Sword of Destiny — The Witcher, Book 2

Sword of Destiny is the second of the two Witcher short story collections that precede the main novel saga. It is slightly longer than The Last Wish and covers the period of Geralt’s life in which the series’ central concern — Ciri — first enters the picture.

The concept of destiny is the book’s recurring theme. In Sapkowski’s world, destiny is not metaphorical: it is a real force, binding people to one another through connections that cannot be predicted or explained but consistently prove accurate. Geralt is famously sceptical of destiny throughout his life, yet finds himself drawn repeatedly into its workings.

Ciri appears in the title story — a girl who, through a set of circumstances involving the Law of Surprise, Geralt has a claim on. He refuses to take her. The story ends. But the series is constructed around the fact that refusing a destiny does not extinguish it.

The collection also contains some of the most technically accomplished individual stories Sapkowski wrote. “A Little Sacrifice” examines romance through the lens of a mermaid and a human and is notably more tender than most of the series. “The Bounds of Reason” brings together a group of witchers in a scenario that functions as both monster hunt and meditation on cooperation between professionals who work alone.

Sword of Destiny is not optional reading before the novels. It establishes Ciri and the emotional groundwork that Blood of Elves builds on, and readers who skip it will find the novel’s opening less resonant than it should be.

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Andrzej Sapkowski and the Witcher’s Origins

Andrzej Sapkowski came to fiction late and from an unusual direction. Born in Łódź in 1948, he worked for years as a sales representative in the foreign-trade business and was already in his forties when he entered a short-story contest run by the Polish science-fiction magazine Fantastyka with a tale called “The Witcher.” It placed third, but it introduced Geralt of Rivia and launched what would become the defining work of modern Polish fantasy. Sword of Destiny (originally Miecz przeznaczenia, 1992) was the second collection to gather these early stories, following The Last Wish. Sapkowski’s witcher tales were a deliberate reaction against both Tolkienesque high fantasy and the sanitised fairy tales of his childhood: he took familiar folkloric figures — mermaids, djinn, dragons, cursed princesses — and dragged them into a morally grey world where the monster is rarely the most dangerous thing in the room. The CD Projekt Red video games and the later Netflix adaptation drew global audiences to the saga, but the prose stories remain the source, and Sword of Destiny is where the saga’s emotional engine is first switched on.

The Stories and Their Range

The collection’s six stories show Sapkowski’s range better than any single novel could. “The Bounds of Reason” opens with a dragon hunt that becomes a sly commentary on greed and the gap between legend and reality, and it introduces the formidable dragon Villentretenmerth. “A Shard of Ice” turns on the painful triangle between Geralt, the sorceress Yennefer, and a rival mage, treating jealousy with adult seriousness rare in genre fiction. “Eternal Flame” is a lighter, almost comic outing involving the doppler Dudu and the merchant Dainty Biberveldt. “A Little Sacrifice” — often singled out as the finest thing Sapkowski has written — reworks Hans Christian Andersen’s “Little Mermaid” into a melancholy meditation on the compromises love demands, framed by the poet Dandelion’s romantic misadventures. The closing title story, “Sword of Destiny,” is the hinge of the entire saga.

Ciri and the Weight of Destiny

What separates this collection from its predecessor is Ciri. In “Sword of Destiny,” Geralt encounters the silver-haired girl in the haunted forest of Brokilon and learns that she is his Child of Surprise — promised to him years earlier through the Law of Surprise, the old custom by which a man may claim “that which you already have but do not know.” Geralt’s lifelong scepticism about destiny collides here with something he cannot reason away. He walks away from Ciri, twice, and the saga that follows in Blood of Elves and the subsequent novels is the long consequence of a bond he tried to refuse. The theme that animates the whole book is that destiny in Sapkowski’s world is not comfort but obligation: it binds people together whether or not they consent, and it exacts a price for evasion.

Geralt and Yennefer

The other current running through Sword of Destiny is the relationship between Geralt and Yennefer, which Sapkowski develops with a frankness about resentment, dependency, and incompatibility that most romantic fantasy avoids. They love each other and they wound each other, and the collection refuses to resolve the tension neatly. Read alongside the Ciri material, these stories assemble the unconventional family — witcher, sorceress, and destined child — whose fate the novels will pursue across five volumes.

Where to Place It and Who Should Read It

Sword of Destiny belongs immediately after The Last Wish and before the first novel, Blood of Elves. It is not strictly the second-published book in every market, and its stories do not run in tight chronological order, but reading it in this position gives the saga’s opening its full emotional charge. The collection is best suited to readers who have already met Geralt in The Last Wish and want the groundwork laid before committing to the longer novels; newcomers should not start here, since several stories assume familiarity with the world’s rules and with characters like Dandelion and Yennefer. The reward for reading in order is considerable: by the final page you understand why the rest of the saga matters.

Our rating: 4.4/5 — Sword of Destiny is the more emotionally resonant of the two Witcher short story collections. It introduces Ciri and the concept of destiny that will drive the novels, and contains several of the series’ finest individual stories. Read after The Last Wish.