Onyx Storm (Chapter 19 & Spotlight on Demonization of Characters)
STATS
Title: Onyx Storm
Series: The Empyrean (Book 3)
Author(s): Rebecca Yarros
Genre: Fantasy (Epic)
First Printing: January 2025
Publisher: Red Tower Books
Rating: 1.5 / 10
SPOILER WARNING
Heavy spoilers will be provided for the entirety of The Empyrean up through the end of the content covered in this part. Mild spoilers for elements later in Onyx Storm may be provided, but I will keep the first paragraph of each section as spoiler-free as possible. Heavy spoilers from later in Onyx Storm will be confined to clearly labelled sections.
STORY
Violet and the task force (which now includes Mira) fly to a ruined Poromish village to collect the fetch quest MacGuffin. Violet, Xaden, and Mira abuse Grady for not doing things Violet’s way, both in private conversation and through blatant insubordination to his face. At the house where the MacGuffin is kept, Violet and a Navarrian rider named Aura stand guard while everyone else goes inside.
Violet patronizes Aura regarding being outside the wards. Despite the many reasons this makes no sense (which we will get to in the Spotlight), Aura is characterized as a trigger-happy, cowardly rookie. This leads to her using her Signet to immolate Grady (under contrived circumstances that we will also get to in the Spotlight). The village catches fire as a result of this. Xaden snags the MacGuffin from Grady’s corpse, and the task force retreats.
On the way out of the village, Aura is slaughtered by a wyvern. Sgaeyl arrives in time to kill this wyvern, and Violet kills another with her Signet. In the aftermath, Mira reveals that the MacGuffin had a note from Theophanie sitting next to it. Theophanie taunts Violet by saying that she can take Violet whenever she wants.
PLOT
The comedy of errors that is this chapter really needs it be broken down in the Spotlight. The whole chain of events is a result of Yarros mangling and abusing characters. The only thing I will call attention to is Theophanie’s note.
Rather than have Theophanie be here (either in person or by setting an ambush), Yarros has her just leave a note. The wyverns that do show up are explicitly drawn in by Aura’s use of a Signet, rather than being here because Theophanie staged them nearby. It is blatantly clear that Yarros is avoiding the logical decisions such a character would make. If Theophanie acted logically, that would lead to conflict with Violet. Yarros won't allow Theophanie to defeat Violet; she doesn’t what Violet to kill her yet; and on some level, she must realize that another arbitrary retreat, so soon after the last one, would make it impossible to take Theophanie seriously. Moustache-twirling taunts about how Violet should just submit to her is the best Yarros could manage.
CHARACTER
This entire chapter is a perfect example of what I mean with regards to how the issue of voice in Onyx Storm now feels like a character issue instead of a prose issue.
Throughout this scene, Violet, Xaden, and Mira behave horrifically, both directly to Grady’s and Aura’s faces and privately with one another. Violet is condescending and entitled. Xaden is sarcastic disdainful. Worst of all, Mira - a character who is supposed to have more experience than them in conducting herself as a member of the military - goes full Karen as she heckles Grady, rather than respecting him as a superior officer who has done nothing to prove himself unworthy of his position.
This is an issue that goes beyond the demonization of Grady and Aura. Even if we blindly accept the way Yarros characterizes these two, this spiteful trio goes out of their way to make themselves the bad guys here.
There is no military discipline. There is no respect for authority. I can somewhat buy this when the riders do this towards infantry or fliers, but within their own ranks, there should be discipline. I know there should be discipline in their own ranks because rider characters keep trying to assert lawful, rank-based authority over Violet and her associates. By the rules Yarros is spelling out here, Violet, Xaden, and Mira are egotistical assholes even compared to an organization of egotistical assholes.
We’ll get into this more in both the Spotlight and the Chapter 20 review. For now, let’s hit the main beats of why I found all three of these characters so appalling in this chapter.
Violet
First, Violet makes it clear that her only issue with Grady’s competence is that he doesn't do everything her way, with only a flimsy excuse for her disgust that tears under the slightest reflection.
“Gryphons can’t keep up,” Grady reminds us. “And this mission will serve as a trial run for all those that follow. An extra member would have thrown off the dynamic.”
“What fucking dynamic?” I ask Xaden. “I loathe Aura, don’t really trust Grady after he fed us the serum during RSC training, and don’t know the rest of them.”
This is a military unit assembled to save everyone Violet supposed loves or wants to take a righteous stand to protect, yet all she cares about is whether she personally likes everyone on it. The excuse about Grady feeding her the serum does not work because it contradicts Iron Flame. Even after Chapter 14 of that book, Grady was still characterized in the narrative as coddlingly nice. The reason Violet and her accessories avoided the serum in the second RSC exercise (the one where Grady emphasized that they were in a safe space) is because she recognized the smell of the drug in their water, rather than because she didn’t trust Grady.
Then there is her response to Aura pulling rank on her when she tries to be patronizing.
“As your senior wingleader, I’m ordering you to stand ready,” Aura seethes. “What use are you as our ‘greatest weapon’ if you can’t wield at a moment’s notice?”
“The only rank that matters out here is cadet, so with all due respect, fuck off.”
Even if this is not insubordination, there are two glaring problems here.
Violet is poisoning the group dynamic further with her caustic attitude, demonstrating that she is the problem here, rather than Grady or his choices.
By doing this, she acknowledges that rank-based authority does exist, meaning that the behavior we’re about to cover for Xaden and Mira is unacceptable and that the infantry squad leader’s authority back in Iron Flame did indeed matter.
Given that Grady assigning them all roles in advance (as implied by the passage we about about to cover for Xaden), I also suspect Violet is wrong here. Seems like Grady might have given Aura some authority over Violet is case there was an emergency while they were standing guard and a decision needed to be made. That would certainly explain why Aura thinks she can pull rank despite Violet claiming they are equals outside of Basgiath.
Xaden
Xaden’s behavior is the most mild of the three, but it is still needlessly abrasive and highly unprofessional, providing yet another example of why it seems unlikely the Senarium would ever trust him with more power than his father had.
“This is the one.” Grady stops in front of an expansive house.
“Was it the plaque that says Home of Amelia, First of the Drifts that gave it away?” Xaden asks, nodding toward the right side of the door.
Grady’s mouth tightens. “You know your places. Let’s go.”
Why say this, Xaden? There’s no need for it. You couldn’t even limit yourself to sharing it as a snide aside to Violet?
Mira
I think the reason Mira bothers me more than the other two is that Mira used to make sense. She used to fit into this world, and she did so while also being Violet’s supportive older sister. Her behavior towards Brennan and regarding their mother could at least be contextualized by the immense emotional strain inflicted on her by those characters.
Now, she’s just insubordinate and caustic, nagging Grady like she is his customer rather than his subordinate.
It starts when Grady is trying to read a map of the village.
“I can’t tell…” Grady flips the hand-drawn map over. “Her handwriting is atrocious.”
“It looks like that way,” Captain Henson notes, leaning in to see and pointing across the village square.
“Which is why you should have brought Cat like Violet asked.” Mira plucks the map straight out of Grady’s hand and studies it.
No, Mira. You are on this squad because of nepotism, because Halden pulled strings at Violet’s request (as explicitly stated in the opening of this chapter). You have neither the rank, the authority, nor the moral high ground to challenge Grady here. You certainly have no place to snatch a map from him.
Moving on (and skipping over the telepathic banter between Violet and Xaden that we already covered):
“Gryphons can’t keep up,” Grady reminds us. “And this mission will serve as a trial run for all those that follow. An extra member would have thrown off the dynamic.”
…
“Really? I don’t see a prince or his guards here, let alone anyone representing Poromiel. And stop whispering like they can hear you.” Mira rotates the map and lines up the landmarks Cat sketched out. “The area is deserted, and we’ll be fine as long as our sentries intercept any wayward patrols and no one wields.” Mira points past my right shoulder. “It’s this way.”
“I’ll take that, Lieutenant.” Grady snatches the map back.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were setting the mission up to fail.” Mira offers a cutting smile.
“Let’s go.” Grady glares my sister’s way, then stalks past me in the direction she pointed.
Why is she patronizing him? Why is she being catty with him? This is neither the time or the place for such behavior. Even ignoring rank, Mira has not been part of the planning process for this mission, so how does she think she has any grounds to hurl this criticism? Grady has given a valid reason for not bringing the rider of a much slower magical creature on this lightning-fast extraction mission, and even his argument about testing the group dynamics of the riders first is not terrible when one considers that two of his team members (one of whom was Violet) were threatening each other back in Chapters 5 and 6.
Mira is, in simple terms, not Mira anymore. The woman we were introduced to in Fourth Wing was Violet’s supportive olders sister, but in the sense that she would help Violet survive, not that she would be Violet's rabid attack dog. She conducted herself within the limits of professional conduct, breaking the rules in the least obtrusive ways. If Mira had been this character back in Fourth Wing, she would never have backed down before General Sorrengail’s authority in Chapter 1.
The Special Snowflake and her Combat Wheelchair
Upon the arrival in the village we get this from Violet.
I swear, there’s a permanent bruise just below my sternum from trying to sleep in the saddle. This thing could use some modifications before we head to Deverelli.
This is a problem that existed at the end of Part 1 of Iron Flame, when Violet slept in the saddle on the journey from Basgiath to Aretia, but since she is now complaining about the saddle being uncomfortable, it’s a good time to play catch-up.
No other rider gets to sleep while flying. They do not have saddles. They must remain conscious to keep a firm grip with their thighs.
For Violet to have this privilege - without which, she cannot perform her duties as a rider - and then gripe about it not being luxurious enough really highlights the depth of her entitlement.
This isn’t the last we’ll need to talk about this stupid thing. It’s going to be very important to the Romance spotlight in November.
WORLDBUILDING
Magic of the Land
Geography
Something I skipped over in Chapter 18 is this line from Tairn.
“There is no magic beyond the Continent. It is why we dragons remain,” Tairn tells me. “Why it is surprising the irids left our shores.”
How this geographic limitation on magic works is never explained. Still, I think this works fine as a rule. If venin can drain magic from the land, and said land is left dead afterwords, then it makes sense that magic is like any other natural resource, found in limited supply and only present (at least, only accessible) in specific places.
Also, Tairn is wrong about this. There is magic present on certain islands in the south. This is a good example of how to provide false information to the audience without lying. Tairn has no reason not to believe that this is the truth, given how he is native of Navarre and only knows what he is experienced or has been told by other dragons.
The Problems
The geographic limitations of magic may make sense, but the ripple effects do not. Right after the task force is dropped off, we get this.
“The magic is long since drained.”
Which is why the dragons are in the sky, flying over the land the dark wielders left untouched in their haste to reach Samara.
We are shown that dragons can enter drained lands just fine. That’s how they were able to drop everyone off. It’s out they extract everyone later. Why, then, do they retreat to undrained lands?
This implies that dragons either can't survive or can’t fly for more than a few minutes in airspace where there is no magic. Their limit is, at the very least, far less than an hour, since otherwise they would remain above the drained lands the village sits on. But if that’s the case, how can they fly across the ocean to visit the islands? That’s days, if not weeks, without magic.
It's possible that Yarros intended this so that the riders could use their Signets - i.e. because the land is drained, the dragons need to pull magic from undrained land and pass it to the riders to channel through their Signets. However, given that Violet kills a wyvern after Tairn reaches the village to extract them, and does so while they are still over the village, that doesn’t work. It’s not like they lured the wyvern over undrained land before she could use her Signet. That implies that this retreat to undrained lands is for the dragons alone, not for any tactical purpose for their riders.
Ultimately, the reason Yarros did this was mechanical. She wants to separate the dragons from the riders so as to generate tension when the time comes to flee. She wants us to ask, “Will the dragons get to the village before the wyverns do?” Unfortunately, in the process, she made the main plot of her book impossible.
Bonds with Riders
Andarna is left behind in Samara when Violet and the task force enter Poromiel. They move so far away from her that the connection between her and Violet is “severed”.
They’re all busy to the south…” Her voice trails off as the connection is severed.
“We have about twelve hours before you’ll start to feel the pain of distance from Andarna,” Tairn reminds me as we cut through the night, opening the conversation to Sgaeyland Xaden’s pathways.
I have no desire to test the three-to-four-day limit that riders and their dragons can be apart, nor to suffer the fatal consequences. Three hours to Anca. One hour to locate the citrine. Three hours back.
I honestly can’t tell if this is a badly executed retcon or another instance of Yarros lying to the audience to pretend danger exists when it does not. Either way, it opens plot holes.
Whenever Violet visited Xaden at Samara in Part 1 of Iron Flame, she was farther from Andarna than she is now, since Andarna was in the Dreamless Sleep back at the Basgiath hatching ground. That’s an eight-hour flight, even when Tairn was flying in a blind panic. If the link to Andarna can break down during a three-hour flight at a less frenzied pace, then it must have broken during each of those visits. Violet never suffered any pain from that, now was any risk of death ever mentioned.
When Violet, Mira, and Brennan flew to see Teclis in Part 2 of Iron Flame, Andarna did not come with them, remaining behind on Aretia. We are not told how long the journey is, but we are told they fly through the morning and well into the afternoon, so this is also easily eight to twelve hours. Again, there is no mention of either pain or a risk of death.
The fact that this can kill a rider implies that the loss of the connection, rather than any sort of trauma, is what kills riders when their dragons die. This is compounded by the fact Violet suffers no trauma from having her link with Andarna severed in this way. Why, then, did Liam die within minutes of his dragon? Shouldn’t his health have deteriorated over time per the timetable presented here?
This raises questions about the serum in Iron Flame. It interfered with the connection with their dragons, preventing telepathy and the transfer of magic. How is this different from severing? Why did not one rider suffer any pain during the RSC exercise in Chapter 14, when they were under this effect for at least 24 hours. Why did no one even consider the possiblity of death? Why did Violet not consider that she might die from the lack of connection while she was imprisoned and drugged over the course of a week?
Later in this book, when Violet and the task force leave the Continent, all of the riders lose the connection to their dragons (except Violet, of course). The connection is severed because there is no magic to sustain it. Why, then, do none of these riders suffer pain or death?
Also later in this book, we will see a rider suffer the effects of a connection being severed without killing the dragon. Said rider does not suffer physical pain or die. There's merely a brief period of emotional pain that seems to be mechanically independent of the bond.
Can a rider separated from a dragon in this way simply “choose to live”?
What I find so frustrating about this is that this is something else that might have worked if Onyx Storm was not a sequel. It explains why riders need to be riders, rather than just waiting behind in Basgiath while their bonded dragons guard the borders. Granted, this doesn’t fully answer the question of riders don’t hide in forts while their dragons fight nearby, but it’s a step in the right direction. Most of these problems only exist because this lore contradicts with the previous books.
Poromish City Planning
The Clock Tower
Upon the task force’s landing in the village, we get this:
Xaden strides past the clock tower, heading my way.
The only other clock tower described thus far in this series was the one in Resson, another Poromish village, in the climax of Fourth Wing. Perhaps this is giving Yarros too much credit, yet I like to think that this was deliberate. It’s a small detail that gives Poromiel a bit more identity (and does so without contradicting anything else).
The Second Pig’s Village
The houses in the Poromish village are deliberately constructed close together, so as to prevent dragons from landing in (or, at least, maneuvering through) the streets.
… yet all the buildings are wood, so this close proximity just makes it easier for dragons (or an accident) to torch the entire settlement.
Also, why would the Poromish build for dragon attacks? Everything previously established indicated that Navarre was fighting a defensive war for all these centuries. That’s why seeing “dragons” (wyverns) across the border was usual. Why, then, did the Poromish go through the effort? It also can't be for the wyverns, since those are explicitly a very recent development. Are we meant to think this village was built from scratch in just the past few years? That can’t be right, though. The house the MacGuffin is found in is stated to have been the home of one of the original gryphon fliers, so it (and the village) must be at least six hundred years old. Navarre and Poromiel weren’t even at war that far back. Fourth Wing stated that they were only at war for four hundred years. What dragons were the Poromish fighting in the 200 year period between Navarre’s founding and the start of that war?
Aura Mustang
At the end of Chapter 5, it is made very clear that Aura does not need an ignition source or an existing flame to use her fire wielding Signet.
I watch every motion as Aura tugs at the fingers of her glove instead of reaching or another dagger or her sword. My stomach tenses. There’s only one reason she’d need her hands bare.
Fire trumps memory-wielding every time.
…
Aura whips of her glove and flares her hand. I throw, releasing my dagger a second before flame erupts from her palm.
Yet here, in Chapter 19, she has an ignition source.
She stands with her hands raised, a flintstrike device between thumb and forefinger, fear punching her face.
Which is it, Ms. Yarros? Can Aura produce her own flames or not?
Now, this is a small issue that isn’t worth tearing apart in and of itself. There are many others like it that I’ve been skimming past in the interest of keeping this review series moving. What makes this one special is that it is emblematic of two bigger issues within The Empyrean as a whole.
Not Worth a Retcon
This contradiction was most likely a proofreading error, spawned from Yarros writing this book in one draft and then only editing enough to add aftshadowing. When Yarros first had Aura use her Signet, she just had Aura produce a flame. When she got to Chapter 19, she decided to do something different. A competent author who cared about the quality of the product being created would have reconciled this discrepancy before publication.
At the same time … this error does not negatively impact the text.
Yes, the fact that such a glaring contradiction can exist reflects poorly on the author, but it doesn’t harm the story in any way. Whether or not Aura needs an ignition source doesn’t impact the flow of events. What matters is that she was able to set Grady on fire.
That puts this mistake on equal footing with Liam wielding ice in the climax of Fourth Wing. That was also a glaring error that reflected on Yarros’s ability and/or investment, but it really didn’t matter to the narrative. It’s not like there was a moment where Violet was inches from death, only to be saved by Liam throwing an ice spear. It was a throwaway detail that could be ignored, only made a problem on retrospect because Yarros broke her series in a desperate bid to insist that she hasn’t made a mistake.
I hope Yarros ignores this particular mistake. More specifically, I hope she just settles on the rules for the fire-wielding Signet and sticks to those rules going forward. She doesn’t need a moment where Violet acknowledges this contradiction and tries to either make up for or excuse not commenting on it earlier. This is a small mistake, and it can very easily be fixed if the publisher ever greenlights a second edition print run.
Imitation Without Understanding
Throughout this series, Yarros has applied elements derived from other works with zero understanding of why the originals worked. This inclusion of this flintstroke device is a clear example of this.
I can’t be the only one who sees the obvious ripoff of Roy Mustang from Fullmetal Alchemist. (No, I don’t think it’s Pyro from X-Men, because he need a flame, not an ignition source.). The reason why Mustang needs an ignition source is because, despite being called the Flame Alchemist, he does not control or manipulate flame. He uses alchemy to transmute a hyper-oxygenated bubble of air around his target; his specially designed gloves then generate a spark when he snaps his fingers, igniting the bubble of air. Even when he executes Lust with a lighter, he isn’t manipulating a flame generated by the lighter, just clicking the flint.
Aura is a fire-wielder. Based on the other type of element-wielders we’ve seen, that means she specifically controls flame, not things that can catch fire. If she can’t produce flames, she needs more than a flint to serve as an ignition source. Much like Pyro, she needs a actual source of flame.
If Yarros understood what she was copying, then she should have given Aura a lighter and shown us an open flame. With the hodgepodge of magical technology in this setting, a lighter should be easy. Even a book of matches would make more sense than a device that, judging by its name, just uses a flint to generate a spark.
SPOTLIGHT: DEMONIZATION OF CHARACTERS
Definitions
Meriam Webster defines “demonize” as:
to portray (someone or something) as evil or as worthy of contempt or blame : vilify
For added context, Meriam Webster defines “villify” as:
to utter slanderous and abusive statements against : defame
Extrapolating this definition of character writing, we shall be defining the demonization of characters as:
The process by which an author asserts thay a character is morally evil, incompetent, otherwise flawed, and/or deserving of punishment or suffering, despite this directly contradicting the evidence on the page.
That last phrase is key. A character being presented as evil is not inherently demonization. If, however, the author uses informed characterization to stigmatize a character when the actual evidence provided to the audience paints a very different picture, then that is demonization.
Let’s go through two familiar examples within The Empyrean.
Not Demonization - Jack Barlowe
While there is plenty of criticism to be leveled at the handling of Jack Barlowe, one can’t accuse Yarros of demonizing him. He was characterized as a murderous psychopath from Chapter 1 of Fourth Wing. We saw him casually murder multiple people just because he could. While I did complain about all the times Yarros hammered in that he was not really a threat, she at least based this off times Violet triumphed over him in one way or another, so it’s not like she is downplaying his abilities.
There is the small matter of Jack starting to redeem himself in Iron Flame before snapping back to being a venin, but that’s not demonization. It’s just poorly handled and inconsistent characterization. Him being a venin is consistent with his original character traits.
Demonization - Dain
Dain was absolutely demonized in Iron Flame. Violet blamed Dain for Liam’s death, despite the multiple variables that we covered in Chapter 21, Chapter 35, and Chapter 49 of that review. (I’ll spare you all the full breakdown here.) She heaped all the blame on Dain for his rather small and very accidental contribution to that mess despite both Xaden and Liam playing far larger and far more willing roles.
However, the demonization started even earlier than that, in Fourth Wing.
As early as Chapter 9, Violet got upset that he didn't believe she could cut it in the Riders Quadrant, framing this as a failure on his part to believe in her, despite the fact that she physically couldn’t cut it in the Quadrant.
In Chapter 16, Violet felt betrayed that Dain would not break the rules to save her during Threshing, despite the fact that not intervening is exactly the thing she previously wanted.
In Chapter 17, after she decided that she didn't want sex with Dain after all, she lost respect for him when he decided not to pursue a relationship with her, all because his reason for not pursuing her wasnthe Codex (the same Codex she happily exploits when it conveniences her) rather than him not being attracted to her.
In Chapter 18, she screamed at him for humbly asking how he coupd help her, despite the fact that this demonstrated that he had accepted her decision to remain as a rider.
In Chapter 20, she screamed at him again for wanting to save his ex-girlfriend from a brutal execution.
On and on it went, with both Violet and Xaden abusing him in various ways, despite Dain not posing any sort of obstacle to Violet by that point.
It’s the moment in Chapter 18 that really gets to me. Had Violet thrown this tantrum at any earlier point, that would be understandable. However, Chapter 18 of Fourth Wing was where Dain gave up. It’s where he stopped trying to get her to give her the thing she’d “always told [him she] wanted” (per Chapter 49 of Iron Flame), point-blank said, “I just want to help you, Vi. How can I help?” and admitted (very reasonably, given how many hundreds of times she should have died during training) that he is “terrified” for her. This is the moment when he would have done whatever Violet asked of her, in the manner that she chose. She chose to tell him that he was “the bullshit that [Basgiath] cuts away” … only to turn around a few chapters later and get weak-kneed over Xaden forcing her to accept his help. (Yarros has lampshaded this double standard in interviews you can find of TikTok, providing us with yet another example of her acknowledging problems while doing nothing to address them.)
What frustrates me the most about this is that Dain could have made for a great villain. Yarros could have committed to making him a genuinely deplorable person. She instead chose to make him harmless and to have Violet beat him down again and again without ever acknowledging that what Violet was doing was wrong. Oh, she’ll say in the press tours that Dain is acting out of sympathetic motivations, but she will condemn those same motivations in the text. All those claims do is highlight the immense gulf between the reality of what’s on the page and Violet’s interpretation of events.
We’ll have more to say about Dain’s handling in Onyx Storm a little farther down. For now, just consider the way he has been handling in previous books as a benchmark.
The Victims
There are many victims of demonization in Onyx Storm. Here, we’ll just discuss three whom I feel collectively embody all the worst aspects of this demonization.
Grady - The Character Assassination
Grady in Iron Flame was an easy-going, gentle man, to the point that his personality actively detracted from his job performance as the RSC teacher. The passage that jumps out most strongly to me is this one from Chapter 23, during the second RSC exercise, when Grady assureed Violet and her accessories that the interrogation exercise is a safe space.
“For right now, we’re in what’s called a classroom setting. Remember what that means?” Professor Grady reaches behind Sawyer, and a second later, Sawyer’s hands are free.
“It means we’re not in the graded scenario,” Rhiannon answers. “We can ask questions.”
“Correct.” Professor Grady moves to Ridoc and does the same. “The purpose of this exercise really is to teach you how to survive capture,” he assures us. “These next couple of days are instructional only.” He reaches for my bonds next, untying therope with surprising gentleness. “It’s an assessment.”
“So you know which buttons to push when it’s the real thing,” Ridoc says, rubbing his wrists.
“Exactly.” Professor Grady smiles. “Is it going to be fun? Absolutely not. Are we going to show you mercy? Also, no.” He moves on to Rhiannon once my hands are free. “And Vice Commandant Varrish seems to have taken an interest in your squad, no doubt because you have quite the legacy here in Cadet Sorrengail. So unfortunately, it looks like we’ll all be evaluated in how we handle this.”
We are explicitly told about Grady’s “gentleness”. We are shown that he considers himself as part of the group. He didn't tell Violet and her accessories to not make him look bad; he told them that they are in the same boat.
In Iron Flame, we were meant to unambiguously view Grady as a Good Teacher. He was on Violet’s team. He was physically present at the defection in Chapter 36, and while we are not explicitly told that he defected to Aretia, we were also not explicitly told that he didn’t (unlike with Nolon, Carr, and Kaori), and him defecting to Aretia is the only way that Xaden's comment in Chapter 37 about “four professors” defecting can even begin to make sense. We were meant to like Grady.
In Onyx Storm, Grady is incompetent … because he does not do things Violet’s way. His experience and his rational reasons for his decisions mean nothing. He is presented as fully deserving of the disparaging remarks and criticisms that Violet and Xaden hurl at him.
In Onyx Storm, Grady is needlessly belligerent … or, at least, he’s framed that way for not rolling over and showing his belly whenever Violet, Xaden, or Mira disrespect him.
In Onyx Storm, Grady deserves to die horribly by being burned alive at the hands of someone he trusted when Violet didn’t.
The entire scenario in which Grady dies in nonsensical stupidity. He left Violet and Aura to stand guard outside the door of the museum while he, Mira, and Xaden collected the MacGuffin. Once they had it, he did not:
Exit the building via that same door. In fact, he chose to exit via a door on the other side of the street (the village has covered bridges connecting the buildings, so they likely crossed the street while searching for the MacGuffin).
He did not call out to Violet and Aura from inside the building to tell them that their allies would be exiting.
He did not telepathically contact his dragon and ask said dragon to warn Violet and Aura, via their dragons, about which door he’d be exiting from.
This stupidity amounts to character assassination, all so that Yarros could smite Grady for the blasphemy of not heeding the holy will of her self-insert Mary Sue.
Yes, I do believe it was that malicious, because there is one other key detail: Grady is never mourned. Red Shirts like Aurelie, Nadine, and Eya were all mourned to some degree, if only for a paragraph or two that Yarros milked for emotion before casting them aside. Later in this very book, Violet and her accessories will go out of their way to provide another Red Shirt with a proper burial. Grady, by contrast, is just dead. He might as well have been a venin.
The following are all the passages where Violet in any way acknowledges Grady’s final moments and ultimate demise.
The door across the street swings open with an ear-screeching creak, and my head whips toward the sound, fear launching my heart into my throat as a figure steps out of the shadows—
“Vi, watch out! Aura’s going to—” Xaden starts.
“Don’t!” I pivot and throw myself at Aura, but the damage has been done.
…
“Get off me!” Aura bellows, shoving me aside as the figure stumbles forward into the moonlight and screams.
I gasp, and for a millisecond, fear wins.
Captain Grady is on fire.
“No!” Aura scrambles across the stone as he kneels in the center of the street. Every inch of the leathers that should help protect him is covered in foot-high flames.
And we don’t have a water or ice wielder on the ground.
“Xaden!” I yell, gaining my feet and running toward the captain. “Aura! Take off your flight jacket!” We can smother the flames. We have to.
His shriek etches itself into my memory as he collapses, and I wrench Aura’s flight jacket from her hands and throw it over him, hoping to put out the fire. The scent of charred flesh turns my stomach, but it’s quickly overpowered by thick, cloying smoke coming from the building behind him.
Xaden gets to me first, yanking me back from the captain, and shadows stream from our feet to smother the flames as the screams cease, but the fire in the building ahead of us roars. “Fuck.”
All three of us look up as the wind gusts.
My heart drops to the ground as house after house catches fire, spreading down the street. The land, the buildings, the very wood they’re built with may be drained of magic, but they go up like kindling.
…
I wrench out of Xaden’s arms and stumble toward Grady as shadows rush up the sidesof the buildings, but the flames have already licked their way across the bridges.
We’re in the middle of a fucking tinderbox.
“Sir!” I drop in front of Grady, but he doesn’t move.
“He’s dead,” Xaden announces like it’s the weather forecast.
…
“This is my fault.” Aura clenches her fist to my right and looks to the courtyard with wide, frightened eyes. “Grady is…gone. They’ll know we’re here. There’s no hiding a no fire like this.”
“All that matters is that we get out,” I tell her. “Don’t think about anything else.”
That last is also the final mention of Grady’s name in the entire book. He is never mourned. He is simply forgotten. Even in the moment of death, Violet saving him is more a matter of her inherent goodness than because he is worth anything as a human being … and she can’t even be bothered to use her own flight jacket to smother the flames, forcing Aura to give up hers. Any negative emotion comes from the unpleasant sensory details, not because Grady was a fellow human being. The village catching fire is given far more emotional weight.
The way Yarros assassinated Grady between Iron Flame and Onyx Storm makes what she did to Markham seem like child’s play. At least with Markham, the biggest issue was the reversal of his relationship with Violet. While combing back through Fourth Wing for the Goblet of Fire review, I did spot small details that could potentially be extrapolated into him being an antagonistic force. I’s not enough to justify the total reversal of his relationship with Violet, but I could buy him being a Bad Teacher if that relationship were removed from the equation. Grady is outright destroyed, all so Yarros could butcher him with less ceremony than even the cadets who tried to kill Violet in her sleep got.
Aura - The Strawman
Aura is a new character in this book, introduced in Chapter 1 of this book to give a face to the Navarrian riders. She is a third-year cadet bonded to a red dragon. Her role in the book has been as follows:
She appeared in Chapter 1 so Yarros could tell us that the Navarrian riders are the enemy.
She was the ringleader of the near-bloodbath in Chapters 5 and 6.
She was present during the task force planning meeting in Chapter 14.
Other than that, she is one of the many tertiary characters whom is part of an insignificant and annoying plot thread tied to how Violet and Xaden can’t date because he is a professor now, constantly spying on them both for General Aetos (a role she also shares with Caroline Ashton and the only other named Navarrian rider cadet up to this point).
Chapter 19 was her last scene, in which she gets patronized by Violet, kills Grady by being trigger-happy, and then gets slaughtered by a wyvern.
Throughout all of this, Aura is characterized throughout this book as bloodthirsty, belligerent, intolerant, and eager to abuse the rules to harm Violet and those Violet approves of, while also being a coward who can’t handle the pressure of combat.
The reason that Aura is demonized is not because of her characterization specifically. After all, she is new to this book; there is nothing to contradict. The problem is that she serves as the face for the Navarrian riders, a faction composed of well over a hundred individuals (based upon the statistics from the last book about half of the riders from Basgiath defecting). Through her, Yarros demonizes an entire group of people for … obeying the will of their dragons, who “don’t make mistakes.”
We previously discussed in the review of Chapters 5 through 7, the behavior of the Navarrian riders makes no sense when compared to that of the Aretian riders. The only thing that distinguishes them from the Aretian riders is a decision made from them by their dragons (as Xaden so helpfully pointed out in Chapter 36 of Iron Flame). If anything, because their first experience with the gryphon fliers was in battle, defending their home, instead of being forced to slog through a miserable hike and then go to school together, they should have been more accepting of the fliers than the Aretian riders initially were.
However, Yarros needs people who can hold be presented as Violet’s moral and intellectual inferiors. Thus, rather than writing the Navarrian riders as people who are just like the Aretian riders, rather that acknowledging their agency was taken from them by their dragons, she frames them all as evil. Aura is the primary conduit by which she does this.
Chapter 19 really hammers this home.
The way that Violet patronizes Aura, lecturing her as if Violet is a hardened veteran and Aura is a private who hasn’t even finished training, is illogical and insulting. It doesn’t matter that Violet has been outside of Navarre three times before this mission, while this is Aura’s first time. Aura fought to defend Basgiath from the venin in the climax of Iron Flame, when the wards had fallen. She did this without a literal suit of plot armor, a Special Snowflake dragon saddle, a god-tier Signet, or the backing of one of the most powerful dragons in existence. She also has an additional year of education above Violet, including additional RSC training. The idea that Violet is a wise mentor while Aura is a trigger-happy coward is as artificial and illogical as the handling of Mazen’s “cowardice” versus Loulie’s “courage” in The Stardust Thief.
Then there is the matter of Grady’s death. Yarros didn’t just assassinate a character who should be far braver and more rational than Violet; she made that character responsible for disposing of Grady. The faction Violet doesn’t like, the faction that she doesn’t want involved in the effort to search for the rainbow dragons, is the one that kills Grady. See how incompetent and evil they are, dear reader? If only Grady had possessed the wisdom to do exactly what the self-insert Mary Sue wanted, and thus shunned these wicked creatures. He would still be alive.
Much like Grady, Aura’s death is not mourned. This is all we get for the death itself:
Scorching heat flares at my back, but I keep my eyes forward as Aura races into the open.
A claw reaches for her, and I hold my breath for them to make contact. The claw curlsin the same way Tairn’s does right before he scoops me up—
The talon emerges somewhere near the middle of her spine.
Blood gushes from the wound, but Aura’s scream is silenced as the wyvern drags herlifeless body into the sky. Not too far overhead, a dragon bellows.
After this, Aura is mentioned only three times in this entire book:
Once at the end of this chapter, where Xaden dismisses her as, “a scared cadet who thought [Grady] was a venin,” before pinning all the blame for what happened on the Navarrian riders.
Once in Chapter 20, where Ridoc equates Aura being on the squad with Violet being tortured in Iron Flame.
Once in Chapter 28, when her killing Grady is referenced disparaging to spit on another Navarrian rider with a fire-wielding Signet.
Oh, and as the cherry on top, we get this early on in the scene, when the dragons are trying to hide from wyvern patrols.
I look to see the clouds breaking as the wind picks up.
Shit.
“Stay out of sight,” I tell Tairn.
“I am as the night.” He sounds more than a little offended. “It is Dagolh you should worry about.”
Aura’s Red Clubtail.
You see, dear reader? If they get caught, it is the Navarrian rider’s fault. Never mind that no rider gets to choose the color of the dragon - nevermind that the dragon does the choosing. Aura is the rider of a dragon with the wrong color. Even if she hadn’t killed Grady and set the town on fire, her mere presence dooms them all.
The bottom line is, Yarros hates Aura, and she hates the Navarrian riders. They have no redeeming qualities. They deserve all the blame. They don’t ever deserve the bare minimum of respect for human dignity that Red Shirts are afforded. Through Aura, Yarros has Othered an entire group of people whose only crime was honoring the wishes of their dragons (dragon who, of course, will never themselves be held accountable).
Dain - Yarros Doesn’t Know What “Apologist” Means
Yarros has claimed (via various interviews that you can find of TikTok) that she considers herself “the ultimate Dain apologist”.
Like so many other other words used within and on connection to these books, I don’t think Yarros understands the meaning of this one.
For context, Meriam-Webster defines apologist as:
someone who speaks or writes in defense of someone or something that is typically controversial, unpopular, or subject to criticism
Yarros will sit in press tours and talk about respecting Dain’s perspective (doing so in a manner that still presents him as someone to be overcome). However, then she turns around and casually brand him as a “dick” in the “beautiful” story where her self-insert Mary Sue gets to assert what she “deserves.”
“Vi.” He still has that flat, tortured look in his eyes, and I hate that I can’t take it away.
“Dain?” My hands tighten on my mug. I’d rather he be a dick again, even obnoxious in his certainty, over this hollow version of himself.
Yarros has no interest in defending Dain, only in punching him (and, by extension, those he represents) down.
This trend has continued in Onyx Storm. That quote was from Chapter 16. Back in Chapter 5, when Dain tried to intervene and stop the bloodbath, we got multiple lines punching Dain down, such as dismissing his rank as being purely the result of nepotism (something also said in Iron Flame, with no evidence ever being provided of it) and reminding us that he is an inferior leader to Xaden (who, remember, is just a thug who uses his power to force people to comply). I haven’t been commenting on these moments because, frankly, there’s nothing new to be said. This pervasive abuse of Dain is the status quo now. The only real change is that Dain is not the primary target of spite, but that’s because Yarros has other people (like Grady and the Navarrian riders) to vomit on now.
When Dain retrieved the research for Violet, I thought that maybe this would mark a turning point. Maybe, now that he has proven his loyalty to Violet, he would no longer be demonized. Perhaps Yarros would allow him to live on in obscurity as a Red Shirt, or perhaps even promote him to accessory.
Except … no. There’s no acknowledgement of what Dain did for Violet. No acknowledgement of the choice he made by helping her instead of his father. There’s just a single line from Violet to acknowledge that he came through, and then his contribution is forgotten about. Going forward, the abuse doesn’t stop. It just takes a new form.
On every single one of the four islands visited during the rainbow dragon search, Dain is humiliated, in some manner, at least once.
On the first island, he is present in a scene where someone mistakes Xaden for Dain, having heard about Violet’s childhood crush from Asher. Everyone laughs at the idea that Violet would ever be with Dain.
On the second island, there is a trial by combat that Dain, Violet, and Xaden participate in. Dain is the only one of the three to lose his fight. We never see how or why; we are simply told, midway through Violet’s trial, that Dain has been rendered unconscious.
Dain’s stated purpose for being on the task force was his proficiency in languages spoken in the isles. On the second, third, and fourth islands, he is made irrelevant by someone else speaking the language. Time is taken each time to call out how frustrated and useless he is, and the framing seems to indicate we’re supposed to laugh at him.
On the fourth island, during a ceremony in which everyone in the task force is granted a random gift, Dain is one of the only two granted a negative gift, his being a slap to the face.
Yarros is just being needlessly cruel at this point. If she wanted to use Dain as a strawman for people who she doesn’t think are supportive enough of the disabled or chronically ill, fair enough, but then she should have stopped after Fourth Wing. That was the only book where that excuse worked. Everything after that has been spite for the sake of spite.
Ms. Yarros, serious question: why don’t you just kill Dain at this point? You give yourself two perfectly good opportunities to do so during the island-hopping. Why do you persist on keeping him in this series? Do you really hate the people Dain represents so much that you need to keep him around just to spit on them repeatedly?
Why Yarros Does This
Art
Demonizing her characters allows Yarros to lean further into the power fantasy.
“Oh, these people fail to acknowledge my self-insert Mary Sue’s intelligence, her virtue, her power? Well, they are stupid, evil, and generally inferior to her!”
In and of itself, this sort of simplistic binary isn’t bad for storytelling, but in the case of The Empyrean, it crashes headlong into the same pitfall that the power fantasy itself does. Yarros may Tell us that tension exists, that there are characters Violet needs to overcome in one way or another, but she then goes out of her way to tear these characters down and undermine them at every turn. It's to a point that the audience can immediately write off any threat posed by those Violet deems as her enemies.
The way Yarros goes about it also undermines audience trust. First, Violet’s trusted mentor, on whom she initially laid no blame for the venin deception, was turned into a “Fucking. Liar” who frothed at the mouth and ran about like a headless chicken at the slightest inconvenience. Now Grady’s character was completely reversed so that he could be discredited and unceremoniously executed. What’s to stop Professor Devera, the Good Teacher who’s “exactly who [Violet has] always thought she is,” from doing a heel turn in Book 4 so that Violet can triumph over her in some filler chapter?
Then there’s the issue of Yarros trying to ram some fairly complex themes into her work. We’ve previously discussed her inability to actually wrap her head around perspectives over than her own. The closest she comes to acknowledging alternative points of view is to put their arguments on the page and then rush past those arguments without actually responding to them. When paired with the demonization, her handling of the themes becomes preachy. She is making sure the audience knows that anyone who does not share what she views as the correct one is stupid, evil, and inferior to her.
I want to reiterate that this sort of simplistic binary is not inherently bad from a literary perspective. Yarros has even used it somewhat effectively back in Fourth Wing, when Violet had to struggle (as much as she ever struggles, at least) against Jack and others who shared his Survival of the Fittest attitude. The issue is that Yarros is using demonization of her characters to achieve this goal. She is ignoring gaping contradictions and damaging the integrity of her narrative to preserve this binary.
Artist
“Oh, these people fail to acknowledge my intelligence, my virtue, my power? Well, they are stupid, evil, and generally inferior to me!”
Even if Yarros had not obliterated the separation of art and artist, there is now enough of a pattern on display that I feel this outlook can reasonably be assigned to Yarros herself.
Yarros’s self-insert Mary Sue is someone whose entire perception of people flips on a dime based on nothing but their decision to disagree with her. That’s hardly unrealistic. It’s human nature to do this sort of thing as a knee-jerk reaction.
The thing is, there is a big difference between doing this in a moment of passion and integrating it into a fictional narrative without it ever being acknowledged. There's supposed to be a layer of psychological separation. Words on the page have to pass through a filter of conscious decision-making. An author should be able to catch it, evaluate it as an outside observer, and then either discard it or else mold the narrative to provide a balancing force of self-awareness. Much like power fantasy and fetishes, when this sort of thing slips through the filter, it’s a sign of something so deeply entrenched into the author's worldview that she takes for granted that it is normal and acceptable. This pattern tells us that Yarros’s entire perception of other people is dictated by the whims of the moment, with zero time taken to reflect or adjust judgments once emotions simmer down.
And, of course, there is the matter that Yarros believes that everything Violet does and thinks is “beautiful” and “destigmatizing”. If Violet demonizes people, then Yarros either agrees with her assessment or believes it is acceptable by sheer virtue of Violet being a woman. Yarros is fully onboard with writing off people as incompetent, evil, and overall inferior for the sin of not fully submitting to one’s own will.
Believe me, that’s going to be relevant in Chapter 20.
Final Thoughts
Nuanced characters are all well and good. Sometimes, though, clear binaries are valuable tools to tell a certain story.
If Yarros wanted to use binaries to support her power fantasy, she could have done so. She simply had to practice moderation to avoid undermining her narrative and not contradict characterization and context that she’d previously established. Jack Barlowe is a functional example of her doing this successfully.
The problem is that Yarros doesn’t care about continuity. She doesn’t care how sympathetic she made characters in previous books or how she absolved a whole faction of blame through her worldbuilding and the explicit acknowledgement of her Bad Boy Love Interest. She wanted someone to crush beneath Violet’s heel now, enemies who she could punch down repeatedly in the name of forcing her power fantasy.
At this point, I don’t trust any characterization Yarros gives us. Why should I like or empathize with any of Violet’s allies in this book, given how Book 4 might turn around and tell me I should have hated them all along? Why should I not empathize with any character Yarros punches into the dirt, given how Book 4 might see her continue to pummel them along after it serves the narrative and after changing circumstances make them into the obvious victims?
A little restraint and self-awareness is all it would take to fix this issue, but I have no hope that Yarros will develop either going forward.
UNLIMITED … POWER!!!
Speaking of which, on July 18th, we will review Chapter 20.
This is the chapter at which the book hits its absolute lowest point. It’s the chapter that prompted my Twitter post declaring that this book could be a 0.5/10. It’s where Yarros’s stated theme for the series implodes under the weight of the hypocrisy displayed by Yarros through her self-insert Mary Sue, and it’s where the true theme (at least, for the story through Onyx Storm) is revealed.
In the interim, we’ve got two other things in the pipeline:
“The Unbottled Idol” has premiered! Chapter 1 is already posted, while Chapters 2 and 3 will release on July 8th and July 15th, respectively.
On July 11th, the review series of The Queen of Vorn proceeds with Part 2! I hope you’ll join us for the overview of the issues with Plot, Worldbuilding, and Character.
Whatever you’re here for, thanks for stopping by. Please remember to subscribe for the newsletter if you’ like weekly e-mail updates with the latest post links. Take care, everyone, and have a good wee
