Chapter 4: Sothoryos
The journey south took three days.
Alaric didn't rush. He flew when he wanted, walked when the mood struck, and spent one whole night floating above the waves, staring at stars so different from the ones he'd known in his first life. Aurelia hunted, rested on his shoulder, and occasionally dove into the sea after fish that glowed in the dark.
Sothoryos appeared on the horizon like a bruise on the water. Dark green, almost black, the jungle rose from the coast in waves of impossible density. Mountains lurked in the distance, their peaks lost in cloud. And everywhere, the sense of age. This was a land that had existed long before men, and would exist long after.
The sorcerers had claimed it thousands of years ago. Smart of them. A whole continent to themselves, free from the petty wars of men, the suspicions of the Faith, the endless complications of mortal rule. Here, magic wasn't hidden or feared. It was simply normal.
He landed on a beach of black sand, staff in hand, Aurelia on his shoulder, and starteda slow stroll enjoying the beautyall sround him.
After about an hour of admiring the forest and all it possessed, two women emerged from the jungle as if the trees had parted specifically for them. The first was tall, silver-haired, with the kind of ageless face that spoke of centuries rather than decades. She wore blue robes that shifted color as she moved, and her eyes were the pale blue of winter skies, beautiful, cold, and absolutely unreadable.
The second was younger, or at least looked it. Dark hair tumbled past her shoulders, and her violet eyes held a spark of something dangerous. She wore black, practical and elegant, and moved with the confidence of someone who had fought for every inch of ground she'd ever claimed.
The silver-haired woman spoke first.
"You're not from any school we know." Her voice was calm, yet stern, the voice of someone used to being listened to. "Yet you carry power like a second skin, who are you ?"
Alaric smiled slightly. "I'm Alaric. I've come to learn."
"Learn what?"
"Everything, but I thought I'd start with the people who've spent thousands of years residing mastering their power upon this continent."
The younger woman snorted. "Flattery, how... original."
"I meant it."
The silver-haired woman studied him for a long moment. Then, almost imperceptibly, she nodded. "I am Tissaia de Vries. This is Yennefer. You'll come with us, and you'll answer our questions. If your answers satisfy, we'll talk about learning."
"And if they don't?"
Tissaia's smile was thin. "Then Sothoryos is very large, and the jungle is very hungry."
Alaric laughed. Not nervously, not forced, genuinely amused. "Fair enough, lead on."
The path through the jungle was invisible to his eyes, but Tissaia walked without hesitation. Yennefer flanked him, close enough to react if he tried anything, far enough to seem casual. Aurelia watched them both.
"You're not afraid," Yennefer observed after an hour of walking.
"Should I be?"
"Two of the most powerful sorceresses on the continent are escorting you to an unknown destination, and you're not afraid."
Alaric considered that. "I'm cautious and I'm paying attention to the path ahead, but afraid?" He shook his head. "I've been afraid before. This isn't it."
"What were you afraid of?"
He thought about the void. The endless, silent dark where he'd almost dissolved into nothing. "Being alone forever," he said quietly. "That's the only thing that's ever really scared me."
Yennefer was silent for a moment. Then, softer than before: "Most people fear death."
"Death and I are... acquainted."
Tissaia glanced back at that, her pale eyes narrowing, but she said nothing.
☆☆★☆☆
Aretuza rose from the jungle like a challenge.
It was a fortress as much as a school, dark stone walls climbing toward the sky, towers bristling with defensive enchantments. Alaric could feel the wards from a mile away, layered, complex, old enough that they'd grown into the very fabric of the land. Anyone who approached without permission would find themselves lost, turned around, or simply... gone.
The gates opened as they approached. Inside, the courtyard bustled with students—young women in practical robes, carrying books or components or simply hurrying between classes. They stared at Alaric, at his staff, at the phoenix on his shoulder, then looked away quickly when they caught Tissaia's eye.
"The first years are always curious," Yennefer said. "The ones who survive learn to mind their own business."
"Survive?"
She smiled, and it wasn't entirely pleasant. "Magic isn't gentle, Alaric. Neither are we."
The first year was... interesting.
Tissaia questioned him extensively. Where had he learned? Who had taught him? Why did his magic feel different from any she'd encountered? He answered carefully—truthful where he could, vague where he had to. He'd been taught by... circumstances. His power came from... unusual sources. He'd spent years alone, practicing, learning.
She accepted this, mostly because his answers were consistent and his power was undeniable. More importantly, he asked questions of his own. Not the arrogant questions of a rival seeking secrets, but genuine curiosity. How did their warding work? What did they know of the deeper magics? Could he observe their teaching methods?
"You want to learn from us," Tissaia said one evening, months into his stay. "But you already know more than most of my senior students."
"Knowing and doing are different. Your students have something I don't, generations of accumulated practice. Techniques refined over centuries. I can learn in a decade what might take them a lifetime, but I still need something to learn from."
Tissaia studied him with those winter-pale eyes. "You're honest about your limitations. That's rarer than you'd think."
"Limitations are just walls. You can't knock one down until you know it's there."
She almost smiled. Almost. "Stay as long as you find useful. But Alaric?"
"Yes?"
"If you harm any of my students, if you use what you learn here against us, I will find you. However long it takes."
He met her gaze without flinching. "I'd expect nothing less."
☆☆★☆☆
Yennefer was harder to read.
She watched him constantly, not with suspicion, exactly, but with a kind of wary curiosity. She'd been hurt before, he guessed. Betrayed. The walls around her were thick and well-defended.
He didn't try to breach them. He simply... existed. Asked her opinion on spellcraft. Listened when she spoke. Never pushed for more than she offered.
It took eight months before she sat beside him voluntarily.
"You're strange," she said, settling onto the bench where he was watching the sunset.
"Thank you?"
"It's not a compliment. You just... are. You don't try to impress anyone. You don't posture or scheme. You learn like a man starving, but you share what you know freely." She glanced at him. "Sorcerers don't act like that."
"Maybe I'm not a sorcerer."
"Then what are you?"
He thought about it. "Someone who was given a gift. Someone who wants to be worthy of it."
Yennefer was quiet for a long moment. Then, softly: "That's the first thing you've said that actually sounds true."
After that, something shifted. Not friendship, not yet—Yennefer didn't give friendship easily. But the walls lowered, just a little. She started seeking him out for conversations. Debates about magical theory. Arguments about the nature of power. Once, a discussion about loneliness that lasted until dawn.
She never talked about her past. He never asked. Some walls, he understood, existed for a reason.
☆☆★☆☆
In the third year, Tissaia made him an offer.
"You've learned everything Aretuza can teach you about theory," she said. "It's time for practical application. The jungle doesn't care about your pedigree. It only cares if you survive."
So he went into the jungle.
Alone. No staff, no Aurelia, no magic except what he could draw from himself. Tissaia's version of a final exam.
The first week nearly killed him.
He'd faced monsters before, but always with preparation, with his staff amplifying his power, with Aurelia watching his back. Now he had nothing but his wits and the magic in his blood. A manticore stalked him for three days before he finally outsmarted it, leading it into a ravine and collapsing the walls with raw, wandless force. A pack of wyverns forced him to climb cliffs he'd have called impossible a decade ago. The jungle itself tried to poison him, drown him, swallow him whole.
By the end of the month, he emerged scratched, exhausted, and grinning like a madman.
Tissaia looked him over, noted the new scars, the weight he'd lost, the fire in his eyes. Then she nodded once.
"Acceptable."
Coming from her, it was the highest praise imaginable.
☆☆★☆☆
The Wolf School sat on a plateau in the southern mountains, far from Aretuza's reach. Alaric had heard rumors of it for years, witchers who'd made Sothoryos their home, adapting their techniques to a continent that made even the worst parts of the Northern Kingdoms look tame.
The Grand Master was a man named Vesemir.
He was old. Older than anyone Alaric had met, older than Tissaia by far. His hair was white, his face lined with decades of hard living, and his eyes held the weight of everything he'd seen and lost. When Alaric arrived at the school's gates, Vesemir was waiting.
"Tissaia sent word," the old witcher said. "Said you might come. Said you wanted to learn."
"I do."
"Witcher training kills most who try it. Even the ones with mutations." Those ancient eyes studied him. "You're not normal."
"No," Alaric agreed. "I'm not."
"Can you die?"
"I don't think so."
Vesemir considered this. Then, unexpectedly, he laughed. "Well, that's something. At least I won't have to bury you." He turned and gestured. "Come on, then. Let's see if an immortal can learn to fight."
☆☆★☆☆
The next five years were the hardest of Alaric's existence.
Vesemir didn't care about his magic. Didn't care about his power or his immortality or his cosmic parentage. On the training grounds, none of that mattered. What mattered was footwork. Blade angles. The precise amount of force needed to cut without overextending. The difference between surviving a fight and winning one.
He started with wooden swords, like a child. Vesemir beat him bloody every day for three months before allowing him to touch steel. Then he beat him bloody with steel, too.
"You rely on magic," Vesemir said after one particularly brutal session. "It's a crutch. Take it away, and you don't know how to move."
"I've survived without it."
"Surviving isn't winning. You want to rule someday, you said. Kings don't just survive no, true kings fight and they win. They make people believe they can't be beaten." He tapped Alaric's chest with a finger. "That belief starts here. In your body. In your bones. Not in your spells."
So Alaric learned.
He learned to fight with a sword—first one, then two, then the silver blade Vesemir insisted all witchers carried, even if he'd never face a monster that required it. He learned to fight without weapons at all, using his body as a tool and a weapon both. He learned to read an opponent's stance, their breathing, the tiny movements that preceded an attack.
And slowly and painfully, he learned to move like a witcher. That fluid grace Eskel had shown in Ibben. The balance of motion that made every strike count, every dodge effortless.
"Better," Vesemir said one day, after Alaric had held his own in a sparring match for a full hour. "Not good. But better."
It was the first compliment he'd received in five years. He treasured it.
☆☆★☆☆
The witchers accepted him slowly.
They were a suspicious lot by nature, mutations and training had bred caution into their bones. But Alaric trained alongside them, ate with them, bled with them. He never asked for special treatment, never used his magic to gain an advantage. When a young witcher named Gerd was injured on a hunt, Alaric spent three days brewing potions and applying healing spells that saved his leg.
After that, things changed.
They still didn't trust him completely. That would take decades, if it ever happened at all. But they respected him. And in the world of witchers, respect was worth more than trust.
Geralt visited once, passing through on his way to some contract in the deep south. He and Alaric circled each other warily for a day before finally sitting down to drink.
"You knew Eskel," Geralt said. It wasn't a question.
"We met in Ibben. Years ago. He pointed me toward Harald."
Geralt nodded slowly. "Eskel said you were a weird one, that you talked to a wyvern."
"It was hungry so I gave it food and it left."
"That's not how wyverns work."
Alaric shrugged. "This one decided it was."
Geralt studied him with those yellow eyes, so like his brother's. Then he raised his cup. "To strange wizards who make things simple."
Alaric raised his own. "To witchers who kill what needs killing."
They drank in companionable silence.
☆☆★☆☆
In the tenth year, Yennefer came to the Wolf School.
She appeared at the gates one morning, looking irritated, beautiful and absolutely determined. Vesemir raised an eyebrow but let her pass. By then, Alaric's presence had become almost routine.
"You've been gone too long," she said without preamble.
"I've been learning."
"You've been hiding."
He considered that. "Maybe. A little." He gestured toward the training grounds. "Come. Walk with me."
They walked in silence for a while, through the courtyard where witchers practiced, past the stables where horses stamped and snorted, up onto the walls that overlooked the jungle below.
"Tissaia sent me," Yennefer finally admitted. "She's worried about you."
"Tissaia doesn't worry."
"Tissaia pretends not to worry. It's different." She leaned against the wall, dark hair blowing in the wind. "You've been here five years. Before that, you were in the jungle for a month. Before that, you were at Aretuza for three years. You just... disappear into things. Lose yourself in them."
"Is that a problem?"
"It's lonely." She said it quietly, almost to herself. "I know lonely when I see it."
Alaric was silent for a long moment. Then, softly: "I spent what felt like decades alone in the dark before I came here. Just floating. No sound, no light, no one. Just me, slowly dissolving into nothing." He glanced at her. "After that, being alone in a crowd isn't so bad."
Yennefer's expression shifted. Something flickered in those violet eyes, recognition maybe, understanding.
"You're not the only one with a past," she said.
"I know."
She nodded, once. Then she punched him in the arm, hard enough that even his enhanced body felt it. "You're still an idiot. Come back to Aretuza. Tissaia misses arguing with you, and I'm tired of talking to students who can't keep up."
Alaric rubbed his arm and smiled. "Give me a year. I need to finish what I started here."
"A year?"
"The Grand Master thinks I might actually be 'not terrible' by then."
Yennefer snorted. "High praise from Vesemir." She turned to go, then stopped. "Alaric?"
"Yes?"
"Don't disappear completely. Some of us would notice."
She was gone before he could answer, disappearing down the path with that fluid grace he'd noticed the first day they met.
☆☆★☆☆
The next year passed quickly.
He mastered the basics of witcher combat—not the mutations, never that, but the techniques that didn't require altered physiology. Vesemir pronounced him "adequate" and "unlikely to die immediately" and "still too dependent on that stick of yours."
High praise, indeed.
He made connections that would last centuries. Witchers who'd remember the strange wizard who trained with them, who healed their wounded, who never asked for more than they offered. Names and faces he'd call on someday, when his kingdom needed people who could fight the things normal soldiers couldn't.
In the fifteenth year, he returned to Aretuza.
☆☆★☆☆
Tissaia met him in her tower, the same room where they'd first spoken seriously all those years ago. She looked exactly the same, she always would, but something in her expression had softened. Just slightly.
"You're different," she observed.
"Fifteen years will do that."
"More than that. You moved like a scholar before. Now you move like a hunter." She gestured to a chair. "Sit. Tell me what you learned."
He told her. Not everything, some things were between him and Vesemir, between him and the witchers who'd accepted him. But enough. The techniques, the philosophy, the way fighting without magic had changed how he used magic with it.
When he finished, Tissaia was quiet for a long moment.
"You came here wanting to learn," she finally said. "You've done that. More than most could in a lifetime." She paused. "What now?"
Alaric thought about it. The castle waiting on Aetherion. The throne that sat empty. The kingdom he'd dreamed of building.
"Now I go home," he said. "And I start figuring out what comes next."
"Will you come back?"
"Sothoryos?" He smiled. "I'll always come back. You're stuck with me, Tissaia."
For the first time in all the years he'd known her, Tissaia de Vries smiled. Not the thin, controlled expression she used for diplomacy. A real smile.
"Good," she said. "It would have been boring without you."
☆☆★☆☆
Yennefer found him on the beach where he'd first landed, fifteen years ago. Aurelia circled overhead, silver-blue against the darkening sky.
"You're leaving."
"I am."
She stood beside him, looking out at the waves. "Will you write? Tissaia has ways to send messages across the continent."
"If you want me to."
"I might." She glanced at him. "You're annoying, but you're interesting. That's rarer than you'd think."
Alaric laughed. "Coming from you, I'll take that as a compliment."
They stood in silence for a while, watching the sun sink toward the horizon. Then Yennefer spoke again, her voice softer than he'd ever heard it.
"Thank you. For not pushing. For just... being there."
"You're welcome."
She nodded once, sharply, then turned and walked back toward the jungle without looking back. That was Yennefer—she'd said what needed saying, and anything more would ruin it.
Alaric watched until she disappeared into the trees. Then he raised his staff, felt its power hum in answer, and looked up at Aurelia.
"Ready to go home?"
She trilled, loud and clear, and dove down to land on his shoulder.
The crack of displaced air echoed across the beach.
And Alaric Peverell, son of Death, wizard immortal, friend to witchers and sorceresses alike, vanished from the shores of Sothoryos.
Home waited.
His kingdom awaited its king to start building it.