Geralt of Rivia, haunted by a curse he thought long broken, travels to the isolated archipelago of Svärholmen — where the last girls born under the Black Sun are imprisoned in a crumbling convent. There, he must unravel a conspiracy involving a rogue witcher, a mad priestess, and a monster that feeds not on blood, but on destiny itself. Prologue — A Letter Without a Seal

Geralt finds Renfri’s sister, , alive but hollow. She’s the Cradle’s current “voice.” She doesn’t want rescue. She wants the ritual to succeed — to erase the day of Blaviken so Renfri never died, even if it means Mila herself is erased from history.

He burns it. Pours two glasses of wine. Leaves one on Yennefer’s empty chair.

The rogue witcher is Letho’s former protégé , a man named . After the School of the Viper fell, Kaelen took mutations from a renegade mage who experimented with “gene-tailoring” — witchers bred to hunt specific types of prey. Kaelen was designed to kill cursed women without triggering their curse-based abilities. But the process shattered his empathy. He sees himself as a tool, nothing more.

Geralt finds a bloodstained letter pinned to the door of an abandoned tavern in Velen. No signature. Just a drawing of a black sun eclipsing a cradle. The message is short: “They’re killing them again. Not with silver — with prayer. Come to Svärholmen. The tide only turns once a month. — Your mistake.” Yennefer, when asked, warns him not to go. “The Black Sun prophecy was a lie used to justify murder. You know this. Whatever’s there now, it’s not your fault.” But Geralt recognizes the handwriting. It belonged to Renfri’s younger sister — whom he thought died thirty years ago in a Blaviken stable fire.

The monster in the Eclipse Tower is not a creature. It’s a cage made of flesh — an amalgam of failed experiment and absorbed agony. The girls who vanish are not killed. They are merged into a silent, weeping mass of limbs and faces called the Cradle — a living anchor for the resonance ritual.

Sister Magdalen is not a savior. She’s collecting the Black Sun women to distill their resonance — a rare magical frequency that occurs when several such women are held in proximity. Her goal: to recreate the original eclipse that birthed the prophecy, not to destroy the world, but to rewrite causality — to save someone she lost during the first Black Sun panic: her own daughter, murdered by a knight-errant who mistook a fever for possession.

Kaelen offers Geralt a deal: help him kill Sister Magdalen and destroy the Cradle. In return, Kaelen will take his own life — “One less monster-maker in the world.”