Our World, Your story

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Ash settles, but the cold does not lift.

Veilmoor breathes again beneath the weight of something worse than fire. Monsters stalk its edges with unnatural hunger, their claws dusted in frost, their eyes hollow with a curse that spreads like rot through winter bark. The ice does not melt. It spreads.

Within the schools, the cracks run deeper than wounds. Grandmaster Hagen, who once stood as the Wolf's unbroken spine, has turned his back on his own wolf medallion, stepping fully into the coils of the Viper. His old brothers watch in silence. Some in anger. Some in understanding.

The trials of the Grasses have spoken once more. New Witchers rose from the agony, eyes changed, hands steadied by mutation. Others did not rise at all, left cold on the stone table; a price the Path has always demanded, and always will.

Beyond the walls of the schools, the world grows uglier. The Eternal Fire burns where it was never invited, and its priests point fingers with more zeal than reason: non-humans find doors closed, roads denied, names turned to slurs. Politics and pyres walk hand in hand.

And above it all, the Wild Hunt rides closer than it has in living memory. Grand Master Hagen has been claimed, a new rider among the spectral host, his fate sealed in frost and silence.

The night grows longer. The Hunt grows bolder.

And yet somewhere, things keep shifting.

Chains shattered, yet winter answers with teeth.

As the Wild Hunt rides beneath a blackened sky, a band of travelers—humans, witchers, and Grandmasters—battle a cold not born of nature but design. Villages freeze mid-breath, roads vanish beneath merciless snow, and the Veil trembles with distant hoofbeats.

On a desolate path they find a merchant, alive yet ensnared in a curse with no visible chain. His shadow lags behind him; his words lead to a ruin marked by the broken crest of the Eternal Fire.

Within waits the truth: a failed experiment, an unknown relic pulsing with winter’s will, and the remains of a long-fallen Viper Witcher who sought to end it. The curse was bait. The cold, controlled.

Steel and Signs shatter the relic, but victory tastes of ash.

At dawn comes word—Veilmoor burns. The home that sheltered them now stands beneath flame and stake, marked by the Hunt.

Winter was only the beginning.

They turn back toward the smoke.

Destiny has a cruel sense of humour.

Two groups, one of mercenaries, the other of witchers, find themselves drawn to the same place not marked on any map, the Crossroad’s Tavern. Weathered by hardship and strung out by misfortune, both groups seek nothing more than a moment of rest.

But hunger and duty leave little room for peace.

In a desperate bid to provide for their own, Garrick "Ironhand" of the Iron Wolves and Grandmaster Hagen of the School of the Wolf take on contracts offered by mysterious benefactors. The deals are sealed in blood, binding and irreversible. What seemed like a simple exchange for coin reveals itself as something far more sinister.

The men behind the contracts were not merchants, but mages. Manipulators and puppeteers.

With invisible strings now wound tight around their necks, both leaders vanish into shadow enslaved, controlled, leaving their followers behind with nothing but questions... and the fallout of betrayal.