Onyx Storm (Climax, Part 3 - Chapters 62, 64 & 66)
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, unmarked spoilers will be provided for the entirety of Onyx Storm, up to and including the end of the book.
STORY
Chapter 62
After the Rhiannon chapter, the events of Violet’s fight with Theophanie pick over at the same moment that they left off. Theophanie continues to deliver weak temptations while twirling her moustache. Things finally start to pick up when Theophanie traps Violet and starts a death wave attack, telling Violet that she can survive by draining the crown around herself. Violet escapes this by climbing wyvern corpses, gets airlifted by Sgaeyl, and then handed off to Tairn. As Violet reorients herself, she sees Theophanie has already run / teleported to Draithus to join all the wyverns there and mounted an “enormous” wyvern.
Violet shows off her god-tier Signet by slaughtering masses of wyvern instead of targeting the venin controlling them (something she’s known she should do since Fourth Wing). Only after nearly burning out does she decide to target venin. She and Tairn chase Theophanie and another venin into some canyons. Before they lose sight of Draithus, they see Aaric returning with a thousand soldiers from Zehyllna. She decides that the city is in good hands with Imogen and focusses on following Theophanie.
Chapter 64
Theophanie and Violet dogfight for a while, with Violet hurling lightning and Theophanie using the weather to deter Tairn and help her own wyvern evade. A moment before Tairn and Violet are trapped by a giant net, which Theophanie had led them into, they sense Sgaeyl also being trapped by a net (putting her in the state we see in Chapter 65). Tairn crash-lands.
As Violet tries to free herself and Tairn from the net, her hand finds the package Sloan flew through a dragon-wyvern melee to hand to her in Chapter 59. She opens it to discover a knife carved from a piece of stone, plus a letter from the high priestess of Dunne to Aaric that indicates that Violet really does have the power of God and anime on her side. Violet crawls out from under the net to face Theophanie alone.
Violet tries to kill Theophanie with lightning, but Theophanie evades her shots. There’s a confusing moment where Violet somehow knows Theophanie is from Unnbriel (despite the fact that the available evidence making Aretia a more likely conclusion, since Theophanie seemed to know that high priestess of Dunne in Chapter 52) and uses that to get under Theophanie’s skin.
Xaden goes Super Mega God Mode, plunging the entire battle into darkness. Violet realizes, in this instant, that Aaric is a precog (“a real one - not like Melgren, who can only foresee battles”). Trusting that God and anime truly are on her side, Violet unleashes her equivalent to a Toa’s Nova Blast to split the darkness, allowing her to see Theophanie. Before Theophanie can escape, she bumps into Andarna, who is just here now. Violet stabs Theophanie with the sacred knife, killing the venin instantly, before passing out.
Chapter 66
Violet wakes up in Aretia twelve hours later to discover:
She is married to Xaden, with documentation from the temple of Dunne as record of that marriage.
Xaden, Garrick, and three other riders are missing.
Six dragon eggs have been stolen from the Aretia hatching ground
The book ends on this line, making it clear that Imogen erased Violet’s memories of the missing hours.
“What did you do?” My head snaps towards Imogen, and a deep sense of foreboding takes root in my chest.
She slowly lifts her gaze to mine. “What you asked me to do.”
PLOT
All The Noise, Noise, Noise
I really do want to like the action in these chapters. Yarros worked hard on it. There’s plenty of wonky prose, but in concept, it should be exciting. Violet escaping the death wave attack by climbing wyvern corpses was a nice touch, even if it’s questionable how she can put that off if her EDS / POTS is as bad as Yarros makes it out to be.
This is where the power fantasy really murders things. Violet is not going to die here. She is too powerful and has too much plot armor to be overcome by external means, and the only reason she’d ever fall to the Dark Side is if Yarros wanted to do an edgy villain arc. The outcome is already predetermined. We’re just waiting for Yarros to get this out of her system.
Reinforcements
A thousand soldiers from Zehyllna. Just regular people on horseback. How, exactly are they going to be any better off here than the thousands of refugees? Why is Yarros treating this as a some kind of payoff and acting like Draithus is saved if only it can survive a little longer? Just a few passes by wyvern will obliterate them, to say nothing of a venin air-dropping in for a death wave attack.
Aaric the Ultra-Omniscient
I’m not shocked that Yarros is once again resorting to the lazy twist of handing her Mary Sue’s team “power for power’s sake” and then rushing a rationalization for the audience. I’m only offended because it’s boring now. This is an anti-twist. It makes the story less interesting and shuts down narrative opportunities rather than livening things up.
I’ll discuss the Signet itself down in Worldbuilding. Let’s just focus on the aftshadowing nightmare, the revelation and rationalization, and what it actually changes about the narrative.
Aftshadowing
As we covered previously, Aaric asking Violet to defend the temple in Chapter 51 was supposed to aftshadow for this moment. This was very clearly a scene that was written without his involvement and that his prophecy was then tacked on. Events play out almost exactly the same without him seeing the future. At most, he changed the location where the showdown with Theophanie occurred and where Leothan talked with Violet and Andarna, but those events would have happened and had the same outcomes with or without him.
In Chapter 58, a big deal is made about Aaric flying away from the battle. Yes, this is suspicious, but he does this to bring reinforcements that he should know have nothing to contribute in this battle, and him learning of their arrival could easily be explained by a rider or flier seeing them sail into port (because ships on the ocean tend to be visible from quite a ways off if one has enough altitude) and then flying to Aretia with a message. At best, Yarros wanted the reinforcements to show up and decided, “Well, Aaric can bring them because … ah, because he saw the future and knew when and where they’d make port!”
Also, there was a moment in Chapter 46 (right before the Duke of Calldyr got thrown through a door) where Aaric realized something was about to happen and stopped the group Violet was with so that Calldyr wouldn’t get thrown into them. All that changed is that Calldyr didn’t knock someone down. Specifically, he didn’t knock Lynx (the riders who manifested the shadow Signet) down - and that does not change anything. What would honestly have happened if he knocked Lynx down? Would the shock of that moment caused Lynx’s shadow Signet to manifest a few minutes earlier? Would we have been spared that farce of a thematic discussion?
Those moments are it. Maybe there were other moments in the text where one could look back and say, “Well, maybe he was applying precognition here,” but if so, they had even less of an impact than these two.
Revelation & Rationalization
The parcel that Sloane handed to Violet has this note from Aaric on it.
For when you lose yours. Strike in the dark, Violet.
Instead, there is the following letter from the high priestess of the temple of Aretia to Aaric.
A gift from one servant of Dunne to another. I must warn you - only those touched by the gods should wield their wrath. I will pray to Her that she need not use it to avoid reacquainting herself with the other who curries her favor. Her path is still not set.
Violet’s reaction is:
My stomach pitches. How would Aaric know I’d lose my dagger, let alone thing that some piece of rock could replace -
Then, when Xaden unleashes Super Mega God Mode, this happens.
“Use the darkness!” Tairn orders.
…
Wait. Strike in the darkness. That’s what Aaric’s note said …
Like he knew this would happen.
I gasp as all the pieces click in one overwhelming heartbeat. The reinforcements. Telling me to guard Dunne’s temple. Yanking Lynx out of the way before the doors even opened to the great hall. He knew. he’s been manifesting this entire time.
“He’s a fucking precog,” I whisper in awe. A real one - not like Melgren, who can only foresee battles. If Aaric wields true precognition, he saw this, and he gave me a weapon made of the fractured temple - a temple Theophanie can’t step inside. I don’t believe in oracles, but I do believe in signets.
I’m not going to belabor this one. Let’s do this as a quick list:
How would Aaric figure Violet would lose her knife? Well, the riders are a mounted formation that insists on THROWING KNIVES as their primary weapons. If someone sends him a special knife and claims it can kill a venin that he knows Violet is going to face, that’s reason enough to shrug and send it along with a note that says, “Keep it just in case, since we tend to throw our primary weapons away.”
“Strike in the dark” is certainly an oddly worded statement. However, he could have just been reminded Violet that she’s at her best when she’s working with Xaden, or else urging Violet to use a stealth approach. Plus, if seeing the future is on the table, he could have easily been told to tell Violet that by an oracle from the temple of Dunne. If anything, this should lead Violet to conclude that maybe the oracles of Dunne are on to something, especially since she’s so willing to accept that the knife made out of Dunne’s temple (a conclusion she just jumped to and was naturally correct about) will have an effect on Theophanie.
There’s a rational explanation for him knowing about reinforcements - again, that riders saw the ships from far and sent a message.
Protecting the temple could be a religious thing.
Stopping Lynx before Calldyr got thrown through the door could be a matter of either Aaric having better hearing than anyone else or else getting a warning relayed through his dragon (since Xaden is also in there, and dragons have an established tendency of passing messages to riders via one another).
Impact on the Narrative
Nothing positive.
All of the supposed setup of this Signet would have happened regardless of whether Aaric had this Signet, and nothing he does as a result of having it actually matters. Not even Violet receiving the knife means anything, since that really comes down to the actions of the high priestess of the temple of Dunne in Aretia had this knife made on her own initiative and then sent it to Aaric (again, likely prompted by the oracles that Violet dismisses). This means that even the final showdown with Theophanie could have happened the exact same way without Aaric foreseeing anything.
In terms of plot holes … well. Even if we assume that the incident in Chapter 46 was the first time Aaric ever saw the future, if he’s truly as powerful as Yarros tells us he is, that leaves everything from Chapter 47 onward as events he should have foreseen. So …
Why didn’t he foresee the attack on Aretia in Chapters 51 and 52 and warn people? If Yarros really wants to keep playing the, “Keep your power secret, or they’ll kill you,” thing going, then he could have still told Xaden hours in advance.
Why didn’t he foresee that Leothan was going to light the wardstone tell people to hold out for that moment? Why not find Leothan and warn him of the attack so that the dragon would act earlier?
Why didn’t he warn people about the attack on Draithus and get them to set up a ward extension as soon as the Aretia wardstone was lit?
Why didn’t he warn anyone about Panchek?
Why didn’t he warn Xaden about the “brother” who would fall?
Why didn’t he warn Xaden that Sgaeyl would end up in a net?
Why didn’t he warn Violet that Tairn would end up in a net?
Why didn’t he warn Violet and Xaden that Theophanie would try to kill Jack, thereby creating a scenario where a magical decoy would be the safer move?
Why didn’t he tell Violet that Andarna would come back at the pivotal moment?
And these are just the plot holes for if Aaric didn’t manifest his Signet until Chapter 46. The farther back one goes, the more holes open.
Bear in mind that, if Melgren is our metric of power, Aaric can see at least two weeks (if not several months) into the future. Remember, in Iron Flame, Melgren warned Aretia about the impending collapse of Basgiath’s wards, that’s more than a week in advance. (This “Canon Timeline” on the wiki says the meeting was December 8th, and the Winter Solstice that year was December 21st, and Melgren would have needed time to send the invite to said meeting, so the absolute shortest amount of time he sees into the future is two weeks). If Aaric is truly more powerful than Melgren, he’s not getting flashes at the last instant. Even if Yarros is restricting his power by giving him a tighter time constraint, he’s has to be able to see no fewer than several hours into the future. That’s the only way he’d be the only way to see a thousand men on horseback coming when no other dragons or riders did - those men would be visible at an extreme range for someone with a dragon’s eyesight and and altitude. So he should have plenty of lead time to warn characters about any of this.
And this is just covering Onyx Storm. Unless there is a massive time jump between this book and Book 4, Aaric should probably be able to foresee the inciting incident of that book. Yarros is laying groundwork for new plot holes in that book without writing a single word of it.
In her endless love of distributing “power for power’s sake”, Yarros has once more broken her narrative.
Andarna’s Back
Why is Andarna back? Why now? In the time that’s passed, she probably couldn’t have even finished the flight to the rainbow dragon island. Did she turn around on the way there? Why? What changed her mind?
Could Yarros really not think of another way to distract Theophanie than, “Oh … Draconis ex Machina”?
What’s worse, though, is that having Andarna just reappear, without explanation, invalidates her departure. All the overwrought emotion of Chapters 53 and 54 means nothing now. A mini-arc about grief was filler.
Violet’s Nemesis is Dead
In the review of The Queen of Vorn, I commented that Grinthy felt like a character who’d only been given a POV so that Emma could have something resembling a boss battle at the end of the story. That’s also how I feel about Theophanie. This character was built up as Violet’s nemesis throughout the book, but it was all in scenes where she ran away for no reason or taunted Violet with notes. The one time she doesn’t run away, she simply dies.
There was no dynamic between these characters, nor was there any history to anchor their conflict. Violet could have killed some random, faceless venin in this scene without harming the story. If anything, if she chased this venin purely for slitting Mira’s throat, that would have been a stronger conflict to end the book on.
Yarros could have made Theophanie into a meaningful threat in this book. She could have explored her character at some point before this final confrontation. Instead, she just took a random fight and pretended it has more substance than it actually does.
The Finale
What an utter wave of sludge.
I’m going to be repeating myself a bit in this section. Please bear with me.
**Ahem**
YARROS. GAVE. UP.
Rather than writing a coherent ending, rather than giving us the catharsis of falling action, she just slung mystery boxes at us, winked, and said, “Buy my next book!”
Let’s be honest with ourselves: Yarros doesn’t know the answers to any of the questions she’s set up here. These are things to make the audience theorycraft. They are a means to make us write our own stories, to distract us while she enjoys her time in the spotlight and procrastinates cleaning up the mess she’s made.
I think the biggest slap in the face here is the erasing of Violet’s memory. Yarros may think she can get away with smash-cutting into Xaden’s POV with no explanation as to how he got where she did, but she knows she can’t get away with that with Violet, as Violet is the primary POV of this book. She couldn’t simply reset Violet to a new position and expect the audience not to have questions of how Violet got there, because Violet should know how she got there. Having Imogen erase Violet’s memory is Yarros going out of her way to try to erase her obligation to tell a coherent story. The fact that Imogen has possessed this power since Fourth Wing does not redeem this. If anything, it makes me wonder if giving Imogen the power to erase memories was always about giving herself a free pass to eliminate narrative consequence and let herself off the hook from writing a coherent narrative.
The only nice thing I have to say about this ending is that Yarros welded some foreshadowing on for it. Remember the second Krovalan uprising? The clear implication here is that Xaden stole this eggs to take them to Unnbriel. This may just be theorycraft bait, but at least Yarros made an effort for this one point to make sense.
Other than that, this is incompetence of the highest order. It’s what one writes on a first draft before going back to write the actual ending. The fact that it’s in the published version shows how little Yarros thinks of her audience.
CHARACTER
Violet
This line is rather silly.
I don’t believe in oracles, but I do believe in signets.
This is Deverelli all over again. Why don’t you believe in oracles, Violet? You weren’t questioning Theophanie’s refusal to enter the temple before, and you know that venin can manifest Signet powers and use magic without dragons, so is it really such a stretch that prophecy is a thing?
Where things get really baffling is the moment Violet stabs Theophanie.
She staggers backwards and starts to laugh.
Then she sees the blood and stops. “How?” Her eyes flare, and she topples to her knees. “Stone doesn’t kill venin.”
“You were never just a venin,” I reply. “Dunne is a wrathful goddess to high priestesses who turn their backs on Her.”
This is not the statement of someone who scoffs at oracles (or divine intervention in general, as Violet did earlier in this book). This is what a true believer would say. And if Violet believes in this, and she believes that precognition is a thing in general, then what is the logic behind her dismissing oracles specifically?
Theophanie
Yarros tries to rush backstory for Theophanie before killing her. Violet is able to goad her by asking if she misses Unnbriel, and we get a stale villain line about not wanting to serve a god when she can be one. This would all be fine as a start for this character. As something rushed at the last minute, it falls as flat when Yarros rushed backstory for Quinn in Chapter 63.
WORLDBUILDING
Venin Immortality
How, exactly, does venin immortality work? There are enough contradictions on the page now that it really needs to be explained.
Injury
Early in Chapter 62, Violet shatters Theophanie’s nose with a headbutt, and then we get this reaction from Theophanie.
“Shit!” she shrieks, then uses her speed to appear twenty-five feet to my left, clutching her nose. “that’s never going to straighten out.”
In Fourth Wing, Jack survived the immense fall from the tower after Violet blew it up, followed by being buried in rubble. He recovered from this without a scratch. This implies that venin either can’t be truly harmed by mundane injuries and/or that they have some sort of healing factor that erases such injuries. This is compounded by the fact that we don’t see venin walking around looking like zombies several years into an apocalypse. If they don’t have a healing factor, then they have easy access to mending - and, frankly, I think the healing factor is more likely, as Iron Flame implied the healing Jack received was an effort to cure him, not to repair his flesh.
Why would a headbutt from a featherweight with EDS do more permanent damage than what Jack suffered from the fall and the avalanche of rubble?
Also, bear in mind that when Violet stabs Theophanie with the stone dagger, Theophanie is laughing until she sees the blood. This implies that a venin won’t bleed if struck by mundane weapons (because, otherwise, she should be used to bleeding when stabbed). Why, then, does a nose break? Shouldn’t it be a case where the flesh is displaced by the weapon by heals the instant the obstruction is removed?
This then begs the question of how and why the venin-killing daggers actually work. There’s a moment in Chapter 60 where Violet tries to kill Theophanie with one. Theophanie catches the strike, forcing Violet to draw a normal dagger and stab Theophanie in the leg, despite knowing this won’t do any lasting harm. The fact that Violet didn’t even consider feinting with a mundane dagger and then stabbing Theophanie in the leg with the correct one implies that the daggers don’t auto-kill venin upon making contact. They clearly need to inflict injury in a vital area. But if venin can be genuinely injured this easily (or, for that matter, suffer anaphylactic shock when exposed to oranges, or blown up by maorsite), then why do the daggers even matter? Why couldn’t dragon fire be used to reduce venin to carbonized husks without the muscle mass needed to move, effectively petrifying them?
Even Twilight did this better. Vampires could suffer physical damage if subjected to another force. It just usually took another vampire or a werewolf to deliver the necessary force. Even then, it was made clear that burning the bodies was the finishing move. The vampires would regenerate if not permanently finished off in that specific way. There were clear rules, and in at least the movies, those were honored.
What are the rules here? What was all the drama over the venin-killing alloy for? At this point, it really seems like neither the daggers nor Violet’s lightning are truly necessary and that venin shrugging off dragon fire is due to some unrelated magical effect.
Age
Just how old is Theophanie?
In Chapter 60, Theophanie stated that there are only a few venin older than she is. However, she hasn’t been presented as a particularly old woman. In Chapter 62, Theophanie also implies that Violet will have “forever” with Xaden and that she’s willing to wait a century for another lightning wielder to come along if Violet dies. The clear implication here is that venin are ageless.
And yet … she has a personal history with General Sorrengail, despite Navarre being isolationist and the venin only recently spreading out of the Barrens. Also, the high priestess of Dunne in Aretia seemed to recognize her (I don’t think it was just the forehead tattoo, as the high priestess didn’t seem all that shocked that a former priestess was a venin, implying a perosnal knowledge of Theophanie). This implies that she’s actually quite young, or at the very least, no more than a few decades older than she looks.
Are venin truly ageless? Or are they no more long-lived than humans? Have an immortal sect of venin been growing in the Barrens all this time? Or is Theophanie among the oldest living members of a group that has only found its footing in the past generation or so?
This wasn’t a factor in previous books because agelessness was never put into focus. It didn’t affect the narrative one way or another if venin were merely humans able of using magic or if they’d unlocked immortality. Now that it’s been put in focus as part of character motivations, though, it demands an answer. We need to understand venin lifespans now to understand how they relate to the world and the impact on their long-term plans. For example, even if all of the venin currently attacking Navarre and Poromiel are destroyed, the threat will never truly be erased if venin are ageless. It would just only one venin escaping and waiting a few centuries for people to forget about the threat to restart this mess all over again.
Speed
In these chapters, we get more ridiculous demonstrations of Theophanie’s speed.
The fact she gets from the place where she was tempting Violet to the gathering point for the wyvern (who somehow couldn’t stop all the other riders from getting away early, so they much have been a good distance away) shows she can cover vast distances within seconds.
She moves “twenty-five feet” as a reflex after Violet breaks her nose.
We are entering the territory of the Flash here. Why hasn’t Tehophanie single-handedly slaughtered every important political and military figure in Navarre if she can move like this?
Farsight Retcon
As part of transitioning from the aerial battle, Yarros demonstrates how well dragons can see, to the point that it negates the farsight Signet. She decided to call attention to that fact.
“Why would riders develop farsight if you can see that clearly, anyway?” I ask.
“The privilege of our sight is afforded to few,” he comments.
Go figure.
Yes, Ms. Yarros. Go figure that you could take something that wasn’t even a plot hole and manage to still mess it up.
Let’s be clear here: there is nothing in the lore that is contradicted by humans gaining the power to see things as well as dragons do. That’s honestly a useful skill. At its absolute weakest, it allows the rider to scan the surrounding area for threats while the dragon focuses on flying, making it valuable for battlefield awareness. What’s more, dragons can also breathe fire, yet no issue has been made about fire wielding Signets. How is this different?
For that matter, Tairns’s answer, which Violet accepts with a shrug, is not an answer to the question. Violet didn’t ask for clarification as to why a certain number of riders developed farsight; she didn’t need Tairn to correct her about the actual number. She wanted to know why the Signet even exists.
This was a rare case of Yarros giving us worldbuilding that worked just fine, yet she went out of her way to showcase that she has no idea what she’s doing with it.
Precognition Signet
In and of itself, Aaric having precognition does not break the worldbuilding in any ways it hasn’t already been broken. The damage was done when Melgren got precognition. Adding another precog does not, in and of itself, make things worse.
Unfortunately, Yarros goes out of her way to make this a problem in her obsession with “power for power’s sake”. She just had to have Violet’s team one-up Melgren.
Let’s go over how Violet described Aaric’s Signet again.
“He’s a fucking precog,” I whisper in awe. A real one - not like Melgren, who can only foresee battles. If Aaric wields true precognition, he saw this, and he gave me a weapon made of the fractured temple - a temple Theophanie can’t step inside.
How is Melgren not a “real” precog?
With everything we have been shown, Melgren is not just a “real-precog” - he is nigh omniscient.
The “only foresee battles” thing has been demonstrated to not be an issue at multiple points in this series. In Chapter 3 of this very book, it was established that Melgren has an omniscient understanding of present events, since Xaden knew he’s know about the venin attempt to free Jack despite it not being anything close to a “battle”. For that matter, while writing this part of the review, it finally occurred to me that the only way Melgren could know about the rebel children creating blind spots in his vision is if he is nigh-omniscient regardless of any “battles”. After all, the rebel children had not participated in any “battles” prior to the climax of Fourth Wing. He shouldn’t have noticed their disruption unless he is otherwise able to see the future and the present in their entirety.
Previously, I postulated that Melgren’s power may be limited by the limit of Navarre’s wards. After all, despite his nigh-omniscience, Violet and Xaden felt comfortable delivering weapons to Poromiel without any other rebel children present. The thing is, Chapter 57 of this book acknowledges that he foresaw the battle at Draithus. He clearly is not limited by geography. (This does not invaldiste the fact that Garrick’s teleportation should redefine the smuggling of the weapons and thus shift the trajectory of the series. He just needed to bring two other rebel children with him, and they’d still have been gone and back in minutes without hours.)
Ultimately, the only impairment to Melgren is the rebel children. This is the product if a conveniently specific set of runes that grant immunity to the Signet of a specific rider. Aaric should absolutely be vulnerable to this same thing.
Furthermore … we have only seen Aaric use precognition for “battles”. This climax is during a battle. The events at the temple in Chapter 52 were during a battle. If the attempt to free Jack counts as a “battle” (or if, as established in Fourth Wing, assassination attempts count as “battles”), then even Calldyr being thrown through that door counts as a “battle”.
This means that, at best, Aaric has the same power as Melgren. They have the same reach and the same limitations. Yarros insisting they are different does not make it so.
Why is Aaric stronger than Melgren?
Since Fourth Wing, it has been hammered in that the power of a rider’s Signet depends on the power (i.e. the color) of the dragon. The fact that Melgren and Violet have the most powerful Signets is a direct result of them both riding black dragons. Xaden’s power is likewise the result of him riding a blue dragon.
The same Signet can be provided by dragons of different colors. Sloane rides a red dragon, yet she has the same transfer Signet that Tairn gave to his previous rider. The implication here is that the power level varies. Tairn’s rider apparently did the impossible and brought Brennan back from the dead. Sloane has merely given a mender a power boost to heal an injury that was mendable but needed more power. (If these two feats are meant to be equal, then Yarros has retconned away the impossibility of bringing back the dead, something she only established for the sake of the Brennan twist.)
Aaric rides a blue dragon. Blues are weaker than blacks. This means that, per the rules Yarros has chosen to establish, his Signet should be weaker than Melgren’s, not stronger. He should be the only who can only see battles, while Melgren is the “real” precog.
Perhaps Yarros will try to rationalize this I'm Book 4 via some outside factor, much like Xaden getting Super Mega God Mode because he is a venin. I’m confident that her efforts to do so will open new plot holes.
A NEW YEAR, A NEW DAWN
Well … we did it. It took nine months, but we’ve finally reached the end.
The final Retrospective for this book is currently scheduled for January 2nd. In it, we’ll do a final summary analysis for this book, discuss the information that is currently available regarding for Book 4 and the TV adaptation, and try to make some sense of how this monstrosity could have been fixed. Prior to that Retrospective, we’ll be getting the final Spotlight analysis for Onyx Storm on December 28th, focusing specifically on the issue of power creep.
I want to thank you all for coming on this journey with me. I know that it’s been quite long. Hopefully you were all entertained and / or learned something new.
Christmas is coming up Thursday. On Christmas Day, we’ll review the indie novel Beyond the Crimson Mists, the first book in the Tidestone Chronicles. Then, on December 26th, we’ll review the last Eisenhorn novel, The Magos.
Thank you all again for being part of this journey. Please remember to sign up for the newsletter if you’d like a weekly e-mail with the latest post updates. Please also share this review with others if you enjoyed it. Take care, everyone, and I hope to see you all again soon.