Red Miasmal

It is often said the darkest recesses of caves play home to the Continent's most fearsome monsters against which there is little of hope of victory or escape. The lone solution, then, is to seal them off from the world with the hope that they shall forever remain buried.

A certain priest of the Eternal Fire, however, learned that hope and prayer is sometimes not enough. The cavernous mine within Devil's Pit holds a specter whose very existence is believed to breed pestilence. With the threat of its release now imminent, the cleric seeks a new solution – the aid of a witcher.

The being that haunted Devil's Pit turned out to be a red miasmal. Whereas a plague maiden is thought to be a damned spirit—once human but now cursed to spread the pestilence—a miasmal, by contrast, is considered an evil force born from the concentrated collective suffering of plague victims. It has the ability to possess human bodies thus granting it corporeal form and a means to wreak havoc. This process, however, irreparably corrupts and damages the host, causing the miasmal to continuously seek out stronger, more durable bodies. What cruel irony, then, that a witcher's immunity makes the monster slayer a perfect shell for the specter to invade and control.

Fortunately, a red miasmal's power is not so absolute that it cannot be defeated by an experienced witcher – though even then only with considerable effort. The specter, once weakened, can be trapped with the Yrden Sign then expelled from the host's body with Aard, thus creating an opening in which to defeat it. Consuming Reinald's Philter offers an advantage by increasing the intensity of witcher Signs.