthrope, a second scream let him identify the caller as Red Hallia. With only a quick application of cursed oil to a silver blade, Jorstadt ran headlong to the poacher's aid. Though both Jorstadt and Oyvind reached her swiftly, the attacker had fled before they arrived. Hallia they found alive, but with her right hand mangled by vicious bites—some of which had removed fingers.

Joined by the others soon after, a healer among Dimka's retinue saw to bandaging the poacher's crippled hand as the others plied her with questions about the attack. Horrified by her disfigurement—which precluded her ever firing a bow again—Hallia was so stunned she could only confirm her attacker had been a werewolf when Jorstadt suggested it to her. The hunt was called off for the day, and all returned to the farmhouse with Red Hallia carried by sling. That night, the hunters decided cooperation and a strategy were called for, and this time, they deferred to Jorstadt's knowledge of monsters.

For three days, the hunters studied a map of the valley their search had narrowed to while Thierry—at Jorstadt's request—made a round trip to Riedbrune to acquire some expensive supplies. When Thierry returned, he came with tools, traps, and various solutions of silver. Setting out at the start of the day, when Jorstadt predicted the lycanthrope would rest, the hunters began to systematically strip their quarry of resources. Dimka's hounds drove prey from the woods, and Jorstadt directed the others to lay traps in favored hunting grounds and seed ponds the werewolf visited to drink with silver powder. Each was done in sequence to push the Ghost of the Amells further down the valley toward the narrow pass at its end.

“*I get it. So a leshen's not a beast in the trees, people just think it 'cause the leshen* is *the tree, and folk don't see it when the branches are already reaching down for them!*”
―Lucjan's response to one of Jorstadt's explanations.
The plan seemed to work. Each night, the hunters returned to the lodge and listened to frustrated howls draw closer and closer to the planned ambush point. Jorstadt spent the nights talking with Lucjan, sharing stories of monsters and the Path with the excitable youth, whose quick grasp of the difference between truth and fiction on monsters impressed him. On the fifth day of the renewed hunt, however, Jorstadt completed his coverage of tainting watering holes with silver and moved to regroup with Oyvind when he found several of the bear traps Oyvind had laid were disarmed. Catching up with the Skelliger, Jorstadt asked bluntly if he'd forgotten to set them, which Oyvind took for a slight against his intelligence, a challenge which Oyvind almost demanded the satisfaction of a duel for.

After barely talking down the proud warrior, Jorstadt concluded—since the mechanism had been carefully disarmed instead of smashed—one of their own number was responsible for the sabotage. Oyvind recalled Myfanwy being late or out of position during their sweep at several points, and immediately concluded she was responsible. Cursing the elf for a monster-loving traitoress, Oyvind set off at once to confront her despite Jorstadt's pleas about jumping to conclusions. Proceeding instead to the next meeting point as planned, Jorstadt soon heard new screams—the werewolf had defied his expectations and struck during the day.

Arriving late on the scene once again, Jorstadt found the others gathered around Ferdinand Molari, who in turn hunched over the still-warm body of his brother Frederico. The werewolf had been able to slip their net thanks to a series of cut tripwires along the game trail Frederico had been tasked with. The dwarf had evidently dropped a tool and gone back for it, only to find the saboteur—their host, the owner of the farmhouse Thierry had paid for hospitality. The Ghost, the farmer shouted, had bettered life for those in the valley like himself by killing or driving away other monsters, becoming the valley's apex predator. Though it killed the occasional forester now and then, the body count was far less than the combined kills of the many fiends, necrophages, and other monsters which had inhabited the same territory before.

The ensuing fight between Frederico and the farmer had drawn the lycanthrope's attention. As soon as they realized it was present, each had run—and the human's longer legs served better. Frederico had been nearly disemboweled by the monster before the arrival of the other hunters warned it away. Furious at his brother's death, Ferdinand swore to kill the farmer on the spot. Given the lycanthrope had slipped through the tightening net they'd lain with painstaking effort the through the previous days, none of the other hunters were inclined to stop him, but Jorstadt alone objected. Though he liked the man no more than anyone, given what Lucjan had told him of his stepfather, Jorstadt drew the line at murder for vengeance's sake.

It was then Oyvind rejoined them, his axe blade tellingly colored with blood. Already agitated by the other hunters' callous attitude toward murder, Jorstadt demanded to know where Myfanwy was. The Skelliger casually replied the elf had escaped him with no more than a flesh wound, but with the werewolf half-starved, she couldn't be expected to last for long. He seemed untroubled when Jorstadt explained the farmer was behind the sabotage, not Myfanwy. When none of the others proved willing, the witcher set out on his own to bring back Myfanwy, demanding the others not harm the farmer until they returned.

Following the scent of blood with his enhanced nose, Jorstadt tracked Oyvind's trail to a river and followed its bank to the top of a waterfall. With the constant crash of the stream deafening him, Jorstadt was caught unawares by an arrow which pierced his armor and fractured a rib. Dragging himself quickly to the shelter of a tree trunk, he narrowly avoided a second shot, after which Myfanwy warned she wouldn't be finished off without a fight. Jorstadt tried to explain he wasn't there to harm her between draughts of swallow potion, but Myfanwy was unconvinced. Only when the witcher agreed to sheathe his sword and step openly into her line of sight did the elf let him explain the farmer's sabotage and Oyvind's mistake.

While still under the sights of Myfanwy's knocked bow, Jorstadt heard a telltale howl from the forest on their side of the river, and knew he hadn't been alone in sniffing out the trail. With both of them wounded, Myfanwy surmised the pair would be no match for a ravenous lycanthrope, and each desperately searched their surroundings for some advantage to make use of. Concluding there were none as the howls drew nearer, Jorstadt set aside his concern about their still-open wounds and pulled Myfanwy with him over the falls. Plunging into the river below, Jorstadt fought to keep his armor from dragging them both under as they let the current carry them away.

Washing up hours later and miles downstream, Jorstadt pulled an unconscious Myfanwy onto the riverbank and hastily set a fire with Igni to warm and dry them for the cold night ahead. While he managed to patch his own wound, the long slashes of Oyvind's axe had drained too much blood from Myfanwy in the river, and were beyond Jorstadt's skill to heal. When she briefly woke and realized her hopeless plight, she commanded Jorstadt to listen. Myfanwy was not the elven woman's true name, nor her identity as a hunter. Hailing from Nazair, she had worked her way into the hunter's company on behalf of Thierry de Salvat's competitors.

The merchant, she revealed, had known about the werewolf from the start, and had some kind of vested interest in it. Rival merchants from Nazair had hired her to learn what, though Myfanwy was forced to admit she'd failed. His potions toxic to non-mutants and skills as a healer insufficient, Jorstadt could do little but make Myfanwy comfortable while she died of blood loss and exposure. Hoping the mud covering them both would throw the lycanthrope off their scent, Jorstadt huddled in for a cold night. The next morning, Jorstadt buried her body and set out alone for the homestead, uncertain how to address what he'd learned to his employer.

With his wound slowing him down, Jorstadt only neared the farmstead as night fell, and thus saw the bloody glow long before reaching it. The farmhouse he returned to was ablaze, the other hunters standing outside it with weapons in hand. Asking what had happened, Oyvind callously explained they'd forced the farmer to make up for his betrayal. As the lycanthrope had been denied food for several days by this time, the farmer and his family had become bait for a new trap. When the werewolf had taken it, they'd barred the doors and set the house alight. Incensed by the casual murder, Jorstadt asked if Thierry would order a stop to it, since he had some interest in the werewolf.

Thierry, however, only shrugged and declined, apparently as indifferent to the lycanthrope's fate as the farmers'. When young Lucjan's voice rang out from the top floor, screaming for help, Jorstadt made up his mind and started toward the building. Tearing apart a barricade—and bowling Oyvind over with an Explosive Quen when he tried to stop him—Jorstadt entered the house and had to make continuous use of signs to see and shield himself from the heat trapped within. While he could hear the werewolf howling in the smoke, it remained too dense for Jorstadt to properly see it before sprinting up the collapsing stairs—and with Jorstadt out of the way, it bolted for the door he'd opened.

Reaching Lucjan only to see flames collapse the stairs behind him, Jorstadt had just enough time to break through a wall with Aard and leap to the ground outside before the ceiling came down. His broken rib forcing him to collapse upon landing, Jorstadt lay still so long that, when he managed to prop himself up, he watched Oyvind, Dimka, and the other hunters give distant chase to the lycanthrope which had bolted for the woods as soon as it escaped. Thierry, however, had remained to ask if the witcher wished to continue the hunt. Thoroughly embittered against the merchant and the whole of his company, Jorstadt declined.

After a night's rest in the farm's stable, Lucjan asked what was to become of him now. He had no relatives who would take him in, and no home to shelter him. The boy asked if Jorstadt could take him in, training him as an apprentice to become a witcher. Though Jorstadt was hesitant, with Kaer Seren destroyed and the Griffin School defunct, the beast they'd so narrowly escaped led him to another notion. Asking if the boy was sure of his decision, Jorstadt pledged to take him instead to Kaer Morhen, seat of the Wolf School, to see if they would take him in. Taking one of the farm's plow horses for a mount, the witcher and apprentice left that very day. While Thierry de Salvat would return to Nazair shortly thereafter, none of the other hunters were ever seen to leave the mountains alive.

### A Centenarian Witcher (1242-1262)

#### A Venture to Zerrikania (1250)

In which a mission for a royal prompts Jorstadt to travel further than ever before, meeting warrior women and strange new monsters.

### Resurgent Populations (1275-1300)

#### The Crimson Curse on Ard Skellige (1275)

In which the witcher shipwrecks on Ard Skellige in the midst of the Crimson Curse, and is sent on a mission by Queen Cerys in the company of (perhaps) some other characters.

## Personality & Traits

“*If you don't know you're facing a wraith by the time it comes at you, that moment you spend signing a life-saving Yrden could be wasted on an Aard that blows right through it—and I wager my silver sword you won't get two chances to save your life.*”
―Jorstadt on the value of forethought and preparation.
A superhuman warrior who'd rather bury himself in a scroll, Jorstadt probably would have preferred becoming a scribe to the life of a witcher. Beyond the importance he placed on knowledge in his trade, he had a love for stories and the written word, and spent many a late evening in taverns with bards swapping and discussing the merits of various ballads and histories. To this end, he went so far as to learn the reading of dwarven ideograms, making him one of the few witchers outside the School of the Bear to study dwarvish records of monster attacks and ecology. In his years on the Path, however, his love for theory was been tempered by firsthand experience. He disdained willful ignorance in any form, whether in an error-ridden book by a scholar purporting to be an authority or the repression of knowledge through book burnings and other means by cults like the Eternal Fire.

Early in his career, Jorstadt's emphasis on knowledge above all else led him to clash with the Griffin School's teachings. Their rigid adherence to the knightly code set forth by the Order of Witchers seemed impractical to him, encouraging their students to face enemies unprepared and inefficiently. Jorstadt placed more value on the end result than the means to achieve them, sharing knowledge with potential allies without thought as to what they may do with his gifts after. Time and experience brought him around, however. He observed dejection in the few remaining witchers he met turn to selfishness, willing to let monsters feast and resurge so long as the ungrateful parties who'd turned on the witchers were among the consumed. Revisiting the codes, Jorstadt came to believe in the witcher's trade as a duty in need of fulfillment, leading him to found a new school in the 14th century.

Being such a learned individual, Jorstadt can't help but correct the misconceptions of anyone around him. Helpful as he means to be, few care how bats detect their prey or the origin of the word "nightmare" when a wyvern prowls nearby. This impulse has even cost him coin on one occasion, when he corrected a village ealdorman that the beast hunting their livestock was no giant, but a troll, and was paid for less than the contract which originally specified a giant. Having spent most of his life in the Northern Realms, Jorstadt was used to cold, wet climates and generally preferred to go no further south than Lyria, especially in summer. Despite this, he had some fascination with Ofiri culture, having enjoyed many works of mathematics, astronomy, and fiction originating in Ofier during his training.

### Physical Description

Born a Povissian, Jorstadt had pale skin and Northern features, with common brown hair he kept close-shaved once he was grown. He preferred to keep a clean face, though when forced to go without a razor for long periods his beard would begin to grow out. As a mutated witcher, his eyes were yellow and possessed slitted pupils, akin to those of a cat. As they marked him as a witcher, Jorstadt would later carry a pair of thick-rimmed faux glasses which obscured his eyes, wearing them while staying in dense population centers. While wrinkles set in slowly over the witcher's extended lifespan, his most prominent feature remained a large, straight nose some remarked made him look imperious.

Of average height despite his mutations, the Trials left Jorstadt with a build one could mistake for that of a simple farmhand or laborer. Yet, while not exceptional by witcher standards, Jorstadt was nonetheless swift and strong beyond the capacity of most humans. A genetically-tailored metabolism stripped him of baby fat and left Jorstadt with a superdense musculature, able to keep pace with the most tenacious monsters. The surgical scars left by the Trials would remain with Jorstadt throughout his life, and be joined by the testaments to many an error or hard-won victory over the monsters he hunted. He was also known to continually bear new papercuts or inkstains on his fingers from long hours spent taking notes on tomes he'd finished many times before.

## Abilities

* Witcher mutations
Before even entering adolescence, witchers in training were subjected to painful and potentially lethal mutative procedures with the goal of reshaping their bodies. The result of these mutations, when successful, were strength and speed far exceeding that of a normal human, capable of matching those creatures which preyed upon humanoids. Though not as developed as some of his brethren, Jorstadt's physique served ably enough against formidable monsters. Even when wounded, a witcher's body healed quickly, and a robust immune system made Jorstadt resistant to disease. In addition, Jorstadt's eyes turned orange and slitted like a cat's, granting him the night vision of a nocturnal animal, and sharpened his other senses. These features would mark Jorstadt as witchers became less and less welcome through the decades, and came at the cost of his ability to reproduce, which were considered inconsequential by the mages who had originally devised the mutations for monster slayers.
* Signs
One result of a witcher's mutations was the ability to cast a handful of simple spells, known as signs. The School of the Griffin emphasized the use of these signs in their teachings, and Jorstadt was made to refine his control over them to the Griffin masters' exacting standards. Despite mastering each sign and their alternate forms, Jorstadt found his School seemed to over-rely on the limited spells and preferred other methods of combating monsters. But, as he remained aware of their utility, Jorstadt did keep himself in practice and lined his armor with glyphs to amplify the power of his signs when they were called for.
* Alchemy
As part of their training, all witchers were given a thorough alchemical education to teach them how best to prepare for monster hunts, and how to strip the most valuable components from their kills. A quick study in the subject, Jorstadt has memorized many of the brews he's found most useful and stores an exhaustive collection of formulae in his journals. Foremost among his collection is a set of blade oils covering every phylum of monster from beasts to vampires. Jorstadt has spent many hours refining these mixtures to superior levels, and keeps a sample of each on his belt, ready to coat his swords with a rag should he need an edge on an unexpected monster.

## Equipment

* Griffin School Steel & Silver swords
The trademark tools of a witcher, Jorstadt's blades both measured 37 inches long, slightly shorter than average, which made them just light enough to suit their wielder's faster fighting style. Each bore the likenesses of two griffin heads on their pommel, a tradition for members of the Griffin School, and had hilts bound in strips of supple wyvern leather for a stiffer grip, often useful against creatures wise enough to try disarming him. In each blade's fuller lay Devana runestones, which fortified their sharpness and made wounds more likely to bleed, aiding Jorstadt in tracking a beast later if forced to disengage from a fight.
* Griffin School armor
Striking a balance between protection and flexibility, the armor crafted for witchers of the Griffin School was reflective of its teachings. Constructed around a padded gambeson under a thin, sturdy cuirass, the few steel splints used to reinforce its sleeves were shaped and imbued with runes which intensified the power of the wearer's signs, well-suited to the Griffin School's emphasis on the cantrips. Jorstadt's personal suit was modified to a relatively modest degree, fitted with belts and bandoliers to carry the many oils, potions, and decoctions he brewed to better prepare himself for monsters of any sort.
* Journal
While every witcher starts out on the Path with their own logbook, a manuscript with details copied from every old tome on monster zoology they ever studied, Jorstadt has been more faithful updating his than most. Between its bound pages are stowed the notices of every contract he's ever taken, each followed by pages of detail on the monsters, their behavior, and his hunt. Yet more has been copied from castle records and unpublished manuscripts by unrecognized researchers on monster attacks unrecorded by the more well-known sources, making the records numerous enough to fill a dozen volumes. These naturally being too much to risk carrying with him at all times, Jorstadt keeps only his latest journal on his person, keeping the rest in a lead-lined fireproof trunk in his permanent room at the Brass Cauldron Inn. He hopes to one day base a treatise on his work, tracking the ecological effects of monsters arriving as invasive species in the Conjunction of Spheres.
* Alchemy set
After acquiring the mule he called Teodore, Jorstadt took advantage of the animal's capacity to bring with him almost a lab's worth of alchemy equipment. This included delicate glass beakers and a full set of measures, but also a collapsible brass boiler which was sometimes mistaken for a still. Though the equipment was costly and easily damaged, it did allow Jorstadt to brew alchemical decoctions with greater precision in the field, allowing him to experiment with formulas on the Path. As result, Jorstadt recorded some of the first formulae for superior potions and oils, knowledge he passed on to other witchers he met.