The Witcher Short Stories in 13 Minutes

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]With the exception of Pope John Paul the Second, probably the most famous export from Poland is Andrzej Sapkowski's Witcher universe, taking place in a fictional medieval world inspired by Slavic folklore and starring a monster hunter who goes by Geralt of Rivia.

[00:00:14]Sapkowski's Witcher books started in the '80s as a short story written for a fantasy and sci-fi magazine. Then they became a series of short stories, and from there they snowballed into a multi-book epic fantasy saga. For this video, let's start with the two collections of short stories.

[00:00:29]Chronologically, our first collection of short stories is 1993's The Last Wish, which introduces us to Geralt as an itinerant monster hunter in a guild known as the witchers. The witchers undergo often times lethal chemical and magical experiments as children at Kaer Morhen, and the survivors gain extended life, training in basic spells, two swords for monster slaying, one silver and one iron, and a hardier constitution, which can take special potions for monster fighting without dying from the potions. But witchers end up looking really weird, particularly Geralt, and people are generally scared of them. After opening the book by narrowly avoiding execution, Geralt of Rivia takes a contract to lift a curse from a monster called a striga, who happens to be King Foltest of Temeria's daughter Adda. Foltest is offering a kingly reward for the one who can cure Adda, but everyone who tries fails, and the striga kills like 50 people a year.

[00:01:18]The king's governor, Velerad, tries to impress upon Geralt that the task is basically impossible, but Geralt is a professional and he's unfazed. So he solos the monster for 3 days and 3 nights, thus breaking the curse. In the next short story, Geralt encounters a monster called Nivellen, who was cursed for attacking a priestess in his youth.

[00:01:36]Women are kind of into Nivellen as a monster, so he's pretty cool with being one. But unfortunately, one of the women Nivellen attracts is a murderous bruxa, a vampire. Geralt fights and kills the bruxa, but not before she inadvertently lifts Nivellen's curse with a proclamation of true love. This next short story is a big one, introducing us to our first sorcerer, giving Geralt his moniker The Butcher of Blaviken, and giving us our first real insight into the inner workings of Geralt's mind with his iconic anti-utilitarian quote, "Evil is evil. If I'm to choose between one evil and another, then I prefer not to choose at all." In this story, a sorcerer named Stregebor explains that he and his sorcerer friends have been hunting women born under the curse of the Black Sun because such women are supposed to be harbingers of the end of the world. But in Geralt's eyes, they have been hunting innocent women for political reasons, with simply the excuse that they are malicious mutants.

[00:02:26]One woman, a princess who escaped the sorcerer's purge, was called Renfri, and she wants revenge on Stregebor.

[00:02:32]Stregebor wants to hire Geralt to kill Renfri, and Renfri wants Geralt to kill Stregebor, and Geralt wants everyone to leave him alone. But when Renfri and her allies threaten the town of Blaviken, Geralt kills them rather than let the town suffer. But Geralt's heroism is not really interpreted that way by the locals.

[00:02:49]In our next short story, Geralt, the Butcher of Blaviken's legend, is growing, and his services are recruited by a monarch, Queen Calanthe of Cintra, who is trying to secure an alliance with the Skellige Viking guys by marrying off her daughter, Princess Pavetta. But there's a wrinkle. A mysterious knight arrived who once saved the late king's life, and this knight invoked the Law of Surprise. The Law of Surprise is a big deal in the Witcher universe, and it means that the person who saves you will receive whatever they find when they return home. And this Law of Surprise is how Geralt himself was once recruited from his family to become a Witcher, although this is later retconned. Geralt surmises that Calanthe wants him to kill the knight named Duny, but Geralt doesn't believe in killing random humans for money. When Duny is threatened, Pavetta reveals fabulous magical power she can't control, which she inherited from her telepathic grandmother and a magical line called the Elder Blood.

[00:03:40]Geralt knocks Pavetta out with the help of a druid called Mousesack, and Calanthe relents and lets Pavetta marry Duny, which Pavetta already wanted to do. I'm like 90% sure Mousesack is the same character as Ermion in The Witcher 3, but sometimes Witcher media translates the Polish names wildly inconsistently. Duny feels indebted to Geralt since Geralt didn't let Calanthe kill him, and Duny asks Geralt to name a reward. On a whim, Geralt invokes the law of surprise himself, saying he will return in 6 years to recruit a new Witcher, Pavetta's child.

[00:04:10]Next, Geralt joins his womanizing troubadour friend Dandelion on an adventure, where Geralt is supposed to drive out a horned sylvan from a village, but instead he and Dandelion get captured by some elves who are employing the sylvan.

[00:04:23]In this universe, elves are super mad and bitter about humans 24/7 because of warfare between their peoples 500 years ago, and the elves suck at providing for themselves because they're hippie vegan types who never learned agriculture or basic farming, and they're making that Geralt's problem. But Geralt and Dandelion are saved by Lily, who seems to be some sort of minor god or guardian spirit of the field where the village was built, who just shows up and makes everyone play nice. The next short story is the titular last wish, where we're introduced to Geralt's on-again, off-again toxic goth girlfriend Yennefer of Vengerberg. In The Last Wish, Geralt meets Yennefer for the first time while on another adventure with Dandelion.

[00:04:59]After Dandelion runs afoul of a jinn while on a fishing trip with Geralt, Geralt needs a sorceress to save Dandelion, and he hits up Yennefer, a loner who avoids interacting with other sorcerers, but who's nonetheless very successful and sought after by important people. Yennefer agrees to help, but she's clearly just after the jinn so it can grant her a wish.

[00:05:17]Geralt starts mentally critiquing Yennefer and noting how sorceresses are usually not very naturally attractive.

[00:05:23]This is because most sorceresses are women who weren't pretty enough to find anyone to marry them, and they smooth over their physical blemishes with magic. But Geralt's critiques betray that he's kind of smitten with Yennefer.

[00:05:33]However, Yennefer is kind of the worst, so she mind controls Geralt to take revenge on random people around town who annoyed her, which lands Geralt in prison. Yennefer does save Dandelion, but gets him to use up all of his wishes. This way, Yennefer thinks she'll be able to control the genie herself, and she tries to subdue it while the town starts to be destroyed around her.

[00:05:52]Geralt tries to rescue Yennefer, who's not too interested in being rescued, particularly once it becomes clear that Geralt is the new master of the genie and not Yennefer. The enamored Geralt uses his last wish to tie his destiny to Yennefer, saving her from being killed by the genie. Like most sorceresses, Yennefer is infertile and wanted to use the genie to restore her ability to have children, but no such luck. Give the preceding short stories some overall focus, Sapkowski couches them inside a larger narrative of Geralt recovering from some injuries from the striga under the care of a priestess named Nenneke, who serves the fertility goddess Melitele. Nenneke wants Geralt to undergo a trance, but the agnostic Geralt isn't having it. Mostly because he already knows what his future holds, which is blood and death. Adding some much-needed levity, Geralt's friend Dandelion drops by, and Geralt winges to him about how there are fewer monsters to slay these days. Dandelion says to go south since there are lots of monsters there, but Geralt's not into the idea because the south doesn't have the infrastructure to make money worth spending, which is a comment that seems to make no sense with the continuity of the later books where the south seems to be way fancier than the north, but Sapkowski seems to be mostly making this up as he goes along. After healing, Geralt and Dandelion journey off together and run into the Order of the White Rose, specifically a guy called Taliesin, who hates witchers. But Geralt outsmarts him and gets him to whack himself with his own sword and gets the heck out of there. The next group of short stories is The Sword of Destiny, again confusingly using the name of one of the short stories to also refer to the whole volume of short stories. Most of the short stories start with a cold open where Geralt is dealing with somebody's monster problem, and in The Bounds of Reason, we start out with Geralt slaying a basilisk for some ungrateful villagers, meeting a guy called Borch, who seems really interested in Geralt, and getting roped into fighting a fabled gold dragon by a motley crew of randos. Most of these characters don't really matter for the wider story, so I won't say all of their names, but this is the first appearance of Yarpen Zigrin the dwarf and the reappearance of Yennefer 4 years after Geralt and her first met. And Dandelion is also here for some reason. Geralt doesn't really care about fighting the dragon, but he enjoys the company.

[00:07:58]Although Yen is mad at Geralt because they seem to have had a bad breakup between short stories.

[00:08:02]The ragtag team go up a mountain to fight the dragon, but the very real golden dragon has the power to change their shape. So, the dragon is actually Borch and he pieces out after revealing himself. Yen wanted the golden dragon to trade for a cure to her infertility, so she doesn't get her cure, but she does reconcile with Geralt. In A Shard of Ice, Geralt is back together with Yen, who as usual is treating him like garbage. They're making an extended stay in a city called Ad Ginvael or Shard of Ice, which Geralt is not too happy about because he prefers to be on the road.

[00:08:33]Yen spends this short story toying with Geralt and Istredd, another sorcerer, in a love triangle of her own making to the point that Geralt and Istredd try to fight each other to the death and Istredd needles Geralt about how witchers have deadened emotions due to their mutations. In the end, Istredd and Geralt give up and just part ways with Yen absconding somewhere new and leaving them both in the dust.

[00:08:54]In our next adventure, Geralt comes across Dandelion getting chewed out by his latest jilted lover in the city of Novigrad, the greatest city in the Witcher universe. While hanging out with Dandelion, Geralt catches a thief who's a doppler or shape-changer named Dudu.

[00:09:07]After a showdown where Dudu briefly becomes Geralt, they decide to just part ways peaceably as well as settling things with the guy Dudu stole from.

[00:09:15]In A Little Sacrifice, our monster cold open is Geralt unsuccessfully trying to broker a marriage by translating between mermaid and human speech for a lovesick duke. After things go south, Geralt and Dandelion are invited to a wedding where Dandelion is supposed to team up with a female bard named Essi, an old acquaintance of his. Essi is in love with Geralt, while Geralt is kind of indifferent to her as just a pretty girl at a party while he tries to take his mind off of Yennefer. After some awkward interactions, they part ways and the book says Essi later died of smallpox off screen. The story feels very random and I guess it's just supposed to show that Geralt has limits on his own womanizing tendencies and that he's very hung up on Yennefer, which he really shouldn't be because she sucks and actively sabotages Geralt's life whenever she interacts with him. I feel like by this point it should be clear that Geralt and Yennefer are not good together and they make each other unhappy, which is more than just me over reading the subtext since characters in the story literally say this directly to Geralt. But Sapkowski loves his doomed lovers thing, so he keeps forcing them to interact for the rest of the series.

[00:10:16]Now for the short story that's also the name of the book, Sword of Destiny.

[00:10:20]This one takes place in the Brokilon forest where the dryads live and they don't much like humans. In the forest, Geralt runs into a little lost princess called Ciri who ran away from an arranged marriage she wasn't too fond of. As it happens, Ciri is the daughter of Duny to whom Geralt invoked the law of surprise. And since Ciri's parents have died, Geralt should and eventually will become Ciri's foster father, but Lady Eithne of the Brokilon forest doesn't want to let Ciri go because she's low on dryads and she can turn ordinary girls into half dryads in a pinch. Eithne is convinced to let Ciri go after she rejects the waters of Brokilon which should have started the process of turning her into a dryad. And Ciri says she wants to follow her destiny and go with Geralt. Ciri inherited magical powers as a child of the elder blood and she leads Geralt and herself out of the forest. Then Geralt and Ciri meet up with the druid Mousesack from the other story who tells Geralt what literally everyone tells Geralt, which is that Ciri and he are united by destiny. Geralt doesn't believe in destiny and thinks fate is hogwash and he leaves the distraught Ciri with Mousesack who takes Ciri back to Cintra.

[00:11:23]Something More is the last short story and it kind of pulls everything together so the main storyline can get going and the short stories can stop. After helping a guy called Yurga get his cart out of the mud, Geralt is injured and dreams of previous adventures, like another one-off interaction with Yennefer. More importantly, he dreams of a time when he once renounced his claim on Ciri to Queen Calanthe, when Ciri was 6 years old. And flashback Geralt lore dumps to Calanthe about his feelings on the trials of the grasses and becoming a witcher. Geralt also reveals that he knows who his mother is and that she's a sorceress who unexpectedly had a child.

[00:11:57]Geralt then awakens with a sorceress healing his wounds. Can you guess which one? Geralt's mother, Visenna, like all sorceresses, is of an unknown age because she uses magic to make herself look young. Geralt says some bitter things to his mom and also drops the tidbit that even though he calls himself Geralt of Rivia, he's just imitating a Rivian accent so he has some place to tell people that he's from because Geralt has no real people. After Visenna leaves and Geralt has recovered somewhat, he visits a local monument celebrating 14 sorcerers who died defending Yurga's home. Except at least two of them, Yennefer and Triss Merigold are super alive. At that moment, the literal embodiment of destiny herself appears to Geralt to tell him to get with the program and let the story happen and to stop being afraid of destiny. Then to cliffhanger for the start of the next story, Dandelion shows up to tell Geralt the armies of Nilfgaard from the south are invading the northern lands. Geralt hears that Cintra has been destroyed, but when he runs across an escaping Ciri, he finally accepts her as his own. I was originally going to make this one big Witcher video for the short stories plus the main line books, but that was going to be way too long. So, if this is the future and I've made the video already, click here to watch the next one.