Hanna’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 5th story in the anthology, “Hanna’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: “Hanna’s Tale”
Anthology: Rath and Storm
Author(s): Miranda Horner
Genre: Epic Fantasy
First Printing: July 1998
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast LLC
SPOILER WARNING
Mild, unmarked spoilers for “Hanna’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)
Reeling from Gerrard’s apparent death during the battle with Greven and the Predator, Hanna throws herself into the work at hand, guiding Weatherlight down for a crash-landing in the Skyshroud Forest. She then asks to join Mirri in the search for Gerrard’s body.
As Hanna and Mirri journey through the Skyshroud, they are attacked by a shapeshifter. They then find where Gerrad fell, as well as evidence that he is still alive. They follow the trail he left until they are captured by the Skyshroud elves.
The Skyshroud elves take Mirri and Hanna back to their village and inform the pair that they have surrounded and will soon attack the Weatherlight. It is then that Gerrard is brought forward, accompanied by the Oracle of the human Vec tribe. The Oracle reveals that Gerrard is the prophesied Korvedal (Uniter) who will lead a rebellion of the human against Rath’s Phyrexian overlords. The Oracle convinces the elves to welcome the crew of the Weatherlight as allies and begin coordinating the alliance between the elves and humans.
(Also laced throughout this is character drama involving Hanna’s feelings with Gerrard and her relationship with Mirri.)
RATING: 4 / 10
After one short story that is just character work, and another that is just an action sequence, this one tries to make up for lost time by cramming multiple stories’ worth of content. It potentially has the length to do so - “Hanna’s Tale” is 34 pages long, whereas “Ertai’s Tale” and “Greven’s Tale” were 29 page in total - but in execution, it ends up feeling like a bloated and shallow mess.
I think that roughly the first half of the story is good. Hanna gets to show her mastery over the Weatherlight, even while under intense emotional distress (and while dealing with Ertai, who continuously gives her reasons not to like him) by landing the ship with minimal casualties. Her decision to join Mirri’s hunt for Gerrard, despite fully expecting that he is dead, makes for a good character moment for her. As for the fight with the shapeshifter, it’s weightless, but at least it gives a chance to show Hanna’s keen mind as she discerns the shapeshifter’s weakness and exploits it.
After that point, though, things really go downhill. Character work and plot milestones are rushed. It reads like Horner was given a checklist of beats to hit, found herself really getting engaged with writing just a few of them, and then had to ram in the rest when she started to get too close to the maximum word count. As a result, a story that started on a high note ended up with an incredibly unsatisfying resolution.
ANALYSIS
Plot
The Good
The sequence of Hanna bringing the Weatherlight down for a crash landing is good. It’s hardly the greatest thing in the world, but for an action sequence that boils down to parking in dense brush, it’s handled in a way that creates believable stakes and tension. Hanna demonstrates an understanding of the situation and a cool command of the crew that makes her feel like a believable leader. Despite her competence, there is also consequence, with one crew member being taken out by a large branch that falls onto the Weatherlight despite Hanna’s best efforts.
The fight scene with the shapeshifter is decent. It has its flaws: the action has no weight to it, and Hanna finishes the shapeshifter off with an absurd action move that she just taught herself to do with no formal training. Still, it’s a good showing of Hanna’s ability to analyze a situation. She also does strain her muscles with that action move, so there’s at least a nod to the consequences of that absurd action move.
Also, the fact Gerrad survived the fall is fine. We’re given an explanation later that holds up, given details in “Greven’s Tale”.
The Bad (Heavy Spoilers)
My rating of this story properly cratered once the elves got involved.
Skyshroud Elves capturing Hanna and Mirri makes sense. Everything is going fine as the pair are brought back to the village and placed in a hut under guard. The fact that the lord of the elves (yes, this is Eladamri, for those who know) decides to come visit the pair in prison to taunt them about the impending attack of the Weatherlight is a bit unnecessary, but maybe he was hoping to get them to provide information to aid his peoples’ takeover of the ship.
However, then Gerrard just waltzes in with the Oracle, and everything is resolved. There was apparently a prophecy that allowed the Vec to find Gerrard at the exact time and place where he fell. This wins over Eladamri with only a token argument. Everyone is just friends now. Gerrard is reunited with the crew with no further fuss.
It’s all just feels so rushed and unearned. The story could have just ended at the point when Hanna and Mirri found the point that Gerrard crashed into the forest. If they had arrived while Gerrard was still there, and then everything about the prophecy and the meeting of the Skyshroud eleves was dumped into the connective exposition in the next interlude chapter, that would probably have made for a much more satisfying reading experience.
Character
Per my comments about the landing of the strong points of the plot, I think this story does a good job of characterizing Hanna. She is smart, insightful, and resourceful, and she is the sort of person to throw herself into a task to distract herself from negative emotions. Her desire to accompany Mirri in the search for Gerrard, despite fully expecting to only find his corpse, demonstrates the depth of her devotion to Gerrard despite him breaking her heart in the past (more on that in a second).
It’s those conflicts later in the story that are the problem.
Bad Blood with Mirri
The conflict with Mirri that gets resolved in this story, though, comes out of left field. It is founded upon events and character interactions that needed to be Shown, not Told. At least when we were Told about Gerrard abandoning the Weatherlight prior to the events of “Gerrard’s Tale”, it was:
One concrete and easily described incident.
The driving force behind both “Gerrard’s Tale” and “Tahngarth’s Tale”.
Resolved via events within those stories that had a clear correlation to the original incident, for reasons provided by the characters.
Here, we’re told that Hanna thought Mirri didn’t think she was competent, and then Mirri said she didn’t trust/resented Hanna for having issues with her father (Barrin) while Mirri herself grew up as an orphan … and this is resolved by Hanna landing the Weatherlight and helping Mirri fight the shapeshifter? This is way too complex for us to just be Told the conflict exists, and Hanna’s actions and one conservation between the pair doesn’t seem like they should instantly make everything better.
Romance
As those of you more aware of events later in the Weatherlight Saga no doubt know already, Hanna is Gerrard’s love interest. Her death in Invasion (or maybe it was Planeshift) really messes him up and leads to the dark cliffhanger that Planeshift ends on. His death at the end of Apocalypse is framed as the hero being reunited with the woman he loves after a heroic sacrifice.
Given the nature of these MTG tie-in books as stories built around marketing the card game, I don’t expect a deep and nuanced Romance. These two are in love, and it motivates Gerrard? Okay, I’ll take the word of the author(s) on good faith. It’s a weakness in the story, but not one that should hamstring the narrative.
Here, the story shines a light of Hanna and Gerrard’s feelings … but rather than exploring them, it just resolves things. Hanna reflects on how much it hurt when Gerrard left the Weatherlight the first time. When they reunited, Gerrad kisses her, and it’s treated like a love declaration (since this is the first time he’s done something like that since rejoining the crew).
It just feels like things are running on autopilot. There’s no emotion to this. There’s no payoff. Gerrard and Hanna could have done this during the exposition covered in the interlude chapters, and it would have felt more rewarding, as at least then the audience could imagine something more substantial happened.
THE BETRAYER
“Hanna’s Tale” is a story with good ideas. Some of those ideas are explored well. It’s just that it tries to explore too many things, without adequate setup. As a result, things end in a series of messy payoffs.
I’m hoping things get better in the next story “Starke’s Tale”. This is a character who is not part of the core crew of the Weatherlight, and whose contribution thus far in the narrative has been backstory about how he helped to make Volrath the “evincar” (ruler) of Rath and how he joined the Weatherlight because Volrath has taken his daughter captive. The interlude chapters promise that his story will be one of plotting and intrigue, as the alliance between the Weatherlight, the Vec tribes, and the Skyshroud elves could go very poorly for him. We shall see how things play out tomorrow.
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