Adapts the short story "The Edge of the World" from the anthology The Last Wish.
Bullied and neglected, Yennefer accidentally finds a means of escape. Geralt's hunt for a so-called devil goes to hell. Ciri seeks safety in numbers.
- Abusive Parents: Yennefer's step-father berates her and calls her useless, then sells her to a sorceress for four marks. He would have charged ten for a pig. It’s later implied this is because he knows she’s the product of his wife’s affair with a half-elf.
- The Ace: Yennefer isn't very good at most magic, but she's great at portal magic, which is notoriously difficult.
- Actually Pretty Funny: Despite being in the middle of a fight, Geralt grins when Torque grabs a lock of his hair and asks if his mother fucked a snowmannote .
- Adaptational Heroism: Filavandrel is a lot more reasonable in this adaptation than he was in the short story "The Edge of the World", letting Geralt and Jaskier go of his own volition.
- Adapted Out: Several characters from the short story "The Edge of the World" aren't featured in this adaptation, including Dhun, Lille and Dana Meadbh.
- The Bard: Jaskier is one. He decides on following Geralt and singing about him to make Geralt a positive figure in the eyes of regular people.
- Cast From Hitpoints: Fringilla learns the hard way that chaos magic runs on Equivalent Exchange. She's the first to successfully make a rock float, but the effort causes her left hand to wither. Tissaia then demonstrates that they're supposed to draw the life force from the provided flowers instead of themselves.
- Cruel to Be Kind: Tissaia clearly sees a lot of herself in Yennefer, and absolutely refuses to coddle her. She constantly belittles her and tells her what she's doing wrong... which is better than the other students, who are given basic instructions and then largely ignored.
- Ear Worm: "Toss a Coin to Your Witcher" is going to be in your head for a few days after this episode.
- Establishing Character Moment: Jaskier is introduced singing a terrible song to a tavern, getting pelted with bread for his trouble, collecting the bread, talking to the mysterious stranger who didn't throw bread at him, and never shutting up for more than two seconds.
- Equivalent Exchange: Magic, used by channeling chaos, is shown to require life force. If you don't have something external, like a flower, then the same amount is used up from the witch's own body.
- Facial Horror: One student appears to successfully capture lightning in a bottle, only for it to explode and send glass shards into her face.
- Forced Transformation: Tissaia turns the girls who showed the least magical aptitude into eels. The eels are then pushed into a large pool filled with other eels. Though the girls failed their magic training, the pool siphons their magic off.
- Hope Spot: Ciri comes across a group of Cintra refugees. They are later all slaughtered by a Nilfgaardian raiding party.
- Immediate Self-Contradiction: Jaskier promises to be quiet for Geralt. That lasts two seconds.
- In the Hood: Ciri covers herself in her hood to hide her identity from the Nilfgaard soldiers looking for her.
- King Incognito: Ciri hides her identity and calls herself "Fiona" to the family that takes her in. This is a good thing, since its clear the Cintran refugees blame the former king and queen for the Nilfgaardian sack of their city.
- Noble Bigot: Adon's mother has utter contempt for her Dwarven servant, yet remains utterly charitable towards Ciri in spite of the desperate situation her family is in.
- Rage Against the Reflection: Yennifer smashes a mirror at how not only was she sold, but for how little.
- Rage Breaking Point: Abbott, the dwarf slave, reaches this point in the middle of a Nilfgaardian raid, stabbing his mistress over and over in the back. Ciri cowers in fear as she watches.
- Reduced to Ratburgers: Ciri at first doesn't want to eat a rat, but the next scene she's eating it over the fire.
- Sink or Swim Mentor: Tissaia's idea of warning her students about the dangers of doing magic without a proper energy source is to let Fringilla accidentally suck all the life energy out of her own hand (not unfixable, but still). And any students who wash out get turned into eels.
- Title Drop: The episode title refers to how much Yennifer was sold for by her father.
- Written by the Winners: Human history claims that the elves gifted the land to the humans before retreating to their mountain palaces. In truth, the elves were forcefully driven out.
