Threshing Day (Title & Content Reveal) (Part 1 - Hope)
Rebecca Yarros’s new mystery book set in the world of The Empyrean has finally gotten a full reveal announcemnet. I found out about it on Wednesday via Substack creator The Romantasy, then verified it on Yarros’s Instagram.
Welcome to Conscription Day, Cadets! I’m thrilled to share the title and cover of my next book (not book four!) in the Empyrean series: Threshing Day!
This collection contains thirteen threshing stories about some of your favorite characters and their dragons. And the deluxe first edition has sixteen beautiful original pieces of full-color art by @joerequeza.art! (Seriously, it’s all so gorgeous!)
If you’re looking for copies outside the US, keep an eye on my foreign publishers’ social media for updates about their release dates.
And as a Threshing Day gift, Xaden’s story is included in the collection and as usual, will be up on my website!
I hope this gives you a fun trip back to Basgiath while I’m writing book four!
Around that time, a dedicated page was added to Yarros’s website, with the following synopsis.
Thirteen unforgettable stories. One Legendary Day. The bond that changes everything.
This is an interesting reveal. I’m still not optimistic about this book, and I will have plenty of negative reaction points to share on Wednesday. That said, this reveal is honestly the best-case scenario I could have hoped for. Plus, as an added bonus, I now know exactly how to structure the review for this book when autumn rolls around.
STATS
Title: Threshing Day
Series: The Empyrean (Bonus Content)
Author(s): Rebecca Yarros
Genre: Fantasy (Epic)
First Printing: September 29th, 2026
Publisher: Red Tower Books
IT’S NOT A NOVELLA
This is, definitionally, not a novella.
Myself and others assumed it was a novella, given the announced length, but that is not the case. This is a short story anthology that just happens to be novella length. While there is some disagreement as to the exact word count that separates a novella from a short story, these are mutually exclusive concepts, because these are separate categorizations of stories based upon length.
To the credit of Yarros and/or the Red Tower marketing department, I can't find any claims by them that this would actually be a novella. This is is a matter of us making assumptions and getting it wrong. It isn’t false advertising. (If I’ve overlooked some statement by one of these parties that this would be a novella, then yes, said statement would be either false advertising or a mistake.) And, of course, an anthology could include a novella. Part of me suspects that the Xaden story, at least, will qualify as a novella. Given that abrupt jump in the page count between when the novella was announced and now, plus the fact this story is being called out as getting a special release to Yarros’s website, I have a feeling that all those added pages for just for this one story and that it was not originally part of the anthology (i.e. Yarros wrote it as a standalone novella and tacked it onto this anthology at the request of Red Tower).
REVIEW STRUCTURE
Threshing Day will not be one continuous story, but 13. This makes it a lot easier to plan out my autumn review schedule, even if it does mean eating up more days.
Each story will get a separate review. We’ll then wrap things up with a retrospective of the anthology as a whole. If major problems are uncovered that would make any one story’s review unreasonably long, the retrospective will be get additional parts to spotlight those issues.
The plan is to release these reviews on Sundays, starting on October 11th. Much like with our previous anthology reviews, I intent to write the reviews as I go along, rather than reading the whole anthology before I start writing. This will allow me to get the reviews out to you in a more timely fashion. At this pace, the full review will span the remainder of autumn and run into January (perhaps February, if there are a lot of major issues to spotlight).
POTENTIAL
My optimism for this series was burned out of me two and a half years ago. I don’t expect this anthology to be a transcendent rebirth that makes me hopeful for Book 4. Still, this isn’t the worst idea ever. Yarros COULD do something great here.
K.I.S.S
All three Empyrean novels thus far share a common problem: Yarros exhausts her stated premise, and rather than the narrative evolving, she just pumps in filler and easily resolved conflicts to delay the climax.
Fourth Wing reached a natural ending at Chapter 16, struggled along for another 16 chapters, and then fell into a climax that hadn’t been adequately set up.
Iron Flame is conveniently split into Part I and Part II, with the split around the midpoint. Part I is the advertised story, while Part II is a sequence of conflicts that fizzle into and out of existence with minimal narrative impact.
Onyx Storm exhausts its story after Chapter 43 of 66, with the climax not beginning until Chapter 57. That may not sound bad. The thing is, Yarros delayed the start of the story until Chapter 21, and most of the story between Chapter 21 and Chapter 40 is the same story recycled four times over.
None of these books’ premises are bad in principle. Even in execution, Chapters 1 through 16 of Fourth Wing aren’t terrible in isolation. And it’s not like they couldn’t have been fleshed out to naturally fill their full page counts. The trend on display is that Yarros is struggles to properly pace stories of this length. If she’s writing shorter narrative, that will naturally condense things, meaning that filler shouldn’t be necessary.
If I were to be optimistic about anything, it would be that any given short story in this anthology will be far more focused than her novels have been.
Focus on Character
This anthology is a prime opportunity to explore a variety of different POV characters during high-stress situations, thereby delivering efficient characterization. The fact that this is the same situation adds in a element of contrast. Yarros could potentially take her cast of accessories and Red Shirts (not to mention their dragons) and rapidly flesh them out into proper characters.
The benefit that this could have for Book 4 really can’t be overstated. At this point, the only three characters in this entire series who are actual characters, rather than puppets in Yarros’s power fantasy, have been:
Her self-insert Mary Sue
Liam, who is dead
Ridoc
To make matters worse, multiple characters have seen radical shifts in their behavior and framing between books, with no justification beyond, “Well, Yarros needs this character to fill a new narrative role.”
This shallowness and lack of consistency makes it very hard to stay emotionally invested in the story whenever drama between characters takes focus. The precedent is that these puppets will dance in whatever manner makes Violet look good, whether that means bowing before her, being trampled by her, or dying so that she can wring her hands about how their deaths affect her personally. Why should be worry about her or care about her setbacks or victories when the work revolves around her alone?
Taking thirteen characters and giving them their owns stories means thirteen chances for Violet to share Book 4 with fleshed-out characters with their own defined personalities, motivations, and sympathetic qualities. This could make character drama matter again. It could mean actual tension when one of these characters is endangered or poses an obstacle to her.
If, somehow, this anthology did manage to salvage the whole series, I suspect this would be the means by which it did so. This is a chance to play catch-up on vital character work.
Damage Control
Of all the stories Yarros could choose to add on to this series, stories about Threshing Day arguably have the least potential to damage this series in new, unforeseen, catastrophic ways.
Threshing Day is very simple: survive in wilderness, fight classmates, impress and bond with dragon. The cadets don’t (or shouldn’t) have magic. They are isolated to a small area that is (based on the lore thus far) the same for every single Threshing Day. They can fail without dying, meaning that, for those riders whose Threshing Day outcomes aren’t predetermined by the novels, there is genuine uncertainly about whether they successfully bond with a dragon within their given story. For example, I can’t recall it ever being established whether Brennan successfully bonded with his dragon during his first go-around at Threshing, so a story of his Threshing experience could end in him bonding with a dragon, needing to repeat his first year, or murdering a cadet later in the year to claim said cadet’s dragon.
That’s not to say that Yarros can’t do any damage. I strongly suspect that Andarna and Jack will get stories, and Yarros might bring up the idea that the dragons of the rebel children sought them out. Any of these would enflame existing wounds within the lore. It’s just that those are existing wounds. They exist regardless of the story. So unless Yarros once again tries to insist to the audience that a glaring mistake was actually part of her original plan back in 2023, there simply aren’t going to be a lot of opportunities for her to generate new plot holes.
Bread and Circuses
I have been very vocal about Yarros’s disrespect for her fans. That being said, it's clear that she (or, at least, someone associated with Red Tower) has paid attention to what will keep the fans happy. Even if Yarros isn’t directly responsible for these things, she is going along with these efforts, so I want to give her some amount of credit.
First, there’s the fact that she’ll make Xaden’s story free on her website.
And as a Threshing Day gift, Xaden’s story is included in the collection and as usual, will be up on my website!
This is a nice gesture. This is obviously the story people will want to read the most. Plus, if it does turn out that Xaden’s story is a post-hoc telling of the content she should have written as part of Onyx Storm’s ending, making it free somewhat atones for that laziness. (Half-assing the ending was wrong thing to do regardless, but not making people pay money for content that should have been part of the narrative they already paid for is a step in the right direction.)
Second, the art.
And the deluxe first edition has sixteen beautiful original pieces of full-color art by @joerequeza.art! (Seriously, it’s all so gorgeous!)
I don’t care for all the special editions and sprayed edges and other gimmicks that trad pub does these days to get people to buy multiple copies. Too much focus is being put into making stories into display pieces instead of being good stories in their own right. Even so, if trad pub insists on doing these special editions, at least the product should be something worthwhile.
Commissioning original artwork, whether to serve as character art to go with each story or just extra pieces to collect with the book, is a significant investment that carries a lot more emotional weight than some dragons stenciled onto the edges of the pages. This is a collectable that has some real meat to it.
If nothing else, Yarros and Red Tower respect that fan hype sustains this series, and some effort is being made to ensure those fans are happy.
YOU KNEW IT COULDN’T LAST
Well … those are all the nice things I have to say about this reveal.
Unfortunately, as those of you who’ve been here for a while know, I’ve been following The Empyrean since the beginning, and I’ve seen enough to be very concerned about the quality of this work. This Wednesday, we’ll wrap up this reaction by going into those concerns.
Thank you all for stopping by. Please remember to subscribe and share if you enjoyed what you read here. Take care, everyone, and have a good week.
