REVIEW ARCHIVE

Honestly, it took me two years to pick up this book. I've had it since 2024, and people kept telling me it was so good that I wouldn't be able to put it down. However, the two times I tried to read it before this, it felt overwhelming. I didn't understand anything, and the names were confusing, so I stopped reading. I think you need to be in a certain mindset to read a fantasy book—you have to be able to put up with not understanding a lot in the beginning and being overwhelmed with information and names.

However, I wanted to read it so badly, so I did. I usually read two books at once (a fiction and a non-fiction one), but this time I focused only on this one, and boy, I did not regret it.

This book is amazing; I understand all the surrounding hype now. The plot, if we are being way too simplistic about it, is basically fantasy queen x knight (but lesbians) trying to keep afloat a queendom that is threatened with collapse by an ancient enemy. The book is divided among four narrators, each in a different region. At the beginning, it felt like everything was happening separately, but the more the plot thickened, the more the lives and stories of each character were revealed to be connected—not in a corny way, but more like a real-world "I know a guy who knows this guy who did all that, and that's what got him banished, lol."

Now, the following section may contain spoilers!

The Ead and Sabran relationship was my favourite. Technically, they were enemies since Ead was considered a heretic, but she proved to be one of the most loyal people in Sabran's life. Also, the slow burn was a real slow burn: it took about 400 pages for a kiss and almost 600 for an "I love you." It was delicious.

I really liked the Tané storyline. It shows very realistic character building; even though she has a lot of flaws, that doesn't make her any less lovable or relatable. And all the dragon stuff was cool.

Also, the religious component was so good. As someone raised Catholic—with lots of Catholic guilt and scepticism pre-installed in my soul—I could understand a lot of the characters when confronted with inconsistencies or criticism of their beliefs. Their slow realization that they may not have the undoubted truth, and that the ones they called heretics were kinda right, was so well-developed. It avoided falling into the "omg I was wrong, I'm gonna convert to this new religion without questioning anything because they have the only truth now :D" trope. Instead, a lot of characters kept their faith, but with a deeper understanding of the world rather than blindly following principles that may be outdated or misapplied to their context.

So, it checked all my boxes for a banger: lesbians, dragons (wyverns), geopolitical disputes (with logical and ethical conclusions), and religious guilt and questioning.