Part 41 - The Witcher 3 - 2nd playthrough - Death March

There were two more Skellige witcher contracts in the low 20s levels that I wanted to do. The first one was Here Comes the Groom which takes place near the village of Svorlag on the island of Spikeroog and is about a missing man and his lover. Nobody believes the girl when she says a flying monster snatched her boyfriend and instead everyone suspect another woman snatched him. Nevertheless, her brother aims to find out the truth and thus hires Geralt.

I accepted the job then went to play with some sheep. If you cast axii on an animal, it gets tame and follows you for a while. :)

After searching through a cave system, I found the girl was telling the truth. An old, powerful siren called Melusine had taken and killed her boyfriend.

I found his body near the siren's nest.

Melusine killed me once, but then I thought of using Golden Oriole potion against her poison, making the fight much easier.

Melusine in her pretty form, dead.

I collected my reward from the mourning girl's brother then went to tell her the bad news. She offered me more coin for my help, but I refused, which she found offending. She also promised to stay true to her boyfriend for the rest of her life, just because he stayed true to her, which I think is a bit too much, as she is way too young to go celibate...

Since I was on Spikeroog, I popped in to say hi to my friend, Jarl Udalryk. By the way, his eye is missing, because the hym had told him to gouge it out, but that was before Cerys tricked it and forced it to leave. Thankfully, he is feeling better now. He shared his opinion on who he thinks would be a better ruler for Skellige, and he prefers Cerys to her bother Hjalmar.

His son Aki is sleeping peacefully. I hope he won't have memories of the few seconds he once spent in a burning oven...

I traveled back to Ard Skellig to complete another witcher contract, In the Heart of the Woods. Elders of the village of Fayrlund worship a "woodland spirit" which likes to kill people. Younger locals want the monster to die, but elders, especially one named Harald, thinks the 13th century is too advanced and they should "go back to the old ways" to please the spirit. I offered to find out what this woodland spirit actually was.

Killing white wolves feel like I'm killing my brothers. :/ But I think all wolves in Skellige are white.

Geralt established the "spirit" was in fact a leshen. I'm sure I killed it during my first playthrough, so this time I offered Harald I would try his way of pleasing the monster instead of killing it. I offered it a sacrifice of wolf hearts which it accepted, apparently making it tamer and less eager to kill everyone who enters its territory.

The younger men of the village were unhappy with this turn of events and murdered all elders. I only managed to save Harald from their wrath by killing them.

With my job here done, I left Skellige for now and traveled back to Velen to complete more witcher contracts there.

EDIT:

The below two screenshots did not show up on my Xboxdvr.com page for some reason until after I had published this post. I found them a day later, so here they are. Geralt is making an offering to the woodland spirit.