Simple comic page margin8/23/2023 “The world over,” we’re told, “was a night of spectres, nightmares and apparitions.”Īnd across the black sky raced the Wild Hunt, “a procession of fiery-eyed phantoms on skeleton horses.” We’re told for the first time that their arrival was actually a somewhat regular occurrence, “every few years” and that each time they came they also took human beings away, “its harvest.” This occasion was particularly awful in that respect as well: “In Novigrad alone over two dozen people went missing without a trace.”īut they disappear from the novel as quickly as they arrive, and do not interact with Ciri or any of the other characters directly. A windstorm rages in the night a ship filled with an army of ghosts and demons known as the Naglfar of Morhögg, its sides “built of dead men’s fingernails and toenails,” was seen off the coasts of the isles of Skellige. As the book opens, Ciri is near death, and the entire Continent seems to be shrieking at the possibility. The Wild Hunt returns at the start of book six, The Tower of Swallows, once again as one of many omens of doom. The bard Dandelion, looking on, sees what looks to him like a cloud shoot upwards into the sky. But you are death.”īefore the spirits can get her, Yennefer shows up and casts them out with a spell. When she refuses, saying they’re corpses, he laughs again. “We will race, race unto the very end, until eternity, unto the very end of existence,” and her place is among them. “O Child of the Elder Blood! You belong to us!” he says. But the King of the Wild Hunt simply laughs. Thinking this, too, is a vision, Ciri insists she doesn’t believe this is real. Riding what appear to be the skeletons of horses, “Buffalo horns and ragged crests sway on their helmets,” she sees, “and cadaverous masks show white beneath them.” Their leader, the King of the Wild Hunt, has “gaping eye sockets burning with a livid flame.” And out of that ribbon emerges “vague, ghastly riders” who race directly at Ciri. But then Ciri sees a “milky, quickly brightening ribbon, writhing like a serpent” in the sky. As she raced away monsters reached arms toward her on either side, “laughing insanely.”Įach disappeared as quickly as they came. And as she rides a massive storm rises, and she begins to have visions of riders chasing her, first Elves, then a black knight whose helm sported the wings of a bird of prey. One chapter later, Ciri encounters this ghostly force herself as she flees the magic school Aretuza to find Geralt. “There’s no way of dealing with the Wild Hunt.”Īt the start of book four, The Time of Contempt, all-out war is descending upon the Continent, and a number of dark omens are described: cows in one town are beginning to squirt blood from their udders a spectral ship is spotted off the coast and “The Wild Hunt, a spectral army galloping across the firmament” near Brokilon Forest where the dryads live. Geralt confides that as a Witcher he’d been offered payment to destroy it, but had refused the job. These people end up abandoning everything to chase the White Queen.īut Geralt tells her this is not a myth at all, but “a pretty description of the hideous phenomenon that is the Wild Hunt.” As he describes it, a “spectral cavalcade rushing across the sky,” often in winter, drives some who see it insane, and they end up joining the group. In the second Witcher book Sword of Destiny, Yennefer of Vengeberg tells Geralt of a legend among the elves of “a Winter Queen who travels the land during snowstorms” casting shards of ice that, if they pierce your eye or heart, will render the person unable to love anything except the ice and snow. In Andzej Sapkowski’s eight bestselling Witcher books, the Wild Hunt is mostly understood as an omen of disaster. What is the Wild Hunt in the Witcher novels? Here’s what we know of the Wild Hunt so far, based on the books, the video games, and the series. They also have a surprising connection to The Witcher: Blood Origin TV miniseries released on Netflix last Christmas. But as it turns out, they are a massive part of the overarching mythology of the Witcherverse. Known as 'The Wild Hunt,' this mysterious group has appeared three times in The Witcher thus far, without any real explanation as of yet as to their identities or purpose. Halfway through the third season of Netflix’s epic fantasy show The Witcher, Geralt of Rivia’s adopted daughter Ciri suddenly finds herself being chased by a group of seven spectral riders who emerge from sudden storm clouds above and race toward her.
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