Discover why The Witcher 3: The Last Wish is the perfect prequel, exploring Geralt’s origins, key characters, and the story that sets the stage for his legendary journey.
CD Projekt Red revealed Songs of the Past this month at gamescom, The Witcher 3 expansion. There is also Ciri-led Witcher 4 already in production that sparked an online discussion about the book ‘The Last Wish’ which is the origin story – the Wild Hunt is built on. The book is a collection of short stories published in 1993.
There is a reason why fans talk about it now, it helps you understand the emotional history behind some of the biggest moments in the game. So some suggest reading it before playing a game or some say read it after so it will be more interesting.
Wild Hunt released on May 19, 2015, and went on to win more than 250 Game of the Year awards. It’s still one of the most replayed RPGs on the market a decade later, which is exactly why CD Projekt Red keeps feeding it new content instead of letting it rest — Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine both landed in 2015 and 2016, and now Songs of the Past is coming to close out the trilogy of expansions. For a game built almost entirely on the idea that your past choices and Geralt’s catch up with you, it makes sense that new players are asking where that past actually started.
It didn’t start with the game. Andrzej Sapkowski, a Polish former economist turned fantasy writer, published his first Geralt short story in 1986 and collected the earliest ones into The Last Wish (Ostatnie życzenie) in 1993 — more than twenty years before CD Projekt Red touched the material.
Gollancz published the UK edition in June 2007, with a US edition from Orbit following in 2008, translated by Danusia Stok. So when people call it “the perfect prequel,” they don’t mean Sapkowski wrote it as a companion piece to a video game that didn’t exist yet. They mean it’s the actual literary starting point of everything that follows — books, games, and the Netflix show alike.
It’s six novella-length short stories, wrapped in a framing narrative called “The Voice of Reason,” which is itself split into seven short parts scattered through the book. The frame is simple: Geralt, badly wounded after a fight, is recovering at the Temple of Melitele under the priestess Nenneke, and each time the story cuts back to the temple, it triggers a flashback that becomes the next full story.
It’s a structure that rewards picking the book up in short sessions — you can read one story, stop, and not lose the thread, which is rare for fantasy fiction and part of why it works so well for people used to console gaming in bursts.
The six stories, in the order they appear, are:
None of them require you to have read anything else first. That’s deliberate — this is Sapkowski introducing his own world to readers who’d never met Geralt before, which is precisely the position most The Witcher 3 players are in relative to the books.
The three stories not covered in detail below still matter. “The Witcher” is the striga contract at Wyzim that opens the book and establishes what Geralt’s job actually looks like day-to-day.
“A Grain of Truth” is a doomed romance with a cursed nobleman named Nivellen, closer to a Beauty and the Beast retelling than a monster hunt.
“The Edge of the World” sends Geralt into elven territory and does more to establish the tension between humans and the Elder Races than anything Wild Hunt shows directly.
None of the three are essential to understanding the game, but they’re short enough that skipping them saves almost no time.
Sword of Destiny actually printed in 1992, a full year before The Last Wish hit shelves in 1993. So chronologically inside the story, Last Wish comes first but it wasn’t published first in its original language.
English readers dodge that confusion entirely, because Stok’s translation of The Last Wish arrived in 2007, while Sword of Destiny wasn’t translated into English until 2015. If you’re reading in English, you’re already getting the books in the “correct” story order without trying.
You don’t need all six stories to understand why the book pairs so well with the game, but three of them do a specific job the game just assumes you already know.
This is the story that introduces the Law of Surprise — the custom where a person saved from death owes their rescuer whatever they didn’t know they had at the time, whether that’s a sack of gold or an unborn child. Geralt invokes it almost as a formality at Pavetta and Duny’s betrothal feast at Cintra, not realizing what he’s just claimed. Wild Hunt spends dozens of hours on Geralt’s bond with Ciri, treating her as the daughter he never planned to have.
This story is the moment that bond gets created, on paper, years before Ciri is even born. Nothing in the game explains the Law of Surprise this clearly — you either already know it or you’re taking the game’s word for why Geralt cares this much.
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The title story is where Geralt and the bard Dandelion free a djinn from a shattered vessel, and where Geralt first crosses paths with the sorceress Yennefer of Vengerberg. It’s a messy, funny, occasionally chaotic story — Yennefer manipulates Geralt into attacking a group of councilmen before the two of them team up to deal with the djinn itself and it ends with Geralt using his last wish to tie his fate to hers.
Wild Hunt shows you the relationship between them but the story shows you the moment it had all started. The game assumes you probably understand the deep connection and bond of Geralt and Yennefer which tied them together from the beginning, even when neither of them really realizes it.
One of the important stories where you understand what makes The Witcher 3’s choices feel different from other RPGs. Geralt had to make a difficult choice, kill Renfri, a woman who has suffered badly but has also killed people, or let her live to kill more people. Sapkowski ‘s entire point is that “the lesser evil” is still evil, and thinking otherwise is a lie, people telling themselves to feel better about hard decisions.
“Sometimes you have to live with your choices because there is no truly good option.”
That’s the exact philosophy behind almost every quest branch in Wild Hunt, from the Bloody Baron questline to the fate of Ciri at the very end. The game never states this philosophy outright. The book does, in one uncomfortable short story.
If you came to Geralt through Netflix instead of the game, you’ve technically already met most of this book, just in the wrong order.
The Witcher Season 1 have eight episodes in which the first five adapted from:
The remaining three episodes pull from Sword of Destiny instead. Showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich chose to mix Geralt’s, Yennefer’s, and Ciri’s timelines together and present it on-screen for viewers but this choice made this season harder to understand without making each event clear during the story jumps across decades.
Reading The Last Wish doesn’t just prepare you for the game. It untangles exactly what confuses people about the show, because you’re seeing the same five stories told in a straight line instead of cut into pieces.
You can read this book before playing the Wild Hunt because The Last Wish doesn’t spoil a single plot point from Wild Hunt because It’s set years before the game’s story, so there’s no spoilers. It just removes the distant feeling that many players experience in the first ten hours, where Geralt clearly has a history with Yennefer, Triss, and Ciri, and it references endlessly but never fully explains because CD Projekt Red thought that players had already read the books.
Reading it after finishing the game still works, and some players actually prefer it that way, because it reveals the part where you assume and then get surprised with the actual story behind it. So both options work so well.
However, skipping it entirely and depending on the game’s codex entries won’t work to understand the story behind these relationships and make your interest loose.
If you want a low-effort entry point, the 2014 UK Audible production, narrated by Peter Kenny, runs a little over twelve hours — short enough to finish over a couple of weeks of commutes, and it’s the version most audiobook-first readers point to as the strongest performance of Geralt’s dry, deadpan voice.
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If you’re one of the players jumping back into Wild Hunt because of the Songs of the Past reveal, or picking it up for the first time because Witcher 4 is putting Ciri in the lead role, The Last Wish is the single most efficient piece of reading you can do first. Skip Sword of Destiny and the five-book saga for now because none of that is required to enjoy the game, and it’s a much bigger time investment.
Read these six stories, pay close attention to “A Question of Price,” “The Last Wish,” and “The Lesser Evil,” and you’ll walk into Wild Hunt already understanding why Geralt fights as hard as he does to protect people he technically didn’t have to.
The Witcher 3 expanded context doesn’t just make the game make more sense — it makes the ending land harder, which is exactly what a good prequel is supposed to do.
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Yellowjackets is a survivalist coming-of-age dark thriller about trauma, sisterhood, and mystery. Discover plot, cast, themes, timelines and season details.
Yellowjackets is a gritty, voyeuristic survival drama that reinvents the “lost in the wild” genre. It follows the ascent and collapse of a high school girls soccer team (so talented it qualifies as insane) whose plane crashes in the remote Canadian wilderness in 1996.
The series is unique for its dual timeline structure, toggling between the teens’ transformation into savage clans over the course of 19 months and their lives 25 years later as adult women, where the secrets of what transpired in the woods simply will not be buried.
Season 2 premieres 24th March 2023 after Its Great Wide Wonder Success of season 1. Meanwhile, viewers can anticipate season 3 which will premiere on February 14, 2025, on Paramount+ with Showtime as a linear television debut on February 16, 2025.
Yellowjackets is a virtuoso blend of genres — equal parts psychological terror, survival drama, coming-of-age story and mystery thriller.
The pair behind the hit series Narcos, Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, are the creators and also executive producers and showrunners with Jonathan Lisco.
Karyn Kusama is executive producer and director with Eva Sørhaug and Jennifer Morrison. Yellowjackets is a production of Lionsgate Television for Showtime.
It’s 1996, and the Wiskayok High School Yellowjackets are on their way to Nationals when their plane goes down. Stranded for close to two years, the survivors are forced to make horrific, cannibalistic choices for survival. The remaining survivors — Shauna, Taissa, Natalie, and Misty — are being blackmailed by someone who knows exactly what they did, in the present day. When they reunite to keep their secrets safe, they find the “Wilderness” they left behind may never really let them go.
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The show is brilliant in its “mirror” casting, with two actors portraying the same character in different times:
| Character | Adult Actor | Teen Actor |
| Shauna Shipman | Melanie Lynskey | Sophie Nélisse |
| Taissa Turner | Tawny Cypress | Jasmin Savoy Brown |
| Misty Quigley | Christina Ricci | Sammi Hanratty |
| Natalie Scatorccio | Juliette Lewis | Sophie Thatcher |
| Lottie Matthews | Simone Kessell | Courtney Eaton |
| Van Palmer | Lauren Ambrose | Liv Hewson |
Giving Nostalgia: Along with artists such as PJ Harvey, Hole, and Tori Amos, it distills the emotional complexity and defiant attitude of that era.
Symbolism: The enigmatic “Symbol” etched into trees has birthed thousands of fan theories across Reddit and social media.
The Antler Queen: The ritualistic leader shrouded in furs and antlers is not only the most haunting image the show creates, but that return of a figure in the final moments of the show’s finale please that terrifying image.
Production is based in Vancouver, British Columbia, where the rough and menacing forest surrounding the 1996 setting is filmed. In particular, the production employed a real, trained bear for key scenes of Season 1 as opposed to using CGI for all scenes and this added to the show’s visceral realism.
Yellowjackets is rated TV-MA (R18 in certain areas). The following content descriptors for this movie have been applied:
The show is full of extreme graphic violence—playing into cannibalism, dismemberment and strong language, sexual content, drug use, and self-harm depictions. It is very dark and twisted and has unsettling content, so it’s geared for adults only.
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The series is a Showtime flagship. It can be streamed on Paramount+ with Showtime in the U.S. Globally, it’s handled by Paramount+ for such territories as UK, Australia and Canada; also on Crave and Sky via region.
With the show entering its third season (and with a fourth season firmly locked in place as the final season), fans have a number of burning questions they’re eager to see answered:
Who is the “Pit Girl” from the pilot’s first scene?
Is the Wilderness magical, or is it shared madness?
How do they get rescued in the end—and why do they come back looking so deeply haunted?
Yellowjackets isn’t just about survival—it’s a terrifying analysis of how trauma changes you on a soul level. Featuring an all-star cast, compelling central mystery, and taking us fearlessly down feral, feminine darkness, the series is sounding all the right notes for a contemporary cult classic. Whether you’re drawn in by the ’90s nostalgia or the physical horror, there’s one thing I can promise you: once the hive gets its hands on you, it’s for keeps.
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Watch now Monarch Legacy of Monsters Season 2 trailer. Apple TV+ airs a glimpse of Skull Island, a new Alpha Titan, timelines shift, and MonsterVerse ties.
AppleTV+ has at last released the official trailer for Monarch Legacy of Monsters Season 2 at their Press Day event, and to say the MonsterVerse fanbase is going haywire would be an understatement.
The series has returned after a breakout first season that demonstrated you can blend high-prestige human drama with city-stomping kaiju. But this time, they’re not just holed up in bunkers, they’re going to the most dangerous place on Earth. With a new “Alpha” threat on the horizon and the timelines in flux, Season 2 looks to start to connect the dots between the small screen and the huge cinematic battles we know are coming in 2027.
The Monarch Legacy season itself starts with a world premiere on Friday, February 27, 2026, leading into what seems like a regular weekly obsession.
Over the course of 10 episodes, the story will be revealed one chapter at a time, with new episodes released every Friday. The journey ends on May 1, 2026; just enough time for fans to fan theories, argue online, and countdown between every reveal.
Genre: Fiction → science fiction, action-adventure, monster drama.
Theme: The main theme this season appears to go from “discovery” to “consequence.” The trailer shows a series of ripple effects of the past hitting the present. It’s about the trauma passed between generations of living in a world where “Gods” exist, and the corporate greed (hello, Apex Cybernetics) vying to control them.
Setting: The story scope has gone through the roof. We are presented with a split timeline:
The original Monarch Legacy Season 1 hitmakers are back to captain the ship:
Showrunners: Chris Black (Severance) and comic book legend Matt Fraction. Their Presence assures we have that blend of bureaucratic realism and off-the-walls, comic-book heart.
Executive Producers: Joby Harold, Tory Tunnell, and Matt Shakman (director of WandaVision).
Studio Oversight: Toho Co., Ltd. continues to keep a close eye which is key. They are the keepers of the Godzilla legacy — making sure the Titans look and move exactly as they should.
Season 1 concluded with a massive cliffhanger, leaving our heroes stranded in the time-bending dimension of Axis Mundi. Season 2 is going to be piecing things back together. The timeline has jumped to 2017 and the Randa siblings (Cate and Kentaro) aren’t just searching for their father now – they are fighting to stay alive.
The trailer shows a “Titan Event” coming. Monarch is scrambling, but a rival group, Apex Cybernetics, is making a name for itself on Skull Island. The narrative will probably follow the race to discover “buried secrets” beneath the island that ties into the 1950s timeline, and a new, ancient danger emerges from the deep.
The casting for this show is still one of its best selling points, especially when it comes to the “Legacy” gimmick of the Russell father-son duo.
Kurt Russell as the elder Lee Shaw (the man who knows too much).
Wyatt Russell as the young Lee Shaw (1950s timeline).
Takehiro Hira as Hiroshi Randa.
Amber Midthunder (Prey): She adds to the cast as a character named “Isabel,” presumably an action-heavy part based on her past work.
Cliff Curtis: Role TBC, but reports say a senior villain or military leader.
Dominique Tipper reprises her role as Brenda Holland, the public face of Apex Cybernetics’ corporate dreams.
The most talked about thing out of the trailer was the announcement of a new Alpha: Titan X.
The New Monster: Titan X – Billed as a ”living cataclysm”, Titan X is an aquatic, tentacled drake with bioluminescent blue/red scales and “sideways 8” pupils. It can create huge storms.
The Rivalry: The trailer implies that the solution to stopping this thing is to throw Godzilla and Kong at it.
Crossovers: We’re really part of a slow burn this season and laying the groundwork for the international geopolitical muscle flexing that will really heat up in Godzilla x Kong: Supernova, and again we’re talking 2027.
Apple isn’t holding back the purse strings. The VFX for Titan X and the Skull Island sequences are feature-film quality.
Production: Location shooting for a tough approximation of Skull Island was extensive.
Sound Design: The trailer featured a particular acoustic weapon/sound emanating from Titan X that causes fear. The sound designers are weaponizing the audio in the narrative.
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The rating is expected to be TV-14, but it’s intense. With the Titan attacks, heavy psychological horror aspects, it’s really pushing the boundaries of the rating. Parents should be aware that while it’s not R-rated, danger seems very real.
Platform: Exclusively on Apple TV+.
Global Reach: The series will air simultaneously in over 100 countries worldwide, allowing the huge international fanbase — particularly in Japan and the US to watch together.
The bar is set very high this time. It’s not monster-sized battles fans want anymore—they want answers. The story is now scheduled to reveal the lore: how Apex Cybernetics went underground to become the creators of Mechagodzilla.
Questions about the time skip also hang heavily—what is Axis Mundi, really, and how long has Lee Shaw been gone?
Let’s not forget Skull Island, which also teases larger mysteries. Are we going to see a younger Kong learning his way, or is the titular “King” already grown up in 2017?
It’s all got that Lost-meets-Godzilla vibe, cloaked in secrecies, timelines and slow-burn revelations. Should the writers really nail the mystery side of things, they could easily be in the running for best sci-fi series of 2026. You can find these answers by watching the full series on Apple TV+ after its release.
Monarch Legacy of Monsters Season 2 appears to be leveling up from “spinoff” to “must-watch” pillar of the MonsterVerse. By relocating the action to Skull Island and bringing in a frightening new antagonist, Apple TV+ is upping the ante. The February 27 countdown is on.
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