Temesia was not a place one found on most maps. It was a memory, a ghost of stone clinging to the flanks of the Amell Mountains. Once, it had been a minor barony, its wealth dug from shallow silver veins. Now, it was a collection of broken walls, frost-heaved courtyards, and the whispering echoes of a tragedy so commonplace it had been forgotten by everyone but the dead.
Geralt rode into the valley as a bank of iron-grey clouds swallowed the mountain peaks. The air here was thin, cold, and carried the scent of pine and deep stone. Roach's breath steamed in great plumes, her hooves crunching on the skeletal remains of the old road. According to the fragmentary notes in de Ruyter's ledger, this was where Mastic's agent had "acquired" the noonwraith. Geralt needed to know its story. To break a curse, you first had to understand its shape.
The village of Temesia—what remained of it—clung to the mountainside below the ruins like a barnacle. A dozen smoke-stained huts, a communal sheepfold, and a single tavern that was little more than a hovel with a sign. The people who watched him pass had the pinched, weathered faces of highlanders, their eyes holding the deep suspicion of those for whom strangers rarely brought anything good.
He stabled Roach at a lean-to beside the tavern and entered. The warmth was a physical blow after the mountain cold. A few grizzled shepherds hunched over clay mugs, their conversation dying as he approached the rough-hewn bar. The innkeeper, a broad woman with arms like ham hocks and a permanent squint, wiped a tankard with a rag.
"Ale," Geralt said, placing a copper on the wood. He waited until she slid the foaming mug to him before speaking again, keeping his voice low and neutral. "I'm looking for information. About the ruins. About a death."
Her squint tightened. "Ruins are cursed. Death's old news here. We've our own to mind."
"A specific death. A woman. Wronged. She may not rest."
One of the shepherds spat into the fire. The hiss was loud in the silence. The innkeeper's eyes flicked to the swords on Geralt's back. "Witcher," she stated, no question in her tone.
"Yes."
She sighed, a sound of weary resignation. "Old Man Karel. He's the only one left who was here before the fall. Lives up the switchback, last hut before the tree line. Talks to the wind, but he remembers. He might tell you. For a price."
"What price?"
"His son disappeared last winter. Up by the old baronial cemetery. We found his hat, nothing else. If your business is with the dead… find out what happened to Filip."
It was a contract, unspoken and crude. Information for information. The currency of the Path. Geralt nodded. "I'll see what I can learn."
The climb to Karel's hut was steep, the wind picking up, keening through the stunted pines. The hut was a precarious thing of stone and sod, smoke struggling from a hole in the roof. Geralt knocked on the rotting doorframe.
"Go away! I've nothing to steal but ghosts!" The voice from within was cracked and sharp.
"I'm here about Filip. And about the lady in the ruins."
A long pause. Then the hide curtain was shoved aside. Old Man Karel was a skeleton draped in greasy wool, his eyes milky with cataracts but burning with a fierce intelligence. He peered at Geralt, his nose twitching. "You smell of cold iron and colder places. Witcher."
"Geralt of Rivia."
Karel grunted and shuffled back inside, leaving the entry open. The hut was a single room, cluttered with the detritus of a long life: carved wooden charms, bundles of dried herbs, a rusted halberd leaning in a corner. A small fire smoldered in a hearthstone.
"Filip," Karel said, settling onto a stool. "Good boy. Curious. Went up to find the 'white lady' the fools from Gors Velen were whispering about. Wanted to prove he wasn't afraid." The old man's gnarled hands twisted in his lap. "He shouldn't have gone. The baron's daughter doesn't like the living."
"The baron's daughter. Tell me."
Karel's story unfolded like a sad, familiar ballad. Decades past, the last Baron of Temesia, one Voron Temes, had sought to shore up his fading fortunes by marrying his only child, Lenore, to a rich, brutish wool merchant from the south. Lenore, however, was in love with the captain of the guard, a man named Kael. On the eve of the wedding, the baron discovered them. In a rage, he had Kael dragged to the courtyard and executed. He forced Lenore to watch from her balcony. That night, dressed in her wedding gown, Lenore threw herself from that same balcony onto the flagstones below.
"The barony fell within a year," Karel whispered. "Plague, then bandits. The Temes line ended. But Lenore… she stayed. At first, she'd just be seen at noon, walking the parapet where she fell, weeping. A sad thing. We'd leave flowers at the gate." He shook his head. "Then the hunters came. Men with nets and bottles, shouting about 'ectoplasmic resonance' and 'tradeable spirits.' They chased her, tried to trap her. They violated her tomb. That's when she changed. The sadness turned to rage. The weeping to screams. That's when she became dangerous."
Geralt understood. A noonwraith was a spirit bound by sorrow, often tied to the moment of its death. But violation, a second betrayal by the living, could curdle that sorrow into a lethal, repetitive fury. She wasn't just replaying her tragedy; she was punishing the world for it.
"These hunters. One of them was working for a man named Mastic. Did they succeed? Did they capture her?"
Karel's milky eyes seemed to look through him. "They thought they did. Last summer. They had a cart with a silver-lined box. They made a great noise, then left in a hurry. We thought she was gone. But the next noon… she was back. Only… different."
"Different how?"
"The light around her," the old man said, his voice dropping to a superstitious hush. "It used to be pale, like mist. Now it has a… a sickness in it. A blue tinge, like rotten starlight. And her crying… it sounds like it comes from under the earth now. It makes your teeth ache."
Geralt's jaw tightened. They hadn't captured the original wraith. They had captured a fragment of it, a shred of its essence torn away during the botched attempt. That was what Mastic had in his cell—a tortured, partial spirit, being rebuilt and twisted with alchemy. The true, full-powered noonwraith, wounded and enraged by the violation, still remained here. And it had taken Filip.
"The cemetery. Where is it?"
Karel gave him directions, a complex path through the old upper bailey. As Geralt turned to leave, the old man grabbed his wrist with surprising strength. "You'll face her? At noon?"
"That's when she's strongest. That's when I'll find her."
Karel released him, nodding slowly. "Then take this." He fumbled at his neck and pulled off a crude amulet on a leather thong—a small silver locket, tarnished black. "We found it in the dirt outside her tomb after the hunters left. It's hers. It might… remind her."
Geralt took the locket. It was cold, and his medallion gave a sympathetic tremble against his chest. A focus object, a tether to her humanity. It was a kind of key.
The ruins of Castle Temes were a jagged silhouette against the leaden sky. Geralt spent the hours before dawn scouting, using his heightened senses to map the crumbling courtyards, the collapsed great hall, the skeletal remains of the balcony from which Lenore had fallen. He found the old cemetery, a small plot of leaning, mossy headstones behind a ruined chapel. And there, he found signs.
Not just the psychic residue of a wraith—a cold spot that made his breath crystalize, the faint scent of crushed lily-of-the-valley—but physical signs. A scrap of wool from a shepherd's cloak, caught on a bramble. A footprint, too small for a man, pressed into the frozen earth near a fresh disturbance in the soil of a grave that bore the Temes crest.
She hadn't just killed Filip. She had taken him. Into the earth.
As the weak, grey light of noon began to bleed through the clouds, Geralt made his preparations. He coated his silver sword with specter oil, the viscous liquid soaking into the intricate runes on the blade, making them gleam. He drank a swallow of Golden Oriole to fortify his system against ectoplasmic toxins and a draught of Tawny Owl to sharpen his focus. The bitter brews coursed through him, heightening his senses, turning the world sharp and clear and slightly tremulous.
He stood in the center of the courtyard, near the stained flagstones, and waited.
The change was subtle at first. The birdsong died. The wind stilled. The very light seemed to thicken, taking on a pale, watery quality. Then came the sound. A weeping that was less a sound and more a vibration in the bones, rising from the ground, from the stones themselves.
She materialized not on the balcony, but in the center of the courtyard, her back to him. She was a column of shifting grey and white, the tattered remnants of a wedding gown swirling around her. The air temperature plummeted. Frost raced out from her in a glittering wave, crawling up the stone walls.
"Lenore," Geralt said, his voice steady, cutting through the spectral weeping.
She turned. Her face was a blur of pain, her eyes dark voids. But around the edges of her form, Karel was right—a faint, sickly blue phosphorescence pulsed, a contamination. The echo of Mastic's tampering.
"You took a boy," Geralt continued, slowly drawing his silver sword. "Filip. His father grieves."
The wraith's mouth opened in a silent scream. The weeping intensified, becoming a physical pressure, a wall of sorrow and rage meant to crush the mind. Geralt felt it like a headache behind his eyes, but his mutations and potions held it at bay.
"Miiiiine… All are miiiiine…" The voice was a chorus of whispers, rising from the earth, the air, from inside his own skull. "They take… they always take…"
She floated towards him, her hands extending. Where her tears fell, the frost turned black and corrosive.
Geralt moved. He didn't charge; he circled, forcing her to turn. "The hunters took a piece of you. I'm not them."
"Liar!" She shrieked, and the sound was a physical force. She vanished in a swirl of mist and reappeared directly before him, her icy hands reaching for his face. He pivoted, the silver sword flashing in the pale light. It passed through her shoulder, and she screamed—a real, agonized sound this time. Silver was to specters what steel was to flesh. Ectoplasm, the substance of her being, sizzled and burned away like smoke in sunlight.
But she was powerful, and fueled by a fresh, deep wrong. She lashed out. A tendril of freezing mist wrapped around his ankle, and a pain like a thousand needles shot up his leg. He grunted, slashing downward to sever the connection.
He needed to break the cycle. He reached into his pocket, pulling out the locket. "Lenore! Do you remember this?"
He held it up. The tarnished silver caught the weird light.
The wraith froze. Her form flickered, the raging blue tinge receding for a heartbeat, revealing the purer, older sorrow beneath. The weeping softened, just for a moment, into something truly heartbreaking.
"Kael…" she whispered, the name a sigh of infinite loss.
It was the opening. But Geralt didn't strike. "He's gone. You are too. This place, this pain… it's not your tomb. It's your prison. The boy doesn't belong here. Let him go."
The confusion on her spectral face was terrible. The blue sickness pulsed again, fighting against the memory, trying to reassert the rage. "They hurt me… they steal…"
"The ones who hurt you are far away," Geralt said, taking a step closer, the locket held before him like a talisman. "Holding a part of you prisoner. Filip is not them. Let him go, and I swear I will find the piece they stole. I will set it free."
It was a gamble. A witcher's promise to a monster. But wraiths were not like necrophages; they were echoes of people, bound by emotion and promise.
Lenore's form shuddered. She looked from the locket to the disturbed earth of the cemetery, then back to Geralt. The battle within her visible in the swirling chaos of her essence. The sorrow, the rage, the foreign sickness, and a final, fading glimmer of the woman she had been.
Slowly, the ground near the Temes grave began to churn. The soil, frozen solid moments before, softened and parted. From it, a pale hand emerged, then an arm. Geralt rushed over, sheathing his sword, and dug with his bare hands. He pulled Filip's body from the shallow, spectral grave. The boy was ice-cold, not breathing, his skin tinged blue.
But Geralt's enhanced hearing caught it—a faint, sluggish heartbeat. A thread of life, preserved in the unnatural cold.
He looked back at the wraith. Lenore was watching, her form growing more transparent, the violent hues fading, leaving only the original, mournful white.
"Go," Geralt said, his voice rough. "Find your peace."
He held up the locket, then gently placed it on the stained flagstones where she had died. As the last of the noon light began to fade from the courtyard, the wraith of Lenore Temes reached a translucent hand toward the locket. Her form dissolved into a shower of pale, warm light that drifted upwards like dandelion seeds, and was gone.
The cold broke. The wind returned, carrying the distant call of a crow.
Geralt slung the unconscious boy over his shoulder and began the treacherous climb down to the village. He had kept one promise. He had freed a wraith and recovered a lost son. But the larger promise remained. In a cell in Fen Hythe, a corrupted fragment of Lenore's sorrow still twisted in agony, being forged into a weapon.
He had the boy. He had the story. And now he had a personal stake. De Ruyter and Mastic weren't just creating monsters; they were perpetuating tragedies, enslaving grief itself. As he carried the icy weight of Filip down the mountain, Geralt knew the path ahead was no longer just about stopping a political plot. It was about restitution. It was about showing a lord that some things—even ghosts—were not property to be seized and sold.
The quiet, final peace of Lenore Temes was a victory. But it was a small, local one. The war for her stolen fragment, and for the souls of all the creatures de Ruyter might think to claim, was just beginning. And Geralt of Rivia, with a half-frozen boy in his arms, walked back into the world of the living, his resolve hardened into something as cold and sharp as the silver sword on his back.