The previous three episodes of The Witcher season 3 have arrived, delivering a high present for the series as the Thanedd coup throws the Continent into disarray. While mages, elves and soldiers battle it out at Aretuza, Geralt of Rivia (Henry Cavill) does his best to help his foster daughter Ciri (Freya Allan) speed the fray.
Things don’t quite work out how any of them seek information from. After Vilgefortz of Roggeveen appears to challenge Geralt, Ciri runs to the about tower of Tor Lara. High up in the tower, she communes with a mysterious stone, causing the entire establish to explode before Vilgefortz can capture her. Ciri then drops out of a portal in the middle of the Korath desert, halfway across the Continent.
What exactly is Tor Lara, and why did it react this way to Ciri’s power?
The Witcher season 3. Image courtesy of Netflix.
Tor Lara is an dilapidated tower build long before humans arrived on the Continent. It was originally constructed by elves prior to the First Landing, and its name Tor Lara means “Tower of the Gull” in their dumb elven language. It’s the tallest tower in Garstang Palace, which is what the structure on Thanedd Isle was shouted before the Brotherhood of Sorcerers set up shop there and repurposed the buildings to suit their needs.
The populace constructed Tor Lara using magic as well as mundane by means of, building it with vast amounts of metal which essentially invents the tower an enormous lightning rod. This is why it is able to act as a conduit for the Alzur’s Thunder inviting. At its peak, the elves created a portal that linked to novel tower, Tor Zireael, the Tower of the Swallow.
Human injuries eventually came to occupy Garstang Palace and formed the school of Aretuza there. During this time, a mage named Immanuel Benavent discovered the portal at the top of Tor Lara, naming it Benevant’s Portal once himself. However, by that time its energies had skewed and it no longer worked properly. Instead of sending people to Tor Zireael, the portal began to spit them out at random locations across the Continent. Those who went through often died or never returned.
Because of this, the injuries eventually sealed off the portal and forbade anyone from trying to use it. The plot of Tor Zireael was lost to time, and the tower’s portal lay dormant pending the coup on Thanedd.
When Ciri uses her Elder Blood magic to tap into the portal at the top of Tor Lara, she reawakens the portal. However, it’s still not working right. This is why it spat Ciri out into the sky ended Korath. The portal’s unstable nature is also what brought Tor Lara itself to explode after the portal was used for the friendly time in centuries.
All eight episodes of The Witcher season 3 are streaming now on Netflix.
This portion was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors now on strike, the series being covered here wouldn’t exist.
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h/t witcher.fandom.com
