Dragons of a Fallen Sun (Dragonlance: The War of Souls, Volume I)
Hello, everyone. Welcome back.
I was blessed with the chance to snap up a boxed set of the War of Souls trilogy at Book-Off, meaning that I find myself in the rare position to be able to fully commit to reviewing an entire series from start to finish. These books won’t get comprehensive deep dives, instead getting shorter reviews of individual books. However, I think that these will be some of the most important reviews I have done thus far on this site - not necessarily because the books themselves are that important, but because of what they represent.
The Dragonlance setting is one of the most iconic and recognized Fantasy settings of the late 20th Century. The novels written by Margarent Weis and Tracy Hickman (hereafter referred to as W&H) have taken on such a life of their own that it’s easy to forget that these are tie-in novels for a Dungeons & Dragons setting. Despite the bulk of these novels being written for adult fantasy audiences, the setting has been so successful that it spawned a YA adaptation of the original series (Dragonlance Chronicles), as well as multiple YA spinoff series across the 2000s (collectively known as Dragonlance: The New Adventures). While the War of Souls trilogy, released between 2000 and 2002, is not as renowned as Dragonlance Chronicles, it very much carries on the legacy of those stories.
What we have here is a Fantasy series that is recent enough to reflect the stories that influenced modern writers while predating modern writing trends by more than a decade. This series is a time capsule by which we can make comparisons and understand changes in the literary landscape. While the Eisenhorn Trilogy novels were released around the same time, they reflect a far more niche property sustained by a dedicated fanbase. Dragonlance is much closer to the wider Fantasy zeitgeist.
Therefore, while the reviews for this trilogy will discuss the books themselves, they will also be full of comparisons to more recent titles that we’ve reviewed here at Recent Reads. Naturally, The Empyrean will get a lot of focus (some of it being complimentary, for a change), but I am going to try to pull in as many other books as possible.
With all that being said, let’s dive into Volume I of the War of Souls, Dragons of the Fallen Sun.
STATS
Title: Dragons of the Fallen Sun
Series: The War of Souls (Volume I)
Author(s): Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman
Genre: Fantasy (Epic)
First Printing: March 2000
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast, Inc.
SPOILER WARNING
Mild spoilers for Dragons of the Fallen Sun will be included throughout this review, through I will keep the first paragraph of each section as spoiler-free as possible. Heavy spoilers will be confined to clearly labelled sections.
I will not be including any spoilers for Dragons of a Lost Star or Dragons of a Vanished Moon, as I am writing this review prior to reading those two titles. However, there will be unmarked spoilers for titles earlier in the Dragonlance chronology, particularly the Dragonlance Chronicles series (Dragons of Autumn Twilight, Dragons of Winter Night, and Dragons of Spring Dawning) and Dragons of Summer Flame. Those books fundamentally shape the world in which the War of Souls trilogy takes place, so I can’t really discuss this book without spoiling key elements from those ones.
STRUCTURE
In this review, we will cover the following:
Premise
Rating
Series Structure
Target Audience
Title
Plot
Character
Worldbuilding & Exposition
Prose & Editing
Mysteries
PREMISE
From the back cover of the box set reprint of Dragons of a Fallen Sun (which, according to the publisher information inside the book, was printed sometime in 2003):
The people of Krynn have known war in past ages. Some are still alive who remember the triumph of good at the conclusion of the War of the Lance. Still more remember the Chaos War, which ended the Fourth Age of the world.
But now a new war is about to begin, more terrible than any have known. This war is one for the very heart and soul of the world itself.
Reaction
This is one of those premises that is perfectly accurate because of its vagueness. All we are told is the general placement of the trilogy in the Dragonlance timeline and that war is looming. That is exactly what we get in the book. The most I could really nitpick here is that it seems more like there’s a lot of decentralized conflict rather than one new war igniting. The story picks up with an existing war between the Solamnic Knights and the Knights of Neraka, and that conflict evolves by the end of the book; there’s also a separate military conflict kicking off between a dragon’s forces and one of the elvish kingdoms in the setting. I amuse that this looming war will manifest later in the series. The ending of Dragons of a Fallen Sun makes it clear that things have escalated dramatically and that a far more devastating conflict is on the horizon.
RATING: 7/10
There is so much about Dragons of a Fallen Sun that I really, really did not like. I am going to complain about these things in great detail, to the point of complimenting far worse books.
However … even more so than Xenos, I cannot in good faith say that the narrative is broken. The story as a whole does work. If anything, the elements that work well were so easy to read that I breezed through those portions, only to slog through the things I disliked, thereby making the issues seem more pervasive than they actually are.
SERIES STRUCTURE
You may have noticed in the Stats that this is “Volume I” of the trilogy rather than “Book 1”. That is how the book was marketed, and doing so was a very honest decision. Dragons of a Fallen Sun is not a standalone book with a definite beginning, middle, and end. It is very clearly a handful of chapters that comprise the first third of a single story, that being the War of Souls.
I could explain this in terms of The Lord of the Rings. After all, that is also one continuous story, which Tolkien split into six volumes across three books due to publisher concerns about the length. However, as a child of the Peter Jackson films, I personally struggle to see The Lord of the Rings as one narrative. I was first introduced to it as three movies with definite beginnings, middles, and ends. I may understand the history at play and can look at the books and see the truth, but deep down, I have trouble accepting it. I’m sure that at least some of you who saw the films before reading the books feel the same way (and, of course, if you haven’t read the books, you won’t have any frame of reference except the three disparate narratives).
So, instead, let’s compare this to The Empyrean.
Fourth Wing, Iron Flame, and Onyx Storm are the first three books in a five part-series. Each of these stories is its own narrative. Yes, each sequential book is the sequel to all of the previous books, but at the end of the day, they are distinct stories that exist in sequence.
Let’s set aside the flaws of The Empyrean for a moment. If you read any one of those books to the end, you will likely feel some sense of fulfillment, whether that be the happiness of finishing a book you enjoy or the grim satisfaction that you didn’t give up entirely on a book you hated. Yes, you may find yourself eagerly awaiting the next book (perhaps even binge-reading the available books in order), but the fact remains that you will have hit a stopping point within the greater narrative of the series. You could step away feeling at least a partial sense of closure.
The same cannot be said of Dragons of a Fallen Sun. This book just ends at a moment of heightened tension. No one has reached the end of their character arc; only one conflict that was set up at the start of the book has been resolved, and that resolution just feeds back into an ongoing conflict. There’s no closure here. If you do not keep reading to Dragons of a Lost Star (and, most likely, onward through the end of Dragons of a Vanished Moon), you are very much not finishing things.
The reason I point this out is because it is something that affects the analysis. In and of itself, writing a story this way is not a bad thing. It’s clear that both W&H and the publisher were fully committed to completing the trilogy, and so this book was written from the beginning with the intention of pausing events a third of the way through the overall story. This is preferable to a book that was clearly written as a standalone and then broken at the end to force a sequel (as was the case in The Stardust Thief or Notorious Sorcerer) or else presents itself as a standalone and amounts to nothing more than a lot of filler building up to the series’ prologue (which is what happened in The Eye of Minds). As I analyze the Plot and Characters, I am going to be giving a lot of leeway for the fact that most of the plot threads and character arcs aren’t meant to hit some endpoint with this book.
However, this sort of thing can be very hard to swallow if you’re not used to it. I completely understand if someone hated this book and refused to read Dragons of a Lost Star because of the frustration at the lack of resolution. It’s part of the reason that I myself didn’t enjoy the book. I’m not sure that I’d read this whole series beginning to end for pleasure, so the lack of closure at the end of Volume I felt like an anticlimax.
TARGET AUDIENCE
Prior to reading Dragons of a Fallen Sun, I had never read any of W&H’s original works for the Dragonlance setting. I had read the YA adaption of Dragonlance Chronicles, followed by multiple series from Dragonlance: The New Adventures (namely, the Spellbinder and Dragon Quartets, the Trinistyr Trilogy, and the Elidor Trilogy). I am also familiar with D&D lore that originated from Dragonlance, such as Cyan Bloodbane (who got a profile and stat block in the 4th Edition Draconomicon), the Orbs of Dragonkind (again, from the 4th Edition Draconomicon, as well as their recurrence in the 5th Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide) and the titular Dragonlances (which I don’t remember being in the 4th Edition Draconomicon, but they did get stats in the 5th Edition Fizban’s Treasury of Dragons). I also own and make liberal use of the 5th Edition adventure book Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen and that free monster supplement that D&D Beyond released to go with it.
All of which is to say … I have absolutely no idea who Dragons of a Fallen Star is written for. I feel like a sit at a strange middle between neophyte and well-acquainted fan of the lore. Looking at this middle and those extremes, I frankly don't know where the target audience for this book (and arguably this whole series) should sit.
Is it for the newcomers?
If we were to go by the number and size of the exposition dumps throughout this story, one might think it was written for newcomers who have never read a Dragonlance novel before. W&H are onboarding new people as quickly as possible. However, those exposition dumps are severely lacking in critical lore. We get detailed character backstories and multiple iterations of world history over the prior sixty-odd years, with emphasis on the War of the Lance (the conflict from Dragonlance Chronicles) and the Chaos War (the conflict from Dragons of Summer Flame). However, we don’t know how this world works.
What does it really means that the gods have left - what was the relationship before they left, and how have things changed? We get one paragraph about one character’s perspective of this in the last 10% of the book, and that’s it. The story as a whole is very vague on this point, despite the fact that a major subplot (arguably the most important one) is about a prophet converting people to the cause of her deity.
What does it mean that magic users are losing their abilities - how did the magic system work in the first place, and how much did magic really impact the setting? Again, we have a subplot about a wizard struggling with the loss of his magic and following his efforts to reclaim it, but even this feels like he’s personally addicted to the power, not like the world as a whole actually cares that much.
What do the colors of dragons actually mean, and what are their abilities? As nonsensical and contradictory as Yarros’s handling of this concept is in The Empyrean, she at least provides something for the audience to work with. Here, we’re told that there are red dragons, green dragons, blue dragons, and silver dragons, and it’s never quite clear how they relate to each other.
If you know the lore of Dragonlance, you'll know the answers to these questions, but if you don’t, these would be massive stumbling blocks to fully appreciating the narrative.
Is it for the fans?
If we go back the multiple references to the past stories, one would think that this was written for the fans. I recognized plenty from Chronicles. Tasselhoff Burrfoot (arriving in this story courtesy of a literal time travel device) is one of the POV characters. Goldmoon shows up, and when she talks about Riverwind being dead, I know who she’s talking about and feel her sense of loss. Laurana also shows up, and we’re told about the death of Tanis - my reaction for this one was more muted, because while I remember Tanis as being a main character on the same level as Goldmoon, I mainly remember Laurana as Tanis’s love interest, so I don’t feel for her quite as strongly. Caramon Majere appears in the opening of the book and promptly dies of heart failure (the man was pushing ninety, after all), and that hurt quite a bit. Raistlin Majere, Sturm and Fizban are all referenced, and I at least appreciated who they were and what they were capable of. Other characters are implied to have been important in Dragons of Summer Flame, such as Caramon’s son Palin.
However … if it’s for the fans, why do said fans need to endure torrents of exposition about minute details of world history that aren’t relevant to the main narrative? It’s pointless and annoying no matter how one slices it. Either we’re being told information that we already know for no good reason (imagine if a character in the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy looked at the camera and spontaneously said, “Yoda died when he was 900 years old,” and you’ll get an idea of what I mean), or we’re being lectured about not knowing things we still don’t need to know. It’s the polar opposite of rewarding people who are already familiar with the setting.
That’s a small issue, though. What really tipped me off that this book might not be meant for the fans is the inclusion and utilization of the green dragon Cyan Bloodbane.
I’ll go into how Cyan was squandered when we talk about Mysteries. For now, I’ll just say that the mystery built around him in this book only has substance if you have zero prior knowledge of who he is or of what dragons in this setting are capable of. Anyone with even a passing understanding of these two points of information will see the twist coming at the 37% mark and spend the next 60% of the book (no, I am not joking, the reveal is held until the very end) feeling like they’re being patronized by the authors. Again, I have not read a Dragonlance novel in nearly 20 years, yet even I immediately figured this out. There’s not even a sense of dramatic irony to it. I spent the book wondering how all the characters linked to this mystery, who should all know what dragons in this setting and Cyan specifically are capable of, were so unable to see the obvious.
Is it for people in the middle?
Maybe? If so, this book is written with a very specific, very limited knowledge base to pull from. For someone like me, who does not have this specific pattern of knowledge, I felt like I was getting the worst of both worlds. I was continually being annoyed by exposition I didn’t need while being left in the dark on critical information. It seems like an unnecessary risk to take with audience engagement.
Why it matters
As we covered back in the review of The City of Brass, a book is flawed if it fails to understand its audience. However, I think it’s worth considering why The City of Brass failed versus why Dragons of a Fallen Sun failed. Also, despite my detailed complaints thus far, I don’t feel like the flaw is as severe in Dragons of a Fallen Sun as it is in The City of Brass.
We know exactly why The City of Brass made this mistake. Chakraborty told us in interviews. She wrote the book for a YA Muslim audience living in her local area, then tried to publish it for adult audiences across the Western, English-speaking world as a whole. This was a book written for a niche audience that was foisted upon general audiences without the necessary edits needed to reconcile the difference. The results were very messy. The story cut corners when it really needed to take time to develop things, and key details needed to understand the conflicts and the characters were left as something the audience needed to fill in based on lived experiences they most likely didn’t have.
Dragons of a Fallen Sun, by contrast, merely produces an uneven reading experience. It’s never clear if you’re expected to know things or to be looking upon the story with fresh eyes, but I wouldn’t say that it failed to engage me. As for the holes in the worldbuilding that the exposition failed to cover, they either don’t significantly affect the narrative of this one book (in the case of the questions about the gods and the dragons) or else get explored in the aspects that matter most (as the issue of why magic is failing does get an answer by the climax).
At the end of the day, I think the reason Dragons of a Fallen Sun doesn’t seem to be written for anyone is that W&H meant to write for everyone - that is to say, they tried to write a book that is both accessible to newcomers and rewarding for the fans. Where they went wrong was in what exposition they chose to provide while also writing the Cyan Bloodbane mystery in such a manner that only the new fans would be able to enjoy it. I feel like this could have been fixed by outright cutting a lot of the exposition and by reworking the Bloodbane twist for more dramatic irony (or at least taking the twist in a less predictable direction).
TITLE
This is probably the most unnecessary title of out any book I’ve reviewed thus far. More specifically, the fact the word “dragon” is in the title is unnecessary.
Yes, this is a book set in the Dragonlance setting, but not every book in this setting needs to mention dragons in the title. Most of the YA books didn’t. There’s an excerpt in the back of this book for another Dragonlace novel, and that book is titled Night of Blood (Book 1 of The Minotaur Wars)
Looking at the content of this book, dragons are barely relevant. There’s a green dragon named Beryl who drives a lot of the action, but by that logic, it would be more accurate to title this book Kender of a Fallen Sun, as Tasselhoff has a far bigger impact on the story than Beryl does. Various other dragons are name-dropped or appear in minor roles, but other factions take centerstage. The Knights of Neraka are more important than them, so Knights of a Fallen Sun would also be a more accurate title. There’s the Cyan Bloodbane twist, but even that just feeds back into what the Knights of Neraka are doing, so that’s still not enough to justify the title.
At least when Xenos had nothing to do with aliens until the second half, the name still made some sense because Eisenhorn was a member of Ordos Xenos. Even Malleus made more sense, as the involvement of dæmons was established in the prologue, and the influence of a dæmonhost was later revealed as a key influence in Act One of the story.
Obviously, this is a minor detail that doesn’t affect the quality of the writing. I just find it very weird how, in this case, the title was clearly only used to establish a connection to the previous W&H novels. It’s a marketing gimmick with no deeper substance. We’ve reviewed books where the narratives put gimmicks ahead of substance, but even these justified their titles. Siyon became publicly known as the Notorious Sorcerer. Violet was assigned to the Fourth Wing and messed up a translation of the phrase, “Iron Flame.” Someone tried to become master of all the djinn in Cairo. Even The Eye of Minds made some sense as an abstract way to tell the audience that it was about virtual reality.
PLOT
The plot of Dragons of a Fallen Sun is by far its weakest element.
I think that most of this problem boils down to this being Volume I of a three-volume epic. This book is effectively a very long Act One. It’s all setups. Even the inciting incidents feel more like setups to the dramatic events that truly kick the narrative into gear If we view the War of Souls as one massive book, then the slow grind and minimal developments within this one volume feel more like a deliberate choice with the promise of a payoff later.
The story isn’t all that interesting or original, at least not by today’s standards. Maybe it was shocking and provocative when it released. I found a review online saying that this book sharply veered from the tone of the past W&H Dragonlance novels, being far more bleak and darker. From two decades later, though, it’s wobbles between predictable and mildly interesting.
That said said, the plot is perfectly functional. As much as I’ve complained about the Cyan Bloodbane thing, I think the twist is fine (not great, but fine) if the book was indeed written for newcomers. The only unambiguous complaint I have for the plot is that there are unnecessary scenes involving minor characters that really could be cut outright and replaced with throwaway lines of exposition. It would help a lot with the pacing.
The plot also has one luminous star: the subplot for the character of Mina (the girl on the book’s cover), a prophet for an unknown god who converts ever-growing numbers of the Knights of Neraka to her cause. It’s genuinely interesting to see how she rapidly enthralls so many members of the faction established as the unambiguous villains, thwarts efforts by the existing leadership of the Knights to get rid of her, and then pursues her objective. The mystery surrounding what deity she might possibly be serving is also an engaging mystery (more on that later). I found myself flying through the Mina chapters whenever I encountered them.
CHARACTER
The cast of characters in Dragons of a Fallen Sun is quite massive. Unlike The Empyrean, with its massive mob of Red Shirts and accessories, most members of this cast are relevant to some degree and are memorable enough that you know who they are when their names are mentioned. When I came across names like Rolan or Malys or Palthainon or Samar late into the book, I at least remembered how they are connected to the POV characters and what role they’ve played in the narrative, even if their characterizations are too vague to remember them as people on their own. The last book I read to successfully juggle a large cast like this was Jade City.
That being said, much like Jade City, there are only a few members of the cast who truly define the narrative, either by driving the story or by having a meaningful impact upon the reader experience.
Galdar
Galdar is the POV character in the book’s first chapter, and he serves as the POV for most chapters of Mina’s subplot. We are introduced to him as a disgraced, one-armed minotaur serving as a scout for the Knights of Neraka. However, after Mina miraculously restores his lost arm, he becomes her loyal disciple, staying by her side despite his own crises of faith.
What makes Galdar such a compelling character is his dynamic with Mina. He is undyingly loyal to her, yet his experience gives him a pragmatic and cynical edge that prevents him for embracing faith in her in the same way that the rank and file do. This is after Mina has restored his lost arm. This doubt makes it all the more potent when Galdar needs to take a leap of faith by following Mina into a seemingly suicidal situation or when he is awed by some new miracle. Even though the dynamic between him and Mina never truly changes after she restores his arm (which happens at the 4% mark), there is still a sense of emotional growth and depth as the story progresses.
Mina
Mina is both the best part of this book and the main driver of events. I’ve seen her compared to Joan of Arc, yet I feel that really falls short of capturing the impact she has on the story. She’s a warrior prophet who is radically expanding the faith in her god.
We are introduced to Mina when Galdar’s scouting party happens upon her in a desolate wasteland after a cataclysmic storm. She quickly wins over his party through her miraculous powers and force of personality. When she leads the party back to the nearest of the Knights of Neraka’s armies, this combination of miracles and influence allows her to swiftly sway the entire army to her cause. She then leads many of her followers on a suicide mission assigned to her by the Knights’ leadership, displaying absolute conviction that her god will protect her and that walking into this trap will ultimately bring her god victory.
What I particularly love about Mina is that she doesn’t feel like a copy-paste job of a cult leader archetype. Bachel from Murtagh, for example, was just a copy of a copy of a copy, recognizable for what she is intended to be but having so little substance that only the mysteries around her are actually interesting. Mina, by contrast, reads like a character that W&H put serious thought into. There is a magnetism about her. It is very easy to understand how even cynical people who feel abandoned by any gods would be consumed by devotion to her and, through her, to her god.
Silvanoshei Caladon
The heir to the throne of the elvish kingdom of Silvanost, Silvanoshei (shortened to “Silvan” for most of the book) is the worst character in the book. This is not a matter of characterization so much as how he is utilized.
Silvan’s childhood was simultaneously incredibly sheltered and full of hardship. His parents were deemed as “dark elves” and lived in exile with their armies, forcing Silvan to grow up in military encampments. At the same time, his mother tried to keep him away from violence. This produced a young man who is proud, naïve, and entitled while simultaneously being accustomed to hard work and possessing a genuine desire to help people.
In concept, this is a fascinatingly nuanced character with a lot of opportunity to grow as the story progresses. In execution, Silvan’s character oscillates between that of a spoiled idiot and a heroic paragon. What’s worse, every time this happens, it is transparent that the oscillation only happens because that is what needed for the plot to progress in the direction that W&H desired.
I want to give some credit here: this is not a character assassination. This isn’t like Dara experiencing such a huge personality shift in The City of Brass that it felt like a bad setup for a shapeshifter twist; it’s not like Violet supporting a rebellion that her established and later characterization should drive her to oppose; it’s not even as bad as a character having his worldview skewed by Sancia’s lecture of classism despite the fact that he already possessed both a deep awareness of the issue and an honest desire to correct it. However, this is still bad writing. I can understand why Silvan makes every decision that he does. The issue here is that there’s never a sense of a character progressing through the narrative. Silvan simply adjusts his behavior to facilitate what the story needs, rather than driving the story through his characterization.
Tasslehoff Burrfoot
Tasslehoff pops forward in time from the events of Dragons of Summer Flame, intending to visit his friend Caramon and share the eulogy he wrote for Caramon’s funeral. This was apparently his second attempt to do so, with him arriving late on the first attempt and missing the funeral entirely. He is dismayed to discover that the future in which he has arrived is far bleaker than the one he popped into during his first attempt. This leads to him being going (well, being taken along) on a quest to make sense of the clashing timelines.
As mentioned above, I have only read the YA version of Dragonlance Chronicles, and it was a long time ago; with that being said, Tasslehoff is exactly as I remember him. He is a kleptomaniac eight-year old with ADHD, trapped in the body of a middle-aged hobbit. He is the quintessential kender, to the point that his narrative voice is the most distinctive of any character in the book.
I read a review of this book that praised Tasslehoff’s chapters for breathing life into an otherwise bleak story. I agree with this analysis. Tasslehoff’s chapters take scenes that would otherwise feel tedious and make them feel light or humorous. The one nitpick of have about Tasslehoff is that he isn’t used enough. I feel like a good way to address the holes in the worldbuilding exposition would be for people to actually answer the many questions he poses about why the world is different from what he expected. This would be more diegetic than the multi-page info dumps, more focused than meandering backstories, and more memorable due to Tasslehoff’s potential emotional reactions to the information as he receives it.
Alexius Medan
Medan is a Marshal with the Knights of Neraka, specifically in charge of the occupation forces controlling the elvish kingdom of Qualinost. While he is a staunch member of the antagonistic faction of the book, he has also come to deeply appreciate the kingdom and its culture, to the point that the only concession he still makes to living in a non-elvish manner is that his house was assembled from stone rather than being grown out of a tree (which is the case for most elvish buildings in the kingdom). He also is an idealist who fondly remembers the days when the Knights of Neraka valued honor.
I want to say that Medan is a nuanced and deep character. He walks a tightrope between serving the interests of the knights and flexing his authority to shield Qualinot from abuses; he will shield a Solamnic Knight from harm, even if it is in his best interests, because he applauds that Solamnic’s valor. There are some interesting layers at play here.
Unfortunately, in execution, Medan embodies the same problem as Silvan. Aspects of his personality surface as needed to drive the plot or force a certain reading of his character. He will freely make use of elvish collaborators and spies, yet he hates their treachery so much that he will disparage them to their faces, and so we’re supposed to overlook (not forget - he is at least called out for this) that bad things happen in this plot precisely because of he is paying elves to betray their own people. There’s also baffling scene where he needlessly orders two of his men to die in one-on-one duels with a Solamnic Knight, rather than having them attack and overpower this Solamnic together, because he’s just so impressed that the Solamnic is making a heroic last stand … despite the fact that he has no plan for what he’s going to do if the Solamnic survives the duels, comes at him, and kills him, thereby leaving his job to be taken over by a Knight of Neraka who is far sympathetic to the people of Qualinost. It just feels so arbitrary. W&H needed the Solamnic in question to survive this scene, so they had Medan order his men to die and blindly trust that things would work out for him.
WORLDBUILDING & EXPOSITION
The Setting
Much like the plot, the worldbuilding of this book is not spectacular. I don’t think it’s necessarily bad, but as Epic Fantasy goes, it’s not groundbreaking. It’s another vaguely European, high-medieval / low Renaissance setting, with the main identifier of note being that it’s a Dungeons & Dragons setting, which means certain monsters and certain rules are consistent with the other popular D&D properties.
I realize how reductive this sounds. As someone who has at least a passing familiarity with most of the classical D&D settings, I know that there is a discernable difference between Dragonlance and, say, the Forgotten Realms. It’s just that a lot of these differences boil down to vibes. Dragonlance is, as best as I can tell, a setting intended to tell tales of epic wars (emphasis on “wars”) between good and evil.
If you like this sort of setting, that’s great. If not, you may want to skip this book.
Exposition
As mentioned above, rather strange choices were made for the exposition of this book. We learn a great deal about personal character histories and the present geopolitical landscape, but not about the why of these things.
For example, if you are not familiar with the divine struggle between Paladine and Takhisis, you will go into this story having no frame of reference as to why the Knights of Neraka do anything. W&H take time to explain how the Knights of Neraka evolved from the Knights of Takhisis, but without that starting point, it feels limp. Black armor and edgy rank titles weren’t enough to establish a faction as unambiguous villains even in the early 2000s, and it feels even less effective now. Thus, when one has the read multiple pages explaining the full history of how an accountant with good logistical skills became the current leader of the Knights of Neraka, it doesn’t really impart any information needed to understand the story.
Sometimes, what we see on the page contradicts the exposition we receive. If you know Dragonlance, you’ll be aware of how powerful dragons are and what magic they have access to. You will be aware of just how dangerous the big dragon who’s too lazy to leave her lair truly is. However, without that foreknowledge, you will just get a bunch of scenes insisting that dragons are scary, a scene of a dragon doing a high-altitude flyby, and an escape scene where a dragon is thwarted without consequence or injury by just flying through a cloud. These dragons seem absolutely pathetic if you don’t know the rules already.
The Gods
During the events of Dragons of Summer Flame, the gods left the world. This, among other things, cut off all divine magic (magic fueled by connection to a god). A religion of mysticism sprung up in the wake of the gods’ departure, using the “power of the heart” to take the place of divine magic. There's a scene between Mina and a silver dragon that heavily implies that she used to serve some role at the main temple of these mystics. Even people not of this religion, like the Knights of Neraka, can access the mystics’ magic and use it to heal people.
That is all we are really told about this fundamental aspect of the world.
I’m torn on this. The absence of the gods is hammered on so many times, yet there is barely any exploration of what this actually means for the story or the characters. At most, it is associated with the fading of magical powers. We are being told to pay attention to it without anything coming from it.
This is the world Mina comes into. She serves an entity she refers to as the one true God (yes, God with a capital G is how it is written). This God is nameless and, apparently, is neither good nor evil. All evidence points to this entity being very real. Mina is blessed with prophetic insights that always turn out to be correct and performs healing magic at a scale that even the most powerful of D&D clerics would struggle with. The one thing she can’t do - and the story makes a point to call this out - is raise the dead, something that would normally be possible for a cleric (especially if the subject has only recently died).
The Magic
Early on in the book, we are told that the magic has been getting progressively harder for people within the setting to us. Spellcasters have noticed that the amount of effort needed to cast a spell have been skyrocketing, to a point that most now find it impossible. Magic items likewise suffer. Only artifacts from the Fourth Age (in other words, magic items made prior to the gods departing) still work properly, and even those are starting to fail. The hunt for artifacts is therefore a driving motivation for multiple characters and factions.
How does magic work, though? What does it mean for society if magic is harder to use? How is the world adapting to this new status quo? What is truly at stake if magic fails completely?
If you are well-acquainted with Dragonlance, or simply understand D&D in general, you can try to fill in the blanks here. If you are a newcomer, though, this feels very flat. As someone in the middle, I can somewhat appreciate what consequences this has on the world, but not enough to feel emotionally invested when characters complain about magic failing for the umpteenth time. It just gets annoying after a while.
It’s Not That Bad
The worldbuilding of Dragons of a Fallen Sun is far from the best we have reviewed on this blog. The only reason I don’t say that it is the worst is that is neither contradictory nor cannibalistic. It’s perfectly functional; it’s just very bland.
Despite this …. I feel no qualms about holding this book up next to the likes of Shadow of the Conqueror, The City of Brass, or A Master of Djinn and saying, “Yeah, Dragons of a Fallen Sun is better than all of these.”
This comes down to how the worldbuilding is utilized.
In all three of the examples given, the setting is presented as part of the appeal for the story. The authors treated the setting as being of equal important to plot and character for the purposes of telling their stories. That’s fine in principle, but whether by accident or design, the authors in these examples pushed their worldbuilding to the forefront to distract from weak writing.
Dragons of a Fallen Sun does not depend on the worldbuilding in this way. There are certainly magical MacGuffins and lurking dragons and talk of the gods abandoning mortals, but at no point does it feel like the story is relying upon these things to keep the audience invested. What’s more, the Mina plot is written in such a way that her mass conversation of followers is compelling and believable regardless of the broader situation with the religious worldbuilding.
In short, this is a narrative that remains functional regardless of the flaws in the worldbuilding. Improving the worldbuilding would certainly improve the reader experience and aid for fully appreciating the story being told. It’s just that W&H did a good enough job that it isn’t necessary.
PROSE & EDITING
Given both the passage of time and my limited frame of reference, I went into this book with no preconceptions about W&H’s writing style. After finishing, it seems like the two of them were trying to write in the style of Tolkien. This isn't an inherently good or bad thing. However, it does make me wonder if the reason they did so many exposition dumps was an effort to imitate how Tolkien would go on tangents to tell the audience about the history of his world. If that’s the case, I feel like they didn’t properly understand why Tolkien's exposition dumps work. Tolkien typically kept exposition dumps small unless he had a diagetic reason to share that information. Gandalf info dumps to Frodo about the One Ring because he is trying to get Frodo caught up on the stakes of their present dilemma as quickly as possible. The Council of Elrond was an excuse for a diverse group do characters to sit down and get each other (and the audience) caught up about the state of Middle Earth. The big exception to this is, of course, Concerning Hobbits, but that is isolated to a prologue that also doubles as a recap of The Hobbit. You can very easily skip it. I don’t recall there being a moment in The Two Towers where Tolkien stopped the story for six pages to give us the full family history and career of Grima Wormtongue.
There are a couple of moments where information gets repeated with small contradictions. For example, Medan’s first POV scene makes note of how he no longer fears assassination attempts while among elves, trusting the elves of the puppet regime to keep him safe; in his second POV scene, while meeting with an elf who is an informant for him, he has a knife at the ready, and the text spells out his fear of assassins. This is an inconsistency that is easy to reconcile, yet the fact it happens in two sequential POV scenes makes it seem like an editing mistake. I can’t help but wonder if this is an issue of W&H miscommunicating. It reads like each of them worked on one of these scenes and then didn’t properly check one another's work.
MYSTERIES
While Dragons of a Fallen Sun is not a mystery story, it does present readers with unanswered questions to maintain engagement. There are also two reveals at the end of the book that are presented as shocking twists. Assessing the execution of these questions as mysteries is therefore worthwhile as a point of comparison.
What god does Mina serve?
This is a question posed early on. Everyone who falls under Mina’s sway wants to know the name of the god she serves. Her powers feel otherwordly within the setting. One could assume that this god she serves is an evil one, given how she co-opts the Knights of Neraka and is helping them to win wars, but without knowing what her god’s greater goal is, it’s entirely possible that this is meant as a situation of ends justifying the means.
The only thing that we really have to go on is that, in the opening chapter of the book, a sudden and cataclysmic thunderstorm ravages the local continent. Mina appears to Galdar and his party in the aftermath of the storm. That silver dragon who interacts with Mina later in the story is blinded by it, and it’s implied the magic unleashed by the storm allows Goldmoon to access information relevant to the next mystery we’ll cover. The storm appears to be connected to Mina, and thus, to this god.
This question is not answered by the end of the book. All we get is that, near the climax, Mina delivers the exposition about her God being beyond good and evil. This is something that is left hanging for future books.
I think this mystery works fine when one considers this book as Volume I of a continuous story. This is something that is being set up for exploration as the series progresses. The unanswered question gives the audience something intriguing to come back to.
Why is magic failing? (Heavy Spoilers)
This is a mystery that does not work nearly as well.
Early in the book, we are told that magic is failing. Throughout the book, this fact is hammered in. However, no effort to made to answer the question. The audience is given nothing that we can use to answer it ourselves. Characters just treat it as something inevitable while scrambling around for Fourth Age artifacts.
Then, late in the book, Tasselhoff is accused of destroying magic. You see, by traveling to the future, Tasselhoff avoided his death. When a wizard tries to use Tasselhoff’s time travel MacGuffin to go back in time himself, he discovers that he can’t go back before the point that Tasselhoff left to come to the future. Rather than assume the MacGuffin itself is preventing a paradox, the wizard decides that Tasselhoff not being dead broke magic, despite having nothing else to connect the time travel to magic failing.
The answer finally comes when Goldmoon enters the story as a POV character. In the aftermath of the aforementioned storm, Goldmoon discovers that she can see the spirits of the dead. They are crowding around spellcasters, feeding on the magic released when a spell is cast. They later destroy the time travel MacGuffin by feeding upon it in large numbers.
This mystery is a strange inversion of the ones from Fourth Wing. There, the setups for twists did technically exist on the page; they were simply slapped in with as little impact as possible and then swept under the rug so that the audience wouldn’t get distracted from the story Yarros wanted to tell. Here, the mystery is given prominence, yet we are given no way to solve it. We’re just handed an answer at the climax.
Now, maybe this wasn’t truly intended as a mystery. Maybe this was just a slow-burn setup for the reveal about the ghosts draining magic from the living. If so, though, W&H overdid it. The question of why magic was failing shouldn’t have gotten so much focus if we were meant to just sit back and wait for the answer to be handed to us.
Where is Cyan Bloodbane? (Heavy Spoilers)
All right. Let’s break this down.
The kingdom of Silvanost is protected by an impenetrable magical barrier. One of the inciting incidents of this book is that, on the night of the storm, Silvan passes through the barrier after nearly dying in a lightning strike. (This is itself presented as a mystery, but not one the novel emphasizes; we later learns the the barrier will automatically adjust to shelter helpless people adjacent to it, thereby imprisoning them inside it.) Once inside, elf rangers recognize him as the heir to the throne. They tell him how the magical barrier is draining the life force from all living things in the kingdom, killing the forest and sickening the elves, and urge him to take his rightful place so that he can push back against the general who currently rules the kingdom and wants the shield to be maintained. It is at this time that the rangers also tell Silvan of rumors that Cyan Bloodbane returned to the kingdom before the shield was raised and is now prowling the lands within, but the rangers haven’t been able to find him.
Now, if you know nothing of Cyan or of dragons in this setting, this mystery might intrigue you. The summary version of Cyan’s manipulation of Silvan’s grandfather (during the events of Dragonlance Chronicles) will set clear stakes. Maybe, if you paid attention during the scene where Mina speaks with the silver dragon, a theory will emerge. Then, when Mina half-reveals the truth right before the climax, it will click. You will feel rewarded when the reveal comes on page 607. It may not be a fabulous twist, but it’s functional.
However, maybe you have some foreknowledge of the setting, and thus are aware of the following facts:
Cyan Bloodbane is a green dragon, and green dragons are renowned for being deceivers.
Dragons in this setting have the power to shapeshift into humanoid forms.
Dragons are able to master arcane magic.
So when the general who controls Silvanost gets a POV scene, and we learn how his one and only advisor is the wizard who creating the magical shield that’s killing everyone, and that wizard was also so helpful as to reveal how the general couldn’t trust anyone else to advise him … yes, obviously, that’s Cyan Bloodbane.
Maybe W&H were trying to create dramatic irony for the longtime fans. Silvan wants to be a good king, and he is certain that he will not become his grandfather, and yet as soon as he arrives in Silvanost, Cyan arranges to make himself Silvan’s regent and convinces Silvan to trust him completely. The problem is that Silvan doesn’t get enough focus in this story for that dramatic irony to really play out. We get one chapter where he’s telling his cousin about how wonderful Cyan’s wizard persona is, and then in Silvan’s next chapter, he is asserting his authority and forcing Cyan to scramble to keep control of him. It’s not even like Cyan lives on to serve as a recurring antagonist for Silvan at the end of the book. He dies on page 612, a mere five pages after the reveal.
Final Thoughts on the Mysteries
Dragons of a Fallen Sun does not lean on mysteries in the same manner that either Fourth Wing or Goblet of Fire do. I think the closest point of comparison would be The City of Brass, namely the hanging question of how Dara is outside his vessel without a master and the reveal that Nahri is in fact his master. That was successful because Chakraborty didn’t present this mystery as some mind-blowing information. It was more of a case of simple setup and payoff. If the failing of magic and the question of where Cyan was weren’t emphasized so heavily, I don’t think I’d have nearly as much to complain about.
As for the mystery of the god Mina serves, I think this is executed well. This is the sort of thing I had in mind when I suggested that Andarna’s uniqueness should have gotten more focus in The Empyrean. Yarros could have made the strangeness of Andarna being allowed to bond into an unanswered question that nags at Violet throughout the back of Fourth Wing and all through Iron Flame. I don’t think that it would have single-handedly addressed the problems with how Andarna was used in the latter book, but it would have provided an ongoing thread of intrigue to preserve narrative momentum from one book to the next.
CONCLUSION
Dragons of a Fallen Sun is a perfectly functional narrative with one very interesting plot thread and several others that are at least average. While there were plenty of things for me to criticize, none of them broke the narrative outright. They were merely elements that frustrated me because of how the narrative could have been so much more.
Like I said at the top, I think this Epic Fantasy series from two decades ago is a time capsule. Combined with Goblet of Fire, while was released the same year as this book, we have two data points to consider where Fantasy in recent years has gone wrong (outside of the issues we’ve previously discussed). I’d like to do more reviews of mainstream titles from that era to get a clearer picture of things, yet to start with, I do want to highlight one thing that jumped out of me: Dragons of a Fallen Sun, like Goblet of Fire, doesn’t expect spectacle, high concepts, or vibes to be a substitute for a well-written story. The audience isn’t being asked to accept cut corners or turn a blind eye to plot holes because something flashy is on the page. There’s no recourse to virtue signals or Representation, no outrage bait to jerk the audience around, no power fantasy to drug us with validation or other things. Obviously, these flaws existed in some form in other books released at the same time. There are also Epic Fantasy stories today that avoid these problems (I don’t remember the Licanius Trilogy having them). I just find it interesting that this book that is barely above average manages to cross a basic writing threshold that so few recent titles on this blog have managed to do.
I guess the lesson here is that we need to work hard and try to tell stories that can exist in tandem with the worldbuilding and spectacle, rather than being dependent upon these things.
BACK TO BASGIATH
I will be reviewing Dragons of a Lost Star soon. Exactly how soon is unclear: at this point, I have finished reading Onyx Storm and am hard on at work on that review series (which will have more than 20 parts in total), which is eating up a lot of my spare time. We will be reviewing a Middle Grade novel, The Hero of Numbani, as our next standalone reviw.
In terms of series, the Goblet of Fire series is on its final two weeks, and then the Onyx Storm review hits the week after. That leaves a gap on March 14th. I’d originally intended to squeeze in another book review before starting the Onyx Storm series. However, on January 15th, ELLE.com released a puff piece on Yarros, which was clearly intended to feed the hype for this book. The article is effectively marketing for the book. In it, Yarros revealed a lot about herself. Some of it was inspiring. Other parts destroyed any lingering hope I had for her as a writer. Since this did color my expectations going into the book, I think it’s important that we do a breakdown so that you all understand why my comments will be more acidic in the Onyx Storm review than in the reviews for its two predecessors, so my analysis of the article will take that open day.
It’s going to be a wild ride ahead. I hope you’ll join me for it. Don’t forget to subscribe if you’d like to join the weekly newsletter with all the latest post lines. Have a good weekend, all.
