Witcher
Legacy Name: Migrant

The Path is a lonesome, thankless, and perilous undertaking. It is some twisted form of wanderlust eating away in your bones. It's the way in which the villagers mutter and glare; how they try to overcharge you for board and off-tasting swill. It's in the way those self-same villagers come begging for your swords and brute strength when they give you a contract, stinking of fear the entire time. You stalk. You hunt. You spill your blood and lug back proof of a job completed and get rewarded with a meager pouch of coin on a good day.

On a bad day, or perhaps even a normal one, you wheel your horse around and get run out of town.

On the good days, a portion of coin that's so cold it hasn't even met the inside of your purse is forked out to put a roof over your head, and to see that your horse is given a handful of oats and a full net of hay. If you're particularly grimy, or the monster of the week took a particular shine to you, you shell out more for a bath. The maid fills the tub with water that's just short of boiling, and maybe she thinks that this is an insult to you, when it's just at the right temperature to soothe the screaming of your muscles. Then your swords must be tended to—properly—and your armor must be inspected—carefully—and you'll pack and repack your scant belongings because what coin you missed out on here you can (probably) make back when you sell the monster parts to an apothecary.

That too, is a gamble. There are shops you've been to that have cheated you far worse than any innkeeper ever could, and you'd been forced to commit because of timing and location. There are shops with worn counters that taught you how to haggle and, when that failed, taught you how to force your price. Then there are the shops that will take what you have and actually pay you their worth. You guard their locations jealously in the map of your memory, because this is what the Path teaches you early on: between a safe spot to rest, a hot meal, and fair pay, you can often only choose one.

This is your life: all your worldly possessions condensed down to what can fit into your saddlebags and what can be strapped upon your back, just enough to ensure your survival but not enough to weigh you down. You know the contents of your tattered, dog-eared field guide like the back of your hand, but you keep the ragged thing anyway because there's still some miserable little human part of you that the Trials failed to burn out. It still aches when it sees your childish scrawl on the inside cover. You do not feel emotions, which is a lie, but some days you wonder if it was the first lie that your instructors taught you because they hoped that, through repetition, it would become real.

This is your Path: you turn your horse out onto the road, chasing rumors. There are contracts posted to boards that are more often riddles than cut-and-dry flyers. There are injuries, and there is coin, and there are sneering jeers and harsh words spat your way. There are nights spent camped out in the woods, some more pleasant than others. There are times that you go months without seeing one of your brothers, but you'll hear tall tales of their exploits now and again, and that blunts the teeth of your loneliness.

You are a Witcher, and so you shouldn't want more. You shouldn't want a place to return to, soft words and kind hands, a warm bed under a sturdy roof. Those are things for humans, and you don't have enough humanity left in you to be entitled to that, but—

But.

That miserable little human that weathered the hardships of training and the injustices of the Trials is a little bigger than you anticipated. He rattles against the cage of your ribs, spearing you with want. He makes you stop at the edges of meadows flush with summer wildflowers not just to pick ingredients for your potions but to snag an extra sprig here and there, just because it's pretty. He's in that little pleased hum when you bite into the first apple of fall and sweetly tart juice floods onto your tongue. Every now and then he'll slip a few extra coins into the worn palms of widows or break off a heel of bread for bedraggled orphans. He's never thanked, but there's something powerful in how he can still do this, if nothing else.

But at the end of the day, you are still the only one who stitches yourself together after a hunt. It's a monster's temper that rears its ugly head when your pay is barely enough to cover your potions ingredients. Bandits and mercenaries get set upon you more often than not and you kill them, mostly to defend yourself but also partly to vent, and you pick them clean of any useful possessions with a clear conscience. You take what kindnesses miraculously come your way and never linger. It is safer that way.

There are monsters, and there are contracts, and there is coin. You are still alive today. That has to be enough.



Credits:
Base profile code by Maruun, edited by Monologue
Story by Monologue
Background from Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt
Witcher (c) Andrzej Sapkowski
Fonts from Google Fonts.