Sword of Destiny

“Most of the beautiful stories don’t have beautiful endings because destiny is stronger than love,” Arabic Wisdom.

Sword of Destiny is the second volume of The Witcher saga, which began with The Last Wish, and continues here to present episodic tales packed with irony and social criticism while subverting fairy tales and developing the protagonist, the witcher Geralt of Rivia, around a strong main theme: the fight against taxes, death, and a broken heart – or, more specifically, against everything unavoidable in life.

Geralt wants to prove that his future is not set in stone, that there’s nothing predetermined, that he has a say in what happens in his life, and so also the responsibility to build it correctly. The narrative frames this conflict around his personal and professional life, focusing on his impossible love story with the sorceress Yennefer, and on the witchers’ tradition of recruiting special children.

Geralt’s relationship with Yennefer is the first to be questioned. In the opening tale, for example, a character already tells the sorceress, “It is written all over your faces, I don’t even have to try to read your thoughts. You were made for each other, you and the Witcher. But nothing will come of it. Nothing. I’m sorry.” Geralt’s main antagonist, therefore, is not the monsters he battles or the society he avoids and despises, but destiny itself. The events that transpire around him are fraught with fatalism: some things are meant to be, while others… are not.

Geralt, however, is not okay with that, so even though he fears the hands of fate (or, more specifically, its sword), he wants to face it head-on and cease its influence on him. The witcher, however, knows that to defy one’s destiny is to confront the conformism inherent to the concept, which can be a far more complicated feat than beheading mandrakes and banishing werewolves. For destiny is a comfortable idea; it makes things less painful to process. Because when you accept that things didn’t work out with someone simply because it was “not meant to be”, you remove personal responsibility from the equation; it’s the equivalent of saying, “there was nothing that could be done,” when there were very well things that could have been done. There were lots of things. Someone was just unwilling.

The first story, The Bounds of Reason, is a sarcastic adventure in which Geralt joins an eclectic group of hunters set to kill a dragon for a young king. It focuses on the party banter, with various fantasy tropes – such as the unscrupulous mercenaries, honorable paladins, and sensible druids – being satirically examined while they discuss their worldview. The narration is also profoundly ironic, mirroring Geralt’s disdain for society: when a character tells a guard that he deserves a promotion for not accepting a bribe, the narrator jokes that the guard had a professional future precisely because he would eventually accept a larger one (the guy would feel right at home in Rio de Janeiro).

But the most important bit in this story is how Geralt and Yennefer act in the face of increasingly strange situations: since modifying one’s destiny is, by definition, impossible (for the very the concept of fate removes our free will), it becomes fascinating to notice how they cling to the existence of mythical monsters, yearning to meet creatures out of fairy tales – for their existence would prove that sometimes the impossible may be indeed possible. So, maybe they can conquer destiny, after all. Maybe they can be together. Maybe there’s hope yet for them (there isn’t).

For the next tale reinforces the implacability of the witcher’s antagonist. A Shard of Ice develops his love for Yennefer, testing it when he encounters a powerful wizard who also has a thing for her. The stage for the likely duel between the two men is effectively set: their hostility only grows with each passing page while we get to know Geralt’s rival a bit better – who turns out to be an upstanding, honest man, easily a better person than the witcher – which only increases the tension by making us cheer for both figures (or for none, as they’re dueling for a woman as if she had no say in the matter. So your mileage may vary). Nevertheless, the sense of helplessness present in the climax works very well precisely because it’s also linked to the book’s main conflict: the idea that we’re helpless against what’s meant to be.

The next two stories are Eternal Flame and A Little Sacrifice. The first is more concerned with developing the witcher than the book’s main theme, although it ends up being somewhat redundant. In the story, Geralt finds himself chasing a doppelganger that has taken the form of a merchant. The real merchant has hired the witcher to capture the creature before the city guard confiscates his possessions and puts him in jail. Eternal Flame’s big question, then, is about Geralt’s code of honor, which doesn’t allow him to kill sentient monsters. This refusal is well-developed here, especially when the doppelganger takes the form of Geralt himself, and the following discussion hints at how this personal code may come from how the witcher views himself. So, the problem is that such discussions had already been well-explored in the first short story, in which Geralt also refuses to slay a monster and discusses his reasons.

A Little Sacrifice, on the other hand, proves to be an essential chapter in understanding Geralt’s journey. This time he’s employed by a prince to find out what caused the deaths of several fishermen and, as he proceeds with his investigation, a love story between said prince and a mermaid is developed in the background, with each party demanding the other a sacrifice (just a little one) for the sake of their relationship: the prince wants her to leave the sea and become human – we’re playing with The Little Mermaid here –, while the mermaid wishes he would become a triton instead, relinquishing the crown (“If he really desires me, he must have a tail, fins and everything a normal merman has. Otherwise I don’t want to know him!”).

In other words, we have a relationship where both parties demand great things from the other but are unwilling to give anything themselves. For them both, the relationship is a one-way street: it’s for the other, and the other alone, the task of proving their love. Geralt witnesses the conflict with a melancholic stance, wondering if he would be able to act differently from them if he were ever to be put in the same position by Yennefer: he loves her, yes, but how much of that love is only about him, how it makes him feel? This melancholy fits perfectly with the gloomy, pessimistic tone of the coda, in which his friend Jaskier (in this translation, he’s called Dandelion) reflects on the fate of a troubadour who was interested in the witcher.

The fifth short story, which lends its title to the book, intensifies the focus on Geralt’s profession when he finds himself having to protect a little princess, who has been lost in a dangerous and forbidden forest, where dryads slaughter any humans they see, regardless of their social position (kudos for the dryads) and age (shame, dryads). The struggle against fate is openly discussed by the characters, who explore the subject by pointing out the hypocrisy of a man who constantly expresses his revolt against destiny but, at the same time, has, for several short stories, done nothing but complain about his inability to act.

Finally, Something More concludes the main discussion by bringing back an important tale from the previous book and forcing Geralt to face the prospect that fate, implacable as it is, might also have reserved a gift for him.

Compared to The Last Wish, there were some positive changes in Sword of Destiny, regarding structure. The book is still organized like a collection of short stories, but the chapters that served as an irrelevant connection between each one have disappeared in favor of a chronological narrative, which provides cohesion to the narrative in a much less intrusive way. In addition to that, the presence of Jaskier in all stories is also a positive aspect, since he serves as a necessary comic relief that balances out their melancholic tone. The book’s main problem, then, now lies in its insistence on explaining the meaning of the already obvious titles. In A Shard of Ice, for example, Geralt and Yennefer reflect that the truth is… “a shard of ice” on a tiresome number of occasions. It’s both repetitive and condescending, especially because it happens in each short story. Many times.

Nevertheless, Sword of Destiny is a book that develops its main theme effectively throughout six great short stories, which together represent a single struggle against fate. In the end, Geralt emerges as a tragic figure with a journey that is considerably melancholic and pessimistic.

May 27, 2025.

Review originally published in Portuguese on May 17, 2015.