They kill the monster, but Kitsu escapes.įollowing Kitsu, the pair come across an old and abandoned elven school where they find the bodies of the other missing female elves. They find Kitsu, mutated and now able to cast powerful illusions, and fight her basilisk. Vesemir and Tetra set out and she tells him the story of a young sorceress wrongfully killed by a witcher as part of a con, and that she is convinced that all witchers are corrupted. She personally delivers the mission order to Vesemir who recognizes her as the now 70-year old Illyana. Lady Zerbst persuades the king to send Vesemir along with Tetra to rid the forest of Kitsu. In the present day, Vesemir and another fellow witcher, Luka, are arrested for killing two knights in a bar fight. Enticed by promises of coin and riches, Vesemir traveled to Kaer Morhen and underwent the training and mutations to become a witcher. Vesemir reminisces about his youth when he, along with his best friend Illyana, were servants for a noble whose mistress was saved from a mahr by a witcher named Deglan with Vesemir's help. Meanwhile sorceress Tetra Gilcrest tries to convince the Kaedwani king to wipe out the witchers, but Lady Zerbst, another courtier, is sympathetic to the witchers and speaks in their favor. Vesemir is visited by the elf Filavandrel, who thinks the leshen was controlled by Kitsu, one of many elven girls who have gone missing.
Before dying, the creature says something in an archaic elven dialect to Vesemir, leading him to think it was under someone's control. In 1165, the witcher Vesemir saves a noble child from a leshen in a forest in Kaedwen.