In The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt as well as the book series, Ciri is regarded as a powerful individual, capable of performing great magical feats such as traveling through space and time. However, she isn’t present in CD Projekt Red’s original entry in the franchise. Instead, there was Alvin, who had similar powers but a very different fate.
Alvin is often seen as a stand-in for Ciri in The Witcher. Thus, many fans of the franchise don’t consider him canon. However, Geralt gets a letter from him in The Witcher 3, which somewhat confirms that he exists in CD Projekt Red’s version of The Witcher world. Now, explaining his powers may prove a difficult undertaking, but there are theories that try to fit Alvin into the lore.
Alvin in The Witcher Games
Alvin appears primarily in The Witcher. Geralt first meets the young boy early in the game, after Alvin had escaped from a barghest attack in The Witcher that left him orphaned. What’s strange, however, is that the young boy exhibits magical affinities. For instance, the shock from the barghest attack causes Alvin to go into a trance and recite Ithlinne’s Prophecy. Additionally, he tends to teleport away when in dangerous situations.
Throughout the game, the player must be a father figure to Alvin then later decide whether to leave him in the care of either Triss or Shani. Around the end of the game, however, he vanishes. Geralt then comes across a new antagonist — Jacques de Aldersberg, Grand Master of the Order of the Flaming Rose in The Witcher. It’s heavily implied that Alvin and de Aldersberg are one and the same, suggesting that Alvin teleported back in time, then grew up to become the Grand Master.
By the end of the main story, Geralt of The Witcher must face off against de Aldersberg, who tells the Witcher about the inevitability of the White Frost. According to him, no human will be able to survive it, unless they’re turned into mutants who can withstand the extreme cold. However, Geralt refuses to take part in de Aldersberg’s plan and cuts him down, bringing the first game to an end.
Years later, in the events of The Witcher 3, the player comes across a strange letter in the side quest “A Message from an Old Friend.” In a book entitled “My Manifesto - The Life of Jacques de Aldersberg,” Geralt finds a note labeled “Letter from ‘A’.” This confirms that Alvin did indeed grow up to become Jacques de Aldersberg. In the message, the former Grand Master writes, once again, of the White Frost and impending doom. After, he explains that only a Child of the Elder Blood can stop the end of the world, but that he tried and failed. He, the chosen one, could not save the world from the unforgiving blizzard.
This seems to suggest that de Aldersberg was, like Ciri of The Witcher, a descendant of Lara Dorren. There’s a problem with this suggestion, however.
How Alvin Differs from Ciri
Ciri is, indeed, a descendant of Lara Dorren — a powerful elven mage in The Witcher. Thus, Ciri inherited powerful magic abilities that allowed her to travel across space and time. She is also a Source — an individual with a strong affinity to magic that can create magical power themselves. Both of these qualities make her a formidable magic user, regardless of her inexperience in making use of her abilities.
Alvin, on the other hand, is more likely to be a Source with no trace of the powerful elven sorceress’ Elder Blood. Though he believes himself to be some sort of chosen one, this may have been born from his growing instability. Learning that the world would inevitably end with the coming of the White Frost likely put a strain on his mental state.
Sources are capable of great magical feats in The Witcher because they’re wellsprings of magical power. This would explain why Alvin, and later de Aldersberg, could teleport at will with ease. Additionally, Sources do not react well to stressful situations, and these usually result in powerful bursts of magical energy. This explains Alvin’s trance after the barghest attack. The fact that he divined the future is also added proof, as Sources most commonly end up becoming village soothsayers or psychics.
Still, Alvin being a Source doesn’t explain how he managed to travel back in time to become Jacques de Aldersberg. This is where fans need to start theorizing.
Alvin as a Child of the Elder Blood
Alvin could be a Child of the Elder Blood as well. It’s hard to dismiss the idea since Ciri’s ancestry in The Witcher has been difficult to trace in recent years, and the carriers of the bloodline could have very well passed it on profusely. That said, Alvin should not have exhibited the same magical prowess as Ciri because, in the books, male carriers of the bloodline are not known to inherit Lara Dorren’s magical abilities. In short, he shouldn’t have been able to travel across time.
That said, the theory could still be possible if one were to assume Alvin was an outlier among Lara Dorren’s male descendants. Perhaps he was simply the first male in the family tree that successfully inherited the elven sage’s magical prowess. Still, there’s no way to know for sure, especially considering how thoroughly the mages botched the bloodline.
At the end of the day, The Witcher was CD Projekt Red’s first brush with adapting a game for the book series. The developer wasn’t yet sure how to carry over the characters of the books into a video game. Thus, well-known characters, like Alvin and Yennefer, were “swapped in” with Ciri and Triss. CD Projekt Red even thought to go the character creation route for The Witcher game, but ultimately decided on having Geralt as the main protagonist. And more fumbles aside, the original Witcher title still tells a story worth experiencing.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is available now on PC, PS4, Switch, and Xbox One.