Runebreaker (Part 10 - Plot: Oppression & Oaths)
Hello, all. Welcome back to the review of Runebreaker, an indie Romantasy by Mila Finch.
At long last, we reach the portion of the review where I discuss the plot. While the contradictory worldbuilding and poor characterization were enough to break this book on their own, it is the execution of the plot that convinced me it is the worst book to be reviewed on this site so far. This is where the whiplash from Finch requiring us to turn our brains off properly hits.
In this part, we’ll be discussing the plot issues that arise prior to the climax of the book. Next Sunday, we’ll cover the climax itself and go into how the ending of the book completely collapses the story.
Though you don’t need to read all of the previous parts of this review to understand this plot analysis, I am going to be referring to points I made when discussing:
The romance (Part 2)
The worldbuilding (Parts 4 and 5)
Aelie’s characterization (Parts 6 and 7)
It may be helpful to at least glance over those parts if you haven’t read them already. If you’re all caught up (or simply don’t care about that), let’s break some bonds.
STATS
Title: Runebreaker
Series: [Untitled Trilogy] (Book 1)
Author(s): Mila Finch
Genre: Fantasy (Romantasy)
First Printing: January 2026
Publisher: Self-published to Amazon
Rating: 0.5/10
SPOILER WARNING
Throughout this review, there will be mild, unmarked spoilers for Runebreaker. I will do my best to keep the first paragraph of each section as spoiler-free as possible. Heavy spoilers will be confined to clearly marked sections.
PLOT
The Oppression Narrative
The first conflict presented to us within the story is the systemic oppression of humans by the fae of Skaldir. The opening scene is Aelie and Rheya breaking into a fae noble’s estate to rob the place as a means of supplementary income so that they can escape Skalgard (and, as is poorly relayed later, to help fund the foundling’s hall). So much emphasis is put upon the oppression as the primary obstacle for Aelie to overcome in this story.
Except once Kairos abducts Aelie, all this is basically forgotten.
We’ve already been over how contradictory this all is in terms of the setting and Aelie’s character, but it could have still worked from a plot perspective. After all, the power fantasy promised by the premise is that Aelie will be spirited away to a magical kingdom. The introduction of Aelie as this oppressive place could therefore be seen as a dark backstory that Aelie is leaving behind for something better.
It could have worked … if Finch didn’t pivot late in the story and make the oppression a driving factor in the story.
Even ignoring how the oppression narrative plays into the climax (and believe me, we will get to that), it is Vaeris’s motivation. He wants to help the humans and half-fae if Skaldir, and he is willing to use villainous means to achieve his goals. Furthermore, even though Aelie’s original identity was built on opposition to that suffering, she states that Vaeris is unambiguously wrong - not because of any reason linked to her character, but because plot variables put Vaeris in the wrong (until Aelie needs to be in the right, anyway).
As a result, the oppression narrative reads like a half-baked, poorly paced subplot that Finch went all-out to set up before neglecting it for the bulk of the book. It’s lopsided.
You know what would have fixed this? If Aelie genuinely cared about human suffering when it was outside of her immediate view. If the narrative actually explored what life is like for humans outside of Skaldir. That would have kept this narrative in focus throughout the book, making its resurgence late in the story feel natural.
Captivity
I’ve already explored this portion of the narrative when exploring the romance aspects of the story and discussing Aelie’s character, so here, I just want to cover an angle I skimmed over before.
From the point when Kairos abducts Aelie until the midpoint of the story, Aelie makes a halfhearted effort to escape. I say “halfhearted” because it goes nowhere and comes across as lip service to pretend she’s fighting back against her captor. There’s this whole subplot about her stealing supplies, memorized guard rotations, researching maps needed to get her back to Skaldir, and studying runes that she might need to break on the way. Attention is called to the fact that Kairos knows she is doing this, and yet Aelie still seems to think she is outsmarting them. The motivation behind this is her desire to be reunited with Rheya.
And then the escape attempts just end. Aelie makes one bid to get clear of the castle while drunk, Kairos catches her, they nearly have sex, and then they go back. That’s it.
Why, though?
It’s not like Aelie trusts Kairos now. All the hand-wringing drama about how she can’t trust another man after Vaeris continues long after this point. And given that she was dumb enough to think she could sneak past Kairos after already knowing he’s on to her (not to mentioned dumb enough to think she can just walk back to Skaldir while knowing about all the monsters that could kill her along the way), it’s not like she has the common sense to process that Kairos could just catch her again if she made another attempt.
The narrative tries to frame this as Aelie changing tactics and manipulating Kairos to take her where she wants to be. This almost works. It’s an evolution of the conflict. The problem is that Aelie does this exactly once, to get to a specific plot milestone (more on that next week), and then never tries it again. After this one attempt, she gives up on escaping entirely, despite the fact that her motivation to rescue Rheya has not diminished.
At the end of the day, Aelie’s efforts to escape Kairos are nothing more than Finch pretending something is happening while she stacks sexual moments with Kairos on top of one another. They are a pretense of effort, to pretend that Aelie is trying her best but is powerless to escape this powerful Bad Boy. And because Aelie is supposedly doing her best and supposedly cannot escape, we are meant to shrug and pretend she has no accountability for her failure to help Rheya while she lives in luxury.
Speaking of no accountability …
The Oath
We have already covered how nonsensical it is for Aelie to play the victim of an oath she used blackmail to force into existence. We have also covered how the narrative refuses to acknowledge that this oath gusrantees that Vaeris will do everything in his power to help Rheya. There is, however, an additional angle to consider: the impact of the rules on the stakes and tension.
Here is the exact wording of what Aelie agrees to.
“If you survive tomorrow’s execution … you’ll come to me. You’ll break a rune of my choosing, and you’ll tell no one about this arrangement.”
We later learn that faerie oaths don’t have a hard time limit, but they can compel the sworn individual to fulfill them.
While in captivity, Aelie’s oath starts to kill her. This would seem to go against the whole “no time limit” thing. Aelie isn’t acting against the oath at any point - if anything, because Finch wants us to believe that Aelie is already doing her best to get away from Kairos, she should already be satisfying the oath (at least until such time that she gave up on escaping). It’s obvious that the oath is only killing her to force some narrative drama.
Still, as a means to establish how these oaths are interpreted, I don’t think this is necessarily issue. Finch also made sure to include that line about not telling anyone about the deal, which keeps Aelie from simply getting Kairos to help her. (I mean, this is absolutely another way she could have leveraged Rheya, convincing Kairos to trade her for her sister, but other than that, her options for getting Kairos to help are pretty limited.)
If this was how the oath continued to function, I would have no complaints. The problem is that, in the back half of the story, Finch changes the rules.
First, she changes the conditions of the “you’ll come to me” line twice.
She implies that Vaeris commanded Aelie to come to him, and even though she couldn’t hear the command, the oath kicked in and compelled her.
She has Vaeris order Aelie to come to him during a magic Skype call, explicitly activating the oath.
These two possibilities directly contradict each other.
If the oath is activated by Aelie hearing the command, then it shouldn’t have activated in the first part of the story from either an automatic mechanism or Vaeris giving an order she couldn’t hear.
If Aelie can be commanded by a order she can’t hear, why would Vaeris activate the oath before he knows if Aelie can comply (thereby risking her death if Kairos doesn’t agree to let her out of Sanguir)? Why wouldn’t he have activated it between the midpoint (when he realizes Aelie and Kairos are becoming a couple) and the Skype call?
These are small potatoes compared to the real issue, though: activated the clause about breaking a rune. The rune breaking is a separate term of the agreement from her coming before him. She should not need to come to him before he tells her what time to break. This means that, no matter whether she has to hear a command or not, Vaeris should have been able to compel Aelie to breaknthe rune of his choice. Despite this, the climax is going to focus on getting Aelie close enough to Vaeris to satisfy that first condition without Barris having a chance to activate the second. By the rules Finch has given us, Aelie should have already been compelled to break Vaeris’s chosen then before the climax could even begin.
It probably won’t come as a surprise when I tell you that the hand of the author is visible here. The rules of the oath change from scene to scene to become whatever Finch needs to maximize drama and make Aelie the victim.
I’m not done talking about this oath. We’ll be touching on it again when talking about the climax. Vaeris may have had his arm twisted into this oath, but he improvised by folding it into his master plan … which means he overlooked a very crucial detail that he should have known about.
The War
By using Aelie to break free, Kairos plunged the realms back into a war.
This is mostly background noise. It exists to show how Kairos is a Bad Boy who gives zero shits about his own people, reigniting an armed conflict that his “sacrifice” was supposed to protect them from and then spitting in the face of other fae royals when attempts to make peace are attempted. At most, the war is a pretense for all of the royals to get together for a peace conference at the midpoint of the story. Aelie leverages this conference to get Kairos to bring her close enough to Vaeris to satisfy the oath.
I’m guessing the war will be more relevant in the sequels, though given the note this book ends on, spats between fae kingdoms seem rather trivial.
A DRAGON-SIZED MESS
On Sunday, May 31st, we’ll be wrapping up the analysis of the plot by looking specifically at the climax of the book.
This is the point where I need to emphasize that I tried to give this book every opportunity to be judged on its own terms. I was prepared to rank it no lower than a 3 / 10. Prior to the climax, this story was bad, but it wasn’t cannibalistic.
With the climax, though, the story completely shears apart. Finch leans hard into needing us to not remember what she wrote in previous chapters. The axis of morality whips around so fast that it snaps like a demolished smokestack, and the narrative ends on the note of, “Because the Author Said So.”
Thank you all for joining me today. Please remember to subscribe and share if you enjoyed what you read here. Take care, everyone, and have a good week.
