Emperor Emhyr var Emreis (Bart Edwards) is one of the most fearsome individuals lurking in the shadows of The Witcher. As a bloodthirsty monarch with legions of devout followers, he spells trouble for heroes like Geralt (Liam Hemsworth) and Yennefer (Anya Chalotra). Emhyr is also the father of Princess Cirilla “Ciri” of Cintra (Freya Allan), and he intends to marry her in Season 4 in order to fulfill a powerful prophecy tied to her Elder Blood.
While people throughout the Continent long assumed Ciri’s father was a knight of no renown who died in a tragic boat accident, there’s more to this story. Keep reading for a complete guide to Emhyr — his past and how a person once known as a hedgehog knight ended up as the face of an empire — including what happens in Season 4.
The Witcher fans first come to know Emhyr as the emperor of Nilfgaard. But, in the Season 2 finale, we learn the emperor is none other than Duny, the presumed-dead husband of the late Cintran princess Pavetta (Gaia Mondadori) and Ciri’s father.
Emhyr’s presence becomes increasingly dominant in The Witcher. As his Nilfgaardian army takes more land, Emhyr’s thirst for power only grows. He’s happy to use the unpredictable mage Fringilla (Mimî M. Khayisa), loyal soldier Cahir (Eamon Farren), and an entire army of elves as his puppets. They’re all pawns in Emhyr’s quest to take over the Continent. The final — and most important — piece of the puzzle comes in the form of his daughter, Ciri. Emhyr is convinced a reunion with Ciri will complete his plan, which only grows stronger. As Radovid (Hugh Skinner) tells Jaskier (Joey Batey) in Season 3, Episode 7, Emhyr used the distraction of the Thanedd coup to take the Continent by surprise and officially begin the Second War.
Yes. Before reemerging as Emperor Emhyr, he wormed his way into the Cintran royal family with two names: Lord Urcheon and Duny. He’s also called the White Flame by Nilfgaardians, since his supporters believe he’s the one who’ll lead them through the prophesied time of the White Chill and the White Light. Also, in the Season 3 finale, we learn Emhyr’s full title: Emperor Emhyr var Emreis, Deithwen Addan yn Carn aep Morvudd.
The story of Ciri’s parentage is explained in Season 1, Episode 4, in which Pavetta’s mother, Queen Calanthe (Jodhi May), holds a banquet to determine who will win the hand of her daughter. Toward the end of the evening, Lord Urcheon of Erlenwald — a cursed hedgehog knight who no one really knew — arrives to claim Pavetta as his bride by the Law of Surprise.
Urcheon, aka Duny, says he saved the life of Calanthe’s now-dead husband, King Roegner, from certain death years prior. For payment, Duny accepted the Law of Surprise, which entitled him to receive the first thing that greeted Roegner when he returned home, that Roegner did not yet know about. When he heard King Roegner returned home to the surprise of a baby daughter, Duny never expected to claim her. But destiny intervenes — Duny and Pavetta fall in love.
Calanthe only agrees to the union after Pavetta, in a supernatural rage, nearly kills the entire banquet of people. Immediately after their wedding — and Geralt invoking the Law of Surprise for saving Duny’s life — it’s revealed that Pavetta is pregnant and expecting Duny’s baby. That baby is Ciri. Sadly, Duny and Pavetta’s wedded bliss is short-lived — a raging storm at sea appears to kill the couple soon after Ciri’s birth.
Except Duny lives. In the Season 2 finale, we finally see the face of the oft-mentioned Emhyr. Initially, he’s shot from behind as he explains the pain of losing a child. Then, as Emhyr turns around, we see he and Duny are the same man. Ciri’s father has been the White Flame all along. But he doesn’t want anyone to know it. In the Season 3 premiere, Emhyr sets fire to the Cintran royal portraits, destroying anything that could prove his past as Duny and his paternal connection to Ciri. Emhyr is playing the long game.
Geralt finally discovers Ciri is Emhyr’s daughter in Season 4, Episode 5. After joining Geralt’s search for the princess, Cahir shares how he first came to work for Emhyr: “Years ago, Vilgefortz convinced Emhyr that his destiny rests on the fulfillment of Ithlinne’s prophecy.” Through this tale, Geralt learns that Emhyr is Ciri’s biological father. The news is made even more disturbing by the fact that Geralt is aware that Emhyr intends to marry Ciri.
For Emhyr, marrying Ciri is not only about harnessing her Elder Blood’s magical potential, but also about fulfilling the prophecy and legitimizing his reign over the Continent with an heir destined to rule.
By using one of the loopholes of the curse. When Emhyr was still going by Duny — and living as a hedgehog person — he’d turn into a regular man at the stroke of midnight. Once, he waited for the curse to break and attempted to watch Pavetta from afar, he tells Calanthe in Season 1, Episode 4. While Duny never thought a princess would marry him because of his affliction, he wanted to glimpse the woman promised to him by destiny.
“Destiny intervened and our hearts collided,” Pavetta tells her mother. During the night in question, Duny and Pavetta slept together. Duny awoke with Pavetta in his arms but returned to his hedgehog persona. The curse is only permanently broken once Calanthe allows Duny and Pavetta to marry.
Very little — and that’s just the way Emhyr likes it. The few scraps we do know mostly come from general Nilfgaardian history. Unlike the Northern Kingdoms, Nilfgaard was an empire and one of the largest in the world. Then a tumultuous period hit. The emperor was usurped, and all the mages were jailed; powerful men like Cahir’s nobleman father were also imprisoned.
In The Witcher, it’s unclear what happened to the original emperor’s children — including Emhyr — during this period. All we know is that, at some unknown point, Emhyr was cursed to live as a hedgehog person. Eventually, he envisioned a new future for his home kingdom.
In Season 3, Episode 2, Emhyr stops for a conversation with a dwarf blacksmith and reveals how he retook his empire. In the late summer of 1260, Emhyr was down to his final men in his battle against the Usurper and knew it was his “last chance” to vanquish his enemy. “I realized the only way that I could reclaim my throne was to infiltrate the castle, kill everyone that stood between me and the man that had stolen my life,” he says. So he traded his boots to a dwarf for a Mahakaman steel sword and decapitated the Usurper with the weapon. Then, according to Nilfgaardian history, Emhyr freed the mages and laid the foundations for a bigger, better (and scarier) Nilfgaard.
More insights about Emhyr’s life come to light in Season 4, Episode 5, when Cahir shares his history with the emperor. As a child, Cahir was recruited by a mage named Xarthisius (Simon Paisley Day) to care for Emhyr before Xarthisius headed north in search of a cure for Emhyr’s hedgehog curse. Xarthisius, it seems, knew the solution lay in Cintra. Many years later, after Cahir joined the Nilfgaardian army, Emhyr thanked him for his help. This leads Cahir to realize the hedgehog and the White Flame are the same person, which he eventually relays to Geralt.
In the Season 3 finale, Emhyr welcomes someone heralded as Cirilla to the Cintran palace for her coronation. She’s adorned in a gown befitting royalty and has the same white-blonde hair as Ciri. But the “Ciri” in Cintra is not the Ciri we’ve all come to love. Instead, it’s Teryn (Frances Pooley), the kidnapped part-elf mage novice from earlier in the season.
Geralt finds Teryn in a cave of horrors in Season 3, Episode 2, and realizes that the girl has been enchanted by magic to believe she is Ciri. Teryn even has Ciri’s memories. As we learn throughout Season 3, it’s The Witcher supervillain Vilgefortz (Mahesh Jadu) who abducted Teryn and put a spell on her to lose her identity.
The finale clarifies exactly where Teryn falls in Vilgefortz’s plan — and it all has to do with Emhyr. Vilgefortz needed a fake Ciri to pawn off on Emhyr, with whom he has been working all along. Now Emhyr believes he has the key to his long-gestating plan — Ciri — and is well on his way to continental domination. By the end of Season 3, we know his daughter is nowhere near Cintra — but Emhyr doesn’t know this.
At the start of Season 4, Emhyr becomes suspicious of Teryn after noticing her horrified reaction when he sentences a soldier to death for delivering a threat from Geralt. As a test, in Episode 2, the emperor challenges the fake Ciri to show off the sword-fighting skills the Witcher surely taught her. She, of course, is not up to the task, and he ultimately realizes that Vilgefortz has deceived him by providing a magically altered mage as a decoy — not his real daughter.
In Episode 3, Emhyr confronts the mage, who, it turns out, wants to keep Ciri’s power for himself. “I am her family,” he tells Vilgefortz. “She belongs with me. She will be protected from those who would use her to secure their own fortunes.” But the mage snaps back, “And you would not?” At this point, Emhyr has all he needs to expand his rule across the Continent, but he still desires control over the Continent’s most powerful magic, which lies with Ciri. So it’s not just fatherly love that’s motivating his search for her.
When Vilgefortz leaves, Stefan Skellen (James Purefoy), an agent of the emperor, suggests that Emhyr could still move forward with his plan to marry Ciri since no one else knows Teryn isn’t the princess. Enraged, Emhyr responds, “I will not be a false ruler! My heir will be born of Elder Blood, of my daughter’s womb.” Yes, Emhyr is still determined to have a child with his own daughter. Xarthisius, the mage who helped Emhyr lift the hedgehog curse and now acts as his advisor, then states, “In her, your seed will not sprout but instead burst into flame! A son who’s destined to rule the Continent.” This refers to Ithlinne’s prophecy, which foretold that the descendant of the Elder Blood will save the world, and as established in Season 2, Ciri is of Elder Blood. Skellen convinces Emhyr to at least announce the engagement as a strategic tactic in his war to take over the Continent. Emhyr agrees but tasks Skellen with tracking down Ciri in time for the wedding — and threatens to kill him if he fails.
After piecing together that Ciri has joined the Rats and now goes by the name Falka, Skellen hires Leo Bonhart (Sharlto Copley) — a barbaric bounty hunter who enjoys killing witchers for sport and has history with the gang — to find them. Frustrated with and envious of Emhyr’s growing power, Skellen instructs Bonhart to kill all the Rats, including Ciri, as part of his plot to dethrone the emperor. Upon trapping the Rats in the Season 4 finale, Bonhart, acting on his own twisted interests, murders all of them except Ciri. She becomes his captive.
Paranoid that word of his sham engagement will spread after Yennefer discovers the fake Ciri, Emhyr threatens Skellen’s life if he fails to secure the real Ciri in time for the wedding in Episode 7. In an attempt to regain the emperor’s trust, Skellen tells him there’s a significant detail of the prophecy they’ve overlooked. “There is a reason that the most powerful men on the continent are unable to find your daughter and I have failed alongside them: the Witcher. She is his destiny, and if she is his, she cannot be yours.” At this, Xarthisius pipes in to back up the point. “With two parallel destinies, only one can bear fruit. Geralt of Rivia intervened to save your life when you were Duny. He stole the child of your prophecy given to him in surprise.” Emhyr’s only recourse becomes clear: If he hopes to locate, marry, and have a child with Ciri, he must kill Geralt.
The final scene of Season 4 teases how Emhyr intends to do that. Xarthisius leads him to a set of iron bars, and the two peer into a cell at a “truly magnificent specimen.” The creature’s identity is left unseen, but it is implied to be a powerful weapon Emhyr intends to unleash against Geralt, further raising the stakes of the coming conflict. “There is someone you need to find for me. Someone who stands between me and my daughter, my destiny, whose will is as great as my own,” Emhyr tells the snarling beast. “Find Geralt of Rivia.”
Watch the next chapter unfold. All four seasons of The Witcher are streaming now, only on Netflix.
Additional reporting by Olivia Harrison.
