The Witcher
| The Witcher | |
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The Witcher's protagonist, Geralt, is a witcher trained from childhood in the demanding traditions of his order. Shortly after his birth, Geralt's mother, Visenna, gave him away to undergo training and eventually become a witcher at Kaer Morhen, the ancestral stronghold of the witchers. He survived the brutal mutations of the Trial of the Grasses, a process that granted him a range of distinctive witcher traits: heightened resistance to injury, poison, and disease, along with slowed ageing—though at the cost of infertility.
Geralt resisted the changes brought on by the Trial of the Grasses more successfully than most trainees, a resilience that encouraged his makers to subject him to even more dangerous experimental procedures. These additional mutations stripped him of all body pigmentation, leaving him with the pale skin and white hair that would come to define his appearance. As a result, he became known in the Elder Speech as "Gwynbleidd" (close to the Welsh translation "Blaidd Gwyn"[6]), or "the White Wolf." Through the arduous training regimen of the witchers, Geralt developed into a master swordsman and learned to wield the Signs, the simple yet effective spells used by members of his order.
Despite his surname, Geralt has no actual ties to Rivia, though he later learned to mimic a Rivian accent convincingly and was eventually knighted for his services to the queen of that kingdom. Young witchers were traditionally encouraged by master Vesemir to invent surnames for themselves, believing this made their names sound more trustworthy to the outside world. Geralt once claimed his first choice had been the elaborate "Geralt Roger Eric du Haute-Bellegarde," an idea Vesemir dismissed as silly and overly pretentious.
After completing his training, Geralt received his Wolf medallion, the enduring symbol of Kaer Morhen, before setting off into the world astride his horse, Płotka—a Polish diminutive for "Roach," a name he would go on to give every horse he subsequently owned—to begin his life as a monster slayer for hire.
