Geralt Seriously Needs to Protect Ciri From the Wild Hunt in 'The Witcher' Season 3

Spoiler alert: This article contains spoilers for Season 2 of The Witcher.

It seems like everyone on the continent wants Princess Ciri (Freya Allen) for their own nefarious reasons in Season 2 of The Witcher. It turns out Ciri possesses Elder blood, which gives her the extremely rare ability to open portals to other worlds.

In the Season 2 finale Geralt (Henry Cavill), Ciri, and Yennefer (Anya Chalotra) come across a group of mysterious, shadowy horsemen in another world tinged with red. "Child of Elder blood!" one of the horsemen whispers menacingly. "You belong with us." The horsemen advance upon our heroic trio, and Ciri quickly portals them back to their own dimension before the horsemen can catch her.

When Ciri, Yennefer, and Geralt are safely back in their own world, Ciri asks Geralt if the horsemen were the "Wraiths of Mörhogg." Geralt says yes and notes that they're also called the Wild Hunt.

We don't learn that much more about the Wild Hunt beyond that in Season 2. However, The Witcher's showrunner, Lauren Schmidt Hissrich, agreed with IGN when the outlet asked her if the Wild Hunt was The Witcher's version of Thanos.

Lauren said, "What I love, and this is how it's set up in the books too, is that the Wild Hunt is a ‘portent of doom.' They're always just mentioned when war is coming, or a battle is on the horizon.

"And so they have this air of evil mystery around them. What we're going to start doing [in the show] is beginning to understand where they came from and what they want."

Lauren also mentioned that they'd dig deeper into the characters so they weren't just "skeletal bad guys."

While they aren't explored much beyond the aforementioned Season 2 finale moment, we can refer to The Witcher books and video games for more clues about the Wild Hunt. They're the primary antagonists of the video game The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. According to the official Wikipedia synopsis for the game, players control Geralt of Rivia, who is ordered by Emhyr, Ciri's biological father, to find Ciri.

Just like in the Season 2 finale, the Wild Hunt is relentlessly hunting Ciri down in the video game because of her Elder blood. According to the lore of the video game and Andrzej Sapkowski's The Witcher novels, the Wild Hunt are seen by residents of the continent as harbingers of doom and war.

According to a Polygon report, the Wild Hunt are not just spooky ghost riders of doom. They're actually elves called the Aen Elle and they live in a different world that has never been conquered by humanity. The Wild Hunt do aim to steal humans, but not to get them to join their ranks. Rather, they try to steal humans to bring them back to their world as slaves.

So basically, Ciri needs to be protected from the Wild Hunt at all costs. We're assuming we'll see more of the Wild Hunt in The Witcher Season 3. The question is, will Geralt and Yennefer be able to keep Ciri safe from their clutches?

In the meantime, you can stream all of The Witcher Season 2 on Netflix.