The Last Wish — Introducing The Witcher

The Frame and the Witcher

The Last Wish is a short story collection framed by a narrative — titled “The Voice of Reason” and broken into interludes between the tales — of Geralt recovering from injuries in the temple of Melitele, recalling his past contracts and encounters. The framing is thin by design — it exists to link the stories and feed the reader essential background rather than to generate its own drama — but the stories themselves need no excuse. For the uninitiated, a witcher is a mutant: a child subjected to brutal alchemical “Trials” that grant superhuman reflexes, slowed ageing, cat’s eyes, and immunity to many toxins, all in the service of a single trade — hunting the monsters that plague Sapkowski’s world for coin. Witchers are feared and despised even as they are needed, sterile outcasts moving through a society that wants their services but not their company, and that tension is the engine of Geralt’s character.

Fairy Tales, Subverted

What Sapkowski does in these pages is take European fairy tales — filtered through his own Polish and Slavic folklore — and examine what they would actually look like if the world they describe were real and morally complicated. A princess cursed to turn into a striga at night is not a monster to be slain but a victim to be cured — and the cure requires Geralt to survive a night locked in a crypt with her. A djinn appears in a story that echoes Aladdin, but the wishes anyone makes reveal character and consequence rather than granting uncomplicated desires. Snow White arrives, but the dwarves are thieves, the girl a psychopath, and the Prince’s interest something other than romantic.

The Moral Greyness of a Monster Hunter

Sapkowski is consistently interested in the gap between the story people tell about a situation and the situation itself. Geralt operates in that gap. He is a professional — hired to solve problems — and the stories repeatedly show how the problem as presented and the problem as it actually exists are rarely the same thing. The collection’s sharpest exploration of this is “The Lesser Evil,” in which Geralt is caught between a vengeful outlaw and the sorcerer hunting her, and learns that choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil — a decision that earns him the bitter nickname “the Butcher of Blaviken.” Geralt professes neutrality and claims to feel nothing, yet the stories keep catching him acting out of a buried decency he would never admit to, and that contradiction is what makes him one of fantasy’s most enduring protagonists.

Yennefer, the Djinn, and Destiny

The collection’s title story is also its most consequential, because it describes Geralt and Yennefer of Vengerberg’s first meeting. When Geralt and his bard companion Dandelion accidentally release a djinn from a sealed vessel, the chaos brings them to the sorceress Yennefer, who schemes to harness the genie’s power for herself. To save her life, Geralt spends his final wish binding his fate to hers — a magical entanglement that complicates everything between them ever after, and seeds the great tortured romance of the whole series. The stories also introduce the recurring idea of the Law of Surprise and destiny, the thread that will eventually tie Geralt to the child Ciri at the heart of the saga.

A World of Wit and Texture

Beyond the plots, what makes the collection so moreish is its voice. Sapkowski writes with a dry, sardonic humour that cuts against the genre’s usual solemnity, much of it carried by Dandelion (Jaskier), the vain, cowardly, irrepressibly charming bard whose songs turn Geralt’s grim contracts into popular legend — and who embodies the book’s running interest in how stories get spun from messy reality. The world-building is delivered with an economy that never stops for exposition: the Northern Kingdoms and the looming empire of Nilfgaard, the politically powerful sorceresses, the witcher’s tools of the trade — the silver sword for monsters and steel for men, the simple hand-gestures called Signs, the medallion that quivers near magic — all emerge naturally through incident rather than info-dump. It is a Continent that feels lived-in and morally muddy, where the true monsters are frequently human and the literal monsters frequently sympathetic, and Sapkowski trusts the reader to navigate the greys without a guide.

The Right Place to Start

The Last Wish is not a long book, and it is the correct place to start with the Witcher regardless of whether you’ve come from CD Projekt Red’s acclaimed video games or Netflix’s series with Henry Cavill — both of which draw heavily on this material. Originally published in Polish in 1993, it launched a saga that has become a global phenomenon, and it remains, on its own merits, one of the most inventive short-story collections in modern fantasy. The framing device is functional rather than gripping, and readers who crave long-form immersion may wish each story ran deeper, but as an introduction to a character, a world, and a sensibility, it is close to ideal. Newcomers drawn in by the games or the show will find the Geralt they love here in his original form — wittier, stranger, and more morally serious on the page than any adaptation has quite managed to capture.

Our rating: 4.4/5 — The perfect entry point to the Witcher and a genuinely excellent collection in its own right: sardonic, morally complex fairy tales anchored by one of fantasy’s great antiheroes.

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