The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf movie ending explained

The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf has finally come to Netflix, nearly two years after the first season of The Witcher premiered!

The hit series had such a great reception that creator Lauren Hissrich got a contract with Netflix to create a slew of new Witcher content for their platform.

This new movie is animated, unlike season one of the show. The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf acts as a prequel movie to introduce Vesemir, Geralt’s mentor.

While the movie has a different cast and plot from the Netflix original series, the film adds an incredible amount of new lore and energy to the franchise that shouldn’t be missed out on.

The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf ending

If you’re here, you probably watched it, so I’ll be brief!

Vesemir is a boy who left his role as a servant to become a witcher. After going through deadly trials, experimentation, and painful tests, he successfully is turned into a witcher and goes on to become one of the best of his kind.

Years later, Vesemir is contracted by the nearby kingdom Kaedwen to slay an unknown beast in the forest that has been killing civilians. With the help of Tetra Gilcrest, who happens to want witchers exiled, they find a magically corrupted kitsu.

The kitsu-mahr has been kidnapping female elves and experimenting on them to try to create hybrids like herself, and is only successful with one girl, the rest having gruesomely died.

When Tetra finds evidence that the witcher mages are creating new monsters using mutagenic alchemy, affectively creating more work for witchers, she convinces their king to commit genocide on the entire community. Tetra lies saying Vesimir killed the kitsu’s “daughter”, and so the kitsu aids the humans in killing the witchers.

Only Vesemir and the children that had recently passed the trials to become witchers survive. Geralt, a child, receives his staple piece of jewelry, the witcher wolf necklace.

What did Tetra say when she died in The Witcher?

Tetra Gildcrest, a sorceress supposedly descended from the first human mage, leads the fight against witchers in both propaganda and genocide. On her mission with Vesemir, she tells a story where a witcher and cook tricked a priest into thinking he had been cursed. The priest hired the witcher to kill a local sorceress, who he believed has cursed him. In reality, the cook was poisoning the priest, and stopped after the witch was dead.

Later, Tetra reveals that this story was about her mother. She watched the hired witcher murder her mother, knowing that she was innocent. Tetra carried this incident with her until her death.

“Monsters killing monsters,” she says, considering witchers to be just as bad as the beasts they slay.

“So…” Tetra mutters, her last words after Deglan (Vesemir’s mentor) fells the killing blow.

With her final breath, she commits to her ideals that witchers need to be slain. If witchers are as monstrous as the creatures they are hired to kill, then they shouldn’t exist at all. Monsters can be dealt with in other ways. It’s not worth it to hire a monster to kill another monster; you’re justifying their existence.

Monsters killing monsters. So… they must be exterminated.

What did Illyana say when she died in The Witcher?

Illyana was Vesemir’s childhood sweetheart, who he ended up leaving to become a witcher on his own accord. She eventually married a nobleman, and gained a seat of power once she was widowed. They meet again when she convinces the king to contract Vesemir into killing a monster in the woods, and comes to Kaer Morhen to warn the witchers of Tetra’s genocidal intentions.

During the final battle, Vesemir fatally wounds Illyana while under an illusion, thinking he killed the kitsu. After the dust settles, he takes her to a frozen lake, which he melts with his fire magic. They sit together against a rock, looking out on the beautiful lake.

“It doesn’t seem… real,” Illyana says, and as she dies, Vesemir sobs.

As kids, Illyana told Vesemir that the only thing she really wanted, if she had the money, was a house by a lake. Even as an adult when she had a house, family, and status, she did not achieve this dream. It was Vesemir’s final act of love towards his childhood sweetheart to fulfill her dream as much as he could: to bring her to a beautiful lake.

Despite Vesemir’s efforts, she dies without her only real dream coming true. Maybe, if he had stayed with Illyana, she would have had her house on the lake. But he’ll never know.

What happened to the Elf Mutant in The Witcher?

Vesemir, Tetra, and Filavandrel find the kitsu’s experimentation lab in the depths of elven ruins. She was trying to use mutagenic alchemy to change an elf into a kitsu-mahr like herself; no one wants to be alone. Although it’s not confirmed, it’s implied that Deglan created this hybrid.

After countless failed experiments, the kitsu succeeded in turning a young elf girl into a creature of a similar kind. Tetra attempts to kill the girl, but Filavandrel intervenes.

Filavandrel says he’ll take her back to his people, and the girl will be raised as an elf. The king promises that if the mutated girl ever turns to evil, he’ll kill her himself.

The unnamed elf-mahr-kitsu hasn’t appeared in the show yet, at least not onscreen. Her physical appearance is altered in marks on her head and fox ears, but she isn’t as intensely disfigured as the original kitsu hybrid.

Tetra expects that the girl will be used as a weapon against humans in the future. We know that at some point a few years before the present timeline in The Witcher, Filavandrel leads the elves into a new uprising against the humans… perhaps the hybrid girl was utilized in the battle.

The original kitsu-mahr mutant could also show up in season two, as Vesemir left her alive after the battle at Kaer Morhen. After everyone else has died, she looks down on Vesemir in fox form; Illyana reminds him that the kitsu didn’t ask to be made, and so he leaves without confronting her.

Both the kitsu and her “daughter” are powerful hybrids of magic. It would be a shame if they weren’t utilized later on in the series, either as heroes or villains.

Is Geralt in The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf? 

First of all, let’s address the obvious: having kid Geralt be bald was probably just a quick way to make sure the audience didn’t guess his identity right away. He’s the only witcher we’ve seen in the Netflix franchise to have white hair, so it would have been a dead giveaway.

The movie reveals that most of the boys in the Trial of the Grasses (tests to become a witcher) did not want to be there. They had been sold or dropped off by parents that no longer wanted their children. While Geralt had the knowledge to escape Kaer Morhen, he decided to stay.

In the show, Geralt is given to Vesemir by his own mother, Visenna. She was a single mother that obviously cared for her son, but for reasons unknown, gave him up to the witchers. When Geralt somehow ends up in her care and asks why she did it, Visenna tells him that knowing wouldn’t help him, and that he needs to move forward without the answer.

Maybe we’ll know more about why in season 2.

Or, we need to move forward without the answer, just like Geralt.

What happened to the Witcher kids?

In a sad yet touching scene, Deglan passes the torch as an official witcher mentor and father figure to Vesemir.

When Vesemir finds the last generation of new witchers, there are only four. Geralt (bald), a redhead, a taller kid with blonde hair, and a boy who looks a lot like Vesemir. It’s safe to say of the few witchers that have been introduced in the show, the other kids haven’t been seen yet.

Geralt said he didn’t know the witcher that died while fighting the striga in the third episode. Despite what humans, think, witchers don’t all know each other.

However, in the trailer for season 2, Geralt returns to the ruins of Kaer Morhen with Ciri. A glimpse inside the castle shows at least six witchers sitting around tables, one which Geralt embraces and another who takes interest in Ciri.

These HAVE to be the other witcher children, right?

The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf creates an easy transition into season 2, providing important backstory and witcher history that could be left out in the episodes to come. Now that we’ve watched the animated movie, we have a glimpse into what Geralt and these other witchers went through to get where they are today, creating a sympathetic bond between characters we don’t even know the names of yet.

Who do you think from The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf will come up in season 2?