This Small Detail in the Witcher Season 3 Signals the Return of an Important Prequel Character

This Witcher article contains spoilers for season 3 part 1 and The Witcher: Blood Origin.

In the first part of The Witcher season 3, we learn that Istredd (Royce Pierreson) is one of many people looking for Ciri (Freya Allan) across the Continent. After learning of her Elder Blood last season, he seems to be interested in her connection to the Monoliths for academic purposes. Rather than sending soldiers or monsters after Ciri, his search for answers first sends him on a quest to find the Book of Monoliths, an old elven book that supposedly “holds the key to traveling between spheres.”

Based on information he gets from super sleuths Codringher (Simon Callow) and Fenn (Liz Carr), Istredd tracks the book to an elven cavern near Nilfgaard and is shocked to find that someone from Aretuza had already claimed it. When he returns to his alma mater for the Conclave, he helps Triss (Anna Shaffer), Yennefer (Anya Chalotra), and Geralt (Henry Cavill) track down the tome and uncover a dangerous conspiracy.

But this isn’t the first time that we’ve potentially seen the Book of Monoliths in Netflix’s Witcher universe. If Istredd is correct about the book’s contents, then it’s likely that the Book of Monoliths is actually Syndril’s (Zach Wyatt) journal from The Witcher: Blood Origin or at the very least a copy of it. Although the elven mage died trying to stop Balor (Lenny Henry) from destroying the Continent, the book was last seen with the apprentice Avallac’h (Samuel Blenkin) in the post-credit scene of the prequel series. There, we see him in the timeline of the original series watching Ciri play in the Cintra town square before the invasion of Nilfgaard.

If you haven’t watched Blood Origin yet, or just need a refresher, Syndril’s journal is full of his research on the monoliths and what he knows about their functionality. After imprisoning Syndril, Balor uses the journal to learn how to open portals to the chaos sphere with the Xin’trean monolith. When Avallac’h gets his hands on it through Merwyn (Mirren Mack), he learns that Syndril has hypothesized that the monoliths can be used not only to travel across space and between spheres, but also through time.

While we don’t yet know what happens to Syndril’s journal or Avallac’h between the post-credit scene of Blood Origin and when the book is found in the cavern in season 3 of The Witcher, it’s likely that the Book of Monoliths will play an important part in the series going forward. Istredd deduced that the Rogue Mage who has been experimenting on the missing novices was planning to use it and Ciri to banish all with elven blood to another sphere. Even though Yennefer and Geralt figured out that it was Vilgefortz (Mahesh Jadu) not Stregobor (Lars Mikkelson) who betrayed Aretuza and aligned with Nilfgaard, it’s still not clear what he really wants with Ciri and the book.

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Witcher showrunner Lauren Hissrich recently confirmed that Avallac’h “has been watching Ciri for a very long time, planning his future and her future.” She goes on to say that “One of the things that I love is when we finally meet Avallac’h in the books and you realize he’s been tracking a lot of time. And because he can move through space and time, it felt like such a cool way to go, ‘Wait! Where else has he been?’ We obviously never see him any place else in seasons 1 and 2, but what else has he seen and how are we building to his story in a later season?’” 

Even though we’ve yet to see him this season, now that the Book of Monoliths is officially in play it’s even more likely that we’ll see Avallac’h once again at some point in the future, especially if he’s lost the book and is trying to find it. Though there is a chance that the Book of Monoliths could be something entirely different from Syndril’s journal, there’s likely enough overlap between the monolith research found within them that could open the door (or portal in this case) for the world of The Witcher to expand even further.

The Witcher season 3 part 1 is available to stream on Netflix now. Part 2 will premiere July 27.