Starke'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 6th story in the anthology, “Starke'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: “Starke’s Tale”
Anthology: Rath and Storm
Author(s): Jennifer Clarke Wilkes
Genre: Epic Fantasy
First Printing: July 1998
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast LLC
SPOILER WARNING
Mild, unmarked spoilers for “Starke'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 is split between a present-day plot (immediately following the events of “Hanna’s Tale”) and a flashback plot.
In the present-day plot, Starke advises Gerrard on how best to fly the Weatherlight into the Stronghold. Despite his protests, Gerrard insists that the ship first detour to a defunct planar portal so that the crew can prepare a contingency plan for their escape. The ship then flies to the volcano at the heart of Rath and enters the mountain through a vent. The present-day plot ends with an action set piece as the crew fends off a sliver attack. Throughout all of this, Starke frets about being outed as a traitor (more on that in the analysis).
In the flashback plot, Starke reflects on being sent to Dominaria by the Phyrexians to corrupt a young Vuel. We see how he sabotages Vuel’s rite of passage and then, when the boy is at his lowest point, offers another destiny. Later, he is dragged back to Rath by Vuel, who has now completed the transformation into Volrath, and forced to become Volrath’s pawn.
RATING: 4 / 10
This story was a real let-down.
The present-day plot is, conceptually, very good. If the flashback plot were cut out, and more attention were paid into fleshing out Starke’s character in the present and the action scene with the slivers, I think it could have worked. What’s currently on the page is simply very dull. The action feels lifeless, as does Starke worrying about being outed as a traitor.
The flashback plot … did not need to exist. Full stop. It just recycles information that was covered in exposition during the interlude chapters. There technically is dialogue and action now, but nothing that actually tells us anything new or deeper about Starke, Vuel / Volrath, or even Gerrard (who ruined Vuel’s rite of passage by saving the boy’s life after sabotage by Starke put Vuel in danger).
In the end, this whole story reads like overly wordy exposition (repetitive exposition, in the case of the flashback. If this whole story were cut out and then merely summarized in the interlude chapters, nothing would have been lost.
ANALYSIS
The Traitor
The fact that Starke is a traitor has been known since the first interlude chapter. We were Told about how Starke corrupted Vuel into Volrath. We were Told that Volrath later got Starke under his thumb by taking Starke’s daughter as a hostage. We were even Told that Starke arranged to have Sisay kidnapped by Volrath specifically so that he could convince the crew of the Weatherlight to storm the Stronghold and have her (and thus, either kill Volrath or rescue his daughter).
As a result, a story of him fretting over being outed as the man who set the events of this anthology into motion doesn’t have any weight to it. Maybe it could have worked if the focus was on him outmaneuvering or silencing someone who got too close to learning to truth. Better yet, if the flashbacks had focused on his relationship with his daughter (and also his wife, who is referenced within the story but also not shown), we’d at least have had a emotional basis to sympathize with him as he dithers.
Without either of those variables, though, it’s just dithering.
Skimming Forward
Interesting things do happen in the present plot. It’s just they move past so quickly that they don’t have anything to make them engaging.
The story opens on the end of the negotiations between the elves and human tribes for the Stronghold attack. I was disappointed that we wouldn’t see any manipulations or maneuverings by Starke during this event, but in the interest of moving things along, I can understand why it wasn’t shown. What mattered most was the confirmation that the Weatherlight could count upon the assault of the elves and humans to keep Volrath distracted.
I think skimming forward was also okay with the planar portal. That built on the past characterization of Ertai, who gets left to reactivate the portal while the rest of the crew continued to the Stronghold. It also made sense as a side detour to make Starke antsy and highlight that his goals aren’t quite in sync with the rest of the crew.
The slivers, though, should not have been skimmed over.
For those of you not familiar with MTG lore: slivers are hive-mind creatures that are like a cross between a snake and a mantis. Their whole gimmick (and the reason why MTG reintroduces them or reprints them so sparingly) is that each sliver shares its innate abilities with every other - so if a venomous sliver, a winged sliver, and a sliver covered in bony armor were within close proximity of each other, all three would become venomous and sprout both wings and bony armor.
This has such rich potential for an action scene, and that kind of action scene could easily be an entire story on its own. Figuring out that they can share abilities, how to counteract this mechanic, and that Volrath has fabricated sliver constructs that can benefit from the abilities of the hive … There is just so much potential here. I honestly misremembered this action scene as being its own story, and more specifically, I remembered it as being Hanna’s story. She is the one who ends up figuring out the slivers’ abilities and saving the crew. I find myself wishing this had been her story, given that the only parts of “Hanna’s Tale” that really worked were the ones where she was actively solving problems.
Skimming through the scene with action that is at, “And then they fight,” levels of detail is just a tragic and colossal waste.
SILVER HEART
I wish I had more I could say about “Starke’s Tale” There’s just so little too it. I don’t know why Wizards of the Coast even commissioned it for this anthology if it was going to just be fluffed-up exposition. The interlude chapter immediately after it skims over a couple of obstacles that are just as dangerous as the sliver encounter (the Furnace of Rath and the Death Pits). It’s really not clear what makes the events of this story so specific as to warrant the extra attention.
Unfortunately, I’m worried that the next story, “Karn’s Tale”, is going down the same path. I’m only a small number of pages into that next story at the time that I finish drafting this part of the review. However, given the focus of that tale has already slipped into another flashback that reiterates events that were previously exposited in the interlude chapters, I don’t have a lot of confidence in it. Hopefully, it will prove me wrong.
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