Onyx Storm (Chapter 48 and Chapter 49)
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
During a stormy night, Violet researches venin-related tomes to try to find a cure for Xaden. Her studies are interrupted when Xaden shows up at the bedroom door. They make out. Xaden talks about how much he’s been holding himself back with regards to wanting sex with Violet. The pair go over all the different weapons Violet has available to kill Xaden if he loses control during sex.
Violet and Xaden have sex.
PLOT
Yes, each of those paragraphs does indeed fill an entire chapter.
Half-Measures
Violet researching a cure for Xaden is too little, too late.
Remember Iron Flame? For as badly executed as everything surrounding the Aretia wardstone was (and for the damage Yarros has done to that subplot retroactively), at least Yarros put in the work to demonstrate Violet’s level of investment. Violet spent all of Part 1 actively pursuing information information about how to activate wardstones. Part 2 opened with her attempt to activate it. From there, while her efforts to understand her failure faded into the background, we still saw her engaging with the problem by deigning to exploit Dain.
Yarros could have followed that blueprint for finding a cure for Xaden … but she didn't. She just lumped it in with the hunt for the rainbow dragons, something Violet had to do anyway, and then removed Violet from the actual process of researching where the rainbow dragons might be. She limited Violet’s investigation to interrogations with Jack that make so little progress that it doesn't seem like she's particularly invested. Were it not for all the angst Violet processes while the plot is meandering, it would be impossible to tell that Violet cares about Xaden's condition at all.
Well … I suppose not impossible. It prevents Violet for getting laid, which is what she cares about most. (More on that tomorrow.) However, Yarros removed Xaden’s venin nature from that equation with the drama of Xaden being a professor, so not even that amounts to anything important.
So, when Yarros tells us that now, more than two-thirds of the book, Violet is actively engaging with the problem, it doesn’t feel rewarding. It begs the question of why Yarros didn’t Show us Violet doing this from the start.
Thunder rattles my bedroom windows the next night as I pore over the pages of thelatest book Tecarus sent, letting my hair dry.
He hasn’t forgotten our deal even now that he’s king, and I’m not giving up on Xaden, especially when it’s clear he hasn’t given up on himself. The answer is out there somewhere, and we’ll find it. Having Brennan in the know only bolsters that hope.
We covered last time how Xaden giving up and then finding his resolve again was too rushed to have any weight. Now, I question where Violet’s resolve was this whole time. Was it just a problem of Brennan not knowing? Then why didn't she tell him and get his help from the beginning?
Oh, and Yarros uses this opportunity to set up a mystery box that, based on past precedent, not even she knows the contents of (at the very least, she didn’t know when she finalized this book):
My brows rise at the next passage I read, and I go over it once more to be sure I’ve caught on to a pattern. That makes three.
What A Waste of Our Time
The core conflict of the Romance subplot has been Xaden denying Violet sex because he doesn’t trust himself.
Now he just … gets over that.
Nothing happens. We didn't witness a scene where Xaden comes to the revelation that he’s in control. To boil down many pages of back-and-forth about desire and limitations down to a core idea, he just decided, “I miss sex with Violet,” and came to have sex with her. Most of their discussion is just bondage-themed foreplay while Xaden makes sure Violet is aware of all the means by which she can kill him.
In other words … there never was a conflict to drive this supposed Romance story. They could have done all this back in Chapter 3 or 4. Yarros was only including this drama to spread out the pornography.
Thank you, Ms. Yarros, for wasting our time.
Purest Pornography
Out of all of the pornographic content this far in the series, the sex scene that is Chapter 49 is the one that is most blatant about what it is.
The objective reality of this sex isn’t narratively relevant. It’s presented as a payoff, but as we just covered, there is no conflict to actually pay off. Yarros just decided she was done with Xaden avoiding Violet and hit the porn button.
However, what makes this pornography different from the other cases is that those other cases were plugged into the narrative. They are extraneous and excessive, not even functioning as character moments, but outside of Violet priorizing sex over asking questions and then blaming Xaden for her decision, they don't damage the fabric of the story. The only narrative fixes Yarros would actually accomplish by removing them would be trimming excess and better concealing the hand of the author.
What we have here is a sex scene where an entire subplot was written to bait the audience and deliver upon that bait. No other narrative purpose is served. All of it has been incidental to making this sex scene happen. (The fact the sex scene is its own chapter adds to this impression, making it seem like Yarros wrote the sex scene in isolation and then wrote a story that would lead to this chapter.)
This is how “erotica” (pornographic literature) is written. Anyone who has made the mistake of entering the Internet’s sewage pipes can confirm this. Both fictional narratives and the sex diaries of exhibitonists follow this same principle.
There’s no ambiguity at this point. Yarros is just writing straight-up pornography.
CHARACTER
Violet
I feel like Yarros is walking a tightrope between self-awarness that she is ruining her story with her self-insert Mary Sue and being so addicted to that rush of self-validation that she can’t bring herself to let go.
Prior to Xaden arriving, Yarros plays at giving Violet a weakness. It is a narratively irrelevant weakness, but at least it is a weakness. She then immediately turns around and explicitly states that the weakness is irrelevant, as if afraid of the consequences if the audience is allowed to think for even a minute that her self-insert Mary Sue is less than perfect.
I glance over at the mess of practice runes on my desk and momentarily debate working on the delayed-activation rune Trissa spent most of the afternoon drilling into us. Its purpose is to take an existing, dormant rune and turn it “on” by tempering more magic into it. Its actual use? Nothing, since I can’t make the damned thing work.
Cat got it right on the first try.
Imogen followed quickly after.
Kai singed the ends of his spiky black hair.
Dain, Bodhi, Rhi, Ridoc…everyone eventually mastered one except me. Even Aaric, who has yet to manifest a signet, managed the intricacy of the lesser magic.
Whatever. We’re here for two weeks. Eventually I’ll get it right, and if I don’t, then that’s why we work in squads. I don’t have to be good at everything.
By Yarros's own admission, Violet doesn’t need this skill and isn’t worried about not having it.
Tairn
Despite not even being a proper character, Tairn still gets written out of character in this chapter.
“Why didn’t you tell me he was here?” I ask Tairn.
“You didn’t ask to be made aware of his arrival, only his departure.”
Fucking semantics.
What Violet is referring to here is a request she made to Tairn back in Chapter 46, when Xaden stormed off to brood and Violet asked Tairn to keep her apprised of his whereabouts. That was very obviously a one-and-done situation.
Why, then, does Tairn bring it up here? It is nonsense on multiple levels.
Tairn is supposed to be an incredibly intelligent dragon. He should know that what Violet said then is not relevant here.
While Tairn is not a dour brute, he’s also not a pedant, not does he quip like Ridoc.
If Xaden so back, so is Sgaeyl. Tairn is supposed to have severely missed her because of the mated bind business. He also cares about Violet and knows she misses Xaden. I could understand if he was distracted by Sgaeyl and forgot to alert Violet as a result, but he wouldn’t play word games like this.
WORLDBUILDING
Runes
I glance over at the mess of practice runes on my desk and momentarily debate working on the delayed-activation rune Trissa spent most of the afternoon drilling into us. Its purpose is to take an existing, dormant rune and turn it “on” by tempering more magic into it.
This never becomes relevant in this book. I assume this is either an author's note or setup for something Yarros is toying with for Book 4 or 5.
In terms of lore … this doesn't technically conflict with anything, but I’m baffled as to how it is supposed to work. Does this rune get drawn on top of the dormant rune (in which case, it will probably damage or dormant rune)? If not, how exactly does it temper more power into the dormant rune, since the rune’s power is held inside of itself? If more power can simply be transferred into a rune to recharge it, why can’t a rider or flier transfer the power directly (which is what Violet does with the alloy in her conduit)?
Also, what Yarros describes here is not “delayed-activation”. It’s a “reactivation”.
PROSE
Contradiction
Having Brennan in the know only bolsters that hope. Maybe he can’t mend Xaden, but there’s never been a problem my brother couldn’t solve.
This is a contradictory statement. If Brennan “can’t mend Xaden,” that means Xaden’s condition is “a problem [he can't] solve.” If there’s no “problem [he can't] solve,” then that just means that he “can’t mend Xaden” YET, not that he outright can't do it.
Maybe the idea is that the mending Signet won't work, but Violet is confident that Brennan can find another way. However, if that is what Yarros intended, why not say that? Why word things this way?
SPOTLIGHT: ROMANCE
Tomorrow, November 8th, we’ll be taking a closer look at the Romance in Onyx Storm, as well as reflecting upon the wider trajectory of Violet and Xaden’s relationship across this series. Apologies - I know I’ve been saying for months that this analysis would be included in today’s post. However, in a bid to reduce post sizes, I’ve been exploring options to break down posts that I’ve already written into smaller pieces. You will still be getting the full breakdown that I promised. It will just be delayed until tomorrow. Thank you all for bearing with me.
INSTRUMENT OF THE GODS
On November 21st, we’ll dive into Chapters 50 through 52. After six chapters of stagnation, the plot finally begins rolling forward again. What’s more, Yarros does manage to fit in a couple of twists that are, at the very least, mildly interesting and passably foreshadowed.
As mentioned a few times throughout this series, Chapter 52 is the point where Theophanie finally becomes narratively relevant. While part of me wants to do a Spotlight to dissect her character and how Yarros has handled her, I feel like I’ve already said what needs to be said about how her status as Violet's nemesis seems to have been a last-minute edition.
What I will do here instead is a Spotlight for the religious worldbuilding. While not all of the pieces needed for the resolution of the book’s climax are in place at this point, arguably the most important concepts are revealed in Chapter 52. Since my criticisms of this sections are lighter than the chapters coming after Chapter 52, we might as well pull all the pieces together and get this analysis out of the way. Thus, on November 23rd, we’ll be diving into a Spotlight analysis for religious worldbuilding.
Thank you all for joining me this week. I hope to see you next time. Please remember to subscribe for the newsletter if you’d like weekly e-mails with the latest post links. Please also share this review with others if you enjoyed it. Until then, take care, and have a great weekend.
