Warning: This article contains major spoilers from The Witcher: Blood Origin.
The Witcher: Blood Origin came to a heartbreaking end for Sophia Brown’s Éile. After finding love with Fjall (Laurence O'Fuarain), she is left with no choice but to kill him when his witcher urges take over and make him a danger to anyone he encounters.
The series concludes with the Lark – who is now pregnant with Fjall’s child – singing a beautiful song of loss. But it seems her bad luck isn't yet over when she receives a Ithlinne's prophecy about her future child. Speaking to 12DOVE about the dramatic finale, Éile actor Brown shares some insight into filming the harrowing scenes, as well as how she felt finding out about her character’s ending.
"These are the sort of epic scenes that I’ve grown up with, like Gladiator or 300," she says of the final episode. "These are the kind of things that when I was younger I would play around with and there’s been so many times when I’ve piled pillows up and gone, ‘this is Sparta’ with my siblings, doing big battle or army scenes. So it was surreal, but it’s not very hard to be able to pour everything into Éile when you look around and everyone else is dropped into that world with you."
Éile’s story ends the series too after Ithlinne (Ella Schrey-Yeats) shares an ominous prophecy about her future baby. She is told by the young elven prophetess: "The lark’s seed shall carry forth the first note of a song that ends all time, and one of her blood shall sing the last."
The meaning of this remains pretty ambiguous as the credits roll, but it seems that Ithlinne is predicting her descendant’s role in causing the end of the world. We don’t know who she is talking about, but all signs point to Ciri (Freya Allen). Not only does she have Elder Blood, as is mentioned in the prophecy, but she was also the recipient of a similar prediction from Lara Dorren in The Witcher season 2 when she was told she would bring death to the world.
While Brown wouldn’t be drawn on what this prophecy could mean going forward, she shared her excitement at being part of such an important storyline. "It was amazing obviously to leave it open-ended," she adds. "It gives me a lot of excitement to see us be the birth of a possible story that fans could latch on to. It's exciting because there's so much to explore in the Witcher universe and so much possibility."
Given the seeming importance of this scene too, you might expect it came with a fair amount of pressure. However, Brown admits that she tried to push this out of her mind when filming the show.
"I tried not to think about the expectations from the fans before I started doing it," she explains. "Otherwise that would have just completely squashed what I wanted to give Éile. I knew of course in the prep period and leading up to those days, the importance of each and every scene. Each moment has a big knock-on effect on the next moment, which informs The Witcher universe that everyone knows and loves."
We’ve broken down how all of the major revelations impact the future of The Witcher in our Blood Origin ending explained and the Blood Origin post-credits explanation. The third season of the show will be out in summer 2023, and Jaskier star Joey Batey has already called it the best yet.
For more on the show, check out our Blood Origin explainers on:
