Does Avallac'h love or hate Ciri? In a twisted Grail Quest, Merlin condemns himself to the Lady of the Lake who becomes his salvation throug
So, I wrote the thing I have been wanting to write forever - a dive into Avallac'h's and Ciri's relationship based on Sapkowski's books alone. The final push for it came with Maladie. My two cents on... everything.
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He is walking away when Ciri is desperate for acknowledgement of her pain. The one person who she hopes cares for her, to whom she means something special, is abandoning her. She would never ask directly, would never beg. So she forces the acknowledgement from him by weaponizing his feelings that she is guessing at, while being maximally degrading about it.
In wanting him to see her suffering, she forces him to confront his own bullshit.
‘Or you, perhaps?’ she yelled. ‘If you want I’ll give myself to you! Well? Won’t you sacrifice yourself? I mean, they say I’ve got Lara’s eyes!’
Fuck your plan! Just do it yourself.
This is not how the Fisher King heals. The question must be asked in compassion, not contempt. But suffering is not Avallac’h’s exclusive privilege. By offering herself, Ciri inverts their established power dynamic, seizing back agency and becoming the one doing the using. If she is to be objectified then do it directly, damn you! They want her willing? She gives what they claim to want in a way that exposes its repugnance. It is anti-love and anti-fairy tale, and in no way honouring Lara’s memory.
He was in front of her in two paces. His hands shot towards her neck like snakes and squeezed like steel pincers. She understood that if he'd wanted to, he could have throttled her like a fledgling.
Just like that, Avallac’h’s self-protective, romantic mythology splinters into so many crooked ways of coping. His self-image shatters: he inflicts suffering, not only endures; serves selfish desires in the guise of a higher purpose; and the memory he is protecting is of his own innocence not solely Lara’s. He is like Lara. Those steel pinchers at Ciri’s throat rend him apart from the inside. The Fisher King’s wound must be exposed before it can heal; the inauthentic self must dissolve. Ciri’s desperate daring is a bitter medicine. She is giving him exactly what he wants in an unacceptable form and he only has himself to blame.
They are equal now. For the very first time they are completely exposed to each other. His emotions are like strings on his puppet who clings to her presence on the palm of his hand.
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Available on AO3 as well.
By sympathising with secondary characters and allowing them the complexity usually reserved only for protagonists, Sapkowski affirms humanism’s core thesis throughout his work. The world that can be saved is never ‘out there’ because the hunt for the Grail is an internal journey. Particularly since the Grail is a young woman. The Witcher muses on how to retain and regain one’s humanity through love and decency in our relationships to each other. The only story Sapkowski, never a worldbuilder, truly cares about.
It is not without reason that Andrzej Sapkowski’s Grail is not a lifeless chalice but a living being. The moral of the series, if there is a moral, is that humanity awakens through the heart’s capacity to love the Other. Only love for another person can surmount the love of power. What heals the wounds of the Graceless Land, orders the universe and shows the way, is love. Only desire to do good for another person for their own sake can transform and break through the barrenness of a maimed, lonely heart, and help overcome a fixation with one’s own suffering at any cost to the rest. Love, and lack of love, is the principal malady of Sapkowski’s world.
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Nothing but nothing in the books proves Ciri is not the Saviour. Power does not save the world, but people can save people. Embracing her, Avallac’h at last touches flesh instead of marble and has the chance to realize this. [...] The Lady of the Lake does not only imprison Merlin. In many versions she also loves him, learns from him, helps him. The imprisonment is sometimes mutual, sometimes a sanctuary, sometimes a tomb and sometimes a womb. Fables admit no limits to possibilities. By submitting to that hope in indeterminacy, one can escape the smell of apples and live on.
