Zeugl

The zeugl is a monster made by and for city life. It settles wherever filth piles up, in sewers and on rubbish dumps, and lives on the waste people throw away. With food that plentiful it never has to hunt, so it just keeps growing until one day it is big enough to drag people down into the muck. Its body stays hidden below the surface, and what you see are the tentacles that grab its prey and the toothed maw waiting underneath.

The lesson from the witcher’s bestiary is simple: deal with a zeugl while it is young and small. A fully grown one is a serious opponent even for a witcher, and swords, steel or silver, barely affect its body until its tentacles have been cut away.

In The Witcher

Geralt meets a zeugl in the Epilogue, during The Ashes of Vizima. Vizima is burning, and he has to fight his way across the Vizima Temple Quarter to reach Jacques de Aldersberg in the Order’s Cloister. Some stretches of the way lead through houses, and one of them runs through a short stretch of the sewers, opened with a sewer key that Geralt may have to take from someone near the house. The zeugl has its lair down there.

Once it is dead, Geralt can take zeugl venom from the corpse. It is an alchemy ingredient for Zeugl’s Vigor. The sewer exit lies in the southeast corner, with a campfire nearby, and from there the road leads on to the Cloister.

In the books

The zeugl comes from Sapkowski’s story “A Shard of Ice” in Sword of Destiny. While Geralt is living with Yennefer in Aedd Gynvael, he takes a contract on a zeugl that has grown huge in the town’s rubbish dump.