The return to Aldous's millhouse was a journey through a world turned to liquid darkness. The rain fell in sheets, turning the path along the Redfork into a sucking slurry. Geralt moved like a phantom, his body a symphony of aches: the deep burn in his shoulder from the kikimora's claw, the bone-deep chill from the lake, the raw scrapes from the culvert stone. The precious few grains of dimeritium powder in the pouch around his neck felt heavier than a crown.
He didn't knock. He slid through the door the moment Aldous unbarred it, water cascading from him to pool on the stone floor. The alchemist recoiled, not from the wet, but from the look on Geralt's face.
"You have it?"
Wordlessly, Geralt handed over the pouch. Aldous scurried to his main workbench under the glow of the pulsing hex-light, his lens clicking as he examined the silver scoop and its faint, metallic dust. He scraped it carefully onto a glass slide.
"Fascinating… a coarse grind, high iron content… likely from the mines near Cidaris. It has a… a hungry resonance." He looked up, his magnified eye grotesquely large. "And the workshop?"
"They've built a silver coffin. The binding is to be complete by tomorrow night. Mastic is accelerating his schedule."
Aldous paled. "Tomorrow? Impossible. The counter-agent… the calculations alone…"
"We don't have a choice," Geralt said, stripping off his soaked shirt. The bandage on his shoulder was soaked through with a mix of rain and fresh blood. "They'll unleash a specter programmed to kill the Viscount of Alderberg. How long after that before de Ruyter turns it on anyone else who displeases him?"
As he spoke, Geralt's trained eyes swept the workshop. It was in even greater chaos than before. The wyvern embryo jar sat open on a stand, a complex apparatus of glass tubes and copper wires leading from it to a bubbling flask where a clear, viscous liquid slowly turned a luminous, pearlescent white. Aldous was already working.
"The theory is sound," Aldous muttered, more to himself than to Geralt. "The embryo seeks life, yes? It is a vector for creation. The Alba Corpus hijacks that seeking impulse, turns it towards a twisted, forced fusion. My counter-agent must do the opposite. It must use the same resonant signature to seek out the fusion… and unravel it. A metaphysical solvent." He gestured frantically at a series of complex runic equations chalked across a slate board. "But the delivery! It must be introduced directly into the ectoplasmic matrix. You cannot simply throw a phial at a wraith!"
Geralt began re-dressing his wound with fresh bandages from his own kit. The pain was a sharp focus. "Then I get you into the workshop. You administer it."
Aldous laughed, a sound of pure hysteria. "Are you mad? Mastic knows me! He'd have me dissected on his own table!"
"Then you walk me through it. I'll do it."
The alchemist stared at him, his lens slowly focusing on Geralt's wounded shoulder, then on his resolute, rain-streaked face. "You are a witcher. You kill monsters. This is… surgery. On a soul. One wrong symbol, one mis-measured drop, and you could obliterate what's left of her, or worse, supercharge the binding. You could create an abomination that makes Mastic's work look like a child's doodle."
Geralt finished tightening the bandage. "Then you'd better teach me well. And fast. We have until tomorrow night."
A profound silence fell, broken only by the pop of alchemical glassware and the drumming of rain on the mill roof. Aldous seemed to shrink, the weight of the world settling on his narrow shoulders. He looked from his equations to the pearlescent liquid, then to the determined mutant before him.
"Very well," he whispered, the word a surrender and an oath. "But you must understand the stakes, not just in principle, but in practice. You must see."
He moved to a covered object at the back of the workshop and drew off the cloth. It was a large, shallow basin made of a single piece of obsidian, its surface etched with concentric circles of Elven script. A scrying pool.
"I use it to observe subtle energy flows," Aldous explained. "To see the currents of chaos. It requires a focus. A connection." He held out his hand. "The seeing-stone. The one from the mountains."
Geralt handed over the smooth river stone. Aldous placed it in the center of the obsidian basin. He then took a dropper and added a single, glowing drop of the pearlescent counter-agent to the stone's central hole. Finally, he pricked his own finger with a needle and let a drop of blood fall beside it.
"Blood for life, the stone for connection, the agent for intent," he murmured. He passed his hands over the basin in a complex pattern, whispering words in a language that scratched at the edge of Geralt's understanding.
The surface of the pool, which had been black and inert, shimmered. Images formed, not like a mirror, but like impressions in smoke. Geralt saw the Temesian valley, the ruined balcony, a glimpse of Lenore's sad, pale face. Then the image fractured, torn in two. One thread, pure and white, drifted upward and dissipated—the part he had freed. The other thread, stained a violent, chemical blue, was seized by grasping, clinical hands—Mastic's hands. The image followed this thread, plunging into darkness, into the silver-lined cell at Fen Hythe.
Geralt saw the fragment. It was worse than he remembered. The blue veins were thicker, pulsing like a sick heart. The wraith's form was more defined, sharper, but its motions were jerky, puppet-like. Around it, etched in the air with lines of cold fire, were the binding glyphs. They weren't just holding it; they were stitching themselves into its essence, rewriting its sorrow into targeted hatred. The vision carried with it a wave of emotion—not the deep, tragic sorrow of Lenore, but a sharp, acidic agony, and beneath that, a chilling, empty space where a target's identity was being carved: ALDERBERG. VISCOUNT. BLOODLINE.
"You see?" Aldous's voice was strained. "The binding is a two-part process. The agony fuses the specter to the catalyst. The empty space is then filled with the target's signature—a personal item, a drop of blood, a name spoken in ritual. Once that space is filled… it is irrevocable. The wraith will hunt until either it or the target is destroyed."
The image in the pool shifted, pulled by the resonance of the counter-agent. It showed a possible future: the pearlescent liquid, introduced into the cell. Instead of unwinding the blue veins, it clashed with them, causing a catastrophic reaction. The wraith exploded in a silent burst of annihilating force that shredded the silver cage, then the workshop, then continued outward in a wave of disintegrating chaos that dissolved stone, metal, and flesh alike.
"A miscalculation," Aldous breathed, sweat beading on his brow. "The balance is… infinitesimal."
He adjusted a variable on his slate, erased a rune, added another. The image in the pool changed. This time, the pearlescent liquid flowed gently, seeking out the blue veins not as an attacker, but as a key. It softened them, turned them brittle. The binding glyphs flickered and failed. The fragment, freed from the corrosive agony, didn't explode. It simply… relaxed. The stolen piece of Lenore's sorrow, purified of its artificial hate, hung in the air for a moment—a faint, sad light. Then, drawn by an invisible connection, it streamed upward, through stone and soil, seeking its other half, seeking the peace Geralt had helped grant the rest of her.
"That," Aldous said, wiping his brow, "is the theory. The practice requires the counter-agent to be activated at the moment of administration with the correct Sign of Power. It must be Yrden."
"Yrden?" Geralt frowned. The trap sign was used to ground specters, to slow them. It was a sign of containment.
"Not to trap her. To create a stable, neutral field. A surgical theater. Within a Yrden, the chaotic energies are temporarily stabilized. It will give the agent a controlled environment in which to work. You must cast Yrden, then introduce the agent into the center of the field, directly onto the fragment's core."
Geralt processed this. Casting Yrden was one of the more taxing signs, requiring deep focus and a significant draw of energy. Doing it in the heart of a hostile workshop, with guards likely storming in, while performing a delicate alchemical procedure…
"I can do it," he said, his voice flat.
Aldous studied him. "Your shoulder. Channeling the signs draws on your whole body's vitality. An injury can disrupt the flow, distort the sign. A distorted Yrden could become a vortex that feeds the binding, not contains it."
"It will hold," Geralt insisted. He had no other answer.
The rest of the day bled into a sleepless night. Aldous worked with furious, focused precision, refining the pearlescent liquid, distilling it down to a single, crystal phial that glowed with a soft, inner light. He drilled Geralt on the procedure, not as a scholar, but as a drill sergeant.
"The phial must be uncorked only after Yrden is cast. The vapors are volatile. You will see a point of concentrated darkness within the wraith's form—the nexus of the binding. That is your target. Do not throw the liquid. Let a single drop fall onto that point. The rest will follow of its own accord. Then, you must hold the Yrden. No matter what happens. You must hold it until the process is complete. Do you understand?"
"I understand."
As dawn tinged the sky the colour of a bruise, they were ready. Or as ready as they could be. Geralt had slept in two short, weapon-ready catnaps. He'd consumed a carefully measured dose of Swallow to accelerate his shoulder's healing and another of Tawny Owl to sharpen his mind. The potions hummed under his skin, painting the world in sharp, hyper-real edges.
Aldous handed him the final phial. It was warm, almost alive, in his hand. "There is no precedent for this, Geralt of Rivia. You are attempting a kind of… spiritual mercy. A witcher's mercy. I do not know if such a thing exists."
Geralt secured the phial in a padded leather case on his belt, next to his last vial of Specter oil. "It will have to."
He turned to leave, but Aldous stopped him once more. The alchemist removed the lens apparatus from his head, revealing tired, intelligent eyes. He looked frightened, and terribly old. "When I was at the Academy, we spoke of 'the greater good.' It was a phrase used to justify every atrocity in the name of progress. What you are doing… it is not for a greater good. It is for a single, stolen fragment of a single, wronged soul. It is arguably a terrible strategic decision."
Geralt met his gaze. "It's the right one."
He stepped out into the grey, pre-dawn dampness. The rain had softened to a mist. Roach, sensing his mood, was restless. He checked his gear one final time: silver sword, steel sword, the phial, his Signs. He had no elaborate plan this time. The timeline forced a direct, brutal approach. He would have to create a diversion so massive that it would draw every guard away from the workshop, giving him a window to get inside and perform the procedure.
As he mounted Roach, he looked back at the millhouse. Aldous stood in the doorway, a silhouette against the blue glow, watching him go. The alchemist had given him the tools, the knowledge, and a heavy dose of terrifying doubt.
Geralt turned Roach's head towards Fen Hythe. The elegant estate was no longer just a destination. It was a crucible. Inside it, a soul was being forged into a weapon. And he was riding in to try and reforge it into peace, with nothing but a witcher's stubborn will and a phial of stolen moonlight.
The weight of the promise was now a physical pressure in his chest, as tangible as the wound in his shoulder. He was no longer just undoing a lord's plot. He was walking into a metaphysical surgery, where the patient was a ghost, the scalpel was a Sign, and the cost of failure was the soul of a Viscount, and perhaps his own. The Path had never felt so narrow, or so steep.