The Last Wish

What's inside (10 sections)

1. Healing in Ellander While Everyone Argues About Witchers
2. The Striga of Wyzim and Foltest Secrets
3. Blaviken and the Choice They Call Lesser Evil
4. Beauty and the Beast, Debts and Surprises
5. Elves at the Edge and Hungry Gods in the Hills
6. A Genie in Rinde and the Woman Who Will Not Be Owned
7. Something More and the Girl in the War
8. What Drags, Who Should Skip, Why I Still Suggest It
9. Key takeaways
10. FAQ

I picked up The Last Wish because I kept meeting Geralt in other places first. Games, the show, jokes about tossing coins. I wanted the version from the page, the one Andrzej Sapkowski started in Polish magazines and Orbit later kept in print in the 1993 collection that runs about 360 pages in the standard English edition. What I found was funnier and sadder than I expected, and much less heroic. Geralt is not a shining knight. He is a tired contractor with ruined knees, a horse named Roach, and a friend who sings too loud in taverns.

The book is a linked collection, not a straight novel. Seven stories sit inside a frame called The Voice of Reason. Geralt moves from town to town, kills or spares something, argues about pay, and gets hurt. Women heal him. Priests scold him. Kings lie to him. By the end, a child he has never raised is already tied to him by law and by something that feels like fate. That link to Ciri is the thread that turns monster of the week tales into the start of The Witcher series.

Healing in Ellander While Everyone Argues About Witchers

The Voice of Reason parts open and close each story. Geralt arrives at the temple of Melitele in Ellander, gut wounded after a fight with a genie, and the high priestess Nenneke patches him up. Her young priestess Iola, who does not speak, watches him and later sleeps with him in a trance that shows him strange visions of blood and trees and a girl in a way that scared me more than the monsters did.

Much of the frame is just talk, and I liked that. Nenneke teases Geralt about his diet and his refusal to settle. Dandelion, the poet who calls himself Jaskier in Polish, visits and bickers with him. Knights stop by and repeat rumors: witchers steal children, witchers cannot feel anything, witchers should be banned. Geralt answers dryly. He tells Nenneke he does not believe in destiny but keeps tripping over it.

Sapkowski uses these interludes to explain the trade without a lecture. Witchers were made by old mages through herbs and mutations, trained as sword fighters and minor magic users, then sent out to kill basilisks for coin in a world that now has fewer monsters and more pogroms. Geralt jokes with Iola. He respects Nenneke. He also sulks. The frame gives the book its rhythm: a hurt man resting, remembering a job, then walking back out before he is fully well.

The Striga of Wyzim and Foltest Secrets

The first full job, The Witcher, is the one many readers know. In Wyzim, the capital of Temeria, King Foltest pays Geralt to lift a curse from a striga, a shrieking creature born from incest between Foltest and his dead sister Adda. The thing lives in the old palace crypt, comes out at night, and has killed people for years. Nobles want it dead. Foltest wants it saved, because it is his daughter.

I loved how practical Geralt is here. He interviews the castellan Velerad, the mage Ostrit, and the hunter Segelin. He learns the striga sleeps in its sarcophagus by day and can be cured by spending a night locked in the crypt with it. He sets rules: no one enters, he will stay till dawn, he wants good pay plus a bonus if he survives.

The night itself is tense and gross in a good way. The striga is fast, with glassy eyes and talons, not a sad ghost. Geralt uses a silver chain, signs (simple combat spells), oil, and his wits. He shuts himself in the tomb, fights on the stairs, and keeps the thing from its bed until dawn. When it turns back into a girl, he gets cut across the neck for his trouble and wakes up tied to a bed while Foltest counts coins. Ostrit, who tried to use Geralt to kill the child so his own affair with Adda would stay hidden, ends up dead by the striga. That sour payoff sets the tone: Geralt does the job right and still gets blamed, shorted, and bitten.

Blaviken and the Choice They Call Lesser Evil

If Wyzim shows Geralt as craftsman, The Lesser Evil shows why they call him Butcher of Blaviken. He rides into Blaviken with trouble already waiting. The wizard Stregobor hides in a tower, protected by an alderman named Caldemeyn. Stregobor believes in the Curse of the Black Sun, that girls born during an eclipse grow into monsters, and he has hunted one of them for years: Renfri, called Shrike, a princess turned bandit after stepmother abuse and a rape ordered by a mage.

Renfri and Geralt talk in the woods, and it is one of the best scenes in the book. She is smart, funny, and broken. She tells him Stregobor ruined her life and asks Geralt to kill him. Stregobor tells Geralt to kill her first, arguing she will murder townsfolk to force him out. Geralt refuses both. He says he will leave town, that he does not choose between evils, that witchers stay neutral.

Then Renfri traps him. She says her men hold hostages, that she will stage a massacre in the market at noon to drag Stregobor out, and dares Geralt to stop her. Geralt spends a miserable night turning it over. In the morning he walks into the square and kills her gang one by one in front of a crowd that does not understand what is happening. Renfri herself fights him with a speed that almost matches his. She wounds him, he kills her, and Stregobor comes out to probe her body for mutant traits and finds nothing clear. The crowd only sees a witcher butchering young people in daylight.

Caldemeyn tells him to never come back. Dandelion later turns it into a ballad. Geralt hates the name Butcher. What stuck with me is how Sapkowski refuses to let neutrality stand. Geralt picks a smaller killing to prevent a larger one, and the book treats that as both necessary and staining. People wanted a hero. They got a swordsman doing math with lives.

Beauty and the Beast, Debts and Surprises

Two middle stories widen the map. A Grain of Truth sends Geralt to a ruined manor where Nivellen lives, a thief leader cursed into a beast face after sacking a temple. Nivellen lives with a bruxa, a vampire woman named Vereena who pretends to be his lover. Geralt spots the signs: no reflections, night hunts, drained girls in the woods. He kills Vereena after a hard fight and the curse lifts because true love, even monstrous love, counted. Nivellen wakes human and grieving. It retells Beauty and the Beast without soft edges.

A Question of Price moves to Cintra, and this is where Ciri enters by law if not yet by face. Geralt guards a feast where Princess Pavetta will choose a husband. A hedgehog knight named Duny claims her hand through an old promise: Pavetta father saved his life and Duny asked for that which the king already had but did not know, the Law of Surprise. Queen Calanthe tries to break the custom and have Duny killed. Geralt stops the murder, swords clash, and Pavetta shows wild magic that shakes the hall.

Dandelion, who is there mostly to eat and flirt, almost gets killed for laughing. When calm returns, Duny asks Geralt what he wants as reward for saving his life. Geralt, half joking, half tired, asks for the Law of Surprise: that which Duny has but does not know. Duny pales. Pavetta vomits. She is pregnant. The unborn child is Ciri. Geralt shrugs it off and leaves, saying he does not want the child, but the vow is spoken and witnessed. You can feel the later books click into place here. Geralt thinks he can outwalk fate by refusing it.

Elves at the Edge and Hungry Gods in the Hills

The Edge of the World is my favorite walk in the collection, strange and slow. Geralt and Dandelion take a job to clear pests from fields near Lower Posada. They are captured by elves led by Filavandrel of the Silver Roses and his fighter Toruviel. The elves are starving in the mountains, pushed out by human settlers who cut forests and dam streams. They argue about whether to kill the two travelers or use them as a message.

Sapkowski lets the elves speak at length, and they are not noble background dressing. Filavandrel is proud and exhausted. Toruviel is angry after watching her people fade. An old sage named Lille, worshipped as a goddess in the fields, judges the case and tells the elves to spare them. She sleeps with Geralt in a rite that confuses him, and Dandelion gets a wound that never fully heals. The point lands without a speech: the true monsters here are hunger and settlement, not pointy ears. Geralt spares the horned spirit Torque and tells the villagers to pay it with grain. It is one of the few jobs where he fixes something by refusing to kill.

Critics sometimes call this story slow, and I get it. The plot pauses for history about how humans took the world from elder races. But the details kept me reading: Dandelion trying to translate Elder Speech with dirty songs, Torque eating coal, Lille laughing while priests argue about her. It shows Geralt at his most decent, siding with the losing side because someone has to notice they are starving.

A Genie in Rinde and the Woman Who Will Not Be Owned

Then comes The Last Wish, the story that named the book Ostatnie zyczenie in Polish and gave the English edition its center. Fishing in a river, Dandelion finds a sealed amphora. He opens it and a genie bursts out and nearly strangles him. Geralt saves him with an exorcism phrase and drags the choking poet to the town of Rinde, looking for a healer.

Rinde is full of mages and guards. Geralt meets Yennefer of Vengerberg for the first time, a sorceress with black curls and a sharp tongue. She is trying to trap the genie to draw power from it and heal her own old wounds around infertility. She heals Dandelion, then enslaves Geralt with magic, uses him to humiliate the town council, and sends him to catch the genie for her.

The lore reveal is clever. Geralt realizes the seal was Dandelion, not his. Dandelion spoke two wishes in his sleep without knowing: one for riches, one for an exorcism that nearly killed him. That leaves one wish for Dandelion, and Geralt holds it like a loaded crossbow. The genie is too strong for Yennefer. It breaks her portal, wrecks the street, and starts killing. Geralt shouts his third wish in panic, a wish the book does not quote directly but clearly binds his fate to Yennefer life. The genie, unable to kill its master lover without killing its master, spares them and vanishes.

I liked how messy this romance starts. Yennefer is not a reward. She is ambitious, hurt, and rude. Geralt is not her savior. He is a tool she used and then kept. Their bond is magical but also chosen, renewed later when they are sober. Dandelion, throat ruined, croaks out jokes from a bandaged neck. The town hates them. The sorceress and the witcher walk off together anyway, which feels right for two sterile outsiders who want a child they cannot have and find a different family instead.

Something More and the Girl in the War

The final story, Something More, returns to war. Geralt leaves Ellander to find Ciri during invasion. He travels with a merchant named Yurga, fights wraiths at a ford, and is badly wounded saving Yurga. Feverish, he dreams of Ciri, of Pavetta death at sea, of Calanthe suicide during the fall of Cintra. He wakes in Yurga farmhouse where a small ashen haired girl hides in the straw. She repeats the Law of Surprise. She is Ciri.

After so many detached jobs, this meeting is quiet. Ciri is not a princess in silk. She is dirty, scared, and stubborn. She cries, she clings, she asks if he is her destiny. Geralt, who spent the whole book denying destiny, says yes. Nenneke earlier told him something more is needed than magic and swords: love, perhaps, or duty accepted. Here he accepts it.

Readers should know the timeline wobbles. Sapkowski wrote Something More later and added it to close the gap to the next book, Sword of Destiny. Some meetings repeat with small changes. Ciri and Geralt meet here as if for the first time, then meet again in the next book as if for the first time. If you want a clean chain, you will frown. If you read the collection as tales told in taverns, with Dandelion polishing details, the overlap bothers less. The feeling matters more than the calendar: a childless mutant and a parentless girl choosing each other after war.

What Drags, Who Should Skip, Why I Still Suggest It

The fragmented shape is both strength and flaw. Because stories were written years apart for magazines, tones shift. One tale is horror, the next is farce, the next is court intrigue. Villages blur. Names pile up: Ostrit, Segelin, Velerad, Caldemeyn, Filavandrel, Toruviel, Lille, Roach the third or fourth horse by that name. If you need one quest with clear progress, this will annoy you. The frame helps, but it cannot hide that Geralt learns the same lesson three times: stay out of politics, get pulled back in.

Translation adds bumps. The English prose keeps Polish jokes, curses, and songs that sound odd. Dandelion ballads rhyme in a forced way. Some dialogue repeats tics: Geralt saying hmm, Yennefer snapping, Nenneke scolding. Women are drawn with a male gaze that feels dated. Sorceresses are beautiful and cold, peasant girls are warm and brief, bruxae are seductive first and deadly second. Yennefer and Calanthe and Renfri have real will, but the camera lingers on bodies in a way that tired me by the Rinde chapters.

The moral math can also exhaust. Every story asks whether to kill a cursed man, a born monster, a starving elf, a dangerous child. Geralt lectures less than mages do, but the book loves debates in taverns and towers. Readers who want fast action will find long talks about curses, law, and custom. Readers who dislike grim choices will flinch at Blaviken and at Nivellen blood price.

Even so, I suggest it to fantasy readers who like short fiction and to anyone curious about Poland take on fairy tales. Sapkowski grew up on Slavic stories where noon wraiths and strigas punish broken vows, and he mixes them with Arthurian feasts without making them cute. The monsters have rules you can learn, which makes Geralt work feel like detective work. The jokes land. Dandelion singing about a witcher while Geralt rolls his eyes never got old for me.

For the series, start here, not with Blood of Elves. The Last Wish teaches you how witchers work, why Yennefer and Geralt cling to each other, and why Ciri matters before wars swallow the Continent. Read it as linked tales told by a poet who exaggerates and a priestess who remembers. Let the seams show. The heart is in the frame, when a man who claimed to want nothing admits he wants this child to live. That choice, more than any wish, is the book promise.

FAQ

Is The Last Wish the first Witcher book?

Yes, it opens The Witcher series as book 1 in the Orbit edition from 1993, collecting the early Geralt stories plus the Ciri setup in A Question of Price and Something More.

Do I need to read The Last Wish before Sword of Destiny?

You should. The Last Wish introduces Geralt, Dandelion, Yennefer, Ciri and the Law of Surprise, and Sword of Destiny continues directly from those bonds.

Is The Last Wish a novel or short stories?

It is a linked collection framed by The Voice of Reason, with seven monster hunting tales that together build Geralt and Yennefer and Ciri into a family story.