What The Witcher Season 2 Could Tell Us About Blood Origins and The Conjunction of Spheres

Happy Witcher Week! From Dec. 15 to Dec. 22, TV Guide and sister sites Gamespot and Metacritic are celebrating everything The Witcher. We have reviews, explainers, and everything you need to get ready for and break down The Witcher Season 2, which premieres Dec. 17 on Netflix. The following story is part of that celebration and you can enjoy all of The Witcher content across sites right here. 

The first rule of The Conjunction is that everybody talkedabout The Conjunction in Season 1 of The Witcher, but no one really explained what bearing it had on our heroes, heroines, and my personal favorite characters — the morally gray folks attuned to the direction of wind who will probably, ultimately, choose the side of our exhausted, grimed-down, perpetually cranky witcher. Stay patient, my friends: Season 2 is going to spell everyone's part out with teeth, talons, and the edges of blades. And no matter how much Geralt (Henry Cavill) grunts into the void, from hilltops while well-timed breezes blow his hair back, he won't have much of a choice as to whether or not he plays his part, nor do Ciri (Freya Allan), Yennifer (Anya Cholotra), or anyone else because their stories, like so many other elements of The Witcher universe, are steeped in pre-Christian Slavic mythology and cosmology, which means the rozhanitsy (invisible female creatures that decide one's destiny at birth) determined their fate the second they emerged screaming, or you know, f-bombing, into the world.

Those long, twisty, tangled chains of destiny didn't start with Geralt and crew, however. It started with The Conjunction, when three worlds in The Witcher came together: the World of the Elves, the World of Men, and the World of Monsters. Prior to that unscheduled, and very much unasked for, party each class of beings had enjoyed the relative safety of its own realm. Once they were all shut in a dimensional escape room together, however, humans being humans weren't content with sharing; no, they had to conqueror and defeat the land's rightful inhabitants (ahem). They enslaved and weaponized the monsters. Of course, once men had what they wanted, they found themselves with a new problem: monsters trained to "seek and destroy" doing what they'd been trained to do. And since round one went so well, the mages decided to go ahead and weaponize something else they had in ready supply to fight their battles: men. That's the story as far as the main Netflix series goes and Blood Origins, The Witcher universe Netflix mini-series set to release in 2022,will shed more light on the battle for supremacy of the shared world. But what about The Conjunction itself? Why three worlds? Why is the event so often mentioned in the same breath as the capital "d" Destiny every single character on the show is deeply, fundamentally, and more than a little unhealthily, obsessed with? Behold the source material!

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Most sources seem to agree that Rod was the first of the Slavic gods. He hung out in a golden egg suspended in darkness waiting until he was strong enough to course correct the overwhelming cold in the universe. Once he hatched, it was Rod's job to structure the place such that it existed in a balance between opposites: hot and cold, life and death, light and darkness, etc. To this end, he created a partner named Lada, a primordial goddess who was both his equal and his opposite. In order to help maintain this balance, Rod also separated the universe into three realms: Prav, the realm of the gods; Yav (or Jav), the realm of existence and dissolution; and Nav (the realm of spirits, memory, and ancestors). Prav was also known as, "the realm of the bright gods," Yav the, "world of mankind," and Nav as, "the world of the dark gods," or, oh hey, the World of the Elves, the World of Men, and the World of Monsters. These realms were connected by twelve pillars that allowed for the exchange of information, spiritual junk, and DNA. This all sounds familiar, right?  But what does all that have to do with fate, genealogy, or The Witcher?

It just so happens that Rod was also the god of fate and genealogy. He and Lada created people so it was through them, via the intervening generations, that all people were descended from the gods — to the elder blood as it were. To deny that link was not only to deny the power it offered but to invite disaster. To acknowledge it was to live to your full potential and to earn the blessings of your ancestors and the gods; the progenitor of the elder blood, your elder blood and his rozhanitsa — the Slavic version of the Fates — attended your birth personally to deliver the news, whether you wanted to hear it or not.  

This brings us back to The Witcher. Did it seem impossible that the Lioness of Cintra would fall the way she did in Season 1? All things being equal, perhaps it would have been, but Calanthe committed the greatest sin of all: she denied her ancestors when she hid the elves branch of her family tree. Calanthe's daughter Parvetta, in seeking to deny the truth about Ciri did the same, and she, her husband Duny, and Ciri all suffered for it. 

Is there any chance, given the evidence, and the structure of this particular universe, Geralt is above the law? What does this mean for our heroes as they sally forth into Season 2 and (hopefully) beyond? It means that things are bad now but they have the potential to get so, so much worse if Geralt, Ciri, Yennefer, and the rest continue to deny where, and who, they came from (and we all know what lengths Yennefer went through to deny being quarter elf). That you can bury your past but forgetting it is fatal not only for you but for those you love, those you hate, and those you'd really, really like to murder with your own bare hands. And if The Conjunction of Blood Origins were to repeat itself well, then the fate of three worlds and three species would be at stake.

No problem. They've totally got this, right? I wouldn't bet my medallion on it. 

The Witcher is streaming on Netflix.