Gerrard’s Tale (A Rath and Storm Short Story)
Hello, all. Welcome back to the anthology mini-review series for Rath and Storm.
This part of the review will cover the 1st story in the anthology, “Gerrard’s Tale”. Please see the review series introduction if you’d like an overview of how this anthology is being handled. Otherwise, let’s fly.
STATS
Title: “Gerrard’s Tale”
Anthology: Rath and Storm
Author(s): Michael Ryan
Genre: Epic Fantasy
First Printing: July 1998
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast LLC
SPOILER WARNING
Mild, unmarked spoilers for “Gerrard’s Tale” will be provided throughout this review. Heavy spoilers will be confined to clearly labeled sections. I will keep the first paragraph of any given section spoiler-free.
Heavy, unmarked spoilers will be provided for the framing device of Rath and Storm as well as for all short stories that preceded this one within the anthology.
Throughout this review, I will also be providing heavy spoilers for events at other points within within MTG canon, including events that occur during the Artifacts Cycle. While I will be steering clear of details that would spoil the progression of this book specifically, there is a strong chance that you will figure out certain spoilers if you pay attention to these bits of lore. I’ll confine the heavy spoilers that are relevant to this book into clearly marked sections.
STORY
Years after leaving the Weatherlight upon the death of his friend Rofellos, Gerrard is serving as a master at arm within the army of Benalia. The day that his discovers that a local master of assassins, Lord Kastan, is trying to headhunt among the army recruits is the same day Tahngarth shows up on his doorstep. The minotaur warns Gerrard that Sisay has been kidnapped by Volrath and to urge Gerrard to take over as captain of the Weatherlight to save her. Gerrard must then choose between his two commitments.
RATING: 7 / 10
“Gerrard’s Tale” leaves heavily on Telling us pivotal backstory. As covered back in Part 1, easily a whole novel’s worth of information to get Gerrard to this narrative position is rushed out in the insert chapters. This isn’t like Captain Hawk in Beyond the Crimson Mists, where we start with a hero at this low point and then learn how he got there through his adventures. We are glimpsing a relatively minor chapter of a story already in progress.
Despite this limitation, the story does an effective job of showing Gerrard’s priorities and his struggle. He’s a man who feels a great deal of responsibility for others, whether they are the recruits under his tutelage or allies affected by his destiny as inheritor of the Legacy. Tahngarth’s arrival puts him in a position where he needs to sacrifice one commitment to serve another.
ANALYSIS (Heavy Spoilers)
Plot & Character
The story here is pretty straightforward. Gerrard starts the story with one problem, is presented with another when Tahngarth tries to get him back to Weatherlight, and needs to reconcile the conflict between the two. The climax of the story is him making his decision.
My only real gripe about this story (other than the Telling, but as covered in Part 1, the nature of the anthology makes this somewhat unavoidable) is how Gerrard resolves his commitments. The answer to the problem posed by Lord Kastan just falls into his lap, in the form of an assassin whom he’s able to talk into betraying Kastan, before Tahngarth has the chance to give up and leave without Gerrard. Due to circumstances outside of Gerrard’s conflict, the conflict resolves itself. He no longer has any excuse not to go back to the Weatherlight when his only other commitment wraps itself up that same day.
That being said … I do like what this turn of events tells us about Gerrard’s character. Ryan very efficiently shows us Gerrard’s sense of immense responsibility. For all of the bad blood that led him to forsake the Weatherlight, he is still loyal to his companions. His focus on his duty to Benalia wasn’t just him making an excuse. Once his duty has been satisfied, he didn’t hesitate to embark on a dangerous quest to save a former friend.
Worldbuilding
Most of the worldbuilding in this story is done via Telling. Again, it’s an anthology, there’s not a lot that can be done to avoid that. There’s just one detail - or, I supposed, two details - that don’t make a lot of sense to me.
The falling out between Gerrard and Sisay that led him to abandon the Weatherlight was over Sisay’s quest to reassemble the Legacy artifacts. In addition to abducting Sisay, Volrath also stole the pieces of the Legacy that she’d assembled thus far. The thing is, Gerrard has two pieces of the Legacy with him in Benalia: an hourglass pendant he wears around his neck and a weapon called the Null Rod. Of the two, the hourglass pendant is explicitly acknowledged as a piece of the Legacy.
In the final scene, when Gerrard boards the Weatherlight … he leaves both of them behind. At the very least, he explicitly leaves the hourglass pendant behind, while the Null Rod is implied by it not being mentioned at all.
Something about this feels very weird. Sure, we get a line from Gerrard earlier in the story about how Volrath taking Sisay and the other Legacy pieces, but him leaving these things behind isn’t framed as protecting them from Volrath; it’s used for a moment to emphasize his dedication to his friends over the Legacy. Except Gerrard surely realizes these relics aren’t going to be safe just sitting, unguarded, in his quarters in Benalia, right?
This isn’t a huge issue. It doesn’t affect this story at all. Maybe one of the later novels will acknowledge that these relics were left behind and feature of scene of Gerrad retrieving them. It’s just that, in isolation, it sort of trivializes the Legacy. We don’t have a lot of context on how these relics work. We’re just told, “They’re important, and they’re needed to save the world.” So for Gerrard to just casually ignore two of them runs counter to that idea. At least when Order of the Phoenix has a Horcrux get casually thrown into the trash, none of the characters realized what it was at the time.
CHARGING AHEAD
“Gerrard’s Tale” is a strong note for the anthology to start on. Its weak points either pivot into strengths or are the unfortunate product of it being a snapshot of a much larger story with a lot of background lore. I think it does a good job of setting Gerrard as a classical heroic archetype to lead the crew of the Weatherlight on their adventures to Rath.
But first, the Weatherlight needs to make a pitstop in the forests of Llanowar, which is where we’ll pick up tomorrow with “Tahngarth’s Tale”.
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