Blood of Elves

Each of Ciri’s dreams is a combination of repressed memory, prophetic vision, and highly imagistic nightmares. Her dreams also feature many of the same images and image patterns, like the black knight and a staircase descending into an abyss. The black knight represents the fear Ciri has felt ever since the Massacre of Cintra, while a recurring sound of horses’ hooves is the only sense-memory Ciri has of her escape. When Triss enters Ciri’s mind, instead of the wall of fire Ciri saw at Cintra, she sees a great chasm filled with smoke and a red glow deep within it. It seems the fires that once surrounded Ciri now fill the chasm, possibly representing how deeply she buried those memories. Later in the novel, the smoky chasm becomes an abyss Ciri enters by descending a staircase. Yennefer induces a trance in which Ciri sees that staircase covered in blood and Geralt on the stairs beside her, urging her to keep moving. The descriptive language in every dream sequence is precise and straightforward, suggesting these dreams embody the most basic elements of what haunts Ciri. When she envisions what might be the future, like Geralt on the stairs or Yennefer in chains, sights and sounds from Ciri’s past swiftly interrupt, preventing her from seeing anything more than brief glimpses and thus illustrating how her trauma may hinder her going forward.

The interstitial sections between chapters feature excerpts from fictional texts written by various persons in the Witcher world. Some are by characters present in the novel, like Tissaia de Vries, while others are quotations or excerpts from characters who appear in stories preceding the events of the novel. These fictional texts serve as framing elements that prepare the reader for what follows in the next chapter. For example, an excerpt from Hen Gedymdeith’s Elves and Humans details the arrival of the first humans and their early encounters with elves, and the succeeding chapter focuses on the racial tension between humans and nonhumans. Before Chapter 5, when Geralt hunts the aeschna in Oxenfurt, the interstitial passage includes an excerpt from Monstrum stating that witchers extort ignorant and vulnerable peasants. From a narratological standpoint, the incorporation of fictional texts within the novel offers the reader additional exposition, expanding the storyworld in ways that dialogue or straight narration cannot achieve. These “books within a book” also enhance the believability of Sapkowski’s world-building; these are books the characters read or snippets of conversation they hear, and including them gestures towards the scope of the novel’s world.