One snow-covered morning in late winter, as Geralt approached his fifth birthday, he woke from a dream so vivid and detailed that it felt more like a memory than a vision. He found his mother preparing breakfast and sat at their small wooden table with the solemnity of someone carrying grave news.
"Mama, I had the clearest dream yet. About the place where they train witchers—Kaer Morhen." He spoke the name with the precise pronunciation of someone who had heard it countless times, though no book they owned mentioned the fortress by name.
Visenna's hands stilled over the porridge she was stirring. "Tell me about this dream."
"It's a castle in the Blue Mountains, built into the stone itself. Ancient, but strong. There are towers that reach toward the sky like fingers, and training grounds carved from the mountainside." Geralt's description was remarkably accurate, drawn from his memories of the games where Kaer Morhen had been lovingly rendered in incredible detail.
"In the dream, there were witchers there. Old ones, like Vesemir, who trains the boys. But Mama, the castle is almost empty. There are so few left, and they're dying out because..." He paused, as if struggling with the revelation. "Because they've lost the knowledge of how to make new witchers safely. Too many children die in the trials now."
This was information that Visenna had never encountered in any of her research, but something about her son's certainty convinced her of its truth. "How many survive?" she asked quietly.
"In the dream, I saw that only one or two in ten live through all the trials. And those who survive are changed so much that they can barely remember who they were before. They become something between human and monster, skilled at killing but cut off from most of what makes life worth living."
Geralt looked directly at his mother, his blue eyes holding depths of sorrow that no five-year-old should possess. "But in the dream, I also saw something else. I saw that some of the trials fail not because they're too dangerous, but because they're done wrong. The knowledge has been corrupted over the years, and the witchers don't know how to fix it."
"What are you saying, my love?"
"I'm saying that maybe there's another way. In the dream, I saw a sorceress working with the witchers, helping to make the trials safer. Using healing magic to guide the mutations instead of just hoping the children survive them." He reached across the table to take her hand. "Mama, what if destiny doesn't want you to give me away? What if destiny wants us to go to Kaer Morhen together?"
The idea that Geralt presented to his mother was audacious beyond anything she had ever considered. Instead of surrendering her son to the witchers and then living with the grief of separation, what if she accompanied him to Kaer Morhen and used her considerable magical abilities to make the trials safer and more survivable?
"Think about it, Mama," Geralt said, his young voice carrying the conviction of someone who had seen the future and found it wanting. "You're one of the most skilled healers in the northern kingdoms. Your magic is different from the court sorceresses—it's about preservation and growth, not destruction and transformation. What if that's exactly what the witcher trials need?"
Over the following weeks, as spring returned to the mountains and the Buina ran wild with snowmelt, mother and son explored this possibility from every angle. Geralt's "dreams" provided increasingly detailed information about the current state of Kaer Morhen and the challenges facing the remaining witchers.
"Vesemir is old, older than anyone realizes," Geralt reported after one particularly vivid dream. "He's been trying to preserve the knowledge of the trials, but so much has been lost. And the other witchers—Lambert, Eskel, they're skilled fighters, but they don't understand the magical theory behind the mutations. They just follow the old procedures and hope for the best."
"But if a healer were there, someone who understood both magic and the body's natural processes, they could guide the trials differently. Instead of forcing changes that the body fights against, they could encourage transformations that work with the child's natural essence."
The more they discussed it, the more sense it made. Visenna had always been drawn to healing arts that worked in harmony with natural processes rather than overriding them. Her magic was particularly suited to easing difficult transformations and helping the body adapt to new states of being.
Moreover, Geralt's knowledge from his previous life included understanding of how the trials were supposed to work versus how they actually functioned in practice. He could provide insights that might help restore some of the lost knowledge while also introducing innovations that could dramatically improve survival rates.