Onyx Storm (Spotlight on Power Creep)
Hello, all. Welcome back.
Today, we’ll be covering the final Spotlight analysis for Onyx Storm, covering the issue of power creep. It was inspired by statements Rebecca Yarros made during a Variety interview in January 2025, which we referenced in the review on the non-Violet POV chapters in the book’s climax. However, the true trigger for this analysis was the reveal of Aaric Signet, which we recovered in the review of the last of Violet’s POV chapters. I recommend jumping back to check out both of those posts if you haven’t already. Otherwise, let’s dive right in.
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. The same applies to the previous entries in the series as well.
DEFINTIONS
As we covered while discussing the alternative POV chapters in the climax, Yarros acknowledged a crippling issue in her story and claimed to correcting it without actually doing so. This moment came during the Variety interview.
I fought for that really hard in my draft to keep [Rhiannon’s POV chapter] because I figured that one of the lessons Violet is learning is that she cannot be all things to all people. And I do find that sometimes heroines get overpowered where they are the only one who may accomplish this. And that’s not how it works in a military unit. You have to delegate. And her mission is to go over here and take out this one objective which leaves all of this major battle happening without Violet present.
What Yarros has described here is the issue of “power creep”.
As explained in this TV Tropes page on the subject, power creep is a phenomenon typically seen in gaming. Developers want to encourage players to pay for new products, so they will gradually introduce more and more powerful content to the game, eventually rendering prior content obsolete because of the difference in power level. While used primarily in reference to game, this can also apply to stories where the power levels of characters increase over time. Naruto, for example, began as a manga about ninjas with only mild supernatural abilities and ended in battles between godlike sorcerers.
It’s important to note that, while Yarros has absolutely been making her characters overpowered as she passes out “power for power’s sake”, power creep wasn't really an issue in the first two books. Violet’s lighting Signet, Xaden’s shadow Signet, and Melgren’s precognitive powers (to name a few) may all be so absurdly powerful that Yarros needs to tear open plot holes for her desired narrative to work, but at least she was consistent about how absurdly powerful they were. She set a standard in Fourth Wing and stuck to it. Even when Xaden leveled up his Signet with venin power at the end of Iron Flame, this may sense as an extension of the previously established prowess of the venin.
Onyx Storm is where the creep truly began.
CREEP AND CRUMBLE
The problems with power creep begin as early as Chapter 1, and they only worsen as the book progresses. The end result is a scenario that is exactly what Yarros claims she wanted to avoid.
Venin
Yarros severely damaged her series in Iron Flame when she established that venin could move about undetected within the wards and that venin riders have their rider magic enhanced. Still, the situation was salvageable. It was at least implied that venin riders were the only venin who were truly a threat inside the wards, and that even then, the only unambiguous advantage they had over other ridres was that they retained their invulnerability.
Within the first four chapters of Onyx Storm, Yarros makes the venin so ludicrously powerful within the wards that the wardstones, and everything associated with them, are utterly pointless. We quickly learn that they have access to not only their invulnerability but also their other heightened physical characteristics (including speed that verges on teleportation) and ability to drain people.
This means that the wards block … what? The wyverns? The venin Signets (maybe - Yarros’s past claim that Jack’s pain projection Signet is a venin power calls that into question)?
And that’s before we get into the fact that venin have Signets now. The past books implied that Signets were the balancing factor. The lesser magic of riders was inferior to venin powers, but the Signets were more powerful than venin powers. Now that venin have Signets (and we are meant to thing they manifest Signets according to what the riders have), riders no longer have the balancing factor in any environment where the venin can use their Signets.
At this point, the venin are too powerful to be stopped. They don’t need to rally armies of wyverns and face riders armed with venin-killing daggers on an open field. They should be able to easily infiltrate Navarre and eradicate entire cities before the dragons can respond. I don’t care how many venin-killing daggers the royal guards are carrying - they have no other magic. Annihilating the non-rider leadership of Navarre should be incredibly easy. As for combating Poromiel, it’s no contest. The wyverns could easily distract the fliers and riders while venin stroll into civilian population centers and just annihilate everyone within range of a death wave attack, using Signets to destroy any riders or fliers who rush to the defense of the civilians.
Ridoc
Ridoc’s Signet is a curious case of power creep. Rather than making him more powerful, Yarros chose instead to retroactively mender every other ice wielder obsolete. While this is technically known as “nerfing”, the fact that this nerfing benefits Violet’s team produces the same results.
Aaric
The fact that Aaric is a precog is power creep for two reasons.
The fact that Violet’s team now has a precog at all, one who isn’t affected by the blind spot generated by rebel children, already gives her team a massive leg up on the rider leadership and any other future opponents.
Yarros made sure to establish that Aaric is more powerful than Melgren, who is already effectively omniscient.
Double Signets (the Rebel Children)
I won’t belabor how much damage this retcon has done to the story. Instead, I want to focus on the fact that Yarros has handed Violet’s allies unprecedented utility.
At this point, we only know of three sets of double Signets from the surviving rebel children:
Xaden wields shadows and is an inntinnsic.
Garrick teleports and … I actually don’t remember what else he does, nor do I care enough to look it up, but teleportation was his added power, which is important for the point I’m about to make.
Imogren can erase memories and transmute any other substance to stone.
In the heist scenes of both Fourth Wing and Iron Flame, Yarros demonstrated her willingness to contrive scenarios that perfectly suit the array of Signets at Violet’s disposal. Now that she has introduced this double Signets card, she has also given herself carte blanche to make up new Signets for other rebel children (like Bodhi and Sloane) as suits her convenience.
Violet
While Violet becoming a dream walker is narratively irrelevant, and the idea that she’s the most powerful inntinnsic of all doesn’t hold up, Yarros wants us to think that Violet has more power than ever before. She may also contrive more scenarios to ignore Violet’s limits and prove her great power in the future. I also don’t like this particular line from that same interview.
[Variety]: Is it official that [Violet’s Signet is] dream walking? So in the fourth book, where the signets are listed at the start of the book would it be fair to say it will say “dream walking” and that would be the correct answer?
[Yarros]: I would say it evolves with her understanding. The maps evolve with her understanding, everything is through Violet’s lens.
Yarros is outright telling us that she reserves the right to change Violet’s power here, so she could give Violet even more “power for power’s sake” in future books.
And that’s before we get to the fact that Violet literally has God and anime on her side. The climax makes it very clear that she’s a Chosen One selected by Dunne. That opens the door for Yarros to slap even more power onto Violet going forward and say that its from Dunne.
The Result
At the end of Iron Flame, the venin were a daunting threat, but only outside of the wards. Poromiel was under threat, and Aretia would soon face the same threat if its wardstone was not fired by a different rainbow dragon than Andarna, but Navarre would remain safe so long as the wardstone was protected in the future.
By the end of Onyx Storm, the venin are a threat so immense that only Violet and her immediate allies have the power to oppose them, while Violet and her allies are so powerful that any threat posed by the venin is contrived. Yarros had to outright leash Xaden to keep him from butchering Berwyn and going after the venin leadership (whom I think we can safely assume are above Berwyn in the bloodline hierarchy). Any conflict featuring the venin, the rider leadership, or Navarrian riders will be an absolute joke even if Yarros hadn’t demonstrated them all to be incompetent. At this point, Yarros is going to need to introduce a venin god, super-dragon on the scale of Azlagûr, or some equivalent threat for there to be any credible threat left for the heroes by the time Book 5 rolls around.
COULD POWER CREEP HAVE BEEN AVOIDED?
Yes and no.
Yarros did not need to escalate things for the narrative to progress. She could have kept venin as a threat only outside of the wards. She could have not given out any more double Signets. She could have let Ridoc be typical for a ice wielders. She could have not made Aaric omnipotent Had she stuck to the previously established power levels, the events in this book could have all played out exactly the same.
The issue, as with so much else in this series, is that Yarros does not think these things through. She made the venin more powerful because she wanted an action scene. She made Violet’s team more powerful because it’s cool, lets her contrive utter nonsense to drive her power, and lets her pretend a humiliating mistake was intentional. She makes Violet more powerful because “power for power’s sake” is her personal fantasy.
All this is to say that, yes, this could have been avoided, if only Rebecca Yarros had a tiniest bit of respect for the intelligence of her audience or for the genre she’s exploiting for her own fame.
