Season 3 of The Witcher is just around the corner. This is set to be a pretty big season for The Witcher; not only is it adapting some of the bigger events from Andrzej Sapkowski’s Witcher books, it will be the last time Henry Cavill plays Geralt of Rivia.
Since The Witcher’s second season premiered all the way back in the winter of 2021, you could be forgiven for forgetting some of the particulars. As such, we’ve prepared this guide to help get you up to speed before season 3 premieres later this month. Season 2 ended with a number of large cliffhangers. But none of them were bigger than this:
1. The battle at Kaer Morhen
The Witcher season 2 finale featured a bloody face-off at Kaer Morhen, the imposing castle the witchers of the Wolf School make their home. Throughout the season, we saw Geralt’s on-again-off-again sorceress paramour Yennefer struggle to reclaim her magical powers after they were seemingly sapped away following her use of forbidden fire magic during the battle of Sodden Hill. In order to restore her abilities, Yennefer makes a pact with Voleth Meir, an otherworldly being sometimes referred to as the Deathless Mother. Late in the season, this seemingly ancient creature possesses Ciri. It’s then that things got nasty.
Hoping to keep Ciri safe, the witchers bring her to Kaer Morhen…but they don’t know of her possession by the Deathless Mother, who harbors a centuries-long grudge against the monster hunters for sealing her away. She takes control of Ciri’s body and begins murdering the witchers in their sleep.
It all culminates with a brawl in the great hall of the keep, where we discover that the Deathless Mother is attempting to use a hidden monolith to get back to her own world.
While Vesemir believes the only way to stop the Deathless Mother from opening a gateway is to kill her Ciri, Yennefer finds another solution by drawing her own blood in order to channel the Deathless Mother. She, Geralt, and Ciri fall through a portal into a blasted plane, where they see the Deathless Mother’s spirit rejoin a group of spectral riders: the Wild Hunt.
As they race toward Ciri, our trio of heroes goes back through the portal Ciri created to the Continent and seal it off.
When the dust settles, Geralt and Yennefer have reached an uneasy alliance in the name of protecting Ciri, while the looming threat of the Wild Hunt has been established. That will be important, since we know we’ll see them at least once in season 3. They want Ciri for their own mysterious ends, and they’re far from the only ones:
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:
3. The secret identity of Emperor Emhyr var Emries of Nilfgaard
In season 2, the sorceress Fringilla Vigo tried to persuade the elves into an uneasy alliance with the expanding empire of Nilfgaard. Things get complicated when the son of the elven leader Francesca Findabair is murdered; it is exceedingly rare for Elves to have children, so this hits the elves very hard.
Fringilla and Cahir pin the blame for the murder on the nation of Redania, hoping the elves will go on a bloody path of retribution. But in the season finale, we discover the truth: Emperor Emhyr of Nilfgaard ordered the child killed in order to help in his ultimate goal of finding Ciri. Even more surprising, we finally get a look at Emhyr’s face…and realize we’d seen him before.
Emhyr var Emries, Emperor of Nilgaard, is none other than Ciri’s biological father. We saw the fateful meeting between Ciri’s mother Pavetta and Emhyr back during the season 1 episode “Of Banquets, Bastards and Burials.” During that episode we met a young Emhyr, who went by the name Duny and was cursed to live out his days looking like a porcupine person. After Geralt helps him break the curse, he goes on to marry Ciri’s mother, Pavetta.
We still don’t know what set Emhyr on the violent path he now walks. The revelation of his identity is one of the biggest twists in Andrzej Sapkowski’s Witcher books, and we only learn it right at the end. But the show puts it right up front, likely for logistical reasons since keeping a character’s identity secret when we’ve already seen the actor is very difficult.
We now have a much better idea of why Emperor Emhyr and Nilfgaard are so dead set on capturing Ciri. She’s Emhyr’s long-lost daughter and the heir to his empire.
4. The monoliths and Ciri’s power
Ciri possesses magical powers, which is just one of the reasons so many people are after her. We’ve gotten many hints that Ciri has some arcane strength, going all the way back to the series premiere. In season 2, we learn where it came from.
Ciri possesses the Elder Blood, which essentially means she’s part of a long-running bloodline that goes back to the elven sorceress Lara Dorren and her human mage lover Cregennan of Lod. Their union was extremely controversial in the years following the Conjunction of the Spheres, among both of their races. Their descendants possess an innate magic that is unique in the world of The Witcher.
This allows Ciri to practice magic of the kind most sorcerers and sorceresses can learn, like the ones Yennefer attempts to teach her, as well as tap into abilities beyond normal magic-users, such as when she screamed and split the earth in the series premiere. And sometimes Ciri’s Elder Blood resonates with the monoliths strewn about the Continent. The monoliths are remnants from an ancient era; they connect various worlds, or spheres, together. In season 2, we discovered that Ciri had woken these monoliths up, allowing monsters from other worlds passage onto the Continent.
Ciri’s abilities will no doubt play a huge role in season 3, as she is pushed closer to making her own decisions about her future and what role her magic will play in it.
5. Eredin’s banishment
The Witcher: Blood Origin spinoff was a largely self-contained story that explored the events which led to the Conjunction of the Spheres, when various worlds merged to strand humans, monsters, and more on the Continent. But there’s still one very important plot thread that we expect to see picked up on The Witcher proper.
I’m talking about Eredin Breacc Glas, the leader of the elven armies in Blood Origin. While Eredin mostly served as a henchman to the nefarious mage Balor, the ending of the miniseries sets up his eventually rise to become the leader of the Wild Hunt. In The Witcher video games, Eredin is a major antagonist.
During Blood Origin, Eredin and his closest comrades are betrayed by Balor, who strands them on a blasted sphere with a dusk-choked sky and barren plains of rock. In one of the final scenes, we see that Eredin is still stuck there. He discovers a skull half-sunken into the ground, which he puts on his head as a helmet.
This is a pretty clear allusion to Eredin’s rise as the leader of the Wild Hunt. And since we know for sure that we’ll be seeing the Wild Hunt in season 3, there’s a pretty good chance we might see Eredin return as well.
The Witcher season 3 volume 1 premieres on Netflix on June 29, and will consist of five episodes. Volume 2 will follow on July 27 and contain the final three episodes of the season.
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