Synopsis
THE PAST LIES AHEAD.
Bloodied knuckles. Sword cuts. Aching limbs. With each day of training in a mountain temple, Antarna draws closer to the power she’ll need if an assassin strikes once more. Never again will she be helpless.
When magic ravages the temple, the lives of her friends and the future of the congregation hang by a thread. A rare cure for their grave condition offers hope, and so Antarna braves a return to the city she fled as a child.
The journey ahead is fraught with thieves, traitors and tyrants who covet the cure. Lies are as thick as flies. In a desperate race against time, her past may hold vital clues—or offer only deeper peril.
Review
I was given this ARC by the author a while ago, and I finally got around to reading it right as the book made semi-finalist in SPFBO XI. Life kept getting in the way of finishing this book sooner.
I’ll start off by saying that this isn’t a book for those who like most things explained (I’m one of those people, although it doesn’t need to be spoonfed to me). This book shoves you into a dark cave and pulls you around sharp corners and through action scenes without really stopping to explain a lot. There’s so much packed into this world, so many strange creatures, cultures, and magic, but it doesn’t spend much time telling what things are or the why behind them. Much of this was jarring, like the descriptions of the armless, which took almost the whole book to visualize in my head. The magic system had so many layers to it and different factions that for almost all of the book I felt like a jellybrained mudfish trying to understand everything. The illustrations in my ebook copy helped with some of the creatures and scenes, but trying to visualize everything was a challenge for me.
Now, that’s not to say that it made the book bad. I enjoyed reading it. For me, the strangeness of the world and magic were fascinating because it felt very fresh and not like many other stories I’ve read before. The concepts of the past lives and the Death Goddess that the main character Antarna serves in her mountain monastery were so cool. I also liked that the magic of the mages was built around the madriliks that float around and can be stored inside a person, fueling their magic (although I also kept confusing it with some of the other elements of the magic).
Antarna started off as an interesting character for me because of her connections to her past lives and her need for answers. I did start to grow less interested in her around the middle of the book because I didn’t feel there was as much growth with her as I would have expected.
Cal was my favorite POV, and there were a lot of layers to him that I enjoyed. I felt like he really grew a lot through the book.
Zanth was the POV that I connected with the least. It felt like he came out of nowhere, disappeared for a good portion of the book, and then reappeared only to vanish again in the end (with his ending, at least I know where he is unless the rip between the planes actually leads somewhere else and he’ll be alive in the next book).
My favorite was Enthriff. Again, this little creature took most of the book to fully understand what he was and what he did/looked like, but he was adorable, and if the author ever makes book merch, I would like an Enthriff.
Overall, this is an epic fantasy with a sprawling world and plenty of action. If you don’t mind not knowing a lot of things and just being along for the ride, this book is for you.
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