Every monster fight in The Witcher season 3, ranked from worst to best
By Daniel Roman
4. The Wyvern
Ciri’s first solo monster fight of the season takes place in Episode 3, “Reunion,” when she and her escort from the Giancardi Bank, Fabio, come across a side show where a “basilisk” is being shown off to a crowd. Of course, we soon learn that it isn’t a basilisk at all; thanks to Ciri’s time spent training with the witchers at Kaer Morhen, she knows it’s a much less dangerous monster called a wyvern, and a starving baby wyvern at that.
Ciri reveals this information, but it doesn’t go over well. The man hawking this “basilisk” to the crowd takes a swing at her with his cane, misses, and instead inadvertently unleashes the wyvern on the audience.
The fight between Ciri and the wyvern is the only monster battle in the first half of the season drawn directly Andrzej Sapkowski’s The Time of Contempt, the novel on which season 3 is based. Sapkowski describes the beast as having a whip-like tail, a draconic hide, and razor-sharp claws. The television show keeps the core of the wyvern sequence — it gets loose, Ciri kills it, and then passes off the credit onto an unwitting knight — while improving other elements drastically.
In the show, this scene also serves to introduce Mistle, who we’ll later learn belongs to a band of thieves called the Rats. Mistle steals Ciri’s coin pouch and knife just before she instigates the wyvern fight, leaving the Princess of Cintra unarmed to face the small, whip-tailed creature. As Ciri holds the wyvern down with a fallen pennant flag, Mistle has a change of heart and tosses Ciri her knife, allowing her to finish off the beast.
The wyvern fight is a fun romp that gives multiple characters their own moment in the spotlight. It’s probably the least intense fight in the season; it never really feels like Ciri or anyone else in the crowd is in legitimate danger. But that’s not really the point, in the show or the books. Instead, it serves to develop multiple characters, show Ciri’s self-righteous streak, and allow her to make her first monster kill.