THE FREE CITY OF NOVIGRAD -
The road to Novigrad was a great raw gash in the earth carved by a thousand years of wagon wheels, horse hooves, and marching boots. It widened as Sebastian approached the city, branching into lesser paths that led to farmsteads, mills, and the scattered hamlets that were hidden by the shadow of the great walls.
His horse, a black mare with a white blaze on her forehead and a temperament that swung between stubborn and calm, picked her way carefully through the mud. Sebastian had not named her. Witchers learned early that naming things made them harder to lose, and the Path was built on loss. He called her 'the mare' when he needed to address her, and she answered well enough, which was to say she ignored him as thoroughly as any horse ever had.
The morning was grey and cold, the kind of morning that promised rain by midday and delivered it by noon without fail. Sebastian pulled his hood higher and studied the city as it rose from the coastal plain.
Novigrad.
He had heard the stories, of course. Every witcher had. The Free City. The Pearl of the North. The largest metropolis on the Continent, untouched by war, unclaimed by kings, ruled by a temple and trade and the quiet, ruthless mathematics of coin. But stories were just stories, seeing it was different.
The walls were immense, not the crumbling palisades of some backwater baron's keep, but proper fortifications, forty feet high in places, studded with towers that flew the banners of the Temple Guard, the symbol of the Eternal Fire. The walls seemed to go on forever, curving north toward the harbor and south toward the marshes, encasing the city in a shell of grey stone that had repelled sieges, rebellions, and at least two attempts by Redanian kings to absorb the city into their kingdom.
Beyond the walls, rising above the rooftops like a fist raised against the sky, Sebastian could see the Temple Isle. Even from here, he could make out the spires of the Great Temple, needles of black stone, the Hierarch's palace glittered beside it, home of the Hierarch of Novigrad. The man who styled himself the voice of the Eternal Fire on earth. The man who had, according to the rumors Sebastian had heard in half a dozen taverns, grown increasingly fond of bonfires and witch hunters lately.
Sebastian exhaled through his nose, a thin cloud of steam rose and vanished.
"Temples and walls," he murmured to the mare. "That's what they build when they're afraid, the taller the walls, the deeper the fear."
The mare flicked an ear and kept walking.
The outskirts of Novigrad were a city unto themselves, a sprawling, haphazard maze of wooden shanties, canvas tents, and lean-tos constructed from salvaged timber and prayer. These were the people who could not afford to live inside the walls. The poor. The desperate. The displaced. Entire villages had sprung up in the shadow of the city, their inhabitants hoping that proximity to wealth might somehow translate into a share of it.
Sebastian rode through them slowly, his eyes moving constantly, the humans lived in the houses closest to the gates in crooked structures with sagging roofs and windows patched with oilcloth. They watched him pass with wary eyes, hands hovering near tools that could double as weapons. A child pointed at his swords. An old woman made the sign of the Eternal Fire on her chest and looked away.
But beyond the human shanties, farther from the gates, deeper into the mud and the refuse and the stench of the open sewers that drained from the city, were the non-humans.
Dwarves. Elves. Halflings. A smattering of other races Sebastian could identify only by the shape of their ears or the breadth of their shoulders. They lived in conditions that made the human hovels look like palaces, half-collapsed huts, repurposed animal sheds, hollowed-out wagons that had been abandoned by merchants who could no longer afford to repair them.
They were the majority out here. By far.
Sebastian pulled the mare to a stop. He sat in his saddle for a long moment, watching an elven woman draw water from a communal well while her two children, gaunt, hollow-eyed, dressed in rags huddled at her skirts. A dwarf sat on an upturned barrel, mending a boot that had been mended so many times it was more stitch than leather.
'So it started.' The thought came unbidden to Sebastian.
'It always starts slowly like this. A little push here. A little shove there. The non-humans pushed to the edges, then outside the walls, then outside the law. Then the pogroms. Then the pyres. Then the historians write about it as if it were a natural disaster, something that simply happened, something no one could have stopped.'
Sebastian's jaw tightened beneath his hood. He had read the histories in Kaer Morhen's library, the accounts of the persecution of non-humans in the Northern Kingdoms, the massacres at Kaedwen, the purges in Redania, the pogroms that had swept through the cities of the Pontar Valley like plagues. Vesemir had made him read them. Not as punishment, but as education.
'You need to know what the world is,' the old witcher had said. 'Not what you want it to be. What it is.'
Sebastian clicked his tongue. The mare started walking.
"So it really started," he said aloud, his voice low and rough, barely audible over the squelch of hooves in mud. "It always starts slowly like this... soon they'll start those witch hunts too."
No one heard him. No one would have cared if they had.
The Oxenfurt Gate was the northern entrance to Novigrad, named for the road that led, eventually, after three days of hard riding to the famous academy of the same name. It was a massive arch of black stone, flanked by two square towers bristling with archers and ballistae. The portcullis was raised, revealing a tunnel of darkness that led into the city proper.
Sebastian approached slowly. The mare's hooves echoed off the stone. The crowd thinned as he drew near pedestrians and merchants and laborers giving way to the presence of the Temple Guard, who stood in formation before the gate in their distinctive surcoats, their halberds held at attention.
'The Temple Guard,' Sebastian thought. 'The Hierarch's private army. Enforcers of the Eternal Fire's will. The last line between order and chaos, according to their own propaganda of course.'
He had heard stories about them too. Few of them were decent men, as for the majority, not so much.
"Halt!"
The command came from a guardsman in front a broad-shouldered man with a scar across his lip and the flat, empty eyes of someone who had used violence so often it had become a reflex. His halberd was not raised, but it was not lowered either. It rested diagonally across his body, a clear statement of readiness.
Sebastian halted. The mare stopped with a snort of protest, tossing her head, but she stood.
The guardsman stepped closer. His eyes traveled over Sebastian's gear, the leather jerkin, the silver wolf's head medallion, the two swords slung across his back. Steel and silver. The tools of the trade.
"What is your business here?" the guardsman asked. His voice was flat, professional, devoid of the hostility Sebastian had learned to expect from soldiers. That was something, at least.
Sebastian did not dismount. He raised his right hand, extended one finger, and pointed over his shoulder at the pommels of his swords.
"Work," he said.
The guardsman blinked. His eyes flicked to the swords, then back to Sebastian's face.
"Oh fuck, how did I not notice first." the guardsman said. "You're a witcher."
Before the guardsman could speak again, a voice bellowed from the gatehouse above.
"Let him pass!"
The guardsman looked up. Sebastian looked up.
A man leaned over the parapet of the right-hand tower, older than the others, his surcoat edged with gold thread, a captain's insignia pinned to his chest. He had a grey beard that needed trimming and the kind of face that had been broken at least once and had healed poorly, but his eyes were sharp.
"We have some troubles inside that can be dealt with by a Witcher," the captain called down. His voice carried, echoing off the stone. "Let him through."
The guardsman hesitated, just for a moment. Then he stepped aside, lowering his halberd.
Sebastian's expression did not change beneath his hood. But inside, behind the mask that all Witchers learned to wear, something eased.
'So it's not that bad yet here,' he thought. 'That's reassuring. They still see witchers as tools rather than targets. The Eternal Fire hasn't poisoned everything. Not yet.'
The guardsman cleared his throat. "Alright," he said. "You may pass, witcher."
Sebastian nodded, a single, shallow dip of his head. Nothing more. He did not thank the guardsman. Gratitude implied obligation, and Sebastian owed nothing to the Temple Guard except whatever coin they paid him for whatever work they offered.
He clicked his tongue. The mare stepped forward, into the dark tunnel of the gate.
Behind him, he heard the guardsman mutter to his companion: "Did you see his eyes.. Creepy."
The companion laughed, low and mean. "All witchers are creepy. That's the point."
Sebastian did not look back, the tunnel opened onto Novigrad and he emerged from the shadow of the Oxenfurt Gate and for a moment.. just a moment, he forgot to breathe.
The city was an ocean. A living, breathing, churning sea of humanity and commerce and noise and filth and glory. The streets were not streets but canyons, carved between buildings that rose four, five stories high, their timber frames leaning toward each other. Shop signs swung on iron brackets, a golden tankard, a silver fish, a painted lute, a red boot. The signs told the stories that the illiterate could not read.
The smell hit him second. Novigrad smelled like a thousand things cooking and rotting and living and dying all at once. Bread from a baker's oven. Fish from a market stall. Smoke from a dozen chimneys. Sewage from a gutter that ran down the center of the street. Perfume from a passing merchant's wife, cloying and sweet, meant to cover the fact that she had not bathed in a week. Horses, carts. Spices from the docks, cinnamon and pepper. And naturally, the smell of the sea, salt and brine, carried on the wind from the harbor.
The noise was a wall, a physical pressure against his ears. Carters shouting at their horses. Merchants hawking their wares. Children screaming in play. A street preacher on a soapbox, warning of the End Times and the coming of the Great Cleansing. A dwarf arguing with a human over the price of nails.
Sebastian pulled the mare to the side of the street, letting the current of humanity flow around him. He needed a moment. Just a moment.
'This is very different from Ard Carraigh,' he thought. 'It's really is the biggest city in the world.'
/-\
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