The Battle of Sapphire Bay (The Tidestone Chronicles, Book 2) (Part 0 - Overview)

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to our ongoing voyage through The Tidestone Chronicles.

This is a book I have really been looking forward to, and I was not disappointed by what we got. The Battle of Sapphire Bay continues the powerful character work of Beyond the Crimson Mists. This book also dives deeper into the nature of this swashbuckling world. What is revealed is not groundbreaking in terms of the broader Fantasy landscape, yet it does meld with and enrich the lore that was introduced in the previous book and - more importantly - serves as a foundation for the character work. This book is a reminder of what Fantasy can be when an author is truly invested in it.

As with The Strength of the Few, we’re going to be doing this analysis a bit differently. Today, I’m going to give you the high-level overview of this delightful book. There will be a deep dive analysis to follow. However, due to my rather packed review schedule, I am going to delay that full analysis until August, where it will be spread across consecutive Fridays like so:

• Part 1 (August 14th)

  • Spotlight on Flashbacks

• Part 2 (August 21st)

  • Plot

• Part 2 (August 28tn)

  • Worldbuilding

  • Character

Power up the tidestone core. It’s time to take flight.

STATS

Title: The Battle of Sapphire Bay

Series: The Tidestone Chronicles (Book 2)

Author(s): Nicholas Wolf

Genre: Epic Fantasy

First Printing: April 28th, 2026

Publisher: Self-published to Amazon

SPOILER WARNING

Mild, unmarked spoilers for The Battle of Sapphire Bay will be provided throughout this review. Heavy spoilers will be confined to clearly labeled sections. I will keep the first paragraph of any given section spoiler-free.

Heavy, unmarked spoilers of the previous book, Beyond the Crimson Mists, will be included throughout this review. I will also assume that you have read my review of that book, but doing so is not necessary to appreciate this review.

TERMINOLOGY

As in the last book, I’m not going to use Wolf’s names for certain fantasy races in this setting. I’ll instead be referring to these races by the archetypal fantasy races that they are appear to be derived from:

• Atantyans = elves

• roqlyudi =dwarves

• nurians = humans

I will refer to the waraabei by their proper name. While they may be derivatives of gnolls, gnolls are a creation of D&D, so changing the name was likely necessary to avoid legal issues.

PREMISE

Per the Amazon Kindle listing, we get:

The last thing Hawk remembers is tackling the dreaded pirate Rak-Tak off the deck of the Suncatcher, watching Nyomi pilot the airship to safety, and plummeting into the roiling waters of the Crimson Mists.

He awakens not in the Depths, but in the glowing heart of an ancient Atlantyan tower known as the Sanctuary, tended by the enigmatic Atlantyan Malychai and his inscrutable automaton companion, Davyd. Relief turns to devastation when Hawk learns the terrible cost of his salvation: Nyomi's life. Channeling the power of the Five Moons, she summoned a colossal wave that carried him to shore, but the effort has left her trapped in a state between life and death, perhaps forever.

Her heroic act came at an even steeper price: it extinguished a narrow corridor through the Crimson Mists, exposing the hidden Sanctuary to the outside world for the first time since the Maelstrom. As war looms over Sapphire Bay, darker forces awaken within the tower: Urthanq, the bloodthirsty war golem Hawk once trusted with his life, now shows chilling signs of independent sentience… or perhaps its clockwork mind has been claimed by another.

Hawk vows to guard Nyomi’s still form for as long as it takes, even if she never awakens. Yet as battle engulfs Sapphire Bay, the deadliest threat may lurk not among invading fleets or treacherous alliances, but in the one person Sister Margaret entrusted to protect Nyomi. Diving into Malychai’s preserved memories of Atlantyoc before the Maelstrom, Hawk uncovers a terrifying possibility: in his desperation to save Nyomi, he may have delivered her straight into the grasp of the ancient enemy that has hunted her across a thousand New Moons.

Reaction

For the most part, this is spot-on.

This story is very geographically limited. Whereas Beyond the Crimson Mists followed Hawk and Nyomi as they remained in constant motion, this book is confined to one location. I think this is great for the character study of Hawk. He physically cannot escape from his problems, thereby forcing him to confront them head-on.

This premise drastically oversells Urthanq’s contribution to the narrative and the wider implications of that contribution. They are there, and what’s presented here is either Shown or implied, but Urthanq is such a small presence within the narrative that he’s barely worth mentioning in the premise. I'll explain this in more detail when the time comes for the plot analysis.

RATING: 8.5 / 10

In most respects, The Battle of Sapphire Bay improves upon the already fantastic foundations laid by Beyond the Crimson Mists. The bottle episode-like nature of this story, trapping Hawk in a single location rather than allowing him to flee from danger, forces the story to slow down to really focus on the character work that is the series’ strongest asset.

In terms of story, this book plays out as a massive lore update for the audience. Up until the last third, the plot is almost entirely a vehicle for flashbacks. Some of this is additional lore for Hawk (namely, how he acquired his airship); the rest is the history for the elves’ civilization, from their rise until their fall. This was, to put it mildly, a massive risk on Wolf’s part … and yet it paid off. He demystifies just enough of Hawk’s backstory to color his motivations in the present. As for the flashbacks, he makes them an objective that Hawk had to pursue in his efforts to help Nyomi. Thus, while the pace is far slower than the previous book, the final result is just as satisfying, if not more so. I was genuinely shocked when I would check my progress and discovered just how fast I was tearing through this text. It was just that engaging.

Much like with The Will of the Many, I found myself comparing this book to The Empyrean. A loved one trapped in a state of unlife? An existential threat lurking beyond the walls, whole the protagonist is powerless to act against it? Skulking around in search of the knowledge to save aforementioned loved one? And all of it ending in a big battle that breaks the stalemate and kicks the story in a new direction? This is what the first 19 chapters of Onyx Storm pretended to be. The Battle of Sapphire Bay demonstrates that the concept wasn’t broken, simply mishandled.

I only really have two criticisms for this book. They are relatively small problems in the grand scheme of things, yet still enough to keep me from saying that this story is perfect.

• The action still feels perfunctory. While Wolf mostly corrects that issues of the previous book, the climax has a certainly weightless quality. The end result is that, as the climax passed its halfway mark, I started to wonder if I'd really miss anything if I just skipped to the very end.

• The ending is WAY too abrupt. As in, Pariah abrupt. I know the last book ended very suddenly, too, but at least there we got a note of resolution and finality. In this case, it feels like the actual last page of the book got ripped out. This is really more an issue with presentation than with the ending itself. What’s on the page is still a powerful cliffhanger. I just had a moment when I turned the page and thought, “Wait, really? That’s the end of the book?”

Overall, this is a solid Fantasy with a flawed yet endearing protagonist and solid worldbuilding. If you’re open to a story with a slow pace than the original, I highly recommend it.

CONTENT WARNING

Violence & Gore

This hovers at the same level at the previous book. There’s lots of blood, people getting shot and stabbed, and even references to flogging and hanging. We even get Shown the aftermath of a human (elf) sacrifice. Still nowhere near what you’d find in a Dark Fantasy, Grimdark, or wannabee-Grimdark story, but it is definitely more than the bloodless violence of, say, The Ruins of Gorlan.

PTSD & Alcoholism

Hawk is still an alcoholic war veteran with a dead sister, drinking to forget the horrors of what he’s seen. There’s no hint of it being played for laughs in this one. Hawk is still aware that he has problems and makes no effort to actually overcome them.

At the same time, this never feels excessive. This story Shows us that Hawk lacks impulse control in general and often does things he knows are bad ideas. So while Wolf leans more into these issues, doing so feels like a natural extension of the exploration of character.

PROSE

This is the first entry of the series to be self-published. I previously remarked how I wasn't sure how this would affect the quality of the work (since, without a published, Wolf would theoretically be down one editor). However, the final product still came out polished. A quick glance at the Acknowledgments of the book shows that Staci Olsen, who works for Immortal Works (the publisher for Beyond the Crimson Mists) was credited as an editor, so it looks like Wolf is still investing in the same professional support even though he’s handling the publication himself.

Now, like many professionally edited works, a few things still slipped through. The most memorable example is a sentence in the third act that is italicized for no apparent reason. Still, overall, this does feel like a finished product.

A stylistic choice that is was deliberate - or so I assume, because it was incredibly consistent - was that Hawk’s inner monologue is not formatted differently from the general narration. Usually this sort of thing would be italicized, but here, it is only discernable from the surrounding text by the temporary switch from past tense to present tense. In fact, a quick glance back at Beyond the Crimson Mists shows that the inner monologue was italicized in the last book. I don’t think this would be an issue if the whole story were told in present tense. That way, Hawk’s inner monologue would read like intrusive thoughts disrupting his steam of consciousness. With the bulk of narrative told in past tense, the inner monologue ended up tripping me up multiple times.

THE CURSE OF MEMORY

If you haven’t already, I really do encourage you to read both Beyond the Crimson Mists and The Battle of Sapphire Bay for yourself. They’re excellent books that point towards what Fantasy can be when told by writers who are truly passionate about the genre.

The full analysis of this book will need to wait until the schedule clears up a bit. Thankfully, we won't need to wait past midsummer. We’ll set sail on Friday, August 14th with a discussion of the heavy use of flashbacks. Our focus will be on how Wolf took an element that typically kills narrative momentum and tension and instead made it into a wellspring of both.

Thank you all for joining me today. Please remember to subscribe and share if you enjoyed what you read here. Take care, everyone, and enjoy the rest of your week.