‘The Witcher’ ended its second season with a big twist — and a subtle clue that it was coming

Note: This article contains spoilers for the second season of Netflix’s “The Witcher.”

Ciri was bound to Geralt by the “law of surprise” promise her father Duny (Bart Edwards) made to the witcher for saving his life. The repayment, according to tradition, required Duny to repay Geralt with “that which you already have but do not know.” The agreement took place at a banquet Queen Calanthe (Jodhi May) held for her daughter Pavetta (Gaia Mondadori).

It was at that banquet, first shown in flashback last season, that we saw another law of surprise vow get fulfilled as Pavetta and Duny — who had saved Pavetta’s late father King Roegner years earlier — got married with Queen Calanthe’s blessing. It was a reluctant blessing, granted only after Pavetta witnessed her mother attempt to kill Duny and unleashed a magical meltdown that knocked the banquet’s guests off their feet. The impromptu wedding that happened minutes later broke a years-old curse that had given Duny the face of a hedgehog during daylight hours.

“I cannot start a new life in the shadow of a life debt,” a fresh-faced Duny tells Geralt, who halfheartedly invokes the law of surprise tradition in response. Geralt doesn’t realize — until a newly pregnant Pavetta throws up on the floor of the banquet hall — that he will be linked by destiny to the couple’s yet-to-be born child. Though Ciri’s parents are long dead by the time Geralt and she meet for the first time, the eight-episode second season explores the implications of that promise, building to a nail-biting finale that forces Geralt to defend Ciri — also known as Princess Cirilla of (the fallen kingdom of) Cintra — at all costs.

Early in the season, Geralt takes Ciri to the one place he believes she will be safe: Kaer Morhen, the witcher compound where he was trained to kill monsters. This is where she meets Geralt’s surrogate father, Vesemir (Kim Bodnia), the talented mage Triss Merigold (Anna Shaffer) and Geralt’s brothers by proxy, all of whom have a role in training Ciri to defend herself against the various forces and individuals out to get her.

Kaer Morhen is also the setting of a stunning and important revelation about Ciri: She has Elder blood. Vesemir explains that, according to legend, Elder blood is a crucial ingredient in the first Witcher mutagens and could hold the key to creating more of his and Geralt’s kind.

We get additional details about what Ciri’s heritage means for her powers when Istredd (Royce Pierreson) meets with a pair of investigators known as Codringher (Simon Callow) and Fenn (Liz Carr), two of several intriguing characters introduced this season. Elder blood, Fenn interprets from an old scroll, was a mutant gene the elves created in an effort to defend their race from humans. “The elves didn’t build a weapon,” Fenn tells Istredd, correcting a mistranslation in the text. “They built a warrior.”

Codringher chimes in with the warrior’s legendary name: Lara Dorren. It’s familiar, thanks to a story Geralt’s old friend Nivellen (Kristofer Hivju) tells Ciri in the season’s first episode, about an elven warrior and a human mage who fell in love despite their differences and married. The ill-fated couple was killed but their baby survived. Ciri later sees part of the tragedy play out in a subconscious state that allows Triss to uncover “genetic memories that tell the story” of who Ciri is, along with the source of her powers.

Among the scenes that unfold while Triss navigates Ciri’s subconscious is a clandestine meeting that hints at Ciri’s controversial lineage. “They’d kill her if they knew,” Duny says. “It’s a prophecy,” Pavetta counters. “Maybe it’s not true.”

But “it doesn’t matter if it’s true,” Duny concludes. “It only matters if the people believe it. And they will.”

The couple plans to escape by boat to protect their child and Ciri realizes the memory precedes her parents’ death at sea. But the most terrifying subset of her subconscious brings a dying Lara Dorren into full focus. Triss and Ciri watch as Lara (Niamh McCormack) speaks sweetly to her half-human infant about “the story of the elven warrior made to kill the human invader … she fell in love with.” But when a concerned Triss attempts to heal Lara’s fatal wounds, Lara’s voice becomes distorted and demonic. “You could have united our races,” Lara says, squeezing an outstretched hand around Triss’s neck while looking down at the baby. “And now my sweet daughter, you will destroy them.”

The trip leaves Triss shaken and horrified. “A seed that bursts into flame. It’s you,” she tells Ciri, echoing a dark prophecy that foretells the end of the world. “You will destroy us all.” And with that, Lara Dorren goes from legend to a key part of Ciri’s family history — and an urgent warning about her future.

The finale sets up a battle for that future and, fittingly, transports us back to Pavetta’s destiny-altering banquet. This time, it’s an illusion that Ciri sees while under the spell of the Deathless Mother, a centuries-old demon that feeds on pain, and who was relegated to isolation by witchers that came before Geralt. As the Deathless Mother, also known as Voleth Meir, possesses Ciri, the demon zeroes in on Ciri’s deepest pain, reuniting the Cintran princess with her dead loved ones — her parents, her grandmother and her family’s trusted adviser, Mousesack (Adam Levy) — in a false representation of the banquet Ciri could not possibly have attended because it preceded her birth.

Earlier in the season, we observe the Deathless Mother’s malicious modus operandi through three prominent mages who seek her help in getting what they yearn for most. Yennefer (Anya Chalotra), the Battle of Sodden Hill’s true heroine, longs for her magic to return after it was zapped in the conflict. Fringilla (Mimi Ndiweni) seeks Nilfgaardian power and the admiration of Nilfgaard’s emperor, Emhyr, while the elven mage Francesca (Mecia Simson) desperately hopes to save her people by bringing forth a new life.

Yennefer’s wish comes with a steep price: She has to betray her love, Geralt, by bringing Ciri to the Deathless Mother. While Yenn ultimately backtracks on delivering Ciri, it’s not enough to stop the demon from possessing the girl. After taking control of Ciri, Voleth Meir unleashes her wrath against several unsuspecting witchers, who falsely believe their assailant to be Ciri, the girl they have mentored and loved. The surviving witchers, along with Geralt, Yennefer and Vesemir assemble to stop the demon. Geralt realizes that the Voleth Meir is using Ciri as a means to an end: The Deathless Mother wants to go home.

Yennefer, plagued by guilt over her near-betrayal of Geralt, offers herself as a vessel for the demon, mostly freeing Ciri from her false sense of safety. But it’s the witcher’s reassuring voice that fully pulls Ciri out of it. “We belong together. You. Us,” Geralt tells his surrogate daughter. “It’s not perfect, but it is real. It’s yours. We are your family. And we need you.”

“I have to go home,” Ciri says, setting the stage for an epic alliance with her Witcher “dad” Geralt and her mage “mom” Yennefer, whose powers are finally restored — and perhaps giving those two crazy kids (Yenn and Geralt, that is) a chance at love after all. The scene ends with a blink-and-you-missed-it clue to the reveal that lies ahead. Everyone in Ciri’s banquet illusion — individuals we know to be dead in the present — dissolves to dust. Well, almost everyone.

After Ciri harnesses her power to send the Deathless Mother back from whence she came, Emhyr, the mysterious, oft-discussed emperor of Nilfgaard — known by his most ardent followers as the White Flame — is revealed to be the only banquet guest who didn’t disappear. His face is the last we see as Season 2 of “The Witcher” comes to an end. Emhyr confesses to ordering the murder of Francesca’s baby, the result of the elven mage’s ill-fated meeting with the Deathless Mother. “I had to. It was the best path to helping me find my daughter,” he says, as “The Witcher” reveals Emhyr to be none other than Duny, Ciri’s presumed-dead father.

In the season’s biggest twist, Duny is alive — and among the power-hungry entities desperately trying to recruit Ciri for their own motivations. What we don’t know is why. The good news is “The Witcher’s” third season, like the era of the sword and ax, is nigh.