Everything to know about Tor Lara in The Witcher season 3
By Daniel Roman
The final three episodes of The Witcher season 3 have arrived, delivering a high point for the series as the Thanedd coup throws the Continent into disarray. While mages, elves and soldiers battle it out at Aretuza, Geralt of Rivia (Henry Cavill) does his best to help his foster daughter Ciri (Freya Allan) escape the fray.
Things don’t quite work out how any of them expect. After Vilgefortz of Roggeveen appears to challenge Geralt, Ciri runs to the nearby tower of Tor Lara. High up in the tower, she communes with a mysterious stone, causing the entire place to explode before Vilgefortz can capture her. Ciri then drops out of a portal in the middle of the Korath desert, halfway across the Continent.
What exactly is Tor Lara, and why did it react this way to Ciri’s power?
Tor Lara The Witcher explained
Tor Lara is an ancient tower build long before humans arrived on the Continent. It was originally constructed by elves prior to the First Landing, and its name Tor Lara means “Tower of the Gull” in their native elven language. It’s the tallest tower in Garstang Palace, which is what the structure on Thanedd Isle was called before the Brotherhood of Sorcerers set up shop there and repurposed the buildings to suit their needs.
The elves constructed Tor Lara using magic as well as mundane means, building it with vast amounts of metal which essentially makes the tower an enormous lightning rod. This is why it is able to act as a conduit for the Alzur’s Thunder spell. At its peak, the elves created a portal that linked to another tower, Tor Zireael, the Tower of the Swallow.
Human mages eventually came to occupy Garstang Palace and formed the school of Aretuza there. During this time, a mage named Immanuel Benavent discovered the portal at the top of Tor Lara, naming it Benevant’s Portal after himself. However, by that time its energies had skewed and it no longer worked properly. Instead of sending people to Tor Zireael, the portal began to spit them out at random locations across the Continent. Those who went through often died or never returned.
Because of this, the mages eventually sealed off the portal and forbade anyone from trying to use it. The location of Tor Zireael was lost to time, and the tower’s portal lay dormant until the coup on Thanedd.
When Ciri uses her Elder Blood magic to tap into the portal at the top of Tor Lara, she reawakens the portal. However, it’s still not working right. This is why it spat Ciri out into the sky above Korath. The portal’s unstable nature is also what caused Tor Lara itself to explode after the portal was used for the first time in centuries.
All eight episodes of The Witcher season 3 are streaming now on Netflix.
This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the series being covered here wouldn’t exist.
Next. The Witcher season 3: Every episode reviewed and explained. dark
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