5 storylines to remember before The Witcher season 3

2. Everyone hunting for Ciri

By the end of season 2, various power players across the Continent and beyond had finally discovered that Ciri survived the Nilfgaardian invasion of Cintra back in the first season. Up until that point, only a select few had that knowledge, and they guarded it very closely lest other people started to hunt for the young princess.

But the cat’s out of the bag now. We see a few major players preparing to find and use Ciri for their own ends, including:

• The Wild Hunt. The Wild Hunt are terrifying riders from another world who wear armor laden with bones. We saw them racing across a wasteland world toward Ciri when she, Geralt, and Yen stumbled into a portal at Kaer Morhen. Folktales about them abound on the Continent. Ciri’s connection to the monoliths allows travel between worlds. This ability is something the Wild Hunt has a keen interest in.
• Rience and his mysterious employer. We saw a fair amount of the scarred fire mage Rience in season 2, as his hunt for Ciri brought him into confrontation with Jaskier, Yennefer, Vesemier, Triss, and finally Geralt himself in a brutal fight scene at the temple of Melitele. A mysterious woman named Lydia sprung Rience from jail and set him on this path; by the end of the season, we know that she is working for a mysterious person who has their own designs on Ciri. We never saw the identity of Rience and Lydia’s employer revealed; that’s a mystery we’re expecting to see addressed in season 3.
• Rulers of the North. In one of the ending stingers for season 2, sorceress Tissaia de Vries informs a gathering of the Northern rulers that Ciri had survived. These rulers had all counted Cintra out as a power player, and the return of the Cintran princess is a potential complication. Tissaia informs them that King Radomir of Redania and his spymaster Dijkstra are likely planning to find Ciri so that Radomir can marry her and lay claim to Cintra. The Northern leaders don’t like that idea and decide to place a bounty on Ciri and all those protecting her to keep Radomir from gaining any more power.
• The elves / Squirrels. The Squirrels, or “Scoia’tael,” are a group of elven guerilla fighters following Francesca Findabair. Jaskier tells this group that Ciri lives at the end of the season, and they are gobsmacked. Ciri is the last living member of the Elder Blood ancestry, which means she has powers over space and time. She is spoken of in an elven fortelling called Ithlinne’s Prophecy. The Squirrels want Ciri so she can fulfill her destiny. That probably means they’d keep her safe, but you never know with religious zealots.

There’s one last interested party we have to discuss: the Nilfgaardian Empire. Nilfgaard’s situation is so complicated it deserves its own slide: