Chapter Text
When Geralt meets Renfri, she’s not quite twenty. She hasn’t had time to temper her rage, hasn’t found a way to build a life beyond the sole purpose of revenge. How could she, with mages like Stregobor and Sabrina hunting the girls born under the Black Sun. But she’s not a babe.
Some were lucky; they were born royal or noble or wealthy, to parents who would protest if a sorcerer came after their daughter. Others were loved and normal enough to be protected. Not all though; some were born to parents who had heard of the prophecy and killed their babes before the eclipse was even over. Some waited, feeling that aura grow just as the child did, until the sorcerer arrived and they could be convinced to turn the girl over. Some, like Fialka, escaped their tower prisons. And some of the children born under the Black Sun were not girls, and so they escaped persecution.
It wasn’t princes freeing the girls like Bernika from the towers. Not even was it knights, at least not any who bore crown given titles or their own coat of arms. No, these knights bore silver pendants with shared crests, and the first was an amber eyed Wolf named Eskel.
Eskel did not rescue a Black Sun princess from a tower. Instead he was there in Caingorn when she was born in the dark day, for she was his Child Surprise. Now, Eskel was not a knight, but he was two things. Reliable, and a Witcher. So while the Path took him across the Continent in the warmer months, for twelve years he returned to Caingorn to winter.
Until the first mage came, and little Deidre proved she was both immune to his magic and perfectly capable of removing his manhood with the knife, and the lessons, Eskel had given her on her tenth birthday. Days later, upon the mage’s pained, weeping confessions of his plans of rape, robbery, murder and even stealing Deidre’s body to do an autopsy, Eskel took his head. And then he took Deidre and her sturdy grey pony and rode east, and that winter, he brought the first of the Black Suns to a keep of Witchers.
The Witchers know best a childhood shaped by pain, to be driven away for otherness, to be spat on and called a mutant. So Black Sun after Black Sun, Witchers from all seven schools relocate as many of those children as they can. The children do not become Witchers, not in the truth of the Trial of Grasses, but they train and test the limits of their mutations. After all, children born under the Black Sun are immune to the magic of human mages, and not every monster has wings or claws. Some have human faces and wield magic at their fingertips.
It's not quite an Order, and not really a School. It grows as children like Sylvia Anna are rescued from banishment by a Manticore, or flee from mages with the help of a Griffin like Silvenia. Some, like Maxii van Dekkar, make their own way, until she takes a contract on the same mage as a Viper and finds herself under his tutelage.
So when Geralt meets Renfri at an inn in Blaviken, he knows the touch of a Black Sun aura already. He recognizes her for what she is and doesn’t need Stregobor to tell him.
He needs to offer Renfri a choice. Get her revenge on Stregobor and become the monster the sorcerer is so quick to label these girls as or put her rage aside and leave Blaviken.
“Or,” Geralt offers, and watches some of that darkness fade from her eyes. “You come north with me and we’ll teach you to hunt the monsters who wield magic.”
When he leaves Kaer Morhen that spring, there’s a golden brooch frame on the crossguard of his steel sword, but the blade shaped pin remains in the keep, tucked between a sleeve and bracer of a girl who used it once on a man. Now she has a larger version to use on the monsters.