The Empyrean Series: Fourth Wing, Iron Flame, and Onyx Storm
The Empyrean books are exactly like so many books you've read before. It's set at a magical boarding school, where dueling is encouraged, and half of all entrants die before graduation. Death comes easily, and the students must be hardened to become perfect warriors. In this case, this means bonding with a dragon, gaining access to their magical abilities, and defending the brave kingdom of Navarre from the wicked kingdom of Poromiel. But as our hero progresses in her studies, she learns that the picture painted by her teachers may not be entirely truthful, and the heroic facade hides disgraceful secrets. Also, students will make an enormous amount of moon-eyes at each other, and eventually start doinking like there's no tomorrow.
None of that is a knock against these books. There's a reason so many books have leaned on this same basic setting. Tropes are tropes for a reason, and Rebecca Yarros is a master at executing them. But, saying that three New York Times bestselling novels are a fun read isn’t exactly the keenest of insights. Does the Empyrean series have more to offer than a rollicking good time? I would argue yes. In addition to some surprising suggestions about the nature of warfare, I think the Empyrean books are a perfect case study for what makes a successful book series.
Why the Empyrean series and not À la recherche du temps perdu? Well, Simone Biles can’t teach me gymnastics. “Just jump higher than anyone else in the world and flip 4 times with perfect form” isn’t exactly actionable. Same with the college professors who thought six pages of algebra was easy. The lesson sticks better when you see the struggle. And for all that Yarros is an incredibly talented writer, you can see the struggle in the series, and the Empyrean series has some serious highs but also some serious lows. And while danger signs have started flashing, I think there’s a good chance that Yarros will eventually finish the series, and we’ll be able to see if she can stick the landing.
The Setup: Fourth Wing
Yarros doesn’t just execute the standard fantasy tropes, she exaggerates them. Her protagonist, Violet Sorrengail, isn't simply an underdog. She had always planned on becoming an academic (a "scribe"), but her mother forced her to enroll in dragon college. Her ankles are weak, she's not physically fit, and she knows next to nothing about what happens in the school. She's Katniss Everdeen going up against the Careers from District 2 in the Hunger Games. She's El Higgins scrambling against the enclave kids in the Scholomance. She's Harry Potter fighting against Voldemort. The other half of our enemies-to-lovers equation, Xaden, isn't just a bad boy. He's the hottest, broodingest boy in school; who saw his father executed for rebellion and has a personal vendetta against Violet's mother.
The greatest strength of Fourth Wing is its incredible pace. The first year of school is made up of a series of milestones: entering the school, being presented to the dragons (known as threshing for some reason), choosing a dragon to bond with, and probably some others which I don't remember. None of these are simple. Entering the school isn't just walking in through a set of gates like it would be at a normal school, or some elaborate magical ritual like it would be at a normal magical boarding school. It's walking across a narrow bridge in the rain while other entrants can try to kill you. Being presented to the dragons involves a large number of students being roasted (dragons don't take kindly to disrespect, you see), and also an enormous vertical obstacle course for some reason. And the final exam involves being dropped into an active war zone.
In between these milestones, where you'd expect some calmer chapters, Yarros instead just skips over the time period in between, maybe with a bare modicum of explanation of what's going to happen. A remarkably large portion of their class time is spent sparring with each other, and this being hard-ass dragon college, lots of these matches end up with someone dead. Violet isn’t physically strong enough to win her fights, but she’s able to find out who her opponent is going to be each week and subtly poison them so she wins. But the match ups are supposed to be a secret, so how does she know who her opponent will be? Oh, she has a book from her dead brother that tells her that this information is available somewhere, and then Yarros just jumps straight to the matches.
Rather than being a weakness for the overall series, the pace is an incredible strength. Nothing kills my enjoyment faster than the feeling that a series is dragging things out or withholding information for an inevitable reveal in book 2. Give me Dracula surfing from episode 1 or the frantic pace of the first two seasons of The Good Place rather than the steady reveal of Marvel’s Phase 4. Burning bright and leaving nothing in reserve makes your Book 1 stronger, giving you a stronger foundation to build off of for future books. The downside is you kind of have to start from scratch for book 2.
The way I think about this tradeoff is that your fictional world should always be larger than the books. So even though you haven’t deliberately kept any fuel in reserve, there should always be unfinished hooks that you can expand into additional stories. If those hooks involve your main character, congratulations, you’ve got yourself book 2. If you don’t have any hooks for your main character then I guess this shouldn’t have been a series anyway. Think of A Memory Called Empire, where Arkady Martine has to spend half of the second book getting the characters back into position for the plot to kick off. Maybe that one would have been better as a single novel.
Moving so fast means Yarros has to work hard to give us all the exposition dump a fantasy world inevitably requires. My favorite device is that Violet, to calm and focus herself during challenges, recites facts about the world. Because she's a scribe you see, and she finds knowledge calming. On the one hand, it's such a transparent exposition device. On the other hand, it's actually a nice twist on the common fantasy trope of the main character being an outsider who has to have everything explained to them in excruciating detail. This way, Violet gets to be a knowledgeable insider (at least about the wider world; not about the details of dragon college), and we get the necessary exposition. The Scholomance series gets around this a bit by having El explain the situation directly to the reader, but that approach gives the series a bit of detached tone that works perfectly for that series, but wouldn't work at all for the Empyrean. The Empyrean series is, in many ways, a coyote running off the side of a cliff and keeping itself aloft by running fast and not looking down.
Now of course, we need to talk about the dragons. The dragons are like every other dragon you've read about. They're big, they're magical, they breathe fire. They're also old and haughty, and only reluctantly agree to share their magical abilities with the puny humans. At the beginning of the story, we are told that magic only comes from dragons. A successful student at dragon college will bond with a single dragon, allowing them to manifest a special magical ability. These abilities are wildly different and also some are wildly overpowered. There is no woke attempt at making each dragon's gift equally valuable in the right hands — some are just better than others. Xaden has the ability to manipulate shadows and have them become physical entities that can catch people or smother them. Some people are healers, some have shields, some have storms, some make things cold, and the general of the Navarre army has the gift of foresight, allowing him to know the outcome of a battle before it starts.
So far, so fine. It's mostly interesting, if rather under-specified. There's not a lot of suspense as far as what magic can do, because magic can do whatever Yarros wants the magic to do. Brandon Sanderson this is not. There is some suspense because there aren't enough dragons to go around and what your magical ability is unknown until it suddenly manifests. There are some magical abilities that are total bummers, including the ability to read minds, which is an instant death sentence if discovered. Partly because reading minds without control drives you mad, but mainly because the professors will kill you when they find out.
If there's a weakness in the first two books, it's Violet herself. She starts out as an underdog, but as the books progress she becomes more and more of a very special child, veering dangerously close to Mary Sue territory. She's the weakest student in the college, but other than that she has basically everything going for her. She's the smartest student, she's the most knowledgeable student (in addition to training to be a scribe, her dead father was an amazing scholar), she's the most beautiful student. She's calm under pressure, she seems to know instinctively who to trust and who not to (with one rather glaring exception), and she's kind when others are cruel.
Before it's time to bond with a dragon, there is a break from the constant death and moon-eyes to go through a class/glorified power-point presentation listing the individual dragons that are single and ready to mingle. Among the standard red and green and blue dragons there are two obviously special dragons: an enormous black dragon that hasn't bonded in decades, and a teeny golden "feathertail" dragon that is too small to carry a rider or fight. Obviously our very special protagonist will bond with one of these dragons, but which one? And who will bond with the other? Well, Violet is so brave and pure-hearted that she bonds with both.
Which then leads her to get the super-special power to call lightning from the sky, a power that hasn't been seen in decades. Because she's special, you see. There is some good humor, as while she's learning to control her magic, she accidentally calls down lightning bolts during sex. It's a little on the nose (sparks fly, literally), but if that's not your thing, this is not the series for you.
If a propulsive plot is the first pillar of Fourth Wing, the second pillar is Violet and Xaden's relationship. I came to the series from the fantasy side, rather than the romance side, so I don't know nearly as much about the romance tropes as I do the fantasy tropes. But my understanding is that Violet and Xaden are a classic enemies-to-lovers pair, where they start off sniping at each other, and Violet thinks that Xaden is literally going to kill her as soon as he can. But Violet is immediately and overwhelmingly physically attracted to him, and they are forced again and again into close proximity — Xaden is the leader of her wing, Violet runs into him when sneaking around after hours, and their dragons are each other's mates, and can't bear to be separated for more than a few days. That last part leads to some delightfully stupid world-building, where it turns out that when your dragon gets horny, you get horny.
There's technically a third vertex in this love triangle, Violet's previous love interest Dain. They were close friends before entering into dragon college (he's a year or two older), and now that they're back together, they might become something more. Dain helps Violet out when she first enters the college, but he quickly becomes such a wet blanket that it's clear the two of them are never going to get together. He's protective where Xaden is empowering; he's suspicious where Xaden is trusting; and he's boring where Xaden is thrilling. And while Xaden had a bad-boy image and Dain seems as wholesome as white bread, it turns out that Xaden is working for the greater good, while Dain has (unknowingly) sold Xaden and by extension, Violet, out to his evil father.
Anyway, between immense physical attraction and slowly getting to know the pure heart underneath the bad boy exterior, Violet and Xaden eventually give into their urges and start having extremely passionate sex. Several pieces of furniture are broken, several lightning bolts are thrown, and multiple orgasms are achieved.
Now, I've read a lot of trashy fantasy series in my time, so the sex wasn't more than I was expecting. I will say instead that it was nice to have a fantasy series where the sex scenes don't seem to be the author working out his kinks (looking at you Robert Jordan and especially you Terry Goodkind). Not that collars, spanking, and BDSM don't have their place, but it's a nice change of pace.
Yarros is also good at having the sex scenes be integral to the story, rather than feeling like they are thrown in for titillation. They usually occur at important moments in Xaden and Violet's relationship, and each one usually contributes something to their arc. The downside to this approach is that Yarros has to spend 3 books coming up with increasingly elaborate reasons why the two of them can't have sex.
While Yarros has dialed everything up to 11, what makes the relationship plot work is that there is a real, emotional journey for the two of them to go through; a journey that doesn't end as soon as they start canoodling. Xaden keeps an enormous number of secrets, mostly connected to the rebellion his father led when he was a child. Xaden has to learn to open up and share his secrets with Violet; Violet has to learn to trust Xaden, even if he is keeping secrets from her. All relationships are different, and while I wouldn't say Xialet reaches the levels of #relationshipgoals, I think their pairing strikes a good balance of letting the two of them live independent lives, while still obviously caring deeply about each other and working toward a shared end.
That balance, between individual and joint lives, is at the crux of so many real relationship conflicts, and Yarros manages to keep that core idea intact while surrounding it with an enormous amount of fantasy jibbity-jabbity. Most of us, even if we are in committed relationships, haven't gained the ability to communicate telepathically through our dragons, nor are we committing treason against our kingdom together.
The talk of treason brings us at last to the world building of the Empyrean series, and boy do we have to talk about it. At the beginning of Fourth Wing, we are told that our good and virtuous kingdom is at war with the mean and cruel neighboring kingdom. Our kingdom is protected by dragons, as well as by magical wards (powered by the dragons), which would seem to give us an insurmountable advantage, and yet our cruel neighbors keep on managing to slip through our magical wards, and attacking us with their flying animal of choice, gryphons. That's why our kingdom needs to spend so much of its resources developing dragon riders and an extremely large infantry force to boot.
Which raises the immediate question: what the hell do the infantry do in this world? There appear to be enough dragons to man every outpost, and there's never any indication that any number of infantry could take down a single dragon. There's some parts of Iron Flame where they suggest that the infantry do a lot of scouting and camping in the woods, but again, what's the point of scouts on foot when you could have someone on a dragon? As far as I know, this question is never answered. Similarly, why do the students spend so much time sparring when they are going to be fighting on dragons anyway. If they end up having to fight hand-to-hand without magic, something has gone terribly wrong. This question too is never answered.
But let's set that aside for now. In a major twist at the end of Fourth Wing, it's revealed that our kingdom is not actually at war with the neighboring kingdom, but actually against a society of (basically) undead wizards called venin, who draw their power from the earth (booo! bad) instead of from dragons (yay! good!). Venin are incredibly powerful, able to take down multiple dragons and their riders with ease, and can only be killed by a weapon imbued with magical power from the dragons. The evil enemy kingdom isn't actually at war with us at all, but are just raiding our outposts to steal the magical weapons that can kill venin. The venin aren't really a problem for our kingdom though, because they are blocked by the wards, and also they have to cross the entire "enemy" kingdom to get to us.
In the context of the book, this twist is huge. It changes everything we know about:
- Our kingdom, Navarre. It's not a heroic kingdom struggling against its evil neighbors, but hiding behind its wards and leaving its neighbor out to dry.
- The scribes. Rather than well-meaning academics on a search for the truth, they have been systematically hiding or destroying information about the venin to keep them a secret. Even books describing venin as myths or folklore are destroyed.
- Violet's mother, General Lilith Sorrengail. She knows about the venin, but hasn't told Violet or done anything to help Poromiel or stop the venin.
- Xaden. This one is a confusing double-twist. Xaden has been acting secretive throughout the book, and throughout has insisted that he is working for the best interests of Navarre. First it is revealed that Xaden has been collaborating with the Poromielians and supplying them weapons, leading Violet (and us) to suspect him of actual treason. Then we get the reveal about the venin, and we learn that Xaden has actually always known about them, and he's working with the Poromielians to defeat the venin.
That last double-twist with Xaden is one of the weakest points of the book, and maybe the only point in Fourth Wing where Yarros's unrelenting pace lets her down. The not-treason/treason/not-treason all happens within a couple pages, which I ended up reading about 6 times to understand what the hell was going on and what I should think about these various characters.
The problem is that when you have a character say "surprise, I was lying when I said I wasn't working with the Poromielians" I'm not going to trust anything he says, and so when he says a page or two later (when Violet is still understandably very upset at him) that "No, it's ok actually, the Poromielians are the good guys", I didn't believe him.
But that's alright. The pace comes back to save Yarros, and we immediately move into the major action scene to end Book 1. Three venin are targeting a town, and Xaden, Violet, and their crew need to team up with the Poromielians to stop them. Fight fight fight, magic magic magic. Violet's good friend Liam dies, despite Violet's best efforts to save him, but they stop the venin and prevent them from getting the mysterious artifact at the center of town. Violet is badly injured in the fight, and Xaden takes her to his home base, where it's revealed that Violet's older brother isn't dead after all, and he heals her.
The Payoff: Iron Flame
If Fourth Wing is a coyote running off the side of a cliff, kept aloft only by its frantic pace and refusal to look down, Iron Flame is something else entirely. An entire crystal palace hanging in the air by a single thread, 8 flaming clubs being juggled with ease, Michael Flatley step dancing at the edge of the Grand Canyon. It shouldn't be possible to write a second 600 page book that keeps up the same frenetic pace, and yet, somehow, Yarros does.
Immediately, Yarros is faced with a dilemma when coming back for book 2. You’ve got two basic choices when writing a sequel:
- Telling the same story again, just with half the proper names updated
- Telling one story across all the books.
Both of these are fundamentally unsatisfying. The first rapidly hits diminishing returns, while the second makes each individual book unsatisfying. Also series of the second type seem to have a bad habit of never being completed (I'm still waiting Misters Martin & Rothfuss!).
Now, obviously a lot of this is personal preference. Younger me loved a sprawling story taking place across thousands and thousands of pages. I've read all 13 books of The Wheel of Time series, most of them multiple times. I think I'm also one of like six people who finished Tad Williams's Otherland series, which has only 4 books but each one is a thousand pages with a cliffhanger ending. But now I have kids and a job and just don't have the time.
So what do I want from a sequel? I want each book to have its own tightly contained, satisfying, story, and for each book to build on the previous one, telling us something that hits differently because of all that's come before. Those two goals are in conflict, which is what makes it so difficult. Try to make each book have its own satisfying story, and it's easy to just tell the same story over and over again. Especially since you're going to write your most compelling story first, the following ones are inevitably going to lose steam. But try to have each book build on the previous and it's easy to just tell one story over all your books.
Magical boarding schools actually seem like a really good format for this though, since the yearly structure provides natural breakpoints for the story. Harry Potter does this, as does the Scholomance, as does The Empyrean.
Harry Potter is actually a really good parallel for this, except instead of having the second book be mostly a retread of the first, Iron Flame jumps ahead to the fifth book and Dragon College enters its Umbridge era. No longer is the head of dragon college a mostly-distant administrator, but a meanie-poo who has it out for Violet. There are physical punishments. There are drugs. There are attempts to use magic to get Violet to divulge her secrets.
While Fourth Wing is dialed up to 11, Iron Flame is turned all the way up 14. Violet continues to grow in her abilities, except instead of learning how to make one bolt of lightning, she learns how to make 50. This being hard-ass Navarre, she learns this by being forced to make as many bolts as she can in a row until it almost kills her. Xaden is no longer leading illicit supply runs to Poromiel, but openly rebelling against the crown and opening the borders to Poromielian refugees. It also turns out that he's basically a king? Of the kingdom of Tyrrendor which is now a province of Navarre, granted, but given it's now in open rebellion, that's not an insurmountable barrier.
When I say everything is turned up to 14, I mean everything. Violet and Xaden are no longer fucking in their dorm room, they're having cunnilingus on the throne of Tyrrendor. The most straight-out evil person from the first book, Jack Harlowe, returns as a venin, meaning he's way more powerful and somehow even more evil than in the first book. Whereas Fourth Wing had Violet and her friends steal a map from her mom's office for a class project, Iron Flame has them steal a book from the royal library, with the help of Navarre's prince (he's run away from home and secretly joined the dragon college you see).
Turning everything up even further is a seductive approach to writing sequels, but it only works for so long. If you start off fast and hot, there’s not much more room to go up before you end up writing MAGGGGGGGGICCCCCCC in purple sharpie on your ceiling rather than a cohesive book. Honestly, I didn’t think Yarros would be able to pull it off at all, but her two pillars of pace and Xiolet somehow manage to keep Iron Flame afloat, even though by all rights it should crash and burn. Yarros even manages to start bucking some of the fantasy tropes that she leaned on so heavily in Fourth Wing.
Xaden and Violet's relationship is where Iron Flame burns the brightest (if you are not a fan of on-the-nose metaphors, then this review is also not for you). Yes, Yarros has to come up with increasingly implausible reasons why the two of them can't be making the beast with two backs, but other than that, it's remarkably successful. In large part that's because Yarros actually takes the fallout from Fourth Wing seriously. After an entire enemy-to-lovers arc, where Violet has come to trust Xaden, learning that he has been lying to her and secretly working with Poromielians is a big fucking deal. Way too many fantasy books would treat it as a blip that's resolved by chapter 3, but Yarros makes it the central obstacle to Vioden throughout. The two of them actually have discussions about it! Violet complains about all the secrets Xaden is keeping, Xaden says he'll tell her anything she asks to regain her trust, and Violet says that is not good enough because she doesn't know what to ask.
The payoff to this comes part way through, where Violet deduces that Xaden must have a second magical ability, in addition to his ability to manipulate shadows. There's a complicated lore explanation for this, but honestly, it's not important. Finally with a concrete question, Violet asks Xaden about it, and Xaden has a crisis of faith. He is torn between his devotion to Violet and the need to keep his most dangerous secret, which he has revealed to literally nobody.
On a desolate mountaintop, because he couldn't bring himself to tell her anywhere else, Xaden reveals that he has the ability to read minds. I love this. It's the one secret Xaden could have that would make him vulnerable to Violet, it builds on a foundation laid down in Fourth Wing, and it explains why Xaden has been so successfully hiding his smuggling operation. It even explains why Xaden decided to trust Violet when she found him sneaking around at the beginning of Fourth Wing.
The pace is as relentless as ever. At one point, Violet takes a trip to Poromiel to gain possession of an important magical macguffin. She reaches the fabulous palace of Viscount Tecarus, meets Xaden's previous fiancée Cat, and is invited to a dinner party. I have read this scene 1000 times in fantasy books. At its best, it's the banquet on Arrakis in Dune. But 99% of the time, it's a slog of poorly written courtly drama. Yarros bucks the trend here, and instead of a dinner party, Tecarus releases a venin at Violet, and she and her siblings are forced into a life-or-death battle. They succeed (barely), gain possession of the macguffin, and return home victorious.
I could go on for quite a while about all the things I think Iron Flame does well. It introduces new, interesting characters in a natural way, including the previously mentioned Cat and Liam's younger sister Sloane, who would like nothing to do with Violet thank you very much, despite Violet's promise to the dying Liam to look after her. And it expands the world of Navarre, taking us into the kingdom of Poromiel and letting us get to know its inhabitants.
The talk of Poromiel raises its own insane world-building question: How is it surviving? It's right next to the venin homeland, doesn't have dragons, doesn't have wards, and they can't make the magical weapons that can defeat venin. Navarre doesn't have any of those disadvantages, and yet it seems to take the entirety of their economy to defend itself. How then, can Poromiel survive?
There's one answer to this question that I like, even though it's almost certainly not what Yarros is intending. My headcanon is that the Poromiel is able to do this precisely because they don't have this hard-assed approach to training warriors. In one of my favorite exchanges of the series, a Navarran students asks a Poromielian how they bond with their gryphons, and she tells them that they jump off a cliff as the gryphons fly underneath, and if you manage to land on a gryphon, you bond with that one. That leads to this wondrous exchange:
"That's pretty badass," Sloane admits begrudgingly. "What happens if you miss? Do the bodies wash up on the shore?"
Maren blinks. "Bodies? No one dies. It's just like cliff jumping. If we miss, we swim to shore"
In this world, Navarre being all cool and badass and killing half of their students to create the ULTIMATE DRAGON WARRIORS isn't actually making them stronger; it's making them weaker. Poromiel doesn't run its military that way, and that allows them to fight off the venin despite their disadvantages.
Now, part of the reason that I like this answer is that it conveniently aligns with my personal views on how wars are won, which also happens to conveniently align with my politics. I'm very strongly in the camp that believes the way to win is through overwhelming economic superiority allowing you to out-produce/out-gun/out-bomb your enemies, rather than through production of ultimate warriors. Basically my military strategy is summed up by this tweet:
That's very clearly the woke position these days, while Pete Hegseth is clearly aligned with the Navarran approach to creating warfighters. As a hippie liberal pining for Woke 2, seeing this worldview reflected in my fantasy series has obvious appeal to me (you know, since representation is important).
While I'm biased, I also think this answer is also more interesting. There are so many series where the warriors hardened by the harsh environment run roughshod over the soft soldiers of the decadent society (the Fremen in Dune, the Aiel in Wheel of Time, the Dothraki in A Song of Ice and Fire, the Mongols in real life) that it's been done to death. While there are plenty of examples of individuals being soft and kind and working together to overcome the hardasses (Katniss in Hunger Games, Violet in Fourth Wing), I can't think of another example where a society being soft is presented as a strength.
Unfortunately, Yarros doesn't do much with this, leaving it as probably unintentional subtext rather than as a foundational element of her world building. I'm pretty sure the actual explanation for why Poromiel survives is "They just are, don't worry about it". Poromiel is mostly forgotten by the end of the book, leading to a final confrontation that's basically a repeat of the first book: The venin manage to infiltrate the dragon college and destroy their wards. Fight fight fight fight, magic magic magic magic. Xaden and Violet manage to hold them off long enough for Violet's mother to heroically sacrifice herself (with a rather traumatizing assist from Sloane) to re-establish the wards and defeat the venin. Alas, the only way for Xaden to hold off the venin is to become one himself.
The cautionary tale: Onyx Storm
Unfortunately, Onyx Storm is where the coyote finally looks down. Where Yarros tries to push the story to be even bigger, to go ever faster, and the book just can't handle it and it falls apart around her.
In other words, it's this scene from Top Gun Maverick:
Which is such a shame, because it's got such a promising set up. At the end of Iron Flame, we had the simultaneous reveals that Xaden is now a venin, and that Violet's feathertail dragon is a mysterious irid dragon that holds the key to expanding the wards, if only she can find more of them. That's honestly a great set up — new stakes for Xaden, a clear reason why Violet and Xaden can't bump uglies constantly, and a magic quest.
There is one thing Yarros does in Onyx Storm that I love, which is giving Violet a better villain: the venin Theophanie. She should be a great villain. She has a mysterious connection to Violet, with the same unusual hair (black with silver tips), and shares the same power as Violet's mother (storm-wielding). She's incredibly powerful, but doesn't want to kill Violet. Instead, she wants to make Violet become a venin and to train her, until she is the ultimate venin weapon.
This is great! It turns the venin from a mysterious faceless entity into people with their own motivations and plans. It replicates some of the energy from the first book, where Xaden could have killed Violet so many times, but didn't for reasons that Violet didn't understand. And most of all, it gives Violet a more powerful enemy to face, commensurate with her growing abilities.
So many series suffer from what I think of as diminishing-returns-to-villainy, where they bring the same villains back over and over again until they just aren't scary any more. Think of the maw-mouths in the Scholomance series, which start off truly terrifying and even by the end of the first book are nothing more than a road bump. In the Scholomance it's at least deliberate, and the series eventually becomes a meditation on the nature of invincibility, but in lesser hands it often ends up comical.
The Empyrean series could have easily fallen into this trap. Continue to have Violet fight against dragon college, evil Jack Harlowe, and the faceless venin, and as she becomes more powerful and knowledgeable, each of these antagonists would fade into the background. Theophanie gives us a new villain to rail against, one who makes Violet an underdog again.
Unfortunately, that's about the last positive thing I can say about Onyx Storm. Yarros tries! She tries so hard to turn the dial up even further, but this time it just doesn’t work. This is the danger of the “turn up all the dials” approach to writing sequels: at some point, it stops being exciting and starts being awkward and unsatisfying.
Whereas Iron Flame introduced Xaden's ex Cat, Onyx Storm introduces Violet's ex, Halden, who happens to be the prince of Navarre. Not only does this push Violet even further into Very Special Main Character territory, but Halden is so comically incompetent and distasteful that it just doesn't make any sense why Violet ever dated him. It looks even worse in contrast with Cat, who is an interesting character you could imagine Xaden falling in love with, even if it was a political engagement.
Whereas Iron Flame took us into Poromiel on a quest for a magical macguffin, Onyx Storm takes us to the island kingdoms off the coast of Navarre on a search for a magical macguffin irid dragons. These islands were mentioned in the previous books, so they don't come completely out of nowhere, but they are a giant structural issue in the book. There are too many of them, and they are too disconnected from the rest of the world (they aren't even on the map). Basic questions like how big they are, how far away they are from the mainland, etc. are left unanswered. All in all, the islands lead to a scattershot, repetitive approach where we don't get to meet any characters we actually care about.
Whereas Iron Flame had a tense dinner scene turn into a duel with a venin, Onyx Storm has a tense dinner scene that turns into an attempted poisoning. Yarros is clearly pushing things to be even bigger here, so one of the hosts at this party is Xaden's mother (turns out she's been living on the Islands this whole time). But while the scene in Iron Flame is great, the one in Onyx Storm is a slog. Partly because it's the dessert that's poisoned, so we have to suffer through an entire dialogue-heavy dinner party first, before we get to the good stuff. And partly because the resolution is absurdly improbable: Violet's friends were poisoned by berries that just happen to turn the cook's hands blue, and Violet's father just happened to write about those berries in his notebook, and Violet had just happened to bring the antidote with her.
By the time we get to the final battle, we know what to expect: a giant confrontation between Violet and the venin. Fight fight fight fight fight, magic magic magic magic magic. Someone we care about dies, and Violet barely manages to escape and fight another day. Fourth Wing had Violet's friend Liam die in the final battle, and Iron Flame had Violet's mother die, so we're expecting someone equally important to kick the bucket. Except we seem to have run out of people close to Violet who Yarros is willing to sacrifice, and so instead Violet's friend-of-a-friend Quinn dies, and we get a couple chapters from Violet's friend Imogen's point of view telling us how important Quinn was to her. I guess points to Yarros for subverting our expectations, but this is extremely disappointing. Yarros is trying to have it both ways, sacrificing someone who we don't really care about, but trying to make us feel as though we should.
Impressively, Onyx Storm also manages to fall down even when Yarros isn't trying to out-do Iron Flame. There's a whole back story about Violet's mysterious past, that I don't understand even after finishing the book. She was taken to a temple on one of the islands to become a priestess of Dunne? But didn't? And then her parents didn't tell her? Or maybe her mom didn't even know? It's all very confusing and doesn't really go anywhere.
The whole Xaden-as-a-venin thing also doesn't work. Xaden clearly has enough plot armor that he's not going to die in Book 3 of the series, and if he does become evil it will only be before an eventual redemption by the end of the series.
Also Xaden-as-a-venin means that he spends the whole book trying to stay in control of his emotions, and not channel magic from the earth. That's really unsatisfying! Xaden's whole deal is that he's not in control! He fucks Violet with abandon and he risks life and limb to protect his compatriots. Now he turns into Dain from Fourth Wing saying "Wait, be careful!" the whole time.
There's one other enormous issue I have with Onyx Storm, which is that Violet loses all her agency. Yes, she thinks on her feet and gets herself and her friends out of trouble so many times, but the large-scale decisions just seem to happen without any rhyme or reason. She decides to look for the irid dragons on the islands purely by process of elimination, rather than anything clever or decisive. Much of her journey through the islands involves Violet following a trail of breadcrumbs left in her dad’s journals. And when she eventually does find the irid dragons, it’s entirely by accident: they fly to one of the small islands to bury one of their companions and find the dragons there.
Even worse is the resolution of the final battle. Theophanie ends up defeating Violet's dragons with *checks notes* a giant net, but then Violet ends up defeating Theophanie with a magic dagger. How did Violet end up with a magic dagger? Well, it turns out that the Navarran prince (the younger one, the one who joined the dragon college; not the stupid older Violet's-ex one) has the gift of precognition, allowing him to know that he needed to give Violet the magic dagger to win the battle. I hate this! If one of Violet's teammates has the gift of foresight, then all Violet has to do is listen to him and everything will be okay.
I find it even more disappointing because Yarros seemed to understand this was a problem in the previous books! Navarre's top general also has the gift of foresight, but in a deliberately limited way: he can see the outcome of battles before they start, but not how victory or defeat is achieved. That's rather Calvinist in its implications, but it still leaves room for individual agency in achieving those ends. Also his powers don't work in fairly arbitrary circumstances, so his powers aren’t active for almost all of the battles we actually care about.
Even after the end of the final battle, there’s one more unsatisfying scene to set us up for Book 4. We jump ahead 12 hours. Violet has no memories of what's happened, but Xaden is missing and Violet has a ring and a wedding certificate indicating that she and Xaden are married. There are dead dragons, missing dragon eggs, and the reveal that Violet asked to have her own memories erased, setting us up for whatever will come in Book 4. Unfortunately, knowing that Violet has her own secret plan takes most of the suspense out of the cliffhanger.
Book 4: Is redemption possible?
Given that Yarros drove the series off a cliff in Book 3, can she bring it back in Book 4? I don't know, but I really hope so. Yarros is clearly an extremely talented writer, and when everything's clicking her books compel me to keep reading until I finish them, in a sort of poorly-advised-stay-up-till-3-am sort of way. I burned through all of Fourth Wing in 24 hours and put the next two books on hold that same day. Yarros can write compulsively readable books. The only question is if the structural factors of the series make it impossible to continue the magic.
My biggest hope for book 4 is that it actually comes out. Yarros has been writing them extremely quickly so far, but then again so was Tamsyn Muir for the first three books of her series before going radio silent on the fate of Alecto the Ninth. I would take a disappointing Book 4 over no Book 4. So far the signs aren't great. There were only 6 months between the release of Fourth Wing and Iron Flame and 14 months between Iron Flame and Onyx Storm. It's been 16 months since Onyx Storm came out, and I haven't seen any information about Book 4 (no title, no cover, no release date). Even more worryingly, Yarros has announced her next book will be set in the world of the Empyrean, but will not be book 4 of the series. All in all, it’s giving me dangerous Patrick Rothfuss vibes, and we all know that The Kingkiller Chronicle is never getting finished.
Beyond that, I would say that I'm cautiously optimistic about the potential Book 4. I think there are three major factors working against her, but three key factors that make me think she's got the juice to bring the magic back for another book or two (Wikipedia says the series will eventually have 5 books).
We’ve discussed it already, but the biggest factor working against her is that she can’t expand upward. Even Yarros couldn’t push the tension up from Iron Flame, leading to Onyx Storm crashing and burning. Any successful book 4 is going to have to find interesting things to say that aren’t just the hits of Fourth Wing or Iron Flame cranked up another notch or 7.
The second structural factor that’s going to make it difficult for Yarros to bring the magic back is in the magical dragon war college itself. By the end of Onyx Storm, nothing about the college makes sense anymore. The students know more about who they're fighting than the teachers, and they're spending more time flying around on quests or fighting battles than they are learning anything. It's unclear what exactly Violet is supposed to be learning at this point anyway — she has her dragons, she has her magical abilities, and her trainings with the professors at the college seem more likely to kill her than to make her stronger.
This might be a fundamental problem with the magic boarding school plot. Harry Potter ditches the school in book 7 (and kind of in book 6), and The Scholomance does the same in book 3. If Yarros is going to bring the series in for a successful landing, I think she's going to have to leave the magical boarding school behind.
The final factor working against her is that she may have written herself into some corners in Onyx Storm. The existence of a pre-cog seriously limits the options available to her, and it’s clear from the closing scene that Yarros has something planned for Book 4. That probably makes it harder to course correct after the disappointment of Onyx Storm.
Compare that to the factors working in her favor. First and foremost is her ability to write obscenely readable books. I cannot emphasize enough how compulsive I found these things. Even Onyx Storm, a book I did not like, I read in less than a week. All three books are page turners in the truest sense of the word. When Yarros is cooking, her ability to come up with fun plot points and quickly introduce characters I care about is basically unmatched. At this point I’m willing to say the lack of good characters in Onyx Storm was due to the island-hopping plot rather than Yarros suddenly forgetting how to write them.
Secondly, even though she doesn’t have room to expand upwards, she does still have room to expand sideways. There are still plenty of places we could explore that tie into the lands we care about — the two that come to mind are the other provinces of Navarre (maybe including a visit to Violet's estranged Grandmother) and the homeland of the venin, beyond the kingdom of Poromiel. The plot arc of the venin clearly isn’t done, and that still has room to expand, with Theophanie making references to an even more powerful venin who’s also interested in Violet.
The final thing Yarros has going for her is that she seems to be writing this series by the seat of her pants. There have been so many series where the author gets bogged down in their intricate clockwork mechanism of a plot, leaving them unable to resolve it satisfactorily. I probably don’t need to name drop A Song of Ice and Fire here, but it’s by far the clearest and most well-known example. Or How I Met Your Mother, which botched its finale by grafting a pre-planned ending onto a series that had long ago outgrown it. I don’t want to overstate the case — it’s clear that Yarros has some overall arc for the series planned — but it feels more like she’s flying by the seat of her pants than crafting Swiss watches. The inconsistent world building is a part of this too, since if she says “lol nevermind his precognition ability stopped working for anything involving Xaden” that would be just as reasonable as everything else involving magic in the series.
So here’s my marker for Book 4: It will be published by July 2027 (90%), and will have a rating on Goodreads greater than or equal to 4.30 six months after being released (70%). That would require a serious change in trajectory, since the Goodreads ratings have been trending down for all three books in the series, and Onyx Storm currently has a rating of just 4.21.