0 Graal

He turned around. Ciri overcame the lump in her throat.
‘Avallac’h.’
A look.

‘The big moment in the medieval myth is the awakening of the heart to compassion, the transformation of passion into compassion. That is the whole problem of the Grail stories, compassion for the wounded king.’

‘Forgive me. I behaved thoughtlessly and shabbily. Forgive me. And, if you can, forget it.’

‘And this means not only experiencing sorrows oneself but participating with compassion in the sorrows of others. Compassion is the awakening of the heart from bestial self-interest to humanity. The word “compassion” means literally “suffering with.”’

He went over to her and embraced her.
‘I’ve already forgotten,’ he said warmly. ‘No, let us not return to that ever again.’

‘What was it Jung said – that the soul cannot exist in peace until it finds its other, and the Other is always a you? Is that what the romantic –’             
‘Yes, exactly, romance. That's romance. That's what myth is all about.’
—J. Campbell, The Power of Myth

1 Introduction

Three things will last forever: faith, hope, and love – and the greatest of these is love.
— 1 Corinthians 13:13

“Maladie” speaks about how legend creates a model of love, and love can save the beauty of legend.
—A. Fulińska, The Fairy Tale that Saves

The Witcher is built around the Grail Quest.^[1] An endless search for a girl with ashen hair and poison green eyes. A search for meaning and transcendence of self through another being. The Grail is a Woman in Andrzej Sapkowski’s philosophy; a person to see and cherish, not possess. In this story, the Alder Elves are part of the birth of a legend about Geralt, the witcher, and his Child of Destiny. Theirs is the legend that must complete in the course of the books. Ciri, however, is also part of another legend that birthed her – that of Lara Dorren and Cregennan of Lod. And that of an eternally returning spring in which the Waste Land is reborn. The thread unifying the Grail Quest, The Witcher and Maladie is the transformative power of co-suffering love toward the Other. The Other who is not unlike ourselves.

Maladie was first published in 1992. It is a beautiful meditation on the never-ending nature of legends on the basis of the love story of Tristan and Iseult (the Breton version), focusing the side characters and their chance at rebirth. It is also Andrzej Sapkowski’s personal favourite. Maladie foreshadows, in a condensed and honed fashion, several motifs that receive partial (to full) treatment in Lady of the Lake, including the author’s conviction about the nature of Grail’s power – love. Sapkowski writes about ontological violence in both Maladie and The Witcher: do characters get to exist as persons or only as roles the legend needs for its fulfilment? What does it mean to have your personhood erased from narratives which see your value only in your function; your humanity denied by the story that uses you? It is the central tragedy of Ciri’s life. And also Avallac’h’s. Maladie is, therefore, a useful interpretive key for disentangling Ciri’s and Avallac’h’s relationship.

Legends bear some kind of an ideal that is worth preserving. Maladie suggests that legends can survive, be reborn, and continue unfolding (endlessly in infinite variety) only if people keep entering them wholeheartedly. Tristan’s and Iseult’s love legend summons its successors for archetypal positions that can never remain empty. Morholt (an antagonist) and Branwen (Iseult the Golden-Haired’s handmaiden) are called back from death (that smells like apples) by the tale's need to complete itself. In the classic love legend, both characters were merely instrumental and had unhappy fates. They are instrumental even in the short story that grants them a second chance. But Maladie suggests that even instrumental characters, even those who have done wrong, deserve a chance to their own stories and transformation. Love awakens between Morholt and Branwen, understanding of each other’s suffering in the legend’s grip. And when a force arrives that seeks to destroy the love legend of Tristan and Iseult (but which Iseult? the White Hands or the Golden-Haired?) Morholt takes up Tristan’s mantle and fights to preserve the famous beryl tomb in collective memory. Asked his name, he answers 'Tristan’ and steps into the image of the man who brought about his own demise, becoming a new iteration of the archetype of a tragic lover; beginning a new cycle of an eternally recurring story.

To frame what I am about to do, think of it like this: the Grail journey’s moral frames everything that happens in The Witcher and Maladie unlocks the story that unfolds at Tir ná Lia.

I want to indicate at a meaningful symmetry.

As one of the less understood characters in The Witcher, Avallac’h’s relationship with Ciri is among the most controversial. It is neither purely utilitarian nor paternal. Since the nature of his wound^[2] is amorous, it involves romantic love in its most volatile form. Amorous love begins blind, driven by projection, need, and possession. The Grail Quest^[3], though, requires lust (I want you for my sake) to mature through amor benevolentiae (I will your good for your sake). The nature of his wound makes transformation harder to obtain yet more necessary. When it fails completely, when thwarted lust hardens into pure will to power, we see the wound fester as in Vilgefortz. Avallac'h risks similar corruption as, in the name of revanchism, he uses myth to justify coercion; self-defeatingly, since Maladie shows that treating the beloved functionally makes humanity – and healing – impossible. Yet unlike his human counterpart, Avallac’h has not abandoned love.

Their tale concurs with The Witcher’s central message wonderfully: both are meta-characters instrumentalized by the narrative, struggling with the consequences of their assigned roles as they attempt to reshape their stories. With Avallac’h as a failed Tristan who suffered Morholt’s fate, mechanically trying to fix his legend while yearning for another chance. And with Ciri as Iseult of the White Hands, but primarily, just herself, Ciri. Their relationship looks closely at themes of death and resurrection, sickness and healing. Ciri’s journey into the elven Otherworld – into Mythic Time of death, dreams, the Unconscious – is undertaken for self-transformation, but as the Grail, she instigates transformation in others as well. She is the Saviour, just not in the way Avallac’h initially is willing to accept. He hungers for power – over the story. Over fate. And, doing so for selfish reasons that hide behind a common cause, there is danger and elegance, and certainly pitifulness, to such megalomania; and tragedy. Because in The Witcher, the knots that stand the chance of being disentangled remain solely in individual characters’ hearts.

By sympathising with secondary characters and allowing them the complexity usually reserved only for protagonists, Sapkowski affirms humanism’s core thesis throughout his work. The world that can be saved is never ‘out there’ because the hunt for the Grail is an internal journey. Particularly since the Grail is a young woman. The Witcher muses on how to retain and regain one’s humanity through love and decency in our relationships to each other. The only story Sapkowski, never a worldbuilder, truly cares about.

2 The Violence of Love Legends

‘We don't live for ourselves, not anymore, we're merely a part of the fates of Tristan of Lyonesse and Golden-Haired Iseult of the Green Island. […] In which we play roles incomprehensible to us. Which perhaps won't even mention these roles, or will distort and deform them, put words we never spoke in our mouths, attribute to us deeds we didn't commit. We don't exist, Morholt. There's a legend that's ending.’
—Maladie

Maladie interrogates who gets to exist in legends. Tristan and Iseult’s love story erases the suffering of Branwen, the handmaiden, and Morholt, the antagonist, vilifies the ‘other’ Iseult of the White Hands, and frequently ridicules Mark, the cuckold. They are the collateral damage. Of them the legend does not speak or speaks in an unrecognisable or grotesque manner (Morholt, ‘the dragon’ by plot function, is frequently turned into the literal beast). They are reduced to roles that are attributed post fact and their point of view vanishes; their emotional annihilation aestheticized away in the service of a great tragic romance.

Branwen’s lot is particularly cruel because she agrees to sleep with King Mark in a switcheroo to protect her Lady’s ‘virginity’; then is shooed away by Iseult the Golden-Haired to satisfy Tristan’s frustrated passion for Mark’s queen. Branwen is used instrumentally and Tristan begins ignoring her the moment Iseult becomes available again, but the handmaiden manages to develop feelings for Tristan. She jumps into the Severn Sea. Tristan and Iseult’s romance has no room for a woman destroyed in its wake. For Branwen and Morholt – only the sea and darkness. And the smell of apples.

Analogously to Avallac’h – the so-called Lord of Avalon – in another legend.

‘La maladie d'espoir, the disease of hope. Selfish blindness, doing wrong to everyone around. I don't worry about the fate of others whom I might inadvertently entangle in my love, hurt and trample. Isn't that terrible?’
—Maladie

With regard to Lara and Cregennan, history relegates Crevan to the role of an opponent and an obstacle, a hindrance to others’ happiness whose own pain is rendered irrelevant.^[4] He is left in frozen grief and regret in the moment something ended and began, but not for him. At least not in the way hoped for. Hope is a disease most brightly exemplified in love. Lara’s love led to her persecution, flight, and death in childbirth, and Avallac’h watched that malady destroy her. Even while in its clutches, she trampled on his own heart. And yet he cannot fault her this feeling that wrecks him equally. ‘It would be an even greater crime to deliberately destroy the memory of this emotion.’ Uncompromising, the heart knows no prejudice or rules, though also no courtesy to the decorum of the society in which one lives. Nor decency.

Whether or not Cregennan understands it, symbolically, by entering the elves’ legends through his love affair, he does what humanity does at large – displaces the Faërie. Symbolically, Avallac’h is defeated by the inexorable march of History over Myth, the profane time over the time of fairy tales. With Cragen taking Crevan’s position twice-over (as lover to Lara and father to her child) and becoming what Avallac’h, it is implied, was purposed for genetically (a progenitor to a Saviour figure^[5]), Crevan is erased from his own fairy tale. Legendary love triangles typically kill the third wheel in the end because survival is an unimaginable trial: to be gaslighted with the legend’s ‘truth’ – flattened and reductive – as you try to hold onto a semblance of your feelings and facts. Legends do not care about facts.

The story of Lara Dorren and Cregennan of Lod persists in collective memory as a tale of transgressive love bridging the chasm between Self and the Other among the two tribes that fear, kill, and do not want to understand each other. To unify two ways of being in the world – human (profane, rational, modernising) and elven (fantastic, pre-rational, preserving) – is the hope that lives on with their love legend. Regardless of how ugly or contrived the reality of their affair may have been. But this hope proves double-edged: without collective sympathy, the bridge will not hold. Humans kill Cregennan and drive Lara to her demise, and, as their human descendants inherit Elder Blood while elves continue to be exterminated, the love affair leads simply to the absorption of the elven tribe’s legacy by the conquerors while destroying its people.

From this historical wreckage, the legend eternalizes the hopeful possibility anyway: we can choose transgressively, against hurt, across boundaries, and against (tribal) logic. That spark of defying systemic vices remains worthy of remembering. But it is not a policy statement. Love legends on their own do not show compassion for the trampled and have a tentative relationship with truth. First, every legend will fall to ideology. And secondly, legends efface; even their protagonists. Until everything in that spiralling whirlpool of metamorphosis comes to serve a symbol. Returning us to Maladie’s meditation on legends’ fragility.

‘We won't allow something like the love of these two to cloud in the future minds destined for higher matters. To weaken arms whose task is to break and kill. To soften characters that must wield power in steel fists. And above all, Branwen, we won't allow what bound Tristan and Iseult to pass into legend as triumphant love, overcoming obstacles, joining lovers even after death. Therefore Iseult of Cornwall must die far from here, decently, in childbirth, bringing another offspring of King Mark into the world. And Tristan, if before our arrival he managed to die meanly, must rest at the bottom of the sea, with a stone around his neck. Or burn. Oh yes, it will be much better if he burns.’
—Maladie

Mariadoc and co, like Branwen and Morholt, have been sent from the beyond, but as anti-legend forces. Like humanity, or very power-hungry actors, they would strip the myth down to its bones. They are like the incarnation of the euhemerizing force Sapkowski employs in designing The Witcher’s Graceless Land; a force that, when left unchecked, profanes and destroys its wielder's hope at being saved by fairy tales’ humanistic message. It is striking, for example, that while the elven retelling of Lara and Cregennan ideologizes in its own way (Lara as a self-sacrificing Madonna who can do no wrong; to whom everything is done to), it is the human narration that really tries to smash the legend into smithereens.^[6] Humanity is winning and the Faërie receding – this is no time for pacifism! decency! compassion!?

When the world is laid to waste, when bastardry rules universally, nothing will bar wronged hearts from exacting revenge. Lust for power is love’s substitute.^[7]

Mariadoc like Morholt was, perhaps unjustly, assigned the ‘villain’ role. Unlike Morholt, when summoned, he responds unforgivingly; and he does not have his Branwen (because in Sapkowski’s retellings, love saves you from your worst self, you neep!). If a love legend marches over your corpse, make a corpse of it. Subdue it to an institutional power’s control, mechanise it, reduce it to its parts, defang it. Mariadoc is not wrong about the harm of romanticizing passion: justifying passions blindly one forgets about compassion and fairness. But Mariadoc never experiences what Morholt does: a moment of grace within the brutal legend. In Sapkowski’s retelling, Iseult of the White Hands, wronged and invisible, lies about the sails to give dying Tristan hope rather than despair. In that small act of mercy, Morholt sees that the legend can be transformed. Mariadoc, by contrast, sees reason only to annihilate. (Which, in the end, separates Vilgefortz from Avallac’h.)

‘Instead of a beryl tomb, a stinking ruin. Instead of a beautiful legend, ugly truth. The truth about selfish blindness, about marching over corpses, about trampling the feelings of other people, about the wrong done to them. What do you say to that, Branwen? Do you want to stand in the way of us, fighters for truth?’
—Maladie

If a legend hurts so many in its making, is it worth saving? Is such a memory worth preserving? Yes, says the author, because you must not kill the capacity for hope.

Sapkowski uses demythification as a method to engage the modern readers of fantasy, but rejects it as philosophy. He demonstrates in both Maladie and The Witcher why it must fail in the end: without myth, death and suffering are just meat and meaninglessness; love is hormones, heroism is luck, death ends everything. No pattern, no hope, no redemption. Pitchforks and graves, shit and oblivion. Ooh, you can feel how the edginess sells. But mistaking that for The Witcher is – drumroll! – mistaking stars in the pond for the heavens. In the end, the power of myth and fairy tale triumphs in individual relationships. Love becomes archetypal, immortal, a light in the dark. Tread towards the light, always. Metaphorically or literally, that is the right way. In myth survives a model for living, a source of hope unending.

And elves are mythic beings, the stuff of fairy tales and legends. In philosophy, too. They honour the meaningfulness of love even when it destroys them, because denying and profaning the fairy tale would violate their essence.

Mariadoc fails and the Amell marble tomb is built, but cleverly. Mark builds it. The horn-bearer himself. He builds it in a way in which his rival is present only through his lover’s desire for him, not as himself. Support was not gained for the plan to carve both of the legendary lovers in beryl and chalcedony; nor to plant briers and rose trees nearby, as they would simply die at Tir ná Béa Arainne. So, formally, Tristan is not here. And yet he is. In Lara’s aspect and pose. The reclining she-elf seems to be touching something invisible. Reaching out to intertwine with the non-existent brier from Cregennan’s empty patch. Nothing was able to separate them. Neither death, nor oblivion… Nor hatred.

Says Pygmalion to the witcher, stroking the marble arm with a cautious, gentle movement. Instead of destroying the legend of Lara and Cregennan, Avallac’h looks to… save it.

3 Who is Avallac’h? | An Unknowing Knowing One

‘If the song says they were in love,’ replied the wizard, ‘then that’s what happened, and their love will endure down the ages. Such is the power of poetry.’
—Blood of Elves

Of course he ends up doing it wrong.

In the legend, Lara and Cregennan remain together; at peace with their malady. Only Crevan survives, afflicted. His creator is not unkind to him, though. Unlike purely malicious characters, Avallac'h contains the seed of his own redemption, making his moral failures that much more poignant. And irritating.

‘Because, perhaps,’ [Geralt] replied dryly, ‘it is inevitable?’
 
The elf spun around.
 
‘What,’ he asked through clenched teeth, ‘is inevitable?’
 
[…]
 
‘Whatever is destined must occur.’
 
‘So what must occur?’
 
‘Whatever is destined to. That which was determined above, in the metaphorical sense, of course. Something that is determined by the action of an unerringly functioning mechanism, at the root of which lies the Purpose, the Plan and the Result.’
—The Tower of the Swallow

The Witcher is a story in which we witness the birth of a myth. In this story, Avallac’h is a plot function who facilitates Ciri’s transformation into who she needs to be in order to complete the legend about a witcher, a sorceress, and their Child of Destiny. I would go as far as to claim that he is aware he is a plot function thanks to his special abilities: he sees the future accurately (e.g. Geralt will get Ciri back), which effectively amounts to seeing the Plan and the Result, if not the Purpose, of the Demiurge from Łódź. In this Plan, ‘the end’ is a misnomer. Fairy tale returns eternally as archetypal variations reflecting off of each other inside a mirror tunnel, regenerating what has been and what will always be. Such poetic metaphysics is affirmed by the author in both Maladie and The Witcher. A supernatural emissary from the legendary apparatus, much like the chaplain in Maladie, Avallac’h, like any good meta-character, would like to use this principle to his advantage.

Crevan’s nom de guerre is unlikely to be random. Perhaps he, too, has returned to the world of the living for a reason? Haunted by the smell of apples like Morholt. Literally or metaphorically, it works. His pseudonym marks him as the ruler over the place where the strange boat without a rudder comes from – the source-space in the mists from which legends summon their actors.^[8] What does it say that he aspires to rule over myth-generation instead of participating in it wholeheartedly? His taken name hints at his self-delusion: he retrieves Ciri for a legend that he is interested in retelling while forgetting, or ignoring, that he is also being retrieved for a legend Sapkowski is telling. In ‘helping’ Ciri reach a timeless and blessed Otherworld of Tir ná Lia, analogous to Avalon, Avallac’h acts as a psychopomp-god summoning a character for his game and purposes. Like Iseult of the White Hands, he hopes to change the legend that has harmed him, but would rather lord over the process than surrender to another role in it. Typical rebellion against one’s creator, you might say.

It makes it so, however, that Crevan cannot but choose the wrong means to do what the archetypal romance that he is part of actually requires of him.

It is evident in Avallac’h’s introduction – as an angelic figure manufacturing an artifice in the underworld – that his modus operandi and fatalism are a façade. Claiming to serve the Plan, he truly wants to alter it, curious ‘as to what a pebble falling in the gears of the querns might accomplish.’ This despite knowing in advance the shape of the story the Demiurge is weaving; knowing that in stories nothing is ever fully freely willed by the characters. Knowing the formula imperfectly, perhaps? Because as just a man, Crevan desperately needs to believe that choices matter in a universe that seems to have been designed to reduce him to a sad part.

• If choices do not matter, if archetypal roles are wholly fixed, then Lara was always going to choose Cregennan. Crevan has randomly come to inhabit the role of a loser. His suffering has generic meaning, being archetypal, but personally his pain remains a cosmic cruelty and entirely meaningless. He is interchangeable with any other who might fall into this role, so, as an individual, he might as well not exist. He remains powerless to change anything even should an archetypal cycle of sad love stories repeat.
• If choices do matter, if variation within archetypal roles is possible, then Lara saw them both and chose. And how she chose and why she chose matters and reflects something about who she was and who he was. That moment of evaluation of character might reoccur with an opportunity for a different outcome. There is something he could have done then, but could also still do, because new beginnings and transformation exist. It hurts his ego to have been deigned inadequate, and he guards against this hurt, but it offers hope as well.

Avallac’h see-saws between fatalism, which absolves him of failure despite making his suffering and actions meaningless, and free will, which makes loss his fault too but gives its pain meaning and his current choices power. While skirting the third option, which remains locked behind trauma: the heart wants what it wants, regardless of adequacy. With this option, you can only see the Other, let them see you, and see what happens. He did something like that once. But only once!

Like a marble statue (of a young elf standing on one leg, face contorted in anger), Crevan exists frozen mid-gesture. Like his beloved Lara, he is unable to complete a necessary movement – of letting go. This manifests in various toadly ways. His paternalistic sexism, for example, sees elven women as delicate objects requiring careful handling, shielded from their own ‘dangerous’ desires. This benevolent control masks a need to dictate acceptable female behaviour which, in turn, is driven by wounded pride and unresolved emotional trauma. The ugliness of the soul results from damage done to it and not having dealt with the wounds appropriately and timely. It’s a motif Sapkowski touches upon over and over, at times casting the toad into the fire, at times giving it a chance to mend its ways.^[9]

In Maladie, Branwen has been used instrumentally so many times (in Mark’s bed, Tristan’s bed) that she has come to see herself as having no value; which is why sacrificing her body to the bandits who accost her and Morholt costs ‘not much.’ It is eerily similar to Ciri’s self-objectifying mind state from the Rats onward. Morholt’s wound, in turn, makes him unable to believe in higher feeling. His self-concept is purely utilitarian. When Tristan speaks of love’s transformative power, Morholt is lost, because he reduces everything to base matter – love is just lifting a skirt, chivalry is a weird custom, and hope? Life’s a mechanism, what hope? Avallac'h has adopted the same mechanical reductionism in self-defence not out of incapacity for feeling – he knows love’s hope, despair, and transformative power exist and remains curious about the pebble in the gears, but he cannot risk believing in it again because last time it was not merciful to him.

That is Avallac’h’s entire philosophy.

Geralt and Avallac’h, despite enormous surface differences, have in common that they are lonely and isolated characters bearing maimed hearts. Neither has been given to experience fatherhood, neither has a firm sense of their romantic lovability. Vanity and elitism mask Crevan’s wound, stoicism and self-deprecation Geralt’s. Both, upon embracing Ciri for the first time, have the chance to experience the mystery of the Grail which expresses itself in ‘the natural opening of the human heart to another human being’ (Campbell 1988). An elevation of character above animal self-interest. We will get to that.

The self-entombment of this Merlin-figure is far from complete. Unlike the Alder King, he still feels very strongly and his façade crumbles often enough to make the reader aware of it.

It seemed to the Witcher that the elf’s indifferent voice had changed for a moment. But that would have been impossible. Avallac’h approached the statue and stroked the marble arm with a cautious, gentle movement. Then he turned around and the usual, slightly sneering smile reappeared on his angular face.
 
[…]
 
‘It was, however, humans–and not elves–who murdered Cregennan. Humans–and not elves–brought Lara to ruin. Thus it was, despite the fact that many elves had reason to hate the lovers. Personally, too.’
For the second time, the slight change in the elf’s voice puzzled Geralt.
—The Tower of the Swallow

 

‘She indeed has something in her eyes that brings to mind Lara Dorren. Doesn’t she, Avallac’h? Who, if not you, is more entitled to judge?’
Avallac’h didn’t speak this time either. But Ciri noticed a faint blush on his pale face. She was very surprised. And pondered it.
—Lady of the Lake

If love was just biological programming or a cruel joke in a wholly predetermined universe, it would diminish the most significant experience in Crevan’s existence. If Lara’s choice could not have been real then the love for which it was worth destroying herself would have been meaningless. Which means the emotion that destroyed Avallac’h would also have been meaningless. At the cenotaph, despite his spiel about hormones and lust, he grasps intellectually that even if Lara made a mistake (in his view) it must have been a genuine one in some way. Ironically, Crevan needs Lara to have loved truly. Because what if it was not about him at all? If human character can prove to be more than he expects, it might validate her choice retrospectively. Could she have seen something transformative, graceful, and worthy of respect in humanity? For that love to have been worth ruin – for HER to have been worth his pain and heartache – Cregennan better have been a better man than Avallac’h has any reason to believe.

From his first meeting with Geralt, Avallac’h is testing to see if anything at all is able to shake his prejudices. He is still wondering what quality in Lara's love made it true? What in that legend remains worth renewing? Geralt is only the first dummy from whom the elf learns about humanity. So despite intending to replace Geralt in Ciri’s life^[10], when he helps the witcher while predicting doom (and he is right), Crevan casts the dice: will Geralt succeed in some meaningful way in proving his cynicism wrong through sheer determination, love, and character (and he does)? But it is not to Geralt that Avallac'h believes destiny has bound him.

‘Will I get Ciri back?’
 
The answer was immediate.
 
‘You will. Only to lose her at once. And to be clear: forever; irrevocably.’
—The Tower of the Swallow

Indeed, why try to keep Ciri at Tir ná Lia at all if he knows she will have to leave? Because the encounter itself might be what matters most. Something must happen in Faërie, something that transforms them both. Like Iseult of the White Hands, Avallac’h knows the shape of Ciri’s and Geralt’s fate, but there remains that small space where conscious choice might make a difference; not by changing the legend, for Sapkowski's Plan is set, but in how its prisoners come through.

Maladie asserts that legends can only survive and be reborn if people keep entering them. You need a great deal of hope and faith to re-enter a legend that already burned you once. Avallac’h no longer dares to just hope. He wants to direct the narrative – safely and logically. Except what then of saving a legend that started with love? It will be solved like a technical problem, procedurally correctly, but in utter travesty of the spirit of the malady of love. By forcing the legend’s regeneration to serve his needs without any risk to himself.

‘Don't you understand what a powerful force feeling is? A force capable of reversing the natural order of things? Don't you feel that?’
—Maladie

With Lara, Avallac'h was in the role of Mark, of Branwen, of Iseult of the White Hands. In his heart, he is always in the role of Tristan. A hundred and fifty years after Lara's demise, he is still waiting for her return; waiting for the white sails. La maladie d’espoir has never left him. Eventually the sails re-appear, but they are as gray as gray sails come.

A mutant.

The Swallow.

Ciri.

3.1 His Witchcraft

Foreshadowing precedes Avallac’h’s appearance in Ciri’s life from the very beginning of The Tower of the Swallow.

‘I can give you everything you desire,’ said the fortune-teller. ‘Riches, power and influence, fame and a long and happy life. Choose.’ […] ‘I shall give you a horse, blacker than the night and fleeter than a nightly gale… I shall give you a sword, brighter and keener than a moonbeam. But you demand much, witcher girl, thus you must pay me dearly.’
 
‘With what? For I have nothing.’
 
‘With your blood.’
Flourens Delannoy, Fairy Tales and Stories
—The Tower of the Swallow, Chapter 1

Building toward Geralt’s meeting with the Sage, the narrative employs premonitory techniques: the repeat mentions of the Devil’s Mountain, the repetition of ‘no one could have seen it’ as Ciri confides in the old hermit Vysygota – until the moment we learn that through the walls of Tir ná Béa Arainne someone has been watching after all. He is quite like Tristan in this, since he, too, observed Iseult from afar and in disguise. Long before Ciri’s birth, Crevan had himself written into human legends about Tor Zireael in Peregrinations along Magic Trails and Places; a book that will find its way into Ciri’s hands at just the right moment. It is like bread crumbs or candy left on the trail of (mis)treats, leading toward an initiation into her mythic nature and out of the baptism of fire that befalls her among humans. Out of the underworld, of brutal history, and into myth and fairy tale.

It is as if he were saving her.

In order to see Ciri through the magic walls of Tir ná Béa Arainne, Avallac’h must ‘Think intensively. About how much she needs [him] right now. And declare, so to speak, the mental willingness to help. Think about how [he would] want to run and rescue her, be beside her...’^[11] It is quite certain that he does not see himself as a villain. In fact, he cannot see himself as the villain. It is psychologically unbearable. We will return to this later.

‘Now that she has taken the right road, the Swallow will cope wonderfully by herself. She carries too mighty a force inside her to fear anything. She doesn’t need your help. And thirdly… Hmmm…’
 
‘I’m still all ears, Avallac’h. All ears!’
 
‘Thirdly… Thirdly, someone else will help her now. You can’t be so arrogant as to think that the girl’s destiny is exclusively bound to you.’
—The Tower of the Swallow

There has been a stalker on Ciri’s trail for longer than she knows and it is not Bonhart or the Wild Hunt. He delights in the weaving of illusions. A mythmaker like his creator, he does it to himself all the time. Wishing for their fates to be bound together – quite like Geralt with Yennefer – he knows this is how it will be. It has been written. Ciri must and will enter the Tower of the Swallow only once she is ready to become ‘just a legend.’ Reaching the land of lakes, she will disappear in it like in legends where the swallows winter underneath a lake.

Water, that element of the Unconscious, embraces Ciri as she slips from historical time into another: a phantasmal, dream-like place that reflects. A timeless realm like the psyche – of her own and of those she encounters in Faërie. She commences this journey to get to her adoptive parents, believing she is on her way back to the beginning (back into childhood), returning to a time where everything is like it used to be and is still possible. Ciri longs for the unbroken past. Except it is an impossible dream. You will never get back the person you lost when something traumatic happened to you. Transformed, you will be something new now; but you can still go on living. By reaching Faërie and her roots, Ciri learns this about herself as well as her hosts.

They meet for the first time in a landscape that is unusually beautiful, just like in the painting of Lara’s and Cregennan’s first encounter that hangs in the Gallery of Glory. A misty lake with water as smooth as a mirror emerges from underneath tiny green carpets of white-blooming lily pads, the banks drowning in leaves and flowers and wild roses and white-blooming bird cherries under which graze unicorns, white as snow. White! White as apple trees in spring. White as a page as of yet unwritten, in a story that is only beginning, ever beginning, in May – the month of her rebirth. It is warm. Unfolding before her, and for her, to the jolly tune of pan pipes, is an artist’s enchantment which draws her in with awe, charming even her half-wild mare. Out of the darkness of the past now, and into the light.

‘What took you so long?’ he asks with a smile. ‘What kept you?’ Translation: I have been waiting for you ever since the moment you went away; and you are late.

‘We're bound. Woven into this wheel of torture, chained, sucked into the whirlpool. […] The only thing connecting us is a legend of love that isn't our legend.’
—Maladie

As is known, the Universe – like life – describes a wheel. Or a noose? To save and regenerate a legend, you must make it your legend.

In its romance, this is a scene of courtship. Designed to woo the maiden and pull the wool over her eyes a little, for ‘not everything here is as pretty as it looks’. Except that by presenting his best self, he is also showing her what he values, what elves ideally are like. And Ciri is moved; later to tears even, when she sees Tir ná Lia. Having just escaped history into myth, she, too, starts morphing – from a fantasy of his into something tangible. She is here at last, in front of his eyes, vivid as a vision, and yet… The serious evil has already occurred. Soot-stained traumatized eyes in a scarred face on which sits grim countenance – that is what is left of the pearl thrown before men. What have they done with Her!?

It is a moment of vulnerability and exposure that Ciri cannot possibly understand yet. His la maladie d’espoir. The past is broken and in need of re-writing. ‘Your place is here, not among the Dh’oine.’ Except he has no formal claim on her without her affirmation, only hope. And he fears refusal. Fears it to the point of being willing to strangle any chance of its appearance and thus, rendering acquiescence meaningless. It is a symptom of Avallac’h’s condition as the wounded Fisher King.

Both Crevan and Ciri are instrumentalised by fate and exist in a kind of narrative self-consciousness. They are meta-characters with metafictional abilities and functions. Within The Witcher storyworld, both already exist in the legends people recite. Neither can be for their own sake alone in the great machinery of storytelling, and Tir ná Lia is Ciri’s introduction to this fact. A gilded cage, Myth, for her and the elves. The Plot of The Witcher has set chains on them. Avallac’h must bring about the salvation of elves by ‘causing’ the Saviour. Ciri must be the Child of Destiny, the mythic Grail who begins and ends tales. Their individuality – personal hopes and needs – are tethered to their archetype, rendering them tools. Avallac’h yanks at this very fetter binding them while trying to untangle himself and the elves from its condemnation. But why tighten this noose?

Despite desiring the restoration of fairy tale over the bastardry of history, Avallac’h paradoxically begins by depersonalizing Ciri. When she tells Galahad off for calling her Lady of the Lake, she protests how legendary titles can imprison and erase personhood and agency. Flattering as they may be, the role will eat you; pound you into a symbol in a grand narrative. This is Ciri’s whole life. Her tragedy. It is Tir ná Lia’s formative lesson: whether she likes it or not, she exists like a legend, like her elven relatives; forever summoned by the stories that need her. It is a threshold of understanding she must cross for the sake of the Plot. She must become mythic by mastering Time in order to be able to do what her story with Geralt requires of her – save their legend. Unpleasant but true. Once she accepts her roots (‘I am of the blood of Lara Dorren, the daughter of Shiadhal.’), Ciri fills her role as Lady of the Lake perfectly: it is she who will take you by the hand in the mists as you pass on, from one tale into another.

‘I’m just a legend,’ she said bitterly. ‘Have been since my birth. Zireael, the Swallow, the Unexpected Child. The Chosen One. The Child of Destiny. The Child of the Elder Blood. I’m going, Vysogota. Farewell.’
—The Tower of the Swallow

‘The legend cannot end without us. Without our participation. Yours and mine. I don't know why, but we're important, indispensable in this story.’
—Maladie

Loc’hlaith. Lady of the Lake.^[12]

Avallac’h bestows this title on Ciri. He gives her a name, a legendary one like the one he himself bears. This being partly Ciri’s bildungsroman, she is changing. And Faërie is classically always a sphere of metamorphosis. In Sapkowski’s rendition, the elves themselves do not remain untouched either. The quest is always first and foremost an internal odyssey. As a threshold guardian in her initiation (and yes, motherhood is a rite of passage too), Avallac’h tries to redefine Ciri and make her more like himself and Lara. A symbol in the flesh who operates in Mythic Time not linear history. For in the beginning was the Word. His act of naming is necessary, sinister, and hopeful all at once. Speaking the Lady of the Lake into existence, the Lord of Avalon introduces her into a different way of being in which lies the secret of her blood: stories eternally need their archetypes. There is a kind of immortality in that. Whenever a tale, retold endlessly, requires the Lady (or a witcher girl) Ciri will find her way.

Authorship is Avallac’h’s witchcraft. For Tolkien (1947), it is the elves’ foremost craft, as well as what they are – sub-creators. Both a captor and a mentor figure, Crevan gets a carte blanche to apply his sorcery. Ciri is in real danger in Faërie of losing sight of her own identity by being subsumed into Avallac’h’s myth-making; without noticing, she might relinquish the reins of her own tale. Despite passing on something essential about her nature that is vital to her growth, he is also drawing her into his narration, his legend; one that is defined by a love story. He is performing his plot function by arranging her ascension, but he is also trying to ensure, by right and might, like Mark, that the Lady has no chance but to bestow her favour on the elves in this retelling. He errs. Oversteps. How can he be so arrogant as to want Ciri’s destiny to only be connected with him? Rather than letting the archetypal role unfold naturally, he tries to lock it down. Performing on her a Creator's cruelty that he himself has already suffered. But there is a further catch.

Because why Lady of the Lake in particular?

By naming Ciri, Avallac’h, by the necessity inherent in the narrative he invokes, casts himself into a complementary mythic role. If she is the Lady, he becomes the Merlin.^[13] Merlin, the magician, affects transformations and his own story, too, is about endless metamorphosis. ‘The alchemist works on himself. His prima materia is him. He labors to transmute the base matter of his dreams into gold’ (Nye 1988). Merlin, the wise enchanter who sees the future, has power over others and arranges their destinies: famously causing Arthur’s conception by enabling Uther to have his way with Igraine, wife to the Duke of Cornwall. Merlin who then claims the child for himself because it was his power that enabled the conception of the Chosen King. Merlin who prophesised the Grail would one day return. And the Grail has returned… in the shape of a young woman. Because, in the vein of Joseph Campbell, The Grail is a Woman for Andrzej Sapkowski. And Merlin falls under the spell of this Lady who will imprison him in a glass tower – his esplumoir.

Classic.

So, naturally, Avallac’h imprisons his enchantress first.

The Forest of Broceliande. The wizard Merlin, while strolling, comes upon a clear spring, by which sits a beautiful black-haired [ashen-haired] girl. Merlin suddenly knows, with terrifying certainty, that everything has already been decided. He knows that he has sacrificed everything for this girl. His sorcerous powers, his fame, his duties to Arthur and Britain. ‘Who are you, O beautiful one?’ he asks. The girl raises her violet [green] eyes. ‘I am Nimue [Ciri],’ she replies. ‘You have just condemned yourself to me.’
 
It is May.
—The World of King Arthur, ‘The Mystery of Love’

Like Merlin, Avallac’h sees the future and knows meeting Ciri is his destiny. Everything has already happened: Lara the Seagull, Ciri the Swallow… The wheel turns and the fairy tale returns; eternally and through a mirror. The Plan was never impersonal. It was always deeply personal because the narrative has given Crevan a need that only Ciri can address. The ‘how’ is quite important though, because hunting for the Grail means accepting change that happens within. Only now, upon meeting each other in person, does he realize this. Only now does his fate become real to him. He sees to whom he has condemned himself and Lara’s eyes look back. The wound re-opens instantly.

Love legends are inherently a little perverse and narcissistic. Tragic lovers rarely really see each other, for example, because they are not usually allowed to graduate into mature love. And in the beginning… well: ‘Jest tylko Beatrycze. I właśnie jej nie ma. There is only Beatrice. And precisely she is not there.’ They look at each other but do not see each other. To see the person in the Other, passion (feeling) must first transform into compassion (co-suffering). And there are a lot of feelings in both Ciri and Crevan; thorny, tangled, powerful feelings. In Ciri there is disproportionately much of it for her age and in the elf it does not even begin to compute. This girl is his hope (Lara returned) and doom (Lara who rejected him). But much more importantly, she is herself. Ciri. A stranger who is somehow familiar. A person, not one of his fantasies or nightmares. Because Crevan does not really want Ciri to be Lara who left him, he wants her to be the one who will not leave and will save the legend with him.

Real people inside archetypes are scary. He is a prideful, vain, controlling man broken by grief. And this is a teenage girl who is exhausted, traumatised, bleeding, and with vengeance and fear in her eyes; and awe at what she now sees. No abstract shape in the mist. This is a scarred person. Crevan’s whole edifice of meaning that has kept him functional – his purple bison – would come crashing down if he were to see Ciri in that moment as she really is and has been for some time – suffering. Because acknowledging the Other’s suffering brings attention to our own. And until that one fatal moment in Lady of the Lake, that is unbearable for Avallac’h.

Their meeting at the end of The Tower of the Swallow is Avallac’h’s Broceliande moment. This traumatized young woman is who Fate has sent. Swallow whom the elves must follow. This is who will save him. To Her he will lose everything about himself. Again. She – a human-elf mutant – will enchant him if he lets her. In a way she already has: if it should be him instead of Auberon then he would not be able to let her go. Lara’s daughter is a proof of concept sent to him by the woman he loved: the Saviour will appear only if we cross the chasm of hatred and fear that separates us. Will he?

No amount of rationalization will help, no amount of hiding behind excuses of genetics and hormones. The Power capable of changing the world is not Magic. It is faith, love, and sacrifice. And the greatest of these is love.

As Avallac’h had ordered the witcher, as the Goddess demanded of Yennefer, he must now prove he is capable of humility and sacrifice. ‘Are you prepared to sacrifice yourself? Your priceless magic?’ Are you prepared to submit to the Plan? We witness the fatal moment before the Grail over and over in The Witcher, hinting at the story’s blueprint. Only pride and vanity, fear and pain, impede the quester. Acknowledging Ciri as she is, submitting to the pattern he has invoked, would mean being ready to accept transformation. But that is something he cannot control nor make safe for himself. It would mean facing grief and trauma and the ways in which they have twisted him, and working on it. And letting it go. It would mean seeing Ciri for herself and his elaborate artifices for what they are – selfish desperation.

Above all, it would mean acting on the moment and hoping.

And what does Avallac’h do? He runs away.

3.2 The Mistake(s)

By fleeing his Broceliande moment, and by the methods he employs subsequently, Avallac’h perverts the spirit of the legend he would like to regenerate and make work in the service of his and the elves’ redemption. He refuses entering authentically and being transformed by the tale. Perhaps he knows this, but he will not face it until Ciri makes him face it.

The Knowing One covers his eyes when the Ouroboros swallows him.^[14]

‘For despite all his wisdom, in the end Merlin behaved like an adolescent.’
—A. Sapkowski, The World of King Arthur

A classic with a twist, just as Sapkowski likes them.

One of the founding principles of this legend, the principle Avallac’h twists out of his untreated trauma, involves gambling on the Other’s free choice. The Law of Surprise on which is based the entire cycle of The Witcher. It is quite simple: it is about the affirmation of fated chance. You need something, will it, and affirm the chance that the Other – and love is always at first Other – might acknowledge and accept you. Might try and understand your need and meet you halfway, transcending selfishness.

Elves require (the birth of) a child born under the shadow of destiny; in myth and fairy tale, pure biology is not enough. Something more is needed. The Law of Surprise stipulates: destiny becomes true only when the people subjected to it choose to affirm it. They affirm, through a wish, to bind their fates together (like Yennefer, Ciri, and Geralt). The fairy tale is based on a Deleuzian dice throw: l’affirmation du hasard – ‘affirmation of fated chance.’ You will a future (like Geralt did, like Avallac’h does) and throw the dice, and it is the co-fatality with the other dice thrower’s throw that binds you together as co-fated in ‘something more.’ It is not enough for Geralt to get a child as payment, or for the elves to demand a child back, and in a love legend it is not sufficient for a man to see himself and another as lovers. It is the beloved who must consent to loving him first. It always starts as a gamble; and you cannot run away from it.

It is a love story that Avallac’h is attempting to correct. Love brings the necessity of mutuality. Recall that despite having several means and plenty of chances for taking what they need by force, the Alder Folk court Ciri’s consent. ‘Not completely [prepared to co-operate]? Ha, that’s not good,’ says Eredin, ‘Since the nature of the cooperation demands that it be complete. It’s simply not possible if it’s less than complete.’ Something more than force is needed. A saviour cannot be born from coercion because it would mean travestying the nature of the legend its parents and the child are apart. It would, moreover, blaspheme against the elves’ self-concept, since they see themselves as antithetical to dh’oine who destroy and rape Nature. Nature, which is female in The Witcher. But consent obtained under duress is not genuine consent. It is loading the dice, ripping the soul out of a legend which began with Lara’s eyes in which la maladie, leading to transgression and the unexpected. Try telling Crevan that Lara was a whore. You won’t live to hear the response.

You cannot artificially reproduce a scenario that originates in a transgressive decision. Lara’s and Cregennan's tale’s vitality arises out of (an eventual) mutual and risky desire that violates tribal boundaries. Elves end up trying to achieve the same result with a profane toolkit of obligation, contracts, aphrodisiacs. Elves, who are mythic creatures, whose nature is legend. By trying to reproduce a moment of legendary choice with debased means, they are going against their own ontology. It cannot work.

‘It will be as fate wills. Chance. This whole legend we so stubbornly speak of is the work of chance. A series of chances. If not for blind fate, there might be no legend. Then, at Dún Laoghaire, just think, Branwen, if not for blind fate... After all, then it was he, not I, who could have...’ I broke off, frightened by a sudden thought. Terrified by the word that pressed to my lips.
 
‘Morholt,’ Branwen whispered. ‘Fate has already done with us what it had to do. The rest can no longer be the work of chance. We're no longer subject to chance.’
—Maladie

Fate has already done what it wanted with Avallac’h and Ciri – deprived him of his purpose and put her on a path on which she will lose everything. With the serious evil having occurred, the rest can no longer be the work of chance. Morholt and Branwen surrender to where the legend takes them. They accept narrative necessity and flow with it. And, since it is the legend of Tristan and Iseult that has given them the second chance, when the moment comes to choose each other over the Plan (which follows the schemata of a tragedy), they take it; saving the legend by replicating its spirit, but not sticking with it. Legends require victims, but why die for a symbol if you can live?

‘I know what you wouldn't have done,’ said Tristan, closing his eyes. ‘You wouldn't have presented her to Mark, wouldn't have aroused his interest, babbling about her constantly in his presence. You wouldn't have sailed for her to Ireland in someone else's name. You wouldn't have wasted the love that began then. Then, not on the ship. Branwen wrongly torments herself with that story about the magic potion. The potion had nothing to do with it. When she boarded the ship, she was already mine. Morholt... If you had boarded that ship with her, would you have sailed to Tintagel? Would you have given Iseult to Mark? Certainly not. You'd rather have fled with her to the end of the world, to Brittany, Arabia, to Hyperborea, to Ultima Thule itself.’
—Maladie

Tristan’s second greatest mistake was not leaving the story for good with Iseult. Confiding in Morholt, he is instructing him in what to do differently. When Avallac’h and Ciri board an oarless boat at Tir ná Lia, its high, slender prow is carved in the shape of a key. As subtle a hint as they come (in two respects). It would be a risk, but destiny is hope. Except in Avallac’h hope wars with a need for control. It is not enough, though, to know the myth’s origin and to control and manipulate it at will; one ‘lives’ the myth ‘in the sense that one is seized by the sacred, exalting power of the events’ (Eliade 1975). By refusing to experience the essence of the love legend personally, by refusing to allow it to transform and destroy the old structures of one’s being, the power of the Grail can never be wholly unleashed.

Tristan’s greatest error in life was not realizing he had condemned himself to Iseult the Golden-Haired. He babbled to his uncle King Mark about her.^[15] That’s where their tragedy truly started. Avallac’h, of course, arouses Auberon’s ambition in setting right his daughter’s and son-in-law’s folly; a chance for the Old Ruler to validate his claim to power by passing a test that could bring restoration to the waste land of elven existence. A separate question is how enthusiastic Auberon really is about this and ‘not very’ seems about right. The wound that Auberon and Avallac’h share, and which makes them each other’s doubles as Fisher Kings, derives from the loss of the same person. Except Lara was Auberon’s daughter. A raison d'état better not pursued (but that is another story). Like Tristan, Crevan fetches the princess. Like Tristan, he himself is thoroughly invested in the woman.

Archetypes impose themselves. Morholt becomes Tristan by accepting the role fully, including its potential for future tragedy. Avallac’h, by contrast, tries to avoid the elements that wounded him. It is a very important failure. Swallows signify new beginnings. Despite thinking he can control the pattern that he is invoking, his deed will determine his fate no matter what he wants. Merlin will be imprisoned by the Lady metaphorically and literally. The terrible power imbalance we witness in Lady of the Lake will shift completely, and Avallac’h knows this. It has already happened; from the moment they met it has been guaranteed. If Ciri is the Lady and Avallac’h is the Merlin then their story will proceed archetypally with his enchantment by her. The Swallow’s counter-spell to the curse that lies on him and the elves has a single purpose – transformation. Lest he embalm himself in regret forever.

‘Here is a power against which I am powerless. Here is a fire I cannot comprehend. Here in this woman is a witchcraft beyond my own.’
—Robert Nye, Merlin

Avallac'h believes in Fate until it requires trusting Ciri's choice. His experience says: ‘She will refuse you, just like Lara.’ Deep down he may believe himself unworthy of being freely chosen. So instead of risking himself again, he devises a script, a play, and casts himself as the puppeteer. Of course, ultimately, Ciri’s choice is not at all about him. It cannot be. There is a legend that is ending elsewhere and it is not this legend. Ciri is saying so, but nobody listens. No wonder the entire enterprise turns into a farce. The Purpose, the Plan, and the Result have been fixed by Sapkowski a long time ago. Like Ciri, Avallac’h essentially refuses to be a tool for a Demiurge’s Plot. But the character arc and position the author has given him make it necessary for him to surrender if his protest is to succeed; and that he cannot do so makes for his tragedy.

Until an intervention by his Grail herself.

4 Transformative Encounter

The people of the hidden castle live on in helpless sorrow, waiting for that one to arrive who will, out of the impulse of his own noble heart, pronounce the words that will break the spell.
—J. Campbell, Romance of the Grail

The basic theme of the Grail romance is of a king, a Fisher King. […] The Fisher King has been very seriously wounded, and as a result of the wound, the land is laid waste. The central problem of the Grail romance is to heal the Fisher King. The goal of the Grail hero is to heal that wound, but he is to do so without knowing how he is to do so. He is to be a perfect innocent, not to know the rules of the quest, and he is to ask spontaneously, “What is the matter?”
—J. Campbell, Romance of the Grail

In the confrontation that occurs between Ciri and Avallac’h, Ciri basically calls Avallac’h’s bluff. For all his devotion to Lara’s memory, for all his talk of fate and noble ends, it is his personal desire that guides him, except he is too damaged to be willing to enter the love legend that needs him.

Avallac’h believes Ciri is connected to him by destiny but will not surrender to what that means – co-suffering in a shared journey. By trying to shortcut this process, by running from his Broceliande moment, he costs himself the forming of a foundation that might convince Ciri of that fate. There is no shared adventure. Basically, we see what would have happened if Geralt had let Ciri run away from him in Brokilon, or worse, had posted her to Kistrin of Verden. Geralt ran later from what they had built. Avallac'h ran before they could build anything. This is important because when Ciri offers the paternity of her child to Avallac’h, she invokes the same ritual affirmation of fated chance that worked with Geralt, however, unlike with Geralt, she is doing so uncertainly. Worse, contemptuously and despairingly. She is trying to transform her entrapment into meaningful connection by conjuring something based on mythic logic alone: there is Lara’s ghost, the romantic template, the prophecy that deems her the bringer of new beginnings. And Avallac’h recognizes the difference instantly, even if unconsciously. On the hilltop, little Ciri trusted her own feelings and claimed Geralt as her destiny, but here she is trying to borrow that certainty from his desire. ‘If you want, I’ll give myself to you’ means Ciri is asking if this could be fate, offering him the power to make it real by wanting her. Only he does not want it if it is not the real thing because only the real thing could heal him. Tough break. By offering herself conditionally, she is just mirroring his own fearful approach back at him, treating destiny as something to negotiate with instead of surrender to. Skipping Broceliande means authentic connection and mutual vulnerability must be torn out of them, from underneath mountains of dysfunctionality. They get there through fire.

There is a lot going on in this scene. I’ll try to keep the meta frame brief.

The Grail Quest revolves around the healing of a Waste Land, the image of which is the Fisher King. The motif of the Waste Land reflects in the elves’ historical condition, which has left them the creators of a beautiful albeit barren and decadent civilization that, despite its grace, is sustained on the backs of slaves and genocide. At Tir ná Lia we have a doubled Fisher King (Eredin becomes the third spoke only at the end). As in Chrétien’s poem where one suffers from a wound and the other from old age. Auberon holds the role ceremonially, serving as metonymy for all elves via his title, but Avallac’h’s wound actually drives the narrative interpersonally and it is his healing (or continued wounding) that forms the real psychological centre of the story.^[16] The wound is associated with the loss of life force and is symbolically received in the thigh area. As the Grail’s guardians, Auberon and Avallac’h receive theirs through the loss of those who are the most important, the source of meaning and order in their lives – their other halves.^[17] Tristan’s demise, too, is brought about by a lance received in the thigh after he has given up on Iseult the Golden-Haired and emotionally mistreats his new wife, Iseult of the White Hands. The wounding is frequently seen as a sign of divine displeasure, marking a spiritual failure. In Sapkowskian terms, we might see it as a ‘loss of humanity’ and the love of power and control winning out over compassion and mercy. It is a symptom of a mutilated heart that becomes capable of most abominable crime. An original wound, if you will, driving this world’s misery.

Ciri, meanwhile, both represents the Grail and is the questing Grail Knight. Like Parzival, she is young and naïve, yet ready to cross a threshold between life stages, which is why she can access Faërie, this magical realm of metamorphosis, at all. The outcome of the quest is of great importance to the quester and the Fisher King both.

Ashamed, enraged, and humiliated after her first night with the Alder King, made aroused and then abandoned, Ciri seeks Crevan out the next day. The setting among an avenue of statues of elven children frozen in their youth is poignant: we are about to witness emotional immaturity (and emerging maturity) from both characters. The angry child Avallac’h points to mirrors them – locked in rage and trauma, unable to grow beyond their wounds. ‘Time means nothing’ takes on a cruel irony.

She explains her misery.

‘I made an agreement! […] I’m giving myself! What do I care that he can’t or doesn’t want to? What do I care if it’s senile impotence, or if I don’t attract him? Perhaps Dh’oine repulse him? Perhaps like Eredin he only sees in me a nugget in a heap of compost?’
 
‘I hope …’ Avallac’h’s face, exceptionally, changed and contorted. ‘I hope you didn’t say anything like that to him?’

It does not work with Auberon. It cannot. The Alder King longs for Shiadhal with whom they had Lara and Ciri bears both their eyes. Auberon’s (Ciri’s ancestor’s) fate inversely echoes Emhyr’s (Ciri’s father’s); Emhyr’s heart melts, the Alder King’s does not. Time has turned it into marble. His erection melts instead. Understandably. Besides, Ciri is doing this transactionally, motivated like a cornered animal; not out of compassion for the Aen Seidhe but out of self-interest. She fails to ask the compassionate question, showing the emotion only once the Alder King is dying. Equally understandably.

‘Don’t act rashly under any circumstances. Be patient. Remember, time means nothing.’
 
‘Yes, it does!’
 
‘Please, don’t be an unruly child. I repeat again: be patient with Auberon. Because he’s your only chance of regaining your freedom.’
 
‘Really?’ she almost screamed. ‘I’m beginning to have my doubts! I’m beginning to suspect you of cheating me! That you’ve all cheated me—’

Like the Grail Hero, Ciri does not know what she is actually supposed to do; and it does not look like the elves know either since they act instrumentally about something spiritual. It echoes Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Waste Land: ‘a people’s own spirituality cut down by an order of values radically out of accord with the order of nature itself’ (Campbell 2015). The laboratory, rationally speaking, would be the most efficient means, but it travesties the elven ethos and the love legend so grossly that it becomes essentially unthinkable for Avallac’h after he has met Ciri in person. What transpires is marginally better, but only marginally.

The scene starts from Ciri’s degradation. She has agreed to prostitute herself for freedom and even so is rejected. Scarred and bereft, Ciri wants to feel wanted, to belong, and though Avallac’h is trying to reassure her that this is her place (they share an abandonment trauma, she and him), that she has been long-awaited and that her arrival is a happy occasion, the proof is in the pudding. Eventually, she will start blaming herself, ‘It’s all my fault. That scar blights me, I know. I know what you see when you look at me. There’s not much elf left in me. A gold nugget in a pile of compost—’ but finds no pity from Auberon.^[18] From her time with the Rats, Ciri has learned that by objectifying and instrumentalising herself, she can claw back power. Her body can be transactional currency, which, in her mind, she tries to treat like the sorceresses, ‘a little angry at herself, for she had decided to act proud and impassive.’ Failing in this draws attention to her coping habits, however, and that is uncomfortable.

So the Lady of the Lake tries taking back control of the narrative.

He was about to go, but she barred his way. His aquamarine eyes narrowed and Ciri understood she was dealing with a very, very, dangerous elf. But it was too late to withdraw.
 
‘That’s very much in the elven style,’ she hissed like a viper. ‘To insult someone and then not let them get even.’
 
‘Beware, O Swallow.’

Sapkowski structured things since The Tower of the Swallow so as to show Crevan’s progressive loss of control over his carefully maintained façade. Eredin violated his privacy in front of Ciri by exposing his entitlement to Lara. Now Ciri is about to violate his romantic mythology by commodifying it. When Avallac’h warns Ciri with his eyes before his composure cracks, Ciri, who has faced many dangerous people, singles out him specifically.

Appearances can be deceiving. In spite of the fairy tale edifice, Ciri is at the mercy of a being who can do whatever he wishes to her. ‘If he’d wanted to, he could have throttled her like a fledgling.’ The gentle eyes and calm demeanour belie a mangled and volatile soul of great power, held in check by self-control. More perilously still, he cares immensely about her person. Uniquely Ciri can undo that control and unleash repressed emotions, heal or wound him, because she has become the centre of meaning in his life. She is, quite simply, Avallac’h’s weakness; the base matter of his dreams that he would like to transmute into gold.

Perversely, courting disaster is what Ciri prefers. All cards on the table. She recognizes damaged people trying to do what they think is good – seek justice or merely survive – through terrible means, for it is her own pattern. So she pummels ahead.

‘Listen.’ She lifted her head proudly. ‘Your Alder King won’t fulfil the task, that’s more than clear. It isn’t important if he’s the problem or if I am. That’s trivial and meaningless. But I want to fulfil the contract. And get it over with. Let someone else impregnate me to beget the child you care so much about.’
 
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’
 
‘And if I’m the problem—’ she didn’t change her tone or expression ‘—it means you’re mistaken, Avallac’h. You lured the wrong person to this world.’^[19]

Nothing, basically, makes sense. ‘Auberon treated you with reverence, like a born Aen Elle.’ Really? If she has been so long-awaited, if this is so incredibly important, why does the Alder King behave like he does? Why are they saddling her with failure?

No matter, she is ready to forego dignity and comply without reservation. She will make their indignity explicit by accepting it and prove their hypocrisy. Pure business? Fine. Treating herself as defective merchandise, Ciri pre-empts any attempts at defining her worth. It hurts less if you dehumanize yourself before others can do so. It’s a feint. She can get pregnancy over with like any unpleasant duty – with anyone – and if their plan is so important, why would they not accept any method that works? But secretly Ciri is testing if anyone will object to her self-abasement. Will he object?

Ciri turns to Avallac’h because out of all the elves Crevan treats this as fated. A part of her wants to believe what he serves up for her: an offering of purpose, belonging and an identity in which she is seen as precious rather than a misshapen monster. If anyone here were to see she is worth more than this then it must to be him. The hidden, desperate hope is that he will object to the way she is rephrasing his grand narrative.

Avallac’h’s refusal^[20] to engage with her directly on terms that render her livestock (also evident in his objection to the way Eredin talks about her) validates Ciri’s feelings, but also confuses her. He is not accepting the transactional frame she is now fully committing to despite having effectively made such a deal with her. So it must be that how she is treated matters to him. So why… Why insist she keep humiliating herself with Auberon who clearly does not want her? Even if Crevan did not care, how is this in their interests? Why give her to Auberon at all? What on earth does this elf actually want?

‘If, though,’ she screamed, ‘you’re all repulsed by me, use the hinny breeders’ method. What, don’t you know? You show the stallion a mare, and then you blindfold it and put the jenny in front of it.’
 
He didn’t even deign to reply. He passed her by unceremoniously and walked off along the avenue of statues.

Ciri’s wild aim is remarkable, for Avallac’h was, indeed, the ‘stallion’ meant for that ‘mare’ called Lara. Except there was nothing base and transactional about it for him. He loved her. Ciri is dragging a sacred thing through the dirt to make her point, though arguably quite rightly. Because is Crevan not doing the same to the essence of the love legend in his cowardice? How is any of this noble and fated and significant? Genuine connection, mutual freely willed affirmation – these things that allow a fate to become true – are missing. Putting another person’s well-being over your own need is absent. The fate-framing which they would like to be true does not work without; without, it is just trade or exploitation. Yet Avallac’h minds such a framing very much. It attacks everything about his own love for Lara – about their arrangement – and about the way he sees himself as the noble, long-suffering victim.

By walking away in disgust, Avallac’h answers Ciri’s question implicitly – yes, he is personally invested and cares about how this child will be born, and he cannot bear to discuss this as degradation; as if that was all there was to it. It is beneath the way he sees himself and her. A purely clinical approach, like Vilgefortz’s, would not be bothered by Ciri’s words, and would welcome her self-objectification as useful. Would just take what is made available for the taking.

He is walking away, though, when Ciri is desperate for acknowledgement of her pain. The one person who she hopes cares for her, to whom she means something special, is abandoning her. She would never ask this of him directly, would never beg nor say ‘don’t leave, why won’t you help me, don’t you care?’ So she forces the acknowledgement from him by weaponizing his feelings that she is guessing at, while being maximally degrading about it.

In wanting him to see her suffering, she forces him to confront his own bullshit.

‘Or you, perhaps?’ she yelled. ‘If you want I’ll give myself to you! Well? Won’t you sacrifice yourself? I mean, they say I’ve got Lara’s eyes!’

Fuck your plan! Just do it yourself.

This is not how the Fisher King heals. The question must be asked in compassion, not contempt. But suffering is not Avallac’h’s exclusive privilege. By offering herself, Ciri inverts their established power dynamic, seizing back agency and becoming the one doing the using. If she is to be objectified then do it directly, damn you! They want her willing? She gives what they claim to want in a way that exposes its repugnance. It is anti-love and anti-fairy tale, and in no way honouring Lara’s memory. Challenging Avallac’h’s need for control, she forces him to inhabit the story he has been weaving without any risk for himself and makes him see how low it is for how much he hopes to get in return.

Ciri adapts fast, showing her hosts that like them, she is not above weaponizing intimacy. On their way to Tir ná Lia, she had asked if she would be free after having the child and Avallac’h had confirmed so before an afterthought: ‘Assuming you don’t decide to stay. With the child.’ There are things he hopes for and thinks about, but does not reveal to her. Including that he wants her to choose this world and him permanently. Which, quod erad demonstrandum, could render what he does now destiny not coercion. There is desperation in him that the wizard does not wish Ciri to see. As when hearing her refusal to his proposal while he rides ‘so close he was touching her knee’ before his blackmail; a stupidly aggressive move. By hook or crook, but not by meeting her halfway. Not by winning her favour through helping her first. And yet he is in no way indifferent, and that is her leverage – and hope.

She chooses him because Lara’s first love was this man. It makes him interesting and Ciri knows the template of tragic romances. With him, all this might mean something. If Lara (an elf) chose Cregennan (a human), perhaps she (a human) choosing Avallac'h (an elf) closes the circle with meaningful symmetry? Her fury is real because he used romantic logic to imprison her, so she will use it to force his hand. Except even when put with contempt and practicality, there is a question that echoes underneath: would you want me? If he loved Lara, she might be lovable for him too. Maybe this transaction with him could carry emotional weight and change degradation into a tragic romance? Connect her with a larger tale. Ciri is becoming merged with Lara’s story at Tir ná Lia, learning to see herself as her heir. The romantic template makes him her only meaningful choice. Otherwise she is just ‘material for a king’s wife,’ and not even all that splendid.

She cannot voice any of this directly though, only provoke. From their first meeting to his blush at Eredin’s suggestion of his entitlement to her, to Crevan dismissing his paramour for her sake, Ciri suspects what he wants and infers what would get a reaction from him that is honest. She has sensed what power her resemblance to his Lara holds. ‘Won’t you sacrifice yourself?’ weaponizes this hunch without forcing her to become any more vulnerable than she already feels. Surely it is not that big of a sacrifice if you desire something so badly, is it? It is a deeply self-pitying and volatile mix that she hurls at him, framing sex with her as a sacrifice after she has been forced to surrender herself. It is painful to read because it reveals Ciri’s self-hatred and internalised racism, seeing herself as something unpleasant that surely cannot be genuinely desired; despite wanting to hear assurance to the contrary. That she says this at all and does not just give in means that deep down she hopes none of it is true. Dragging his hypocrisy into the spotlight while also trying to ascertain her worth, Ciri forces Avallac’h to admit desire or confirm her worthlessness. Show that it is not her fault or confirm her fear and let her hate them all with ease.

Avallac’h’s reaction is violent and visceral. And reveals his heart.

4.1 The Malady of Love

He was in front of her in two paces. His hands shot towards her neck like snakes and squeezed like steel pincers. She understood that if he’d wanted to, he could have throttled her like a fledgling.
 
He let her go. He leaned over and looked into her eyes from close up.

Just like that, Avallac’h’s self-protective, romantic mythology splinters into so many crooked ways of coping. His self-image shatters: he inflicts suffering, not only endures; serves selfish desires in the guise of a higher purpose; and the memory he is protecting is of his own innocence not solely Lara’s. He is like Lara. Those steel pinchers at Ciri’s throat rend him apart from the inside. The Fisher King’s wound must be exposed before it can heal; the inauthentic self must dissolve. Ciri’s desperate daring is a bitter medicine. She is giving him exactly what he wants in an unacceptable form and he only has himself to blame. He stops himself before becoming a villain in earnest.

They are equal now. For the very first time they are completely exposed to each other. His emotions are like strings on his puppet who clings to her presence on the palm of his hand. The enchantment he ran from and fears – being condemned to her, losing everything to her – begins in earnest when Merlin is forced to face the Lady as a person not a fantasy. Language fails the intellectual. He could destroy her for this, but he cannot. Because who is this? Who is She?

A semi-decently adjusted individual might see Ciri's jibe as coming from a place of suffering, only Crevan is anything but. Still, it might be the first time he really asks himself, ‘who am I seeing, who is this person?’ To truly dissolve his projections though, something more is needed. Because the minefield inside his soul is real.

‘Who are you,’ he asked extremely calmly, ‘to dare to defile her name in such a way? Who are you to dare to abuse me with such miserable charity?’

The calm to which he forces himself is in a sense more terrifying than the flash of rage because it shows how desperately he needs to maintain his façade and how vulnerable to Ciri he really is. Something animal reveals itself: in this refined elite lies the same capacity for ugliness as in any man protecting his ego. Paradoxically, Ciri is offering him the fulfilment of his longing, and she even does it in Lara’s spirit by taking back control and deciding for herself how she wants to do things. Unfortunately, she is making this narratively ‘correct’ move (choosing him as the father and binding their fates) in the spiritually wrong way. Contemptuously, transactionally, uncertainly. Ciri’s offer comes off as though he were pathetic enough to warrant pity-sex. She has offered herself like a martyr, mocking his feelings, pain and desire that he dares not speak about. It, too, is anti-romance. Deep down, it wounds like his deepest injury that insists he is only acceptable when She has to sacrifice herself for it. It re-asserts his unworthiness when he has tried so hard not to ask the question.

The form in which he is being offered what he wants is wrong. He wants the freely chosen love that Lara gave Cregennan. To be chosen for his sake. With regard to their deepest needs, Avallac’h and Ciri are remarkably alike. If Ciri, this living echo of Lara who also carries the blood of his enemy, were to freely choose him, it would offer powerful psychological redemption. This ‘charity’ though plays out like a comeuppance. He made this about repaying a debt. Naturally he is incensed – he is forced to face what he has become. Naturally, he tries to portray the ‘defilement’ as her doing. In this inversion of their positions, Avallac’h shows himself to be the imprisoned one, worn down by a longing that has made him unable to reach for what he actually needs. Being seen as desperate by the object of your desperation is, of course, gruelling.

In sick poetic justice, too, Avallac’h mimics Lara’s own rejection of the elves’ plans. By prioritizing how Ciri comes to him over the prophecy’s most efficient fulfilment, the man who spent centuries judging Lara for valuing personal choice over duty essentially ends up behaving in the same way. By rejecting Ciri's offer at this point, he confirms that the manner in which destiny unfolds matters, not just the outcome. The child alone is not enough. Avallac’h is called to realise that he is following in Lara’s footsteps, making the same error of selfish hope.

‘Oh, I know, I see who you are. You are not the daughter of Lara. You are the daughter of Cregennan. You are a thoughtless, arrogant, selfish Dh’oine, a simply perfect representative of your race, who understands nothing, and must ruin and destroy, besmirch by touch alone, denigrate and defile by thought alone.’

What makes it difficult is his racism.

Ciri’s offer threatens one of the core tenets of his identity: elves and humans are not equal. It pains him to think of Ciri as anything but elven and, as a consequence, his inability to see Ciri for herself lies in that he compartmentalizes. Hard. Ciri is Lara’s daughter (valuable, sacred) but also Cregennan’s get (contemptible, threatening) resulting in cognitive dissonance. When Ciri becomes threatening to the story Avallac’h is telling, when she acts recklessly and stomps on things she should float over, she stops being Lara’s heir and becomes the enemy’s. Reclassifying her, he can feel rage and righteousness instead of longing, desire, shame – all of which force him to question his own premises and heart. Fundamentally he is just confused at wanting what he thinks he should not want since she is prone to falling off the pedestal he is trying to hoist her on.

Othering the Other through idealization or denigration, he can avoid examining himself by focusing on a ‘problem’ to be solved in Ciri. It is totally deluded. Ciri has to be better to make up for the sins of her ancestors, but for Lara he can always make up excuses while anything at all that is Cregennan’ish is just plain doomed. Possessing Ciri sexually would force him to confront that he cannot transform her into another idol, and that he is not that different from his once beloved. He would rather smash the mirror Ciri is holding up in front of him to bits than face that he is a man afraid of risking his heart again, a hypocrite who fears the disease of love’s selfish desire (la maladie d'espoir) that he thinks destroyed Lara and him. To avoid confronting this, he needs a buffer – someone else to do the taking for him.

Which leads us to a tricky crux neurosis: by taking Ciri for himself, Crevan, in his mind, would become the villain of Avallac’h’s personal mythology. His entire moral argument depends on Cregennan having been a selfish thief. This is not how Avallac’h wants to see himself, but ‘Every dream, if dreamed for too long, will turn into a nightmare.’ Even the role of a noble sufferer can become pathological. You have to embrace change to heal. The irony is that Avallac’h is already on his way to becoming Cregennan who stole Lara from him because he is stealing Ciri from Geralt, and from her own story.

The totality of the victim narrative he has going on is, hence, something of a marvel.

Giving Ciri to Auberon’s care is symbolically, if sickly, befitting: the patriarch can reclaim the gift his daughter squandered and Avallac’h can retain the purity of his role and self-perception in this collective psychodrama, while redeeming himself by achieving the elves’ grander goals. Auberon, besides on paper being key for maximally efficient back breeding, presents a voyeuristic solution to his dilemma. Avallac’h sees himself as a noble, long-suffering lover not an obsessive stalker: he loved truly and was wronged, he is protecting Ciri and helping her realize her true identity, he serves destiny and his people rather than a personal fantasy, he is the romantic hero who will ultimately be absolved. Shuffling responsibility onto Auberon’s shoulders allows him to maintain the sense of control that he needs like air and he gets to avoid disintegrating into the messy disaster he actually is. Taking Ciri for himself out of the gate would force him into the role of a villain in this story and that is something he has spent centuries avoiding thinking about (‘Could I have had anything to do with Lara’s defection? Surely not…’).

Should Auberon fail though (which is, let's be honest, likely), Avallac’h suddenly gets a duty-based excuse to desire Ciri himself. Romantic vindication (‘I was the better choice always’), an intact personal mythology (this was not his first choice), and continued victim positioning (he becomes the ‘reluctant’ hero salvaging the situation). It is a really neat self-deception: he gets what he wants while maintaining the fiction that he never wanted it to come to this. Never having to grapple with his complicated desire or face himself and grow.

‘Your ancestor stole my love from me, took her away from me, selfishly and arrogantly took Lara from me.’

There is also the whole Madonna-Whore trap that gets sprung. When Lara chose Cregennan and gave herself ‘out of perverse curiosity’, she transgressed and became a ‘whore.’ Except Avallac’h is unable to think of Lara in this way, particularly since she died, so, instead, he seems to see her as a ‘fallen Madonna’. With Cregennan taking the brunt of the blame. Of course, in reality, Lara was never meant to be virginal. She was meant to have sex and get pregnant, just not with a human. It does not need overstating how dehumanizing and ego-protective this stance is. But it is protective, because Avallac’h also seems to at least intellectually acknowledge that the quality of Lara’s love, while a mistake, was true. In marble and symbol, Avallac’h can appreciate that bond, but emotionally? Lara was taken, corrupted, led astray into her destruction. In his thoughts she remains a tragic and noble figure, victimized by circumstance and Cregennan’s selfishness and short-sightedness. Never the culprit and cause of her own fate. The blame pours entirely onto the human. Invoking her resemblance to Lara, Ciri is effectively suggesting though, that Lara, too, may have casually thrown down in front of just about anyone only to get procreation over with. Both Avallac’h and Auberon see the Elf King’s daughter as a pearl cast in front of pigs, but did it make Lara herself a handout? Why no, no father or lover will swallow such an insult. Ciri’s provocation forces Avallac’h to think of his and Lara’s personal history in a way Crevan does not ever want to remember it; regardless of truth and even should he have ruminated on it in private.

Compounding that insult, Ciri suggests Avallac’h would need to ‘sacrifice himself’ to be intimate with her. It triggers the elf, seeing as he has tried to make Ciri feel like she is worthy; more than humanity and above them. Ciri is protecting herself from the pain of rejection with this, but to him it implies that whatever he may have considered admirable and worthy in Lara, that also exists in Ciri, could be repulsive to him. By acting like she'll 'whore herself to whoever will take her,' Ciri forces him to imagine Lara's choice as equally casual. Heck, he might have thought it such at the time; a woman’s fleeting fancy, something strange not to be taken seriously. But in retrospect, it is unbefitting. And the contamination flows both ways: Ciri's behaviour makes Lara's choice seem base and Lara's choice makes Ciri's seem like inherited corruption of character. Ciri is in an unenviable double-bind with no way of winning. She is ‘a miserable charity’ thanks to Cregennan, but by assuming that her human traits spoil her she is insulting by implying Lara’s daughter could ever in any way be undesirable to him. If Ciri presents herself as desirable, she is presumptuous for thinking humans could be appealing to elves (a fact Crevan knows is true but struggles to admit in himself). But if she notes her undesirability, she is offensive by suggesting her heritage is insufficient to redeem her humanity.

It is a total and utter mess, and he is a person at war with himself.

‘But I shall not permit you, O his worthy daughter, to take the memory of her from me.’

The threat to his memories of Lara only exists if Avallac’h wants Ciri.

‘O his worthy daughter’ does enormous work in trying to create distance, but ‘worthy’ acknowledges Ciri could take Lara’s place, which is precisely what makes her dangerous as Cregennan’s heir. Ciri is capable of tempting Crevan away from the apple island and into something uncertain and new. Cregennan stole Lara by being desirable to her and Ciri threatens to steal Lara’s memory by being desirable to Avallac’h.

If Avallac’h felt nothing for Ciri, then her offer would be insulting but ultimately meaningless; certainly more likely to invite his ridicule and dismissal rather than total loss of composure and dignity. The threat exists because a part of him wants to accept. With his violent response, an unacceptable, threatening impulse that destroys the mask he wears is transformed into its opposite. In the Jungian sense, he is having an encounter with his unintegrated shadow. He must react strongly because her resemblance has him caught. Not Ciri is trying to take Lara away from him, but his own la maladie d’espoir for Ciri, which is already doing away with the past.

The memory he guards is about himself as the eternal, faithful lover. Love legends demand eternal devotion. Tristan cannot love Iseult of the White Hands because he is bound to the Golden-Haired. If Avallac’h can desire Ciri, then he is not Tristan. (He never was for Lara; only in his heart.) Why be a masochist? Because it reassures that his love was transcendent, not ordinary. Everything he has done since would seem pathological instead of tragic otherwise. Of course, love is a pathology. In a strange way, in this perverse commitment to suffering for love, he, not Cregennan, truly embodies Tristan’s archetype. La tristesse. But getting what you want can be the most dangerous thing, and not what you actually need.

Desiring Ciri shifts the focus of his heartache from losing a woman of exceptional nature onto him; all of this becomes about him never getting what he wanted. It becomes ignoble. Desire shatters the symbol he has made of himself and forces him to be a person, which is hard after hundreds of years of being an Amell marble monument. Desire makes him real: a starved, frustrated, jealous, obsessed man. Archetypes are noble, reality frequently sad. Avallac’h’s conscious self resists and wants to remain archetypal, fairy tale-like and comfortable in timelessness where everything is still possible. Only in memory’s frozen moments where the damage has not occurred yet, where Lara is still alive and has not met Cregennan, can she still be his. But it is not realistic in Sapkowski’s story where renewal means destruction of the old in hopes that the new, too, might have its charm and saving grace.

Defending his faithfulness to the corpse of a feeling that trapped him in grief, the Lord of Avalon has ensorcelled himself in that apple-scented space of living death by holding onto a memory of heartbreak instead of allowing it transform and float away. Trade an old legend for a new, living one. By feeling strongly about Ciri, he proves that he has at least crawled out of the tomb. To let go of his shackles would mean to begin healing, but when the wound closes – who is he? Elves are natural embalmers, preservers. Ego-death can be scary. Ciri’s compassion, however, creates the possibility that Avallac’h might survive that death and become something else.

Such is the power of a living legend. At its heart are just persons, changing.

4.2 Blooming Apple Trees

He turned around. Ciri overcame the lump in her throat.
 
‘Avallac’h.’
 
A look.

This is the end of who they were to each other. She has power over him, and can hurt him. He could destroy her, but will not. Neither can pretend the sword of destiny does not have two edges. Ciri forces Avallac’h to crack the chrysalis of bullshit in which he has been marinating and he hates and fears her for it; and wants her like nothing else because of it.

‘Forgive me. I behaved thoughtlessly and shabbily. Forgive me. And, if you can, forget it.’

The witcher girl performs a little miracle.

She apologizes to the proud elf. For he, too, is just another wounded person, not so different from herself. She acknowledges his humanity and takes him as she, too, is – suffering. Passion turns into compassion as she realises he is trapped in this legend like her and that he cannot escape his role despite trying any more than she can escape hers. Briefly, they exit the roles legend has assigned to them, and she sees his wound and he sees the beauty of her humanity.

Ciri makes Avallac’h real in present tense, quite in reverse to how she makes Geralt and Yennefer immortal in legend – she brings Avallac’h, the Lord of the Apple Island, out of the mists of myth and makes him a person again. She breaks his eternal return to suffering, pulling him from frozen time into a new moment. Time matters again.

His attempts at controlling fate were unnecessary because here, through complete loss of control, he receives what he needs: to be seen as worthy of care as Ciri chooses to acknowledge his humanity in spite of everything. From her fury at being humiliated and objectified, she moves to co-suffering with him as victims of their fate. By refusing to dehumanize him, reduce him to an ‘abuser’ despite genuine cause, by moving first in extending a hand across the no man’s land, Ciri sees Crevan as a person – the very thing he has been unable to do for her. Without resentment, without being forced. It is true grace.

Avallac’h responds to grace. Geralt, remember, did not resent him despite having been told his quest is meaningless and getting his face punched in by Crevan’s chums. In these small-seeming kind acts, Ciri and Geralt prove that the Sage has judged humanity hastily, and he responds with kindness in return.

He went over to her and embraced her.
 
‘I’ve already forgotten,’ he said warmly. ‘No, let us not return to that ever again.’

Avallac’h reacts instantly, warmly, and with feeling. Ciri’s gift is spontaneous and made in genuine remorse in a moment of moral growth, and the metaphorical curse the elf labours under snaps. Because freely, after he has acted so shamefully toward her, she has chosen to treat him as someone whose suffering matters. She has broken the narrative he has repeated to himself: that humans can only take and destroy without care. She takes moral responsibility and he, foregoing pride and power games, releases her from any kind of debt toward him as per her request. No conditions, no penance. Because Ciri has unknowingly given Avallac’h what Lara, perhaps, never did: recognition of the harm done to him. And briefly, she, too, is just a young person who acts wisely beyond her years.

Yet an asymmetry remains. He does not reciprocate with an apology of his own in, what you might say, characteristic avoidance. Ciri is morally ahead of him, capable of something the Knowing One is yet to learn, and is that not charming? It is very realistic, too. A seed has been planted and a new spring has come, but the Waste Land is still submerged in ashes.

Their embrace substitutes for words he cannot yet say.

In that moment, Ciri and Avallac’h are able to experience a glimpse of a relationship they could have. However briefly, their reconciliation allows him to imagine a new identity that, of course, is nothing more than the long-forgotten old. Lara’s last message to him. The promise of not returning ‘to that ever again’ we can interpret variously: suppression of feelings awakened or revealed, refusal to let the crudeness define her and him, or the beginning of ego death and letting go of the past. The dynamic that has been must change. It is Ciri who lives and matters now.

Above all, it says: ‘You've shown me kindness despite what I've done to you, and I will remember that.’

Neither has participated in the revival of the legend that binds them authentically. Neither has been able to. But something has ended, something is beginning, and something has happened. In Maladie, Branwen recognizes hers and Morholt’s shared entrapment in how the legend they are part of will change them both: ‘I’ll never find myself again, never find myself as I was. And if you respond with feeling to my love, you too will get lost, vanish… you’ll never again find the old [you].’ If Merlin responds to the Lady’s bitter medicine, this too, eventually, could happen to him.

For if she can see him like this and choose love over hate anyway, maybe there is hope? Overwhelming hope – the Waste Land discovering it can bloom again.

5 Grace

I saw a boat without a rudder tossed by breakers, a boat with a high, curved prow, with a mast decorated with garlands of flowers.
I smelled apples.
—Maladie

It was a strange boat. Ciri had never seen one like it, even on Skellige, where she had spent a long time examining everything that was capable of floating on the water. It had a very high, slender prow, carved in the shape of a key.
—Lady of the Lake

To the longing melody of the elf’s pipes, in a boat without oars, they glide down Easnadh, drifting further and further from dreamy Tir ná Lia. Bridge after bridge passes overhead. Some time later, only after something important has happened, Ciri will take this route again alone. Called by her destiny in a legend that is not yet their legend.

In Maladie, to board the boat without a rudder means surrendering to the legend’s use for you, without knowing where it will lead. The boat that smells of apples comes for those, too, who are consumed in the legend’s service. It takes them into the mists that surround Avalon where they can dissolve into dreams. Had Ciri remained in Faërie, she too would have slowly dissolved, losing her person in the service of a love legend not her own.

The elf made himself more comfortable, put his pipes to his lips and gave himself over entirely to his music.

Only Ciri, through a good deed, forces Crevan to see the hypocrisy and error of his pretend self-abnegation: you can enter your love legend properly or you will destroy it entirely. In the gears of myth, it is the only way to exist for your own sake.

When they embrace, two plot functions recognize each other as people. Like Morholt and Branwen, who internalized how the legend reduced them but act with decency toward each other in spite of it. This allows them to enter the love legend authentically later. Like Iseult of the White Hands, wronged by Tristan’s malady, who extends grace to the dying man by lying that the distant sails are white (marking the coming of Iseult the Golden-Haired) when in truth she cannot tell their colour. Ciri’s compassion follows this pattern. And Avallac’h’s…?

‘I’ve also noticed that the current has borne us quite far from Tir ná Lia. Time to take up the oars. Which I can’t see here, as a matter of fact.’
‘Because there aren’t any.’ Avallac’h raised an arm, twisted his hand and snapped his fingers. The boat stopped. It rested for a while in place, and then began to move against the current.

Just like Merlin, who teaches the Lady everything, including the means to bind and leave him, Avallac’h shows Ciri the way out of Tir ná Lia. It is archetypal. Ironically, by doing this before their confrontation, Avallac’h is also throwing the dice in earnest this time: if he gives Ciri the means to leave and she figures it out and stays anyway (‘Assuming you don’t decide to stay. With the child.’), it would prove a genuine choice. But in that moment they could also simply keep drifting, the elf and the girl with stars in her eyes. Except he does not yet have his reason to trust and surrender to fate. Reversing course against the current, the Fisher King demonstrates his ailment. Although… Perhaps he simply knows: this is not yet the right moment. Something must happen first. And it happens.

Winning the Grail, who is a Woman, begins with a question: ‘What do you need?’ By letting Ciri go to Geralt and Yennefer, Avallac’h acknowledges that the love legend requiring completion in this story is not his. It is a selfless gesture to which he would not have arrived without Ciri’s kindness. He steps out of the role of the puppeteer and finally submits to the Demiurge’s Plot, letting the story unfold as it must. Avallac’h, who never could let Lara go, who never could trust fate, lets Ciri go. In a symbolic sense, he sacrifices his need for hers. Trusting now, perhaps, that if fate wills it, they will meet again.

I would not like to theorize that the forerunner of the search for the Grail was the hunt for a large wild pig. I don't want to be so trivial. I prefer – following Parnicki and Dante – to identify the Grail with the real goal of the great effort of mythical heroes. I prefer to identify the Grail with Olwen, from whose feet as she walked, white clovers grew.
 
I think that the Grail is a woman. To find her and win her, to understand her it is worth sacrificing a lot of time and effort. And that’s the moral.
—A. Sapkowski, The World of King Arthur

When the center of the heart is touched, and a sense of compassion awakened with another person or creature, and you realize that you and that other are in some sense creatures of the one life in being.
 
The birth of spiritual man out of the animal man […] happens when you awaken at the level of the heart to compassion, com-passion, shared suffering: experienced participation in the suffering of another person. That's the beginning of humanity.
—J. Campbell, The Power of Myth

It is not without reason that Andrzej Sapkowski’s Grail is not a lifeless chalice but a living being. The moral of the series, if there is a moral, is that humanity awakens through the heart’s capacity to love the Other. Only love for another person can surmount the love of power. What heals the wounds of the Graceless Land, orders the universe and shows the way, is love. Only desire to do good for another person for their own sake can transform and break through the barrenness of a maimed, lonely heart, and help overcome a fixation with one’s own suffering at any cost to the rest. Love, and lack of love, is the principal malady of Sapkowski’s world.

The Grail romance is a spiritual adventure of self-transcendence. A seeking, a quest. Ultimately, the seekers of the Grail are looking for rejuvenation and understanding within their own souls, but that is never accomplished in isolation; only in relation to others. The quest is for leading us through the dark forest of life and its purpose is to show how to become whole and functional in spite of the violence done to us. It is an adventure in which echoes a primeval longing for a missing half, someone and something that balances and matches us, and shows us the way.

Only in its perversions does the quest becomes the hunt for the body of a young woman. The ability to give life has associated the Grail with a woman’s womb for a long time. It is the most ancient mystery – the origin of life. Only those who view its salvation as a Power to be harnessed instead of witnessed for its beauty lose the chance at gaining either. For the Grail above Grails, truly, is the beloved’s nature which will become the Seeker’s true source of power and courage. For the Grail is a Woman – the symbol of love and an eternal longing for beginnings that everyone seeks. But to find and win her, she must be treated as a person, not as a means for what she represents.

The Celtic legends on which the adventure is based are about the love lives of the Gods. While Arthur sends his knights to find the Grail, Morgan le Fay, his shadow self, is trying to steal the sword Excalibur, the great symbol of masculine energy.^[21] Both are looking for something that is missing in themselves.^[22] Like Geralt, like Ciri. The quest is always deeply personal. Sapkowski’s fondness of paganism is known, showing in the symbolism of the ‘double-edged sword’ metaphor. Sword and Grail. Anima and Animus. Masculine and Feminine. Fear and Desire. Good and Evil. The path the Grail shows is weaving a way through the middle, not letting opposites dominate. Because everything in the field of time and space is dual, oppositional, and divisive. Except for the best things, the most correct things, which transcend opposites because in them manifests eternity.^[23] Eternity lies beyond dual categories of thought, and love, its herald, always stands beyond good and evil.

For Ciri herself, this stage in her bildungsroman pushes moral growth: on Tarn Mira, she restrained herself in taking vengeance and in Tir ná Lia, she learns to extend grace to the undeserving. In herself, she must reconcile the opposite aspects, the masculine and feminine, the knight and the Grail. And so must every other character connected to her. Because the retelling of the Grail myth that seems to resonate the most with Andrzej Sapkowski is Wolfram von Eschenbach’s.

‘Let's look for the Grail within ourselves. Because the Grail is nobility, love of one’s neighbour, and the ability to have compassion. True chivalric ideals, towards which it is worth and necessary to look for the right path, break through the wild forest, where, and I quote, "there is neither road nor path." Everyone must find their own path. But it is not true that there is only one path. There are many of them. Infinitely many.
 
‘Parsifal feels sorry for the Fisher King. Parsifal is the Fool who knows one thing - the King is suffering. […] Humanity is important. Heart.
 
‘I prefer the humanism of Wolfram von Eschenbach and Terry Gilliam to the idiosyncrasy of bitter Cistercian scribes and Bernard of Clairvaux…’
—Andrzej Sapkowski, The World of King Arthur

Love legends are perverse because we seek to possess the object of our love, wounding ourselves from the get go. Ideological woo rarely helps. Woman, who is the Grail who is the Goddess, the Great Mother Earth, ‘has to be loved - loved physically, erotically.’^[24] But Lara’s and Cregennan’s legend is symbolically still remembered for unity and compassion with the Other. It is the end goal of romantic love.

Among the Grail Seekers, Avallac’h’s position is unique in comparison to others who fail, but also to Geralt, who succeeds. His journey of self-transcendence starts with a wound in romantic love’s first phase and in such love eros and amor benevolentiae always clash. The love that transfers to Ciri through this wound is wounded romantic love that never had the chance to mature and become compassionate as in long-term relationships. It makes his journey especially arduous, because amorous love is always initially blind to the beloved – the Other – but it can mutate; even in healthy marriages, though, then the tension never fully resolves. In this, Crevan differs greatly from those Grail Seekers whose investment in Ciri is purely instrumental, but also from Geralt whose love is parental. Avallac'h is caught in love's most challenging form. It makes his journey harder, but possibly more transformative should it succeed.

Ciri’s compassion calls forth the possibility of metanoia in Avallac’h. She does not cure him but she breaks his paralysis and makes healing possible. By not rejecting him for what he has become, she gives Avallac’h hope. In Ciri, he now has a reason to try – a new Purpose.

They cross into unknown territory after their moment. Sealing it off does not erase that something dangerous happened: she saw the heart of her captor and opened her own heart to him. Next morning, Ciri avoids him, going straight to the stables without breakfasting with him, and later he avoids her. The premonitory dream she experiences that night could well be her own conscience warning her; the part of her that knows that she must go. That she cannot lose herself inside a dream that is not hers. Narrative necessity calls in; the Plot intervening to remind Ciri that in spite of what she has experienced, to escape is her task, not re-entanglement in the mire of an elven love story.

Disappearing from the rest of the chapter, Avallac’h’s physical absence breaks the psychological tether – the witchcraft Ciri had promised to outwit – that is holding her captive in relationship to him. His absence enables her eventual escape because it frees her to act.

It does not undo, however, the influence he holds over Ciri and the narrative. He is invoked constantly by Eredin and Auberon, by the unicorns, and in Ciri’s thoughts despite never appearing again. What needed to be said was said in the peristyle. The Plot meanders on. By making him absent while keeping him in Ciri’s thoughts though, we can see what Ciri cannot: she has become emotionally invested in the person everyone is warning her about. Ciri does not believe either Eredin or Auberon with respect to Crevan. She has arrived at her own private understanding of who Avallac’h is and is sticking with her gut, and the author does not say whether she is right or wrong to do so.

She suspected the palace walls had ears. The next day she couldn’t rid herself of the ambiguous looks. She felt sneers behind her back, listened out for whispers.
 
Avallac’h was nowhere to be found. He knows, she thought, he knows what happened and is avoiding me. In advance, before I got up, he sailed or rode somewhere far away with his gilded elf-woman. He doesn’t want to talk to me, doesn’t want to admit his entire plan has come to nothing.
—Lady of the Lake

The morning after Auberon intimidates her with Avallac’h and his laboratory, Ciri is more bothered by not being able to find him than by the threat of artificial insemination. Bitter and hurt, she makes up a scenario: he is avoiding me and went to her instead. Having put me in this situation he’s now off with his beautiful lover while I must deal with the shame alone. Rightfully indignant, yes, but also revealingly insecure. It bothers Ciri that Avallac’h might be with another woman. The gilded elf-woman becomes a symbol of her growing fear of being replaceable in his life. That sugary tart who belongs and is everything Ciri is not in this place. Her captor’s romantic life should not matter, but it does, because he is no longer just her captor. After what happened between him and her, his absence, in her mind, is not about politics or broader schemes, and certainly not about a potential threat to herself – it is about him and her.

Where are you? Why aren't you here? Are you avoiding me? Are you with her instead?

From the category of ‘captor’, Avallac’h has moved into the category of ‘complicated person I have unresolved emotional business with.’ She is not afraid of the laboratory because their exchanges have convinced her that ‘he won’t.’ Ciri does not believe Avallac’h would do that to her. She is attached. It is either dangerous naïveté about her trauma bonding or very insightful, and the text leaves it open. It also sets up that when she escapes, his absence is notable. In a cheap romance, after a moment like this, a misunderstood hero would do a 180: would break the lady out of the chains he helped put her in and run off with her. Ciri does not fantasize about anything like this. She knows only that she cannot predict anything here and, having no way of knowing how long it might take for an elf to act, the only sensible move is to run. Except the elf has already acted. He has shown her the way out and he has made himself scarce.

It is wrong to say there is nothing romantic about Ciri’s and Avallac’h’s relationship in The Witcher books. Its roots are imbued in a desperate need to redo a love legend, and, by way of a wounded old elf and a scarred young woman, we have another variation of Beauty and the Beast. It is uncertain which one is not the Beast. Choosing him as the romantic figure with whom to affirm a fate Lara refused, Ciri re-awakens the fairy tale foundational to The Witcher cycle, underscoring chosen bonds of destiny. Attraction exists in Avallac’h’s suppressed desire and the text supports reading Ciri’s need to be desired and her emotional investment as nascent attraction. There is the possibility of romance here that is acknowledged but foreclosed in present circumstances. Yet in this way exactly, through the recognition of each other’s (non)humanity and need, the relationship derives its narrative power and tension from what could still be in a different time and place.

It is not romantic in the cheap sense. It is romantic in the original Austenian meaning of ‘romantic’ – ‘this is beautiful, this is tragic, this is grotesque, this stirs emotion’ even should it not be something you would be comfortable seeing played out on your doorstep. It is about the mythology and the grandiosity of human connection writ large. It is about playing with the ID in ways that result in the characters having a profound, ongoing effect on each other. That is the only way anything at all changes in Sapkowski’s world. In this deeply Austenian view, we come to know ourselves better and have the chance of becoming better versions of ourselves as a consequence of relationships that are romantic.

The sails at the end of Maladie foretelling Tristan’s fate remain ambiguously dirty. Similarly here. They succeed in saving the legend in only one sense: by creating the foundation for the start of a new one. Ciri does not fix him, but she leaves the door open to the possibility. ‘We are like Tristan and Iseult,’ says Branwen, but do they really want to be exactly like the tragic lovers? That it is not their legend might be a blessing. Until then though, Ciri will ride her black horse through black night with a bright sword in her hand. A legend that she must end is ending, but it is not this one.

The Lady of the Lake does not only imprison Merlin. In many versions she also loves him, learns from him, helps him. The imprisonment is sometimes mutual, sometimes a sanctuary, sometimes a tomb and sometimes a womb. Fables admit no limits to possibilities. By submitting to that hope in indeterminacy, one can escape the smell of apples and live on. As a result of their connection, Avallac’h’s inability to deal with his grief might not have to become his people’s destiny. But we are watching Ciri’s legend, not his, and so we do not get a resolution. For Avallac’h, this is the story of his release from Time’s Glass Tower and his binding in a chrysalis that will end up determining his fate. Sapkowski portrays him with nuance enough that his stepping out of Ciri’s way may become a silver lining, but we don’t know if Ciri’s healing magic worked. The author leaves him hope. Considering Crevan’s actions in The Witcher, it is a remarkable kindness.

Nothing but nothing in the books proves Ciri is not the Saviour. Power does not save the world, but people can save people. Embracing her, Avallac’h at last touches flesh instead of marble and has the chance to realize this. In The Mists of Avalon, when Galahad kneels and drinks out of the Holy Grail, of the great relic of the Old World, he, full of joy, looks into the light, the Great Light which is Infinite and in which all shall become One. And falls cold onto the ground. Death comes for those who touch the holy thing unprepared. As Ciri spells death to those who touch her person heedlessly.^[25] And yet Ciri also bears the power to restore life and take one through the gate of immortality. What is eternity – Avallac’h’s speciality and responsibility?

Woman […] represents the totality of what can be known. The hero is the one who comes to know. […] And if he can match her import, the two, the knower and the known, will be released from every limitation. […] By deficient eyes she is reduced to inferior states; by the evil eye of ignorance she is spellbound to banality and ugliness. But she is redeemed by the eyes of understanding. The hero who can take her as she is, […] with the kindness and assurance she requires, is potentially the king, the incarnate god, of her created world.
 
The meeting with the goddess (who is incarnate in every woman) is the final test of the talent of the hero to win the boon of love (charity: amor fati), which is life itself enjoyed as the encasement of eternity.
—J. Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces

The Knowing One does not perish. He knows what the Grail is and has known all along. Has died for Her once already. But ‘tis spring now. Only Crevan has angered fate a little and must repent; work on himself in his esplumoir.

Good and Evil, Light and Darkness, Order and Chaos? They are but symbols; in reality no such polarity exists! Brightness and Gloom are in each of us, a little of one and a little of the other.
—The Tower of the Swallow
 
‘Are there sorcerers in this world? You know, people who practise the magical arts. Mages. Knowing Ones.’
‘There’s Merlin. And Morgana. But Morgana is evil.’
‘And Merlin?’
‘Average.’
—Lady of the Lake

The Swallow does bring rebirth and rejuvenation to the elves, but it is impossible to heal the whole world. Only the Waste Land of the (non)human heart.

So tread toward the light, literally or metaphorically it is usually the right way.

Love is light.

Post-script

Where does it leave CD Projekt Red’s adaptation? In a good place.

Footnotes