The Witcher season 1 ends with Yennefer’s fate unknown, Nilfgaard’s army (temporarily) defeated, and Geralt of Rivia finally united with his Child of Surprise, Ciri. Drawing on Andrzej Sapkowski’s books of short stories The Sword of Destiny and The Last Wish, as well as the first Witcher novel Blood of Elves, the first season of the Netflix shows establishes the three core characters and their place in the Continent.
In the series premiere, “The End’s Beginning,” the kingdom of Cintra is invaded by Nilfgaard, a southern empire that has been waging a warpath across the Continent. Ciri is left alone after her grandparents, Queen Calanthe and King Eist, are killed in the invasion, and for most of the season she is left struggling to fend for herself as she is relentlessly pursued by Cahir, a Nilfgaardian knight. Meanwhile, a long way in the past, a peasant girl called Yennefer with a twisted spine and jaw is bought from her father and brought to Aretuza, a school for training young women to become sorceresses.
Yennefer’s path eventually crosses with Geralt and the two of them become lovers, but fall into disagreement over Yennefer’s desperate search for a way to restore her fertility. Geralt, meanwhile, accidentally acquires a child of his own when he claims the Law of Surprise in exchange for saving the life of a knight, Duny - not knowing that Duny’s lover, the Princess Pavetta, is already pregnant with Ciri. Geralt’s spur of the moment claim irrevocably ties his destiny to Ciri’s, and Calanthe’s efforts to keep them apart result in Cintra’s destruction - a punishment for defying destiny. Here’s how Geralt, Yennefer, and Ciri’s stories conclude in The Witcher season 1, and what might lie ahead for these characters.
Geralt and Ciri’s Timelines Converge in the Season Finale
When The Witcher begins, the three main characters’ stories are very far removed from one another. Yennefer’s begins a few decades before Geralt’s, and Geralt’s begins approximately a couple of decades before Ciri’s (he claims the Law of Surprise in episode 4, “Of Banquets, Bastards and Burials,” which takes place 12 years before Ciri’s story begins in the series premiere). In the season finale, “Much More,” all three storylines catch up and converge around the Battle of Sodden Hill, with Yennefer fighting in the center of the battle, and Geralt and Ciri in the woods not far away.
Yennefer and Geralt’s timelines start to run parallel to one another by episode 5, “Bottled Appetites,” but it’s not until the very last few moments of The Witcher season 1 that Geralt finally catches up to Ciri. Her plans to travel to Skellige waylaid, Ciri ends up being taken in by the motherly Zola, while Geralt is rescued from near-death by Zola’s husband, Yurga. Ciri runs away from Yurga and Zola’s home shortly before Geralt arrives, but Geralt senses her nearby and runs into the woods. The two finally find each other there, fulfilling their destiny, and embrace as though they’ve known each other for years.
This familiarity might seem strange, given that Geralt has only ever seen Ciri once, and Ciri has never even seen Geralt before. However, not only do their linked destinies create a kind of soul bond between them (which explains how Ciri immediately knows who Geralt is), they have also been searching for one another for some time. Yennefer accuses Geralt of using the Law of Surprise to have a child despite his sterility, indicating that the bond between a person and their Child of Surprise is as powerful as the bond between a biological father and daughter. Meanwhile, Ciri’s last instruction from her now-dead grandmother was to “find Geralt of Rivia… he is your destiny.” After spending the entire first season frightened, hunted, and with few friends, finally finding her guardian is understandably an enormous relief for young Ciri.
How Yennefer Wins the Battle of Sodden Hill
Nilfgaard’s conquest of the Continent is a plot thread that runs through The Witcher season 1, and culminates in the season finale with the pivotal Battle of Sodden Hill. In the books, this battle marks the end of the first Northern War, with Nilfgaard suffering such heavy casualties that what’s left of its army is forced to retreat. The sorcerers who take a stand against Nilfgaard do not escape unscathed, however; by the end of the battle, fourteen are dead, Tissaia de Vries is severely weakened by a dose of dimeritium (a metal that suppresses magical abilities), Triss Merigold is badly burned, and Yennefer’s fate is unknown after she unleashes the full potential of her magic and burns the forest in front of Sodden Hill - and the Nilfgaardians along with it.
The Battle of Sodden Hill, and the lead-up to it, reveals a great deal about the nature of magic in The Witcher. As established earlier in the series, each royal court has a sorcerer or sorceress assigned to it, and Yennefer was originally intended to be sent to Nilfgaard (against her wishes). After rejecting her official initiation and taking her transformation into her own hands, Yennefer was able to seduce the young king of Aedirn - the kingdom containing Vengerberg, where Yennefer was born, and where her fellow student Fringilla was supposed to be sent. Fringilla instead ended up in Nilfgaard’s court, and leads the magical contingent of Nilfgaard’s army in the Battle of Sodden Hill. Fringilla rejects the idea of dark and light magic, which means she has the advantage of a wider range of tools at her disposal - including sacrificing mages’ lives to create magic, and sending mind-controlling ear worms into the bridge’s fortress.
In The Witcher, a sorcerer’s access to magic is referred to as “chaos.” At Aretuza, Tissaia de Vries transforms less talented students into eels and uses them to fuel the academy’s magic - keeping their chaos, but taking away their control. Magic-wielders can also burn through their supply of chaos, which is why Tissaia counsels Yennefer to “reserve your chaos” during the battle, and Vilgefortz finds himself unable to magically retrieve his sword after hastily burning through his chaos in a fight with Cahir. Yennefer is an extremely powerful sorceress, and her chaos is tied to strong emotion, which is why she is able to channel a moment of absolute hopelessness into an enormous fire that ends the battle in the Northern Kingdoms’ favor. What kind of impact this has had on Yennefer, however, remains to be seen in season 2.
Geralt’s Childhood & His Mother’s Return
While tracking Ciri, Geralt runs across the refugee camp that was attacked and is now a mass grave. The dead bodies have attracted nekkers, a nasty species of tunneling monster that are weak on their own but deadly in packs, and have a bite that can kill even a witcher. Geralt gets mobbed by these nekkers and bitten, resulting in a delirium as he travels in the back of Yurga’s cart - and this is how we find out about Geralt childhood, and how he became a witcher. Initially raised by his mother, who instilled in him the importance of not killing intelligent creatures like dragons, Geralt was handed over to the witchers at Kaer Morhen. His mother tricked him into getting out of their wagon to fetch water and then abandoned him, leaving him to be picked up by Vesemir, the witcher who would eventually become his mentor.
In the season finale, Geralt is reunited with his mother, Visenna, when she reappears to treat his nekker bite. Between her trick of making an apple levitate and the fact that she hasn’t aged since Geralt’s childhood, it’s clear that she’s a magic-wielder of some kind. It’s notable that, unlike Yennefer and the other sorceresses, Visenna was able to have a child. This could be because she trained in magic somewhere other than Aretuza, and didn’t undergo the final transformation and removal of her womb.
Geralt’s exchange with his mother offers valuable insight into not only his character, but also the nature of witcher training. The trials and mutations are so brutal, Geralt reveals, that only three out of ten boys even survive the training. This drives home the parallels between Geralt’s early life and Yennefer’s, since both characters lost their fertility in exchange for their abilities, and both watched their fellow students be sacrificed to the rigors of training - in Kaer Morhen with the young witchers-in-training who were killed, and in Aretuza with the girls who were turned into eels. It’s no wonder, then, that Geralt and Yennefer developed such a strong connection.
What’s Next For Geralt, Ciri and Yennefer?
Warning: Possible SPOILERS from the Witcher books ahead.
Yennefer expended a dangerous amount of magical energy at the Battle of Sodden Hill, and calls for her afterwards went unanswered, so it’s safe to assume she will suffer the consequences in The Witcher season 2. From her very first lesson at Aretuza it was drilled into her that magic requires balance, so if something as simple as lifting a stone can wither a person’s hand, the cost of burning a huge swathe of land will surely be much greater. In the books, Yennefer is actually blinded during the battle, and she is bleeding from the eyes as she casts her final spell. When we see her again in season 2 she may have to adjust to a loss of vision - leaving her vulnerable in such a hostile world.
Meanwhile, though Nilfgaard may have lost the war, Cahir is unlikely to give up his pursuit of Ciri. In order to keep her safe, Geralt may decide to take her to Kaer Morhen. It was mentioned earlier in the series that witchers are becoming rare because Kaer Morhen fell, and new witchers are no longer being created there, but Geralt could train Ciri in some of the ways of the witcher so that she can at least defend herself. Ciri’s powers are a mystery that still needs to be unravelled in the show; we know she has a banshee-like scream that’s powerful enough to rip the earth apart, and in the penultimate episode she went into a trance and recited this prophecy:
This is an excerpt from Ithlinne’s Prophecy, one of the predictions of an elf called Ithlinne, who could see the future. It predicts the end of the world through a global cooling that will eventually bury the entire Continent under ice, and goes on to say that “the world will die amidst frost and be reborn with the new sun.” So, not only does Ciri have the power to unleash a deadly scream, she also has the power to see the future - a talent that she may seek to understand or even control in The Witcher season 2.
“Verily, I say unto you, the era of the sword and the axe is nigh, the era of the Wolf’s Blizzard. The time of the White Chill and the White Light is nigh. The Time of Madness and the Time of Contempt.”
The first eight episodes of the series introduced many different characters, creatures, and locations, so we can expect the world to get even bigger when The Witcher returns to Netflix in 2021.
More: What To Expect From The Witcher Season 2
