It was later said that the tragic events in Rivia were an absolutely chance occurrence, that it was a spontaneous reaction, a sudden and unpredictable explosion of justified anger, springing from the mutual hostility and dislike between humans, dwarves and elves. It was said that it wasn’t the humans, but the dwarves who attacked first, that the aggression came from them. That a dwarven market trader had insulted a young noblewoman, Nadia Esposito, a war orphan, that he had used violence against her. When, then, her friends came to her defence, the dwarf mustered his fellows. A scuffle broke out and then a fight, which took over the whole bazaar in an instant. The fight turned into a massacre, into a massed attack by humans on the part of the suburbs occupied by non-humans and the district of Elm. In less than an hour, from the time of the incident at the bazaar to the intervention by sorcerers, a hundred and eighty-four individuals had been killed, and almost half of the victims were women and children.

Professor Emmerich Gottschalk of Oxenfurt gives the same version of events in his dissertation.

But there were also those who said something different. How could it have been spontaneous, how could it have been a sudden and unforeseeable explosion, they asked, if in the course of a few minutes from the altercation at the bazaar, wagons had appeared in the streets from which people began to hand out weapons? How could it have been sudden and justified anger if the ringleaders of the mob–who were the most visible and active during the massacre–were people no one knew, and who had arrived in Rivia several days before the riots, from God knows where? And afterwards vanished without trace? Why did the army intervene so late? And so tentatively at first?

Still other scholars tried to identify Nilfgaardian provocation in the Rivian riots, and there were those who claimed it was all concocted by the dwarves and elves together. That they had killed each other to blacken the name of the humans.

Utterly lost among the serious academic voices was the extremely bold theory of a certain young and eccentric graduate, who–until he was silenced–claimed that it was not conspiracies or secret plots that had manifested themselves in Rivia, but the simple and indeed universal traits of the local people: ignorance, xenophobia, callous boorishness and thorough brutishness.

And then everybody lost interest in the matter and stopped talking about it at all.

‘Into the cellar!’ repeated the Witcher, anxiously listening to the quickly growing roar and yelling of the mob. ‘Dwarves into the cellar! Without any stupid heroics!’

‘Witcher,’ Zoltan grunted, clenching the haft of his battle axe. ‘I can’t… My brothers are dying out there…’

‘Into the cellar. Think about Eudora Brekekeks. Do you want her to be a widow before her wedding?’

The argument worked. The dwarves went down into the cellar. Geralt and Dandelion covered the entrance with straw mats. Wirsing, who was usually pale, was now white as cottage cheese.