Synopsis
Revenge loves company.
Mithrid Fenn wants nothing to do with magick. Magick is a curse word, banned by the vast Arka Empire and punishable by death. Its purging has finally brought peace to war-torn Emaneska. Only a stubborn rebellion, led by the warlord Outlaw King, raids and pillages the empire’s northern fringes.
To cliff-brat Mithrid, this is an age of tranquility and childhood games. That is until an illegal spellbook washes up on her shores, and she finds herself thrust into a war she never knew existed.
Now hunted by daemons and mages, she is dragged inexorably north to Scalussen and its rebels fighting doggedly to preserve a memory of freedom. Mithrid holds no such ideals. She fights for revenge and nothing nobler. If spilling blood means helping the Outlaw King, then so be it. Even if it means all-out war.
Review
Wowwww.
Ok. Firstly, I should really have figured out that I love Norse-inspired fantasy when I got completely obsessed with John Gwynne’s Bloodsworn Saga a couple of years ago. Secondly, this is actually a follow-up series to the author’s Emanaska series, but it has a new main character in Mithrid Fenn, and can be read independently of that series. However, I still recommend reading that series first because it offers a deeper insight into the backstory of the world and introduces some of the characters who play major roles in the story. It’s also fun to see the world Galley created in that series from a new perspective in teenage Mithrid who finds herself dragged into a war she wanted no part in, between the magic-hating Arka Empire and the Outlaw King and his rebel city.
This is a traditional fantasy setup that’s made distinct both by the background events (since the original series had magic users as the rulers of the old empire) and the author’s brilliant character work. Farden, the protagonist of the original series, is a realistically flawed character who makes some mind-bogglingly terrible mistakes yet undergoes character development that feels all the more satisfying because we see the full journey. In a similar way, Mithrid starts out as a very angry teenager who’s just lost her family and only wants revenge and undergoes a brutal journey as she finds herself aligned with a rebellion she wanted no part in. Honestly, the author is not afraid to drag his characters through hell or have protagonists make decisions that are really bad – that they KNOW are really bad – and somehow have the reader still cheering for them anyway even if we also want to strangle them. It’s an art.
Mithrid is no exception, and this series is very much her own journey. But we still get the perspectives of some of the original characters we know and love from the first series, like Farden, Modren, and Inwick. There are plenty of new faces, too, and all of them are drawn with the same attention to detail as the cast of the original series. The difference is that Galley is a more polished writer now, as Emaneska was his debut series and each book improved on the previous one. Now we come to the Forever King, which I feel like is a huge step up in terms of quality, which is saying something given that I found the first series utterly addictive. I particularly like that his magic has a cost that the characters bear, and that many of the cast are the last survivors from among the Written – that is, powerful mages doomed to succumb to madness when their magic inevitably overpowers their minds. Mithrid’s own abilities are an unknown that she struggles to master – again, perhaps a trope that would have seemed cliche in a less polished author’s hands, but the gritty depth to the worldbuilding and setting and the harshness of the struggle she’s caught up in make us genuinely invested in her progress.
The worldbuilding is spectacular. The world is vast and the groundwork the author laid in the original series is developed in new ways, since time has passed and everywhere has changed over the years. This means every setting comes across as new, even the more familiar ones, and there are some new developments like a library on a boat that I absolutely loved. The city of the rebels is new, too, and a lot of the story takes place in this haven of freedom amidst a world determined to strangle all opposition. By switching perspectives, the author is able to show us all sides of this vast empire, from rainy islands to frigid mountains, and each comes to life through the author’s stellar storytelling. I devoured this 600+ page book in two days and was honestly unable to put it down due to the level of tension the author embeds in the pages. There’s a constant pervasive sense of dread and none of the characters are safe, and even the ones who are supposed to be immortal aren’t invulnerable.
I can’t remember the last time I was so blown away by a book that I just sat there staring at a wall afterwards, but The Forever King just floored me. It’s brutal, emotionally intense, and brilliantly written, with the sort of characters who remain lodged in your heart for a long time after you close the last page. If the first book is anything to go by, this series is set to be a stunner of a follow-up. If you like Norse-inspired dark fantasy or just generally the kind of story where you walk away thinking “I’ve been emotionally compromised by a book”, I can’t recommend this highly enough.
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