Onyx Storm (Spotlight on Theme 2)
Hello, all. Welcome to this Tuesday review.
Originally, this spotlight analysis was going to be part of the review of Chapters 45 through 47. However, given how many of you read this site on your phones, I’m trying to break my analyses down into my manageable chunks for everyone who reads on those devices. I’ve therefore excised this analysis from that review to exist as its own entity.
Thank you for bearing with me on this slight format adjustment. I do hope it provides everyone with a more pleasant reading experience.
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 47 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.
DISCLAIMER
Much like with the theme of cultural and linguistic preservation in Chapter 21 of Iron Flame, I will be harshly dissecting the content that follows. This will include calling out parallels to real-world issues that Yarros is likely commenting upon, given where she lives and her abundant virtue signaling about identity politics.
As in Iron Flame, my purpose is not to actually comment as to whether Yarros’s message is correct. My goal is to assess why this commentary utterly fails at being anything deeper than a virtue signal. Any associations made to the real world exist purely to call out holes in Yarros’s logic that she should have had to necessary context to recognize and could have made some effort to address within the rhetorical argument that is her fictional narrative.
With all that said, let’s please go through this next part with an open mind and focus on the utter failure in storytelling in front of us.
THE HALLWAY ENCOUNTER
The commentary in question takes place in Chapter 46., and it is part of the scene in which Xaden openly defies the will of the King of Navarre and threatens to kill Halden. The commentary itself begins right after the Duke of Calldyr is hurled through a door and into the hallway in front of Violet and her accessories. The implication is that Lewellen physically assaulted Calldyr by shoving him or throwing him through said doorway (which Calldyr is gracious enough to overlook).
After filtering out the telepathic conversation between Violet and Xaden, Xaden issuing threats and generally being an egotistical asshole who would have his power stripped form him in any story with logic and consequences, and Ridoc disrupting the tone with quipping, we are left with the following core that actually handles the theme.
Every infantry guard steps off the wall, but Calldyr waves them away and climbs tohis feet, raking a hand over his face and blond beard. “The desire of one province may never outweigh the good of the kingdom!”
Ah, Lewellen must be serving as proxy for Xaden’s Senarium seat…but they usually meet in Calldyr. Are they here for a war council?
“I don’t want to serve a kingdom that leaves civilians to die!” Lewellen snarls.
“You let them in, and there will be no kingdom to serve.” Calldyr lifts his nose. “We have already weakened the outposts by stripping them of all but the necessary alloy, and look what that got us in Suniva. We have sent riders. Lost riders. What more would you have us do? Starve when we cannot feed double our current population?”
“You are a pretentious, spoiled child who has never known suffering a day in your—”
“Enough.” Xaden walks through the door, and my heart stops. His gaze jumps to mine like a compass pulled north.
…
“The discussion is over,” Xaden says, ripping his eyes from mine before passing by Lewellen on his way toward Calldyr. “You were informed as a courtesy. Tell the Senarium, don’t tell them. I don’t particularly care.”
…
“Draithus has weeks before they attack, and Tyrrendor will open her borders. We will take any and all Poromish civilians willing to climb the Medaro Pass. Would you truly condemn thirty thousand people to die?”
…
“You’re choosing their people over ours?” Halden’s fists curl.
“They are not endangering our people,” Lewellen argues. “This is not a them or us situation. They are not risking our wards, nor are they raiding—”
“You don’t have to defend my decision,” Xaden interrupts, turning his full focus to Halden. “We’re opening our borders.”
To properly discuss this, let’s take a pin out of that passage from Chapter 44.
Rhi’s mouth tightens. “Unknown, and the borders are a mess. People are fleeing in every direction. Draithus is facing major supply shortages. Too many people too fast.”
STEP-BY-STEP BREAKDOWN
All right, let’s go through this farce.
Establishing Positions
Every infantry guard steps off the wall, but Calldyr waves them away and climbs tohis feet, raking a hand over his face and blond beard. “The desire of one province may never outweigh the good of the kingdom!”
Ah, Lewellen must be serving as proxy for Xaden’s Senarium seat…but they usually meet in Calldyr. Are they here for a war council?
“I don’t want to serve a kingdom that leaves civilians to die!” Lewellen snarls.
“You let them in, and there will be no kingdom to serve.” Calldyr lifts his nose. “
Here, Yarros has laid out her theme and anti-theme.
Theme: Let the immigrants and refugees in on the basis of dignity of human life, without exceptions.
Anti-Theme: Prioritize the human life that one is able to save and to whom one has a prior commitment, in this case represented by the taxpayers of Navarre, and accept inevitable losses for those outside of this umbrella.
I have no comments here. This is functional as setup to a thematic argument.
The Opening Salvo of the Anti-Theme
“We have already weakened the outposts by stripping them of all but the necessary alloy, and look what that got us in Suniva. We have sent riders. Lost riders. What more would you have us do? Starve when we cannot feed double our current population?”
Good on Calldyr. He’s going in with guns blazing.
This is a variation of Melgren’s lifeboat analogy, albeit this time with specifics. Navarre does not have the resources to double its population. Refugees will require shelter, medicine, and - as explicitly stated here - food. Taking in all these people risks the total collapse of the system and the death of everyone.
This is not a magic bullet argument. Still, it needs to be addressed. Yarros knows it needs to be addressed, because per that quote from Chapter 44, resource shortages are being used as a reason to send refugees to Navarre. That argument cuts both ways. If human suffering due to a lack of resources sustains one side’s position, it should be equally sustaining for the other position, especially when even more people’s lives will be on the line.
And, conveniently enough, there is an easy response to this, one that is used in the real world: legal immigration and a managed inflow of refugees. Take in the people who can be supported, especially those who offer something to strengthen Navarre. Surely, Navarre has the resources to save some of the refugees. Besides, given that Navarre should be throwing every body that it can at the front lines, there must be a shortage of laborers and skilled tradesmen to sustain the economy and, through it, the war machine. Can’t Navarre at least make exceptions for the manpower needed to sustain their war effort, plus the families of said manpower?
Which is why Lewellen proposes this. No, Xaden. Wait, Violet! She is Yarros's self-insert Mary Sue, the “rational woman” chosen by her dragon for her “intelligence”. As covered above, this same chunk of chapters sees her show off her Sue-ness to support others in a crisis. What better time to indulge in power fantasy than to have her step in now and resolve everything?
…
Right. Yarros can’t write characters more intelligent than herself. She has to shift directly to ad hominem.
The Theme Misfires
“You are a pretentious, spoiled child who has never known suffering a day in your—”
“Enough.” Xaden walks through the door, and my heart stops. His gaze jumps to mine like a compass pulled north.
…
“The discussion is over,” Xaden says, ripping his eyes from mine before passing by Lewellen on his way toward Calldyr. “You were informed as a courtesy. Tell the Senarium, don’t tell them. I don’t particularly care.”
To be clear, Xaden is not interrupting here because he thinks Lewellen in out of line. He’s asserting his authority. Lewellen isn’t being rebuked, nor is Xaden taking over as the person to provide counter-arguments. He is simply flexing his POWER while ignoring Calldyr’s very valid argument.
And you know what? Xaden is right. This discussion is over. Not because Yarros resorted to ad hominem. Not because she’s dancing around an argument that she cannot conceive a rebuttal to. No, it’s over because of a glaring hole in her logic.
Guess what kingdom also features - and, indeed, currently has - pretentious, ridiculously wealthy nobility that have likely never known suffering a day in their lives?
Poromiel.
Remember how Iron Flame (and, for that matter, Chapter 21 of this very book) made a big deal out of how luxurious Teclis’s home is? How soft Poromiel is compared to Navarre? Also, something I skimmed over previously is that, with the Queen of Poromiel dead, Teclis is now the king. He lives in luxury as he rules over the very same kingdom that the refugees are coming from.
By Yarros’s own logic, the refugees from Poromiel are in no danger. They don’t need to worry about starvation (or housing shortages, disease, etc.) Their ruler is wealthy and comfortable, and so, their concerns mean nothing.
Obviously, this logic is absurd. Wealthy elites do not equate to a country having the resources to survive doubling its population in a very short period. However, Yarros chose this as her counterargument. She chose to shoot herself in the foot rather than mustering the very obvious “intelligent response” to counter Calldyr’s point.
Performative Virtue
“Draithus has weeks before they attack, and Tyrrendor will open her borders. We will take any and all Poromish civilians willing to climb the Medaro Pass. Would you truly condemn thirty thousand people to die?”
I really love this declaration by Xaden. Not only does he continue to leave Calldyr’s argument unanswered, but he actively demonstrates how hollow and performative his virtue is.
The Medaro Pass is the path up the Cliffs of Dralor that the riders and fliers climbed in Chapters 43 and 44 of Iron Flame. You know that path - the narrow, switchback, booby-trapped one that ascends 12,000 feet of vertical distance. That’s 2.27 miles (or 3.66 kilometers) purely in the vertical. These people need to to the equivalent of climbing from the base of Mount Fuji to its summit, only here, the path is orders of magnitude more dangerous and doesn’t have either rest stops or emergency services. These refugees must climb while potentially dealing with a combination of disease, injury, starvation, heightened emotions, and whilst helping along people who are in no physical shape to make this climb.
And Yarros knows this. In the climax of the book, she’ll acknowledge how absurdly dangerous this climb is. In Chapter 57, Violet refers to the climb as “hellacious”, and then Chapter 58 emphasizes how bad the conditions are to drive up the stakes of refugees fleeing an impending battle.
“We’ll make it,” Tairn promises as we descend the cliffs in a steep dive between the falls and the crowded Medaro Pass. It had been a treacherous, deadly climb in autumn, and we were cadets. I can’t begin to imagine how civilians—how children—are making the ascent.
In other words, Xaden is saying, “Oh, we’ll help them … if they survive this ridiculous death gauntlet to get to us.”
And for the record, at no later point will it be established the the dragons or gryphons are air-lifting people. They really do need to climb this path themselves. Xaden is promising salvation with every intention of condemning the sick, the injured, the elderly, and the very young (likely a large percentage of his “thirty thousand people” estimate) to die.
Cutting and Running
“You’re choosing their people over ours?” Halden’s fists curl.
“They are not endangering our people,” Lewellen argues. “This is not a them or us situation. They are not risking our wards, nor are they raiding—”
“You don’t have to defend my decision,” Xaden interrupts, turning his full focus to Halden. “We’re opening our borders.”
No, Xaden. He absolutely has to defend this decision. You need to defend this.
Halden is calling out your refusal to acknowledge the resource issue. You are risking the lives of all the people who will suddenly need to split their resources to support the refugees. If you do not answer this, then Calldyr’s position standards. However many people you think you are saving, you are actually risking the deaths of “double” that number.
Lewellen is also strawmanning the anti-theme here. Calldyr is not accusing the refugees of attacking the wards or raiding for anything. He is asking Xaden and Lewellen to acknowledge that resources are finite. No matter how strong the wards are, you can all still starve to death inside them.
And, of course, this is the point where Yarros completely gives up on discussion and reverts completely to POWER to assert her potion. Xaden flaunts the political position granted him by the Second Aretia Accords and threatens to murder Halden for considering the use of his own legal authority and military might to counter this.
Yarros ultimately has no counter to Calldyr’s point, only threats to anyone who doesn’t bend knee.
Why did she bring it up in the first place?
What was the point of any of this?
REAL-WORLD PARALLEL
It’s possible that Yarros doesn’t actually intend to comment on immigration in the United States with this theme. I think the pattern of beliefs that she virtue signals about make for a strong case that this is commentary, but nothing is guaranteed at this point. Still, she is a resident of the United States. I also know that she either watches mainstream news channels or gets a lot of news through social media, given how avoiding “misinformation” has suddenly become a thing in Onyx Storm despite not being an issue in the previous books.
All this is to say that there is a recent and very relevant example in Yarros’s backyard that she really should have taken into account before writing this scene.
(I am aware that recent developments in US immigration enforcement over the past couple of months somewhat negatives said parallel. I drafted this post before those policy changes really kicked off. However, I feel this parallel is still worth discussing, as it would have been valid at the time that Yarros wrote Onyx Storm. She could have accounted for it. Therefore, I’ve decided not to rework this whole section over the recent changes.)
Sanctuary Cities
For those of you who don’t know, there are major metropolitan areas in the United States that have designated themselves as “sanctuary cities”. I’m hazy on the legal specifics of this, but the gist of it is that, if you are in the United States illegally (that is to say, without a visa or another form of legal permission to remain in the country as a non-citizen), you can safely live within these jurisdictions without fear of deportation.
Two examples that are very relevant to this discussion are New York and Chicago. These are cities that have, through the politicians elected to represent their residents in the Senate and House of Representatives, repeatedly fought to encourage immigration into the United States, expand the rights of illegal immigrants, and prevent the deportation of illegal immigrants. In the case of New York and Chicago, they are also more than a thousand miles from the southern border of the United States, meaning that the tidal waves of illegal immigrants across said border are highly unlikely to affect them. This leaves states along the border, like Florida and Texas, to bear the burden of New York’s and Chicago’s position, despite these states openly opposing illegal immigration.
A few years ago, the governors of Florida and Texas decided to protest this situation by giving sanctuary cities (and a few other jurisdictions, but the sanctuary cities in particular) a chance to put their money where their mouths were. Buses and planes were chartered to send thousands of immigrants (out of the hundreds of thousands these border states have to deal with) to the sanctuary cities.
New York and Chicago celebrated the arrival of immigrants to their promised haven by:
Insisting that they didn’t have the resources to take on these immigrants.
Filing lawsuits to against Florida and Texas, including invoking legislation that outlawed moving illegal immigrants over state lines, thereby raising the questions of how they expected any illegal immigrants to get to their safe haven in the first place.
Quietly bussing illegal immigrants to suburban areas, including at least one suburb of Chicago that was political aligned with Texas and Florida.
Now, I cannot emphasize strongly enough that I’m not explaining this to provide commentary of my own. I’m highlighting this because Yarros should be well aware of this, and thus should have thought twice before setting up Tyrrendor to become a parody of a sanctuary city.
Neither Xaden nor Lewellen (the two political figures representing Tyrrendor) have any answers to the resource issue. The dangers of the Medaro Pass are far worse than hiding behind laws that simply make it illegal for the immigrants to travel to the sanctuary. There’s also the slight matter that, where the worse-case scenario of an illegal immigrant in the United States is that he or she is some sort of criminal, the refugees from Tyrrendor could be concealing venin. Remember how just twelve of them razed an entire city?
Which brings us to speculation about where Yarros might try to take this theme from here, giving that last thing the sanctuary cities have done.
It’s Navarre’s Problem Now
It would not shock me if, in future books, the focus shifts to Tyrrendor forcing Navarre to take in refugees, despite them already being welcome in Tyrrendor.
After all, if logical cause and effect are followed, Tyrrendor cannot handle all these refugees. We don’t know how much of Navarre’s population lives in Tyrrendor, but as mountainous as it is, I doubt the “largest province of Navarre” is growing enough food to export. They might well be importing food. A mass of refugees that doubles Navarre’s population will likely outnumber Tyrrendor’s population by a factor of two or more. There is no way Tyrrendor can feed all these people. What may well happen in Book 4 or 5 is that Tyrrendor turns around and declares war on Navarre to force Navarre to take on the burden of refugees that they didn’t want and aren’t equipped to handle. Naturally, this will be framed as either a virtuous act or a justified punishment.
Do I really think Yarros will do this? Admittedly, this seems unlikely, though not because I don’t think Yarros is the type of person who would dump the consequences of her virtue signal onto other people. Rather, I don’t think she’s willing to think through this issue deep enough to get that far.
THE TAKEAWAY
Now that we’ve dissected Yarros’s commentary and explored the current-day parallel in more detail than she likely did, what is the takeaway?
I think the obvious one is that, if you’ve going to write commentary by having characters argue an issue, you need to actually counter the arguments that support the anti-theme. Don’t just have have the opposition make an argument and then act as if it doesn’t matter. At a bare minimum (not even the ideal scenario, just the minimum effort needed for your argument to hold together), if you feel an argument by the opposition doesn’t matter, you need to take time to explain why it doesn’t matter.
For example, if Xaden wanted to do what Vis did to oppose the Anguis in The Will of the Many, arguing purely on the basis of ideals, that could have worked. He could have stated that it is better to gamble on uncertain survival for many people than guaranteeing the death of even a few. It would have built a foundation to elevate the theme above an obstacle that isn’t being addressed.
However, an even easier option is to not have the opposition make an argument if you aren’t prepared to address it. All thematic arguments in fiction are rhetorical ones controlled by the author. Better to have commentary seem shallow because you “forgot” an obstacle that hollow because you can’t overcome said obstacle.
As for the real-world parallels, I’m by no means saying that commentary has to model itself around contemporary issues. Timeless messages endure for good reason, and tying a story too much to recent events can make it harder for readers in the future to understand and connect with it. What I am saying, though, if that if you’re going to comment on contemporary issues, at least do you research. This will allow you to an embarrassing situation where real-world events undermine the intended interpretation of your work. It could even provide guidance, providing examples of consequences that were unforeseen in the real world, but that you can now avoid while crafting the rhetorical scenario in your narrative.
THINGS WERE GOING SO WELL
What particularly frustrates me about this theme is the fact that things were going so well right up until the point Yarros actually tried to argue the point.
As covered back in the Iron Flame review, the venin crisis is an existential threat that doesn’t have a good parallel to our real world. Translating it into the far more understandable issue of a refugee crisis was a good move on Yarros’s part. Yes, she was handling this issue in the form of a very simplistic binary, but that didn’t have to sabotage the story. As long as she left this as a means to understand the venin threat, a simplistic binary here was no better or worse than any other moral binary in stortelling.
Where Yarros went wrong here was that she tried to take things deeper. Even if this wasn’t intended as commentary on refugees and illegal immigration in the United States, even if it was just meant to be an exploration of general principles, Yarros failed to argue her position. She acknowledged the arguments against her, yet chose to brush them off rather than address them. She couldn’t even be bothered to argue a higher principle that overrides those arguments. She just resorted to self-defeating logic and ad hominem.
Themes in literature are not an inherently bad thing. Neither is commentary on contemporary, real-world issues. I don’t even think that themes or commentary that argue or assert a “correct” position are necessarily bad, so long as you accept the impact that sort of thing will have on the subjective experience of readers who disagree with your message or just want to be entertained.
However, if one is going to incorporate these things into a story, they can’t just be played with. The author has a responsibility, both to the audience and to the point(s) being argued, to craft a rhetorical argument that holds together under scrutiny.
Otherwise, it all just amounts to another virtue signal.