Onyx Storm (Spotlight on Religious Worldbuilding)
Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining me for this Spotlight analysis.
This analysis was originally prepared as part of the review of Chapters 50 & 52 of Onyx Storm. If you haven’t already, I encourage you to go back and read that review so that you’re up to speed on the state of The Empyrean. If you’ve already read the review in question, or just want to get to the dissection, then 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 spoilers will be provided for the entirety of The Empyrean up through the end of Chapter 52 of Onyx Storm. 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.
Also, as part of the Spotlight analysis, I'm going to be providing heavy spoilers for the first two books in the War of Souls trilogy, as well as minor spoilers for the third book (which will be reviewed this Friday). These spoilers will be confined to the section near the end titled “The Krynn Comparison" but won’t be marked otherwise.
INTRODUCTION
Religious worldbuilding is a topic I’ve touched on several times in past reviews.
This term is exactly what it says on the tin. Any worldbuilding that pertains to the religious or spiritual aspects of the setting can fall under this umbrella. This includes, but is not limited to:
Religious groups / hierarchies / factions / sects / schisms
Beliefs / worldview
Prayers / rites / rituals
Holidays
Theological texts
Holy or unholy relics / places
Signs
The interaction of supernatural elements, including the magic system and any entities worshipped / held in a special status within that religion (gods, angels, demons, etc.)
This last overlaps with the cosmology of the setting, but it's worth noting that cosmologic worldbuilding doesn't need to be religious. The Asgardians in the MCU are recognizable as divine figures from Norse faith, but outside of background details (like how Spider-Man: Homecoming has a church dedicated to the Norse pantheon), the films don't engage with them as religious figures. Likewise, the Progenitor Dragons in Eberron are acknowledged as the creators of that world, but outside of the dragons, no one worships thems (and even then, the dragons don't so much worship them as acknowledge that they exist above the gods).
On the flip side of things, good religious worldbuilding can exist without magic and/or without confirmation that anything described by the religion is objectively true. I feel like the Hostage of the Empire series had pretty good religious worldbuilding. The religious beliefs of the characters shaped their perspectives in subtle ways that made them feel grounded in that setting, rather than stepping out of our own world.
At the end of the day, that’s what’s most important in good religious worldbuilding. You can have as much detail as you want for your fictional church, with every ritual and holiday planned down to the last letter, but if it doesn't reflect in your characters, then it’s all just noise. Religious beliefs - whether past or present - have a foundational influence on a culture’s worldview, influencing even people who don’t practice the religion in question but are still part of the culture. Leveraging this fact can help move the audience out of their real-world locations and deeply immerse them into the POVs of the characters.
This is why I really appreciate good religious worldbuilding … and yet, at the same time, don’t think it’s narratively essential for every story. There are other ways to facilitate the immersion goal. Besides, lazy religious worldbuilding can do more harm than good, creating a sense of shallowness to the world or a disconnect between the characters and the objective reality if their setting. The only stories where religious worldbuilding is imperative is one where the religion is essential to understanding the plot, such as when the characters put a lot of focus on the divine (Foundryside), are engaging in personal or political struggles that spawn out of religious disagreement (The City of Brass), or where the objective existence of cosmologic elements should shape the setting (A Master of Djinn).
This is why the religious worldbuilding in Onyx Storm disappoints me so much. This is an element of the series didn’t matter until now. It was an aspect of the setting that worked well enough as background noise. Yarros has made an unforced error here, and in doing so, she has made a mess that I didn’t realize was still left to be made.
To explain this problem, let’s start with a measure of self-awareness.
Can Opened
Yes, I’m going to be referencing “The Unbottled Idol” for this part of the review. I’m only doing so to acknowledge a problem that I created the moment I settled on my premise. Whether I successfully resolved it isn’t what I’ll be covering here. You all can judge that for yourselves.
For those who haven’t read the story: within the setting of “The Unbottled Idol”, the gods of order (“yazatas”) and the gods of chaos (“daevas”) engage in an endless struggle, with yazatas operating defensively to preserve mortal souls and the cosmic order while the daevas seek to corrupt mortals and remake the world in their own image. This is mostly a spiritual conflict, but it does spill into the physical world. Typically, this involves a daeva manifesting in a physical body through the aid of its worshippers. When this happens, one or more yazatas will also physically manifest to kill said body and force the daeava back out of the physical world.
Establishing that the daevas could physically involve themselves in the world wasn’t necessarily a problem. They are the cause of narrative problems, not the solution. Establishing that yazatas can solve those problems in this same manner sprays worms everywhere. It begs the questions as to why the yazatas aren't popping in to solve more problems, especially when those problems are at least tangentially connected to them. To just list two (non-spoiler) examples that are specific to the first four chapters of “The Unbottled Idol”, one could ask:
Why couldn't Amāstrī eliminate any need to investigate Shapiev’s death? Why not reveal herself to the Inquisition, confess to killing Shapiev, and explain the whole story? The Inquisition are the ones keeping the yazata-daeva conflict quiet in the first place, so all they really care about is official confirmation that a god was behind the killing. (Yes, this does get explained later, but Mohsen never even considers this possibility, so it was still a problem that needed to be addressed.)
Why didn't Amāstrī or any other yazatas execute Kir Nikbin before he made the ifrit binding rings? The man was not subtle about his intentions to use those things for a bloody regime change. It’s established early in the novella that a particularly dangerous wish made via a binding ring is one of the few things besides a daeva that can provoke a yazata’s intervention. Why, then, would the yazatas allow him to get as far as he got? Why not kill him before he made the rings or at any time during his crusade?
This is why I tried to set limits on what the yazatas would or wouldn't do early on in the novella, to make it crystal clear that Mohsen and Aysa couldn't expect any gods to step in and lend direct support. You can have incredibly powerful forces capable of solving problems within your narrative, but unless you want your narrative to come apart at the seams, you need to clearly establish for the audience what the limits of those forces are. The audience needs enough information to understand when stakes and tension truly exist within the story.
Also, on a related note, if divine problem-solvers are going to be involved in the narrative, the narrative needs to be constructed from the beginning with that in mind, or else the rules for the problem-solvers need to take all of the previous problems into account. My workaround for this has been to introduce the setting with divine intervention being a thing that exists. I don't need to backtrack. (I will, however, need to keep that in mind whenever I write a story that doesn’t involve divine intervention, since the option will technically exist in any and all future scenarios that I write in this setting. I’ll need to make sure that no problems cross the line where intervention becomes justified, not unless I want a god to explode into said story and derail the plot.)
Where Yarros Went Wrong
Here in Onyx Storm, Yarros establishes that divine intervention is indeed a thing … but she didn't establish the limits needed to preserve stakes and tension. If anything, she establishes reasons that the gods should be intervening more than they do.
She also takes a setting that made it two books in without divine intervention being on the table and now puts that option on the table. We need to reevaluate the previous books through that lens. The damage on this front isn’t as bad as it could be. However, there are also elements in Onyx Storm itself that were clearly not written with the possibility of divine intervention in mind, so the damage still adds up.
It would not be impossible for Yarros to recover from this. There are fixes that can be applied. Before any repairs can be made, though, a full account of the damage needs to be taken.
Let’s dive in.
DIVINE INTERVENTION
For the purposes of this analysis, I’m using “divine intervention” as a catch-all term for any way in which a god alters the rules of the world from the norm. Under this broad definition, a vampire being harmed by a cross or a demon being warded off by a prayer qualify as divine intervention. The idea is that the world operates on certain rules, but the will of a god or some other higher power supercedes those rules.
Theophanie Can't Enter a Temple
Here’s the Chapter 62 epigraph again.
There is no goddess more wrathful than Dunne. Entering Her temple will slice the soul from any attendant who has shunned Her grace.
—Major Rorilee’s Guide to Appeasing the Gods, Second Edition
With how this is established, this isn’t an issue of hallowed ground. Theophanie’s associates are prepared to enter the temple. Venin in general don’t have this problem, only an “attendant who has shunned [Dunne’s] grace”. Any mundane human who met the terms for this transgression should also face this penalty.
All right. That's fine. So what, exactly, did Theophanie do?
Well … based on what we are actually told … the only possible answer is “she became a venin”. We’re never given any other sins, nor are any religious schisms identified. At a stretch, perhaps Theophanie committed heresy in the course of how she conducted herself in the venin’s war against Poromiel, but that requires the audience to make up theology for Dunne that Theophanie could have violated. This isn’t Eberron, where a religion with only 15 gods in its panthon manages to juggle three war gods and also have a demon lord of war, all of whom have distinct identities and portfolios. All we know about Dunne is that she she values marital prowess and the wisdom to back it up.
Since the only possible heresy Yarros has given us is that Theophanie is a venin, this means that the gods (at least, Dunne) are opposed to the existence of the venin. Combine this with the “soulless” lore, and venin are force of objective evil whom the gods are fully prepared to smite dead. So …
Why would venin who aren't former attendants of Dunne be allowed in the temple? This isn't like a vampire sending human servants into a church. They are also tainted, so they should also be under threat. The fact that Yarros is later going to act like venin have a vampire bloodline aspect (more on that around Christmas) also raises the possibility that these venin are spawned from Theophanie, and thus, they should bear some sort of taint by association (i.e. they are students of the heretic).
Why don’t the gods (particularly Dunne) step in to smite the venin personally, especially if smiting a venin who steps into a temple is on the table? Why is Dunne’s involvement limited to the nonsense in the climax of this book (more on that shortly)?
Why are the secular authorities (Navarre and Poromiel) leading the fight against the venin? Where are the holy paladins crusading out to fight these monsters? Where are the priests to repulse them with prayers or manifestations of divine power?
A Sign from the Heavens
There’s a possibility that the lightning strike that Violet supposedly called down on Unnbriel was actually some sort of sign from the gods (Dunne or Zihnal). Let’s acknowledge the problem that gets added in if this is indeed what Yarros intended: why aren’t there more signs like this? It’s not impossible to rationalize why this would be the only sign, but given that the secular authorities of Navarre have allowed the soulless entities to ravage the continent dedicated to the queen of the gods, there needs to be some explanation for why the gods weren't trying to stir up the people against this regime.
Also, between Chapter 54 and the climax of the book, there’s enough information to indicate that the oracles of Dunne do indeed commune with a higher power capable of warning them about the future. Did the gods never feel compelled to give the temples a heads-up about the impending venin threat? Where were the street preachers and homeless people with sandwich boards to warn people of the doom about to fall upon Navarre?
The Chosen One (Heavy Spoilers)
It should come as no surprise that Violet having God and anime on her side was not just me grasping for a convenient joke.
In the next few chapters, Yarros will bend over backwards to push the idea that Violet is a divine champion of Dunne, chosen to smite dead the heretic Theophanie. We’ll find out in Chapter 54 that Violet’s parents tried to have her dedicated to the temple of Dunne as a little girl. This is the explanation for why Violet has hair that is silver at the tips, whereas Theophanie and the priesthood of Unnbriel are silver all the way through. (So much for my theory that EDS was a prerequisite for joining the priesthood.) At the climax, the high priestess of the Dunne temple in Aretia will also send Violet a holy dagger (by way of Aaric), with the following note attached.
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.
When was Violet “touched by the gods”? Her dedication was never completed. If things did progress far enough for Violet to count as “touched”, why hasn't her attitude towards the gods throughout this book marked HER as a heretic? She’s been very dismissive of the gods. If her attitude is not heretical, then that removes any ambiguity about Theophanie’s potential heresies. The only way for Theophanie to be a heretic when Violet, who rejects Dunne despite being “touched” by Dunne, is not is if being a venin is the heresy.
Fine, though. Violet is the Chosen One. She is a divinely appointed warrior who … smites evildoers … with weapons of the gods …
Yeah. Yarros establishes in this book that there should be crusading paladins.
Why is Violet, whose heart clearly belongs to no god but Khorne, the chosen agent of this pantheon? It can't be because she has a dragon and a Signet. If that were the case, the temples have had six hundred years to try to create dragon-riding (or, for that matter, gryphon-riding) paladins by dedicating people, training them until they are fit for the Riders Quadrant, and then sending them in to bond with dragons. Violet should not be their only option. (It also can’t be because of her power level, unless Yarros is honestly going to claim that her self-insert Mary Sue is so powerful that not even the gods can empower someone to match her.)
No Rules, No Characters
There may be a perfectly rational explanation for why the gods operate the way they do. Unfortunately, Yarros failed to provide one. She hasn't established any worldbuilding limits for why the gods can't sweep in and annihilate this existential threat, not even something as simple as, “Amari willed that it be so.” She also hasn’t written the gods as characters with motivations or agency, so much like the Empyrean, nothing they do (or don't do) can be justified on the basis of a character making a decision.
Bottom Line
By establishing that the gods can and will intervene in her story, Yarros has somehow managed to take a story that was already ground into dust and atomize it.
It would not have been impossible for Yarros to involve the gods of her world in this struggle without uprooting the narrative. She wouldn't necessarily have even needed to change any if the instances of divine intervention we’ve gone over. An exploration of the religious worldview of this world (Violet sniping about the gods doesn't count) could have laid out a framework as to what help the audience could or couldn’t expect from the gods. That could have elevated Violet's Chosen One status from more nonsense power fantasy to something that actually feels like a payoff.
Before we move on to the next section, I do want to acknowledge the possibility that maybe Yarros didn’t meant for the gods to literally exist. Maybe the threat of Theophanie being smote upon entering the temple was hollow. If this is the case, though, then the writing here is even worse.
Yarros has framed everything as if the gods objectively exist, so if that’s not the case, it’s another mistake on her part.
Violet, a woman who is pretty caustic towards acknowledging any power greater than herself (with her explicitly rejecting most gods in this pantheon for one reason or another) flips on a dime and accepts her role as Dunne’s Chosen One. The only way this makes sense without the gods objectively existing is if Yarros is telling us that her self-insert Mary Sue is so narcissistic that she’ll flip her religious beliefs on a dime just to make herself feel even more self-important.
INCOMPATIBILITIES
Fourth Wing
At first glance, all is well here. There’s nothing that I can think of within this book that is actually changed by divine intervention suddenly being a thing in this setting. If anything, the lack of any established clash between the temples and the rider leadership / Navarre’s government makes it clear that nothing happening in the Rider’s Quadrant (which is what the story focusses upon) is against the will of the gods, so there probably wasn’t a reason for divine intervention.
However, there’s the issue of Theophanie being a “heretic” and Yarros not giving us any possible heresy except her being a venin. For it to be heresy, there must be a religious teaching that is being contradicted. The teaching must be recorded somewhere, or else preserved in an oral record. All this is the say that the temples (again, at least the temples of Dunne) should have been fully aware of the venin threat, and by extension, that Navarre shouldn’t have been able to completely erase lore on the venin. What’s more, given that Navarre and Poromiel worship the same gods (and in a similar enough fashion that gryphon riders have no trouble worshipping at the temples hear Basgiath, despite centuries for schisms to form), there was probably communication between religious communities on both sides of the border. There is no reason the clergy in Navarre shouldn't have been fully aware of the “heretics” waging warning Poromiel this whole time.
Why didn’t we hear anything about either divine intervention or a religious movement to end Navarre’s isolationism and take the fight to the venin? If the answer is that the gods approve of the isolationism, too, then Yarros has just kicked over the axis of morality of her series. If the venin are presented as objective evil, and the gods are prepared to smite them for it, then that makes the gods a supernatural force of objective good (an argument supported by Yarros’s employment of harsh moral binaries for other things). So if the gods allow Navarre’s isolationism, while at the same time being prepared to smite venin dead just for stepping into a temple, it means the isolationism is also good, or at the very least, pushed to the good side of the moral binary. An argument could be made that the gods make accommodations for the hard-heartedness of humanity, but that requires the gods to be characters with motivations, or at least for a fully-formed theology to be laid out for the audience. We don’t have that.
All this is to say that either Yarros has torn up a plot hole, or she has made Violet, Xaden, and the rebel children into villains by trying to force Navarre into a conflict that the gods want them to stay out of.
Iron Flame
This issue from Fourth Wing continues throughout Iron Flame. For the most part, that’s the only issue. However, the moment Jack destroys the wardstone, a new problem is created.
Why didn’t the gods intervene to stop that? If nothing else, I think Dunne would want to intervene, since venin overrunning Navarre would include violating her temples. A little proactivity on her part would have gone a long way here.
Now, if the gods were characters, we could again go with the hard-heartedness of humanity thing. Perhaps the gods wanted Navarre to chose to fight the venin of their own free will, and thus, things were allowed to progress to the point that Navarre lost its defenses and was thrust into the conflict. That could work.
The issue, again, is that the gods are not characters, and we still don’t have any theology to otherwise explain this. It makes it seem like the gods just don’t care (which then begs the question of why Dunne would do what she does in this book).
Onyx Storm
The culture of the southern isles makes zero sense if divine intervention is an element in this setting.
First, the Deverelli. We discussed the poor handling of their Flat-Earth Atheism back in Chapters 21 through 28. The fact that they reject gods for “science” while having no discernable science that the god-worshippers don’t already have is dumb enough on the face of it. However, if the gods are objectively real and physically intervene in the world, then this outright rejection of the gods is even dumber. Apostacy I could understand, but when the god of war is ripping people’s souls out and appointing champions to smite individual heretics, then there really isn’t any debate over whether the gods exist.
Second, there’s the islands as a whole. It’s bizarre that the only religion in this world is a single pantheon of gods. Surely there should be at least a wider variation on the same beliefs, spawning schisms. The fact that the gods objectively exist could resolve the problem, but that then begs the question of why the religion on the Continent is different on the isles. Why are the individuals gods allowed to have their followers worship them alone, shut out the rest of the pantheon (including Amari, the Queen of the Gods), and feud with the followers of the other gods? Why is Amari not enforcing worship of the whole pantheon across the islands on at least a tokenized basis (Unnbriel would have at least a few temples for the other gods, etc.)? Why is Deverelli allowed to exist at all? On the flip side of things, if what’s going on within the islands is allowed, why are the gods coexisting peacefully on the continent?
Third … Unnbriel. If Dunne has an issue with venin, why has Unnbriel sat on its ass for the last six centuries? They should be throwing people at the Continent the way Krieg throws Guardsmen into machine gun fire.
THE KRYNN COMPARISON
In my analysis of Dragons of a Fallen Sun, I criticized the religious worldbuilding for not properly exploring the relationship between the gods and humanity. While this issue wasn’t corrected in Dragons of a Lost Star, it didn’t harm the narrative to the same degree, as other elements had taken focus. All that was left was the mystery of the One God’s true identity, and we got an answer to that before the end of the book.
Dragons of a Vanished Moon (the review of which is scheduled, but hasn’t yet released) takes things a step farther. Right out the gate, we get fully caught up on the state of the religious worldbuilding for this setting:
The gods (other than Takhisis) never left Krynn. Takhisis used the Chaos War to hijack the whole planet, shifting Krynn across the Multiverse and hiding it from the other gods. The gods are currently looking for Krynn, and if they were to find it, they would intervene.
Takhisis relocating the planet also meant she closed off the path that the dead would otherwise use to move on. She tasked them with harvesting magic from the world for her, thereby ensuring her stranglehold on magic.
In the decades between the Chaos War and the War of Souls, the dragon Overlords posed a serious threat to Takhisis, due to the amount of power she sacrificed to relocate Krynn. The reason she is now revealing herself through Mina is that she now has amassed enough power (thanks to the dead serving her) to challenge the Overlords.
In the opening chapters of the novel, we also get a demonstration of how complete Takhisis’s control over magic is now that the other gods are gone. After killing Goldmoon instantly at the end of Dragons of a Lost Star (by revoking the youth she restored to Goldmoon), Takhisis then switches off Palin’s and Dalamar’s magic so that Mina can easily kill them.
Right off the bat, we have a clear understanding of how divine intervention works in this setting. The gods can intervene, and they will intervene, and the only things keeping them in check are:
Their power is not finite, and they can be killed (or at least deposed). A sufficiently excessive intervention can weaken them to the point that they can be taken out.
They need to watch their step around other powerful entities who might counter their actions or else strike them when they’re vulnerable.
We also see the ripple effect that divine intervention has on the world. Obviously, there’s Mina and her rapid conversion of the Knights of Neraka back to the cause of Takhisis, but there’s also the mystics of the Citadel of Light. The mystics of the Citadel might not have known that they were dancing on Takhisis’s strings, but they did know that something akin to divine power was at their fingertips, and they build an order around accessing it to help people. The Knights of Neraka then stole these secrets to replace their own former clerics (at least until Mina came).
Then there are the non-believers. When the leaders of the Knights of Neraka learn about Mina’s miracles, their refusal to believe in and follow her is based upon things in the world. We don’t get fed a line about them believing in “science” while not being shown anything about them that is more scientific than anyone else in the world. Instead, they assume that she’s just using an existing source of magic and faking the part about the One God specifically. The rejection of Takhisis makes complete sense with the information these people had available to them.
Dragons of a Vanished Moon also demonstrates the damage that divine intervention can do to stakes and tension. By establishing early on that the other gods were searching for Krynn and that they were the only hope of stopping Takhisis, every other conflict in the book is made irrelevant. Nothing the characters do would actually influence the narrative. The book becomes a long waiting game until the gods show up to save the day.
THE FIX
Most of the fixes to the tangle Yarros has made here would require to have actually had the series “fully plotted out and arced and all of that” in advance, with divine intervention built up from as early as Fourth Wing. That said, I think there is a very easy way to explain why the gods are suddenly involved in events when they weren’t before:
Have the destruction of the Basgiath wardstone in Iron Flame be a catalyst that spurs the gods to more directly involve themselves in mortal affairs.
Throughout Onyx Storm, we could be hearing rumors of signs and miracles in the temples (not unlike the strange occurrences that followed the birth of Dany’s dragons in A Song of Ice and Fire). Individuals dedicated to the temples could unlock the power to channel without a dragon or gryphon and - more importantly - without becoming a venin. This would, naturally, affect Violet. Knowledge of this newfound power could be what drives the desire for an alliance with the southern islands. In this rewrite, the southern islands would not only be dedicated to specific gods but also have greater religious fervor, so the hope would be to recruit vast armies of magic users to overwhelm the venin through sheer numbers. This would also feed into why the venin are way more powerful now than in the previous books: because the gods are interfering in the world, they are creating a cosmic imbalance, and the venin are rapidly growing stronger as the equation of the universe tries to correct itself. This would explain why they are now able to operate inside the wards and facilitate the introduction of venin Signets.
While this solution would put a lot more magic into play (as well as potentially making Violet even more absurdly powerful), it would make the involvement of the gods into a change in status quo that drives the narrative forward, rather than a source of contradictions. Before the Basgiath wardstone was destroyed, the gods believed mortals could handle this for themselves and didn’t want to amplify the venin threat; once the wardstone fell, they understood that helping was a gamble they’d simply have to take. It would set a clear understanding of why the gods didn’t get involved before and why they don’t do more now.
There are other solutions, of course. This is merely the one that I feel would require the least rewrites to bring to fruition. The core framework of the narrative could be left as-is; if anything, the new opportunities opened by exploring why the gods are getting involved could be used to replace the side quests and school drama.
FINAL THOUGHTS ON THE RELIGIOUS WORLDBUILDING
I really do wish Yarros actually cared about her worldbuilding. It’s not like the ideas she’s toying with are inherently bad. She’s just not putting in the thought needed to make them work.