"I knew it wasn't normal." Eskel says, a little bitterness creeping into his voice as he gets settled again. "Leshen's are difficult, yeah, but I should have been able to put one down just fine." His command of signs is second to none, not even Coën, the Griffin School witcher living here. A few blasts from Eskel's Igni should have incapacitated such a creature but it was as if it had been skinned in stone, like the wood had petrified somehow.

"Do you think we're close to another Conjunction? That could be bad, not a lot of us left to deal with an influx of monsters." Humans had grown too comfortable since they had created witchers to deal with the off-world incursions and magical disturbances that came from this world passing to close in space and time to another. They burned, hanged, drowned and beheaded their best chances at survival every time there was a nonhuman panic or religious fervor until there were almost no witchers left. "Though if I miss out on a fat busy season's coinpurse because the old man wants to keep me here until next winter, I'll be pissed." He thinks of shiny new armor and horse races and beautiful women and staggeringly potent Toussaintois absinthe.