hey! guess what!! i’m doing a series of illustrations with snippets of writing about eskel and

hey! guess what!! i’m doing a series of illustrations with snippets of writing about eskel and geralt and their history together titled Young Wolves! i haven’t posted writing online in…years, so this is scary and excitingficlet and warnings under the cut(CW: death, descriptions of illness, kids suffering, mentions of dead bodies)The novices had felt such excitement at the thought of the Trial of the Grasses. Even Geralt, who had grown up in the keep, had seen groups of older boys grow through the Trials and come out the other end looking ill, defeated and their numbers diminished. Still, the only thing that stuck to his mind was the strength and speed of the cat-eyed children who pulled through, and the possibility of having that, being that, was enough to dispel the fears from his mind. Geralt was the first one from his group to pull through, and his excitement had yet to die down, when the first small corpse was carried past his cot and out the door. Seven more followed, over the course of six days.Witchers didn’t believe in gods, and the Trial of the Grasses had made Geralt lose faith in a lot of other things he had believed in as well. Three of his closest friends had died, one after the other, and by the sixth day Geralt was holding onto the linens of Eskel’s cot with a white-knuckled grip. The other surviving novices - no, witchers - had been herded away from the isolated infirmary, but the supervising witcher had allowed Geralt to stay and hold his own vigil over the remaining boys. He didn’t quite understand the reason for this special treatment, but also did not linger on it. Most boys had writhed and screamed and vomited throughout their recovery, but Eskel was almost deathly still. His breath had grown regular and deep, and his fever had finally broken over the course of the night, but then again, so had Arni’s, in the cot to the left, before he’d convulsed and stopped breathing an hour past. Geralt was concentrating on every rise and fall of the boy’s chest, every minute change in his condition, and when his eyes started twitching beneath his eyelids, Geralt shot up in his seat, both a spark of hope and a cold spike of dread going through him. And when Eskel groaned, turned his head, and slowly opened his eyes, and two yellow eyes looked back at him, Geralt sighed a shaky breath of relief. They’d survived. -- source link

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