SOME STORIES SIMPLY NEED TO BE TOLD. Declan de Barra, writer/producer of The Witcher, believed a vital piece of the show’s lore had yet to be explored: the Conjunction of the Spheres. Many of the events leading up to the Conjunction – an ancient period when the worlds of man, monster and elf merged into one – still remained shrouded in secrecy.
Even the original Witcher novels by Andrzej Sapkowski never fleshed out that period. And in planning the second season of The Witcher, the lack of detail over how the Conjunction transpired, and the mechanics behind it became frustrating. That aggravation fuelled the birth of The Witcher: Blood Origin.
“We were trying to figure things out,” de Barra tells SFX. “I remember getting up to the whiteboard in the writers’ room and I drew out a sketch of what I thought this world looked like and what the Conjunction of the Spheres is based on. At the end of season two, showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich said, ‘Would you be interested in writing a prequel, based on the Conjunction of the Spheres?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, that’s great’. That thing was still in my head. I think it was in Lauren’s head, as well.
“Three weeks go by and I’m sitting in a café going, ‘Oh yeah, this pitch,’” he continues. “Literally, it all came out… A, B, C, D, E, F, G… straight down the line. The world. The characters. The names of the characters. What each one did. Why they didn’t like each other. Why they had to work together. It all just came out and I was frantically scratching it all down on napkins.
“This never happens in the world of writing. It’s banging your head against a brick wall for three months, throwing stuff out and tearing your hair
