Garrick (A Tale of Threshing Day)
Hello, all. Welcome back to the review of Threshing Day, a supplemental anthology for The Empyrean.
“Garrick” ends with the following line:
Fuck you, Navarre.
What a perfect way to sum up “Garrick”. That’s the attitude Yarros showed towards the audience when she included this story in a product people paid about $20 apiece for.
Buckle into those Special Snowflake dragon saddles. It’s time to purge some initiates.
STATS
Title: “Garrick”
Series: The Empyrean (Supplemental Anthology)
Author(s): Rebecca Yarros
Genre: Fantasy (Epic)
First Printing: September 29th, 2026
Publisher: Red Tower Books
SPOILERS & DISCLAIMER
This post will provide heavy, unmarked spoilers for the entirety the Threshing Day anthology up through the end of the story being featured. Mild, unmarked stories for later stories may also be provided, while any heavy spoilers for later stories will be confined to clearly marked sections. I will do my best to keep the first paragraph of every section spoiler-free.
Heavy, unmarked spoilers will also be provided for all mainline books of The Empyrean (Fourth Wing, Iron Flame, and Onyx Storm) released prior to Threshing Day. I’m going to assume that you’ve read those previous reviews, but it won’t be necessary to understand this review, as I’ll be doing my best to recap or reference recurring issues or prior canon as it comes up.
For more information regarding the standards by which I’m going to be rating these stories, please see the post titled “Focus and Continuity (A Prelude to Threshing Day)”.
WHAT WE KNEW ABOUT GARRICK BEFORE THRESHING DAY
Garrick was Xaden’s Right Hand Man, Imogen longs for him, and he is used as a blunt instrument to force the double Signets retcon / lie in Onyx Storm. That’s about it. He’s so bland that the only way I can distinguish him from Bodhi is that Bodhi is Xaden’s blood relative, while Garrick is not, and that Garrick is the one whose (second) Signet actually gets utilized in the mainline books.
CONTENT
After the incident with Alic, Garrick walks through the forest with Masen until Masen’s dragon comes to pick him up. He longs for Imogen. He then walks up to his dragon (who apparently chose him the moment he entered the valley, and was just waiting for him to arrive), and they depart.
ANALYSIS
This is not a story. It is, at most, a scene. The only thing is offers is character work for Garrick, and even then, it’s the character work needed to start a story. Yarros doesn’t even try to pretend he has some sort of arc or proves himself to Chradh.
Plot & Worldbuilding
There is no plot. As for the worldbuilding, most of what I have to say really needs to be saved for a spotlight analysis at the end of this review series, because it pertains to the actions and behavior of the dragons who seek out the rebel children.
I will, however, elaborate on the seething hatred for this story that nearly led to me open this review with a far more virulent introduction.
Setup
Garrick has two Signets. By the rules Yarros set in Iron Flame and reinforced in Onyx Storm, this means Chradh must have bonded to one of Garrick’s ancestors. As discussed when breaking down the double Signets reveal in Onyx Storm, the rider leadership and scribes of Navarre should have caught this. They maintain meticulous records, after all, and they are strongly motivated to watch the rebel children carefully.
Yarros knows this is a problem. We know she knows this is a problem because, in “Xaden”, she made sure to address the question of his lineage. Doing so didn’t actually benefit that story in any way. Taken into the context of her track record of using later installments to insist that past mistakes totally weren’t mistakes, it’s clear that she’s covering her ass. It was inevitable that she would bring the matter up in at least one other story and assert some sort of answer.
How does she do this for Garrick?
It’s All Lies
Something I have not been covering is that each of these stories opens with a brief profile on the dragon who the POV character ends up bonded to. This includes the dragon’s estimated age and recorded riders.
The moment I saw Chradh’s profile, alarm bells started ringing. Not only was he listed as being incredibly young compared to the other dragons thus far (a mere 27 years old), but he had no recorded riders.
My first reaction is that Yarros forgot her own worldbuilding. It would not be the first time she messed up the most basic if her own rules. But, no, this was deliberate, and that is somehow so much worse. Yarros uses this to once against lie to the audience by projecting that lie onto an entity without established motivations for lying, and then made all relevant characters selectively idiotic to have the lie get past them.
“Yet another reason I have finally chosen to involve myself with your kind again.” He stares at me with unblinking golden eyes.
“You’re Chradh,” I say slowly, just in case I’m wrong, because the again and his voice have definitely thrown me off.
“Now that introductions have been made…” He stands to his full height. “Shall we depart? While the snow doesn’t bother me, I have no wish to lose you to frostbite after finally having chosen you.”
There’s that finally again. “According to Kaori, you’ve never bonded before. You’re only twenty-seven years old.” It doesn’t make sense.
“What even is a year?”
Chradh - who was not even a character before this point (and, as we’ll cover in a moment, is barely one now) - is a liar who likes to play with semantics. That explains everything.
How did no Dragonkind professor, or any other rider, notice this? Why did no dragon call him out, especially when he is now bonding to a rebel child? Is Yarros seriously implying that is is impossible to tell the difference between a young dragon and an old dragon? When people tell her she looks like she’s 20, does she believe that?
Couldn’t Be Bothered
What particularly offends me about this is that Yarros can’t even commit to it. She doesn’t even try to answer these glaring issues. She just has Chradh vaguely indicate that he is older than humans think and ends the story. She might as well have turned to the audience and said, “You know that plot hole I tore open in Onyx Storm to insist that didn’t make an idiotic editing mistake in Fourth Wing? That sure was a plot hole, wasn’t it? Tee-hee, I am so clever!!!”
There was a story that could have been told here. Yarros could have made this story about getting that lie past the scribes and the rider leadership. That could have turned this plot hole into an adventure. Instead, Yarros took the laziest route possible, merely hinting that mistakes were possible in “Trial by Fire” and then glossing over the moment here.
But good writing takes effort, and that’s clearly too much to ask for.
Garrick
Garrick is a loyal and self-sacrificing individual. His father, who was Xaden’s father’s aide, instructed him to look after Xaden, and so he does so. He makes Chradh wait for him while he ensures that Xaden, then Masen, find their dragons.
That is what is Shown to us. Yarros also Tells us that Garrick is loyal and self-sacrificing when Chradh psychoanalyzes him. In this case, I find the Telling reasonable, because that isn’t the actual characterization imparted by the psychoanalysis. Garrick is instead characterized through how he reacts to being described in this way, revealing himself to be a humble person.
I like the character work here … but it’s wasted. Much like Xaden, the story ends without doing anything with it. Even the wafer-thin plot of “Mira” did more with the POV’s characterization than what Yarros does here in “Garrick”.
Also, much like “Brennan”, time is wasted to rehash information. Garrick guiding Masen is just a repeat of him guiding Xaden. Merely by providing the context that he was ignoring Chradh’s call during “Xaden”, Yarros made everything with Masen redundant.
As with Xaden, Garrick’s characterization is simple yet functional. Whether he continues to be a character will be contingent on how Yarros handles him as the mainline series continues.
Chradh
Chradh was not a character prior to “Garrick”, and he isn't one after.
The only thing to set him apart from the previous dragons is that his mind is already made up about his chosen rider. He does not require any tests. He patiently waits for Garrick to come to him. This is not a trait, though. Yarros established in Onyx Storm that the rebel children’s dragons sought them out. This is Chradh acting the way the plot needs him to.
Likewise, the facts that Chradh is older than humans thinks and lies about his age and/or identity are not character traits. They are what Yarros needs to happen to project dishonesty onto him.
If “Garrick” had been dedicated to exploring why Chradh decided to lie and how he got away with it, that would have been another matter. That would be a story where we learned something about him. As it is, Chradh is a plot device. His existence is dictated by the traits Yarros thinks will cover up the plot hole.
RATING: 1/10
“Garrick” is a story that irritates me because, even more so than “Xaden”, it demonstrates that the low quality of The Empyrean is a deliberate choice by Yarros.
Yarros is capable of writing compelling characters. She is capable of telling stories of logical cause and effect using those characters. She chooses to write aimless filler or cannibalistic chains of events instead. She chooses to lie to the audience (while projecting blame for the false information onto characters who can’t bear that weight) rather than do the work to properly reconcile mistakes.
At least “Xaden” was a story. It had a plot. “Garrick” is one scene where Yarros went out of her way to acknowledge an outstanding plot hole without taking the effort to correct it. It is a waste of time that shows just how little Yarros actually cares about the POV character.
ANOTHER GLIMPSE OF WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN
On November 8th, we review “Dain.” This was a story I was apprehensive about, given Yarros’s track record for demonizing the title character. I was therefore pleasantly surprised to discover that this is the first story in the anthology with a full-on character arc within it. It’s a story that I wish I could rate quite highly, were it not for a plot hole that makes that arc incompatible with the mainline books.
That’s coming November 8th. If you’re looking for more Romantasy content in the interim, you can also check out my free web serial, A Chime for These Hallowed Bones. It’s an Enemies to Lovers story that’s Alchemized meets Fourth Wing, featuring necromancers in a Desi-influenced setting. Chapters 1 through Chapter 11 Part 3 are currently available!
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