Greven’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 4th story in the anthology, “Greven’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: “Greven’s Tale”
Anthology: Rath and Storm
Author(s): Philip Athans
Genre: Epic Fantasy
First Printing: July 1998
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast LLC
SPOILER WARNING
Mild, unmarked spoilers for “Greven’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 (HEAVY SPOILERS)
This story details the Skyship Predator’s surprise attack on the Weatherlight, striking from above within moments of the Weatherlight planeshifting onto Rath. From the perspective of Greven, the captail of the Predator, we get an accounting of the main events of the assault.
This events of the story are rather straightforward. The Predator’s openly volley from its mana cannons cripples the Weatherlight. From there, Greven boards with a horde of mogg goblins. Several crew are killed, and Greven nearly kills Gerrard before a cannon strike sends Gerrard overboard. The moggs are able to strip every Legacy artifact out of the Weatherlight (except the Weatherlight herself and her power core, of course) and convey them back to the Predator while the Weatherlight is still airborne and without having to kill most of the Weatherlight’s crew. Greven then returns to the Predator and executes his first mate, who attempted to kill Greven during the boarding action by firing a volley into the Weatherlight after Greven had boarded.
Oh. I failed to mention one detail: these events are not presented in chronological order.
The story opens on Greven executing his first mate. This is the only scene not from Greven’s POV, instead being from the first mate’s.
We cuts backwards to the duel with Gerrard, during which the first mate attempts to kill Greven.
We zigzag through the boarding action and initial assault.
The story ends with Greven leaping back aboard the Predator and seizing the first mate to execute him.
There’s no clear rhyme or reason to this. At first, I thought this was a story told in reverse order, or that we were following Greven’s train of thought as he reflected on each event was the result of some previous event, but that went out the window when the story zigzagged forward. (Also, the opening scene is the POV of the first mate as he is being thrown overboard, so the POV shift to Greven also invalidates this theory.)
RATING: 2 / 10
The shuffled timeline of this story makes it almost unreadable.
I don’t think the events captured within the story are necessarily an issue. It could have worked as a concise action sequence. I think the fact so much is skimmed (the seizure of the Legacy, in particular) diminishes the story, much in the same way that summarizing the final aboroth fight diminished “Tahngarth’s Tale”, but since Greven is the POV, I think it makes sense to keep the focus purely on his contributions to the boarding action.
By messing with the chronology, this simple story becomes insufferable. There’s no need for this bizarre choice. it doesn’t enhance the story being told. It isn’t necessary to understanding Greven’s perspective on the world. It feels like it was done purely because Athans and/or WotC either didn’t have faith in the narrative to stand up without gimmicks and/or to distract readers from the fact that the crucial plot milestone of the Legacy being seized is being glossed over.
It’s just so frustrating. After the slow, character-focused story that was “Ertai’s Tale”, a straightforward action story would have been a nice way to open the second part of the anthology. Instead, we get this convoluted nightmare that seems to exist just to establish a plot milestone for the overall anthology narrative.
ANALYSIS
Plot
To expand upon the milestone point, this story reads as if Athans was given a checklist of events to cover in this story:
Introduce Greven
Separate Gerrard from the crew so that he could meet the Vec tribe (something that happens out of the audience’s view before he rejoins the crew in the next story, “Hanna’s Tale”)
Get the Legacy out of the Weatherlight so that it becomes one more thing the crew needs to retrieve
Separate Tahngarth and Karn from the crew so that they are in position for whatever narrative roles they fill later in the story
The separation of Gerrard from the crew is a good sequence. Greven’s character introduction is passable if the goal is to frame him as a one-note thug. However, the remaining two points require this crew of pirates to clear out the holds of the Weatherlight in the span of just a couple of minutes, while the ship is still airborne and being fired upon, without killing the many crew members who would no doubt attempt to stop them. Abducting Karn, in particular, is ludicrous. Even if no one helped him, even if he is refusing to fight back (as this anthology established up-front that Karn has adopted a creed of extreme pacifism between the end of Bloodlines and the opening of the anthology), he is made out of metal. He is not lightweight. Literally all he had to do to avoid abduction was refuse to walk in the direction the moggs wanted him to (or, better yet, walk the opposite direction).
This is why I wonder if the shuffled chronology is meant to be a distraction. When everything is sorted back into proper chronological order, everything that Greven is directly involved with is decent. However, the most narratively important bit is happening outside of his view. Shuffling the timeline makes it easier to accept (by making it harder to notice) that illogical events are happening.
Character
I kept holding out for some detail of Greven’s character to explain why the timeline was like this. That just never manifested. He has no character traits or magical powers that would either literally or figuratively distort his perception of time. The only remarkable quality about Greven to be introduced in this story is a spiral implant that links him to Volrath and allows Volrath to punish him whenever he is disobedient or fails in a task, but there’s no indication that this affects how he perceives events unfolding. At the end of the day, Greven is an extremely one-note henchman who has to deal with treacherous underlings. There’s nothing wrong with that. It just amplifies the sense of the shuffled chronology not being justified.
Setting aside my frustration over Karn being seized with the rest of the Legacy, it makes sense in concept for him to be taken. His newfound pacificism has been explicitly established to be at the extreme of, “I won’t even use violence to defend my loved ones.” If a group of armed individuals could force him to move, it is true to his character for him to bow his head and go along with it. As for Tahngarth, his infiltrating the Predator to recover Karn and the Legacy is true to the immense loyalty that was established as a core for his character in both “Gerrard’s Tale” and “Tahngarth’s Tale”.
THE CRASH
“Greven’s Tale” was a short and simple story that was made unnecessarily complicated by a stylistic choice.
The next story, though, takes the content of three or four stories and crams them into the length of one, with predictably unsatisfying results. We’ll get into that on Saturday with the fifth story in the anthology, “Hanna’s Tale”.
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