Witcher 3: Wild Hunt DLC - Hearts of Stone [Part 1] Evil's First Soft Touches
And it began like this: One day Geralt arrived at the Seven Cats Inn in search of his next contract. He perused the notices hanging there, yet found none to be of much interest, and was about to go on his way when a man came to nail a new parchment to the board. The notice announced a certain Olgierd von Everec, residing in the nearby Garin Estate, was looking for someone to kill a dangerous monster lurking in the Oxenfurt sewers. “Sounds like a job for me,” thought Geralt, and he set off to see this Olgierd and learn more about the contract. Little did he know this was to be the beginning of a great adventure, one filled with both delightful diversions and deadly dangers…
As you might have guessed, what looked like a run-of-the-mill monster hunt, the kind Geralt had already completed countless times, turned out to be but the very tip of a very large iceberg. The first icy underwater hunk exposed itself when Geralt quite unexpectedly encountered our old friend Shani, an Oxenfurt medic, in the sewers during his hunt for the toad monster. He promised to visit her as soon as he took care of his task, and kept his promise – but not before going on quite the detour.
When Olgierd mentioned rumors floating around that the sewer monster was an enchanted prince, the thought never even occurred to Geralt to grant them any credence. When he finally found and slew the beast, he learned the error of this disbelief. Once slaughtered, the toad revealed itself to be, as rumored, a prince. Geralt was dumbstruck – partly by this surprise twist, I’m sure, but mostly by the poisonous gasses that had escaped from the toad’s body and still filled the air. He was thus in no state to resist the unit of heavily armed men led by a mage which suddenly appeared and captured him.
When he next awoke, he was on a ship, imprisoned with a strange man who informed him they were bound for Ofier. There Geralt was to be executed for the crime of killing the Ofieri crown prince. Geralt was wracking his brain for a way to jump out of this pot of trouble, when, suddenly, out of the shadows came Gaunter O’Dimm, a merchant Geralt had met earlier on his path, with an offer of help. The merchant charged a high price for his assistance: he left his mark on Geralt’s face and forced him to make an open-ended promise of repayment. And then… then a terrible storm broke out, flinging the ship against the rocks.
Geralt made it out of the resulting chaos unscathed and went to meet O’Dimm. The merchant asked him to carry out three wishes for the man who'd sent him after the toad, Olgierd von Everec. Willing or not, Geralt agreed, and the two set off together to the Garin estate. Once there, they discovered the manor was on fire. The witcher decided to see what was afoot.
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