Iron Flame (Chapter 10 through Chapter 12)

STATS

Title: Iron Flame

Series: The Empyrean (Book 2)

Author(s): Rebecca Yarros

Genre: Fantasy (Epic)

First Printing: November 2023

Publisher: Red Tower Books

Rating: 1/10

SPOILER WARNING

Heavy spoilers will be provided for the entire story up through the end of the content covered in this part. Mild spoilers for elements later in the story may be provided, but I will keep the first paragraph of each section as spoiler-free as possible. Heavy spoilers from later in the book will be confined to clearly labelled sections.

STORY

Violet defends herself from the first-year who murdered Nadine. She ultimately manages to stab him to death, though not before he delivers he message, “Secrets die with the people who keep them,” outing himself as an assassin sent by Colonel Aetos.

Afterwards, Xaden visits her. They chat about some worldbuilding lore - including the daggers that kill venin and how the Quadrant strives to desensitize cadets to death - and Violet reflects on her struggle to not take him back. As they part ways, Xaden leaves Violet a letter. He is working to regain her trust by sharing his personal history with her.

Violet and Imogen go for a run together. As they return, they encounter Jesinia, who has snuck into the Riders Quadrant to deliver the book that Violet requested. Jesinia asks Violet’s help in translating an old tome. The pair then observe a rider being dragged off by Markham and two riders; Jesinia says that the rider had requested an incident report on a classified engagement on the border. Violet reflects on how dangerous her effort to research the wardstones is.

Mail is delivered to Violet and she and her squad go to the flight field for training. Violet discovers that her letter from Mira, who is posted at the border, has been redacted. Violet navigates a conversation of half-truths with her squad.

On the flight field, Violet encounters Draconis Umbridge, who engages in some weak banter about her near-assassination. He orders her to have Andarna attend flight exercises. After this engagement, we see Dain demonstrate a “running landing”, which Violet instantly knows that she cannot do and will need accommodations for.

Violet has her first leave to visit Xaden. On her way out to the flight field, she chats with Bodhi (a rebel child, another character so interchangeable that Yarros goes multiple pages of dialogue without using her actual name) about her relationship with Xaden. A character names Catriona is mentioned as a former girlfriend of Xaden’s. Before Violet can mount Tairn, Draconis Umbridge and a pair of other riders show up to search her for contraband, though they do not search Tairn (whom has already been loaded with venin-killing weapons by the rebel children).

Violet reaches Samara, the outpost where Xaden is stationed. She witnesses the fighting pit that the riders have to gamble leave time and learns that Xaden is fighting to get additional leave. After this, Violet begs Xaden for sex, only to be refused. They then discuss the nature of the alloy and daggers that kill venin.

ACTION

There’s good and bad in the fight scene between Violet and the first-year.

This Is My Fight

This action scene is contrived, for the simple reason that the assassin should have been mowed down by people standing around Violet. The justification for why they don’t makes no sense.

My heart launches into my throat as people around me yell my name, but they can’t interfere. I’m a second-year, and this asshole isn’t in my squad.

Violet being a second-year, at most, explains why no first-years interfere. She told the people around her not to interfere, which could be construed as an order. However, it shouldn’t stop any of the other second years (some of whom explicitly outrank her, as is the case with Rhiannon) from intervening, and it definitely shouldn’t stop the third-years.

As for the assassin not being in her squad, that is not how the rule was established to work. Squad mates can’t kill each other. There is nothing preventing them from protecting members of their own squad. There is nothing preventing them from intervening in fights between two people who are from other squads. In fact, with how it is worded, this doesn’t even prevent the assassin’s squad from dragging him off of Violet and subduing him without killing him.

Not only does this not make sense, but it directly contradicts the previous book. If no one can interfere when a person from one squad tries to kill someone from another squad, then what was the point of bodyguarding Violet in the last book? Surely, Dain and Xaden would have known there was no point if the Codex prevented interference. Violet could be killed in front of her bodyguard without consequence if this was truly the case.

Yarros wanted this one-on-one fight scene, but she also knew it wouldn’t be possible, so she opened a pot hole to justify it.

Choreography

The fight is orders of magnitude better than anything in Fourth Wing. I don’t actually think that Yarros has learned and applied any lessons here. If anything, she merely neglected to throw in the variables that usually make Violet’s actions so questionable. Nevertheless, the fact remains that this scene shows promise.

Back in Chapter 9, we got a throwaway line from the professor in charge of the sparring tests about how Violet was trained by Xaden, and thus, he would not unleash her on a first-year. I have previously criticized this as an explanation for why Violet can overpower opponents from her own year or above, given how they are being trained at the same time at her, have trained longer than her prior to entering the Quadrant, and have physical advantages over her. However, in the case of a second-year Violet fighting a first-year recruit, that first detail no longer applies. It would not be unreasonable to assume that a year of training in the Quadrant would balance out the advantages of pre-Quadrant training and physical superiority.

We also get additional context in the fight. There is indication that the first-year assassin is on some sort of drug, which might aid him in some respects but impair him in others. He also refuses to use knives, even after Violet throws a couple at him, meaning that Violet has a force multiplier that he does not.

All this is to say that I actually do find it credible that Violet could win this fight. Yarros did not have to toggle between realism and Rule of Cool to make it possible.

Aftermath

After killing the assassin, Violet has a moment of grief over Nadine’s death … which is milked for emotion and then discarded.

There’s no real weight to it. Nadine was never really a character. This is, at best, the same, “I can’t let people keep dying for me,” shlock that frequently pops up with self-insert Mary Sues. It gives them something to feel guilty about and then get over without having to give them actual flaws to reflect upon and overcome. Their inherent goodness cannot comprehend loss, and this empowers them to seek the path of righteousness. They wash themselves clean of the sin of not preventing all bad things by transforming into something even more powerful and special.

This is going to be a running problem in this book, especially in Part Two. Yarros is going to have Violet accept blame for a lot of things that aren’t her fault while ignoring Violet’s very real flaws. This allows Violet to be forgiven and uplifted without having to undergo meaningful change.

PLOT

Rebellion Plot

This plot starts to build forward momentum in these chapters. This should be a good thing. Unfortunately, its tires are blown out by multiple instances of incompetence by the antagonists who drive this plot.

Bumbling Idiots

The attempt to assassinate Violet - and, as we learn through her conversation with Bodhi, other assassination attempts upon the other rebel children from the climax of Fourth Wing - was terribly conceived and executed. These assassins are clearly not receiving the bare minimum of prep for their missions. If they were, Violet would have had her neck snapped instead of Nadine. This is yet another layer of incompetence for the rider leadership. Besides, if they are desperate enough to attempt killing Violet and the rebel children, why did they not just invoke Addendums 5.2 & 5.3 and finish all of the rebel children off in one sweep while they had the chance?

That’s Sus

We now have confirmation that the rider leadership knows that the rebel children are smuggling weapons. They would not have searched Violet as she was leaving Basgiath unless they had something they were looking for and knew she was connected to it. Yarros seems to be aware of this. She once again tries to slap a patch over the problem that only serves to make the problem worse. In Chapter 12, as Violet discusses being searched with Xaden, we get this.

“Did they searh Sgaeyl?

[Xaden] shakes his head. “Only me. And Garrick. And every other new lieutenant leaving Basgiath with a rebellion relic.

“They know you’ve been smuggling something out.” I lean over the edge of the high bed and drop my brush into my bag. “Toss me a sharpening stone.”

“They suspect.”

This is ridiculous. The rider leadership either knows exactly what is happening and who is doing it, or else they would not be searching anyone at all. It gets even worse when one considers this line from Bodhi back in Chapter 11, right before Violet is searched.

“And tell [Xaden] it’s raw. They’ve had the forge burning night and day, so we haven’t been able to -” He flinches. “Just tell him it’s raw.

To recap:

• Navarre is actively using the luminary. When would a society as paranoid as Navarre not keep a military asset that they are currently using under heavy guard, both to protect it and to prevent unauthorized access? How have the rebel children (and the dragons they use to fire the luminary) not been caught? Just saying, “We can’t use it when they are,” isn’t enough. They shouldn’t be able to get near the luminary at all.

• There’s a possibility that Bodhi is referring to another forge, and that the “raw” alloy has come out of the luminary and needs to be forged into blades. However, that would make the problem worse, as now Navarre is both completely neglecting luminary security AND neglecting the bare minimum of security on the weapons forges needs to make use of alloy. To go back to my nuclear refinery analogy, this would be like if the US government granted a free run at both centrifuges and the facilities needed to assembly nuclear weapons.

• The rebel children have “raw” alloy. They had to get that material from somewhere. This means that either they stole the alloy after it came out of the luminary (in which case, Basgiath would have discovered the theft, and all previous instances, with a basic inventory check), they stole the materials needed to produce the alloy and made it themselves (in which case, Basgiath would have discovered THAT theft, and all previous instances, with a basic inventory check), or they have been smuggling all of the necessary materials IN to Basgiath (something that has not been established).

The long and short of it is, no, there is nothing for the rider leadership to “suspect”. They should know exactly what has happened. They also know exactly who is responsible, because it would not be showing up in Melgren’s nigh-omnipotent map of the future.

This is not an episode of NCIS, where the team needs to jump through hoops to get either a confession or enough evidence for a conviction through due process. This is a military dictatorship that executes people for manifesting a random magical gift. They drag off a rider for requesting a document that he would have no reason to believe was classified. (We will later learn that said rider was executed for this.) The last book explicitly told us that riders don’t bother with trials.

Iron Flame cannot take this foundation, present the facts as they now stand, and then really expect us to believe that the rider leadership would be hamstrung by having suspicions but no smoking gun. Either they know enough to slaughter Violet and the rebel children (or, at least, to detain them indefinitely for interrogation), or they are utterly ignorant. Helpless suspicion, in the face of everything the rider leadership knows and is capable of, robs them of any lingering credibility and this plot of any stakes or tension.

Search and Destroy

Why does the rider leadership not search the dragons?

This isn’t rocket science. If you have adequate cause and authority to search someone you should have cause to search their luggage (unless you are in a world with complex due process laws, which this world has not been established to have). The fact that the luggage is already in the trunk of the car would not make it exempt. In fact, it seems like this society should have regulations on the books to allow the searching of a dragon, much in the same way that there are jurisdictions where police can search a vehicle without a warrant if the windows are too tinted for them to casually glance inside. The rider leadership are DRAGON RIDERS. They should consider the possibility of contraband being on the dragon.

One possible explanation for this is that the leadership can’t search dragons like Tairn or Sgaeyl, for fear that the dragons will lash out. However, as we are going to get into with the agency discussion next week, the rulings of the Empyrean force some degree of cooperation from the dragons when it comes to the orders of the rider leadership. Why would this not force Tairn or Sgaeyl to submit to search? Why would the rider leadership not send riders and dragons to subdue Tairn through sheet numbers and thereby force him to submit to search?

For that matter, if the rider leadership is going to search suspected traitors prior to any sanctioned departure, why would they not post guards on the flight field and search any suspected traitor who comes out? Tairn has the alloy because rebel children snuck it out to him earlier. The rider leadership could have easily intercepted the alloy before dragons even became involved. In fact, if they suspect a smuggling operation, why would they not be on-edge for any unsanctioned departures (thereby allowing them to intercept the alloy)?

No matter how one slices it, the fact that this book once again failed to end with a rider leadership victory by the end of Chapter 11 just doubles down on the joke that this antagonist faction is.

Master of Dragons

Draconis Umbridge ordering Violet to summon Andarna is something we are going to get into next week. For now, I just want to highlight that Yarros manages to undermine this plot thread in the same scene that she establishes it, all because she had to have Violet say this in response to the order.

“Dragons don’t take orders from humans.”

It does not matter how Draconis tries to work around this obstacle. The fact that the obstacle exists in the first place confirms that this conflict is meaningless. The story needs to stop putting focus on the riders as antagonists and move it to the dragons.

You’ve Got Mail

This verges on being a worldbuilding point, yet it does drive the plot forward, so I will stick it here.

Why does the rider leadership redact personal mail?

The thing about redaction is that it doesn’t hide that classified information exists. It merely prevents it from being accessed. Those thick black bars that have been drawn on Violet’s letter are a clear message that the reader has picked up a document with information he or she is not permitted to read, and thus, that information is being kept from them.

The issue here is that the rider leadership doesn’t want the rank and file to know that a secret is being kept. That’s why the history books were edited. That’s probably why they dragged off (and executed) a rider cadet for trying to access information on an incident they wanted to bury, rather than merely telling him that the incident has been classified.

Redacting a personal letter only encourages the recipient (and anyone whom the recipient shares the letter with or tells about the letter) to ask questions. That is the opposite of what the rider leadership wants.

What the rider leadership should have done was force Mira to rewrite the letter until they were convince it was sanitized. Alternatively, they should have just rewritten the letter themselves, omitting or changing anything incriminating, and excused the change in handwriting by having “Mira” had to dictate the letter to someone else after injuring her hand. Either circumstance would showcase Violet’s intellect as she reads between the lines and realizes that the mail was tampered with, while simultaneously preserving the threat of the antagonists by having them minimize the number of red flags raised.

Wardstone Subplot

More Incompetence (Heavy Spoilers)

By showing us the rider being dragged off during the scene where Violet meets with Jesinia, Yarros tries to raise the stakes of this subplot. She is reminding us that, if Violet says the wrong thing or makes the wrong request, she could be found out and interrogated (or executed) too.

Here’s the problem with that - why would Violet not already be under surveillance?

The rider leadership suspects her enough to search her for contraband. They know she has links to the Archives and the scribes. Markham was just character assassinated to show us that he is now a Bad Guy and acknowledges Violet as a threat.

These problems were lurking in the background from the moment Violet hatched this plan and went to the Archives. However, now we have proof that Markham (and, by extent, the rider leadership) is both paranoid enough to take out a no-name rider who couldn’t even have realized that he was asked for anything classified. With everything established, Violet should already have been detained, interrogated, and executed.

Yarros will try to justify this later in the story. Jesinia, as Violet’s friend and a Good Guy, just knew that Violet was researching something she shouldn’t, and thus opted to not log any of Violet’s requests per established protocol. Markham and the rider leadership therefore had no paper trail to lead them to Violet (unlike the no-name rider).

This is not a fix. Even if Violet is never caught with books that were never checked out of the Archives (thereby incriminating her), even if the missing books are never noticed by another scribe during an inventory check (thereby incriminating Jesinia), there is still the matter that Violet’s coming and goings from the Archives, as well as the scribes with whom she associated, would have been heavily scrutinized if the antagonists had the bare minimum of credibility or competence.

Lotpay Ontrivancecay

The reason that this scene takes place is because Jesinia brought Violet an old tome for translation help.

The fact that Violet speaks a dead language is convenient. However, given her background, it’s not impossible. The explanation for why she knows it - she and Dain learned this dead language as children so that they could communicate in code - is really stretching things, but then again, I knew a girl in middle school who was working on her own conlang, so I can roll with it. The fact that Jesinia doesn’t speak this dead language takes us to the breaking point. Still, being scholarly or generally intelligent does not make a person good at everything. A dead language is a reasonable gap in her skill set.

Sadly, Yarros didn’t know when to quit.

“Thank you. I know almost every other language.” [Jesinia’s] motions are sharp, and her mouth tenses.

This subplot is propelled forward because Violet just so happened to learn the one dead language that the polyglot scholar did not. She only learned said dead language for childish frivolity, yet is fluent enough to aid in translating it. This is utterly contrived.

Story should not be driven forward by such cosmic coincidences. They only serve to expose the artificiality of the narrative.

Romance Subplot

Any investment that I had in this romance died in Chapter 12.

Foundation

I don’t want belabor just how poorly written this Trust conflict is. Violet’s delusions are on full display in these chapters, but they don’t constitute a new element. Instead, my issue here is how Violet is an inherently and unrepentantly selfish person pursuing a selfless person.

As we covered back in Fourth Wing, the romance between Violet and Xaden is pure wish fulfillment and validation. Violet values Xaden as a sexual object, with emotion being a secondary concern. This wasn’t an issue from a literary perspective until the very last chapter of the book, which gave us Xaden’s POV. We therein learned that Xaden is wholly devoted to Violet, putting her needs above his. He values her as a human being and romantic partner, with sex being his secondary concern.

This was already a difficult disconnect to reconcile. While it’s possible that Yarros intended this as part of the wish fulfillment fantasy, what we have on the page suggests the Violet will discard Xaden the moment he stops gratifying her sexually. What reason do we really have to think that Violet won’t run off with the next sexy, sexy man who appears on the page? For that matter, what reason to we have to think she won’t run back to Dain once she has finished grinding him down into an empty husk that she can use at her own pleasure?

The Trust conflict hasn’t helped matters. Again, I’m not going to reiterate what it says about Violet as a character. I will only point out that the Trust conflict hinges of Xaden letting Violet down. The problem is that Xaden is already giving everything that he can reasonably can, given the demands of his position. Violet is within her rights to not trust him after that point, but if the narrative is going to keep hammering on about what Violet “deserves”, it makes it seem like Trust isn’t the real issue. Violet’s entitlement is.

False Reversal

What Chapter 12 does that makes things so much worse is that Violet goes from refusing a relationship with Xaden because he is not meeting her demands to literally begging him for sex. She claims that she’s willing to accept a purely sexual relationship. Xaden refuses, outright saying that he knows he can win her over and control her with sex, yet won’t do so. He wants to earn her trust and prove himself worthy as a romantic partner. Violet’s reaction is:

Somehow in the last month, we’ve managed to switch roles.

Once again, Yarros presents us with an idea that is good at a conceptual level. Once again, it utterly falls apart because of basic context.

In Fourth Wing, Xaden refused a relationship with Violet because he couldn’t afford to involve her in the rebellion. People depended upon him. Lives were at stake. An existential threat needed to be combated. In response to Violet actively pursuing him, insisting on a relationship, he offered sex as an olive branch. He was satisfying her desires as best he could while protecting everyone who counted upon him.

In Iron Flame, Violet refuses a relationship with Xaden on the basis of her personal emotions and desires, which she herself has acknowledge to be irrational in the face of Xaden’s responsibilities. Nothing is at stake if she takes him back except for her emotions. If anything, as Bodhi points out during their conversation in Chapter 11, Xaden’s efforts to win her back are distracting him from the task at hand. She would be helping to protect people, save lives, and combat the existential threat by just accepting that he is sincere and taking him back, thereby eliminating the distraction. At the same time, Xaden is not actively pursuing her. He is patient. He writes her a letter to share more about himself, but he outright states in Chapter 5 that a little breathing room would probably help their relationship in the long run. Violet begging him for sex and proposing a purely sexual relationship is not an olive branch. It is her trying to satisfy her own desires while protecting her own emotions, without any regard for Xaden’s feelings.

This is not a romantic relationship at this point. Violet is just toying with a man for her own gratification. If the book was honest about that, or if she faced come comeuppance or learned a lesson, this wouldn’t be an issue, but the nature of the power fantasy will not allow that. We are supposed to be wholly on board with this as a romance.

I’d say that it can’t get any worse than this, but I’ve read Chapter 27. It does, indeed, get worse.

Jealousy Conflict

This is how Xaden’s ex, Catriona, is first brought up in Chapter 11.

“You know it’s not like that for him,” [Bodhi] says in a lecturing tone that reminds me of Xaden. “I’ve never seen him -”

“Let’s not do this.”

“- care like this -”

“No really. Stop.”

“- and that includes Catriona.”

My gaze whips towards him. “Who the hell is Catriona?”

He winces and presses his lips in a thin line. “What are the chanes that you’ll orget I said that between here and Samara?”

Violet does end up forgetting about Catriona after this conversation - at least, until Chapter 28. Regardless, this was some very heavy-handed setup for a jealousy conflict.

Having one member of a romantic partnership get jealous over a former partner of the other is a well-used trope. I don’t think its inclusion here is bad. If anything, I prefer it to the current conflict of this subplot. My only really issue is that, again, this is going to be forgotten for 24% of the book. This conversation feels like so much of the foreshadowing in Fourth Wing: something that was tacked on in a final draft without bothering to properly integrate it into the story, thereby calling the audience’s attention to something being important without actually taking the effort to get us invested in that thing.

We’ll put this one on the back burned for now. There will be more to say when we get to Chapter, and far more on top of that when we get into Part Two of this book.

The Letter

The only aspect of the subplot in these chapters that is not terrible is Xaden writing the letter for Violet. It’s not going to amount for much, outside of the feel-good emotions of the moment as an excuse to feed character exposition to the audience, but it does show Xaden’s efforts to earn back Violet’s trust.

It sure is a shame that Yarros killed this romance mere chapters later.

CHARACTER

Violet

The good news is that I have something to say about Violet that don’t just rehash the points above.

The bad news is that it is also terrible.

Remember in the last book, how Violet cheated her way through sparring tests by poisoning her opponents? How, outside of her poisoning Jack that one time after Threshing, she seemed to have grown as a fighter and learned to use her own strength? How she defeated a venin is melee combat?

Remember in Chapter 10, how she defended herself from the assassin through skill and weaponry alone?

Chapter 11 doesn’t.

Challenges open up in a week. It’s time to start checking the list the cadre keeps so I can go about my poisoning ways again.

This character has not grown. She has earned nothing. She deserves nothing.

And it’s not just the poisoning that shows this issues. The flight training scene, which is also in Chapter 11, reaffirms that Violet is incapable of fulfilling the flight requirements for a rider, either. This is hers and Tairn’s reactions to seeing the running landing and hearing the professor’s brief instructions about it.

“How are we adapting to that?” I ask Tairn.

“I didn’t say we would.” He chufs. “The dragon-watcher will adapt his request, or I’ll have an early lunch.”

This maneuver is totally, completely pointless in the kind of war we need to fight.

“Kaori doesn’t know what’s out there,” I say softly to Bodhi.

“What makes you so sure?” He glances my way.

“If he did, he’d be teaching us faster ways to get off the damned ground, not land on it.”

Violet cannot complete a basic maneuver that all riders need to learn. Her response, rather than admit fault, is to decide that the requirement is stupid and not reflective of the needs of a rider, with her helicopter parent of a dragon decreeing that he will go full Karen to get her out of meeting the same standards as everyone else.

What’s more, her justification for why it is stupid doesn’t even make sense. Venin can only be killed by those alloy daggers (and Signet powers). Unless every rider is supposed to lure the venin into jumping on their dragons so that they can duel on dragonback, this will necessitate getting OFF the dragons. Then there’s the matter that, according to this same series, the running landing is necessary to drop riders off in places where a dragon physically cannot land.

Violet is right about not wanting to be on the ground with venin. They can leach life out of anything living thing in their vicinity that is in contact with the ground. Were she capable of doing the running landing, I think that her quip at the end would make sense.

The problem is that she is doing this AFTER she admits that she can’t do the running landing and needs accommodations. It’s clearly an excuse, much like how I would always conveniently have too much homework to attend sparring nights at Taekwondo. She knows she cannot meet basic standards, and thus, she is seeking any excuse to claim that which she cannot earn.

Xaden

I never thought I’d be in a position to compare Xaden Riorson to Tohru Honda from Fruits Basket, but here we are.

Xaden may not have Tohru’s innocence, but he’s giving her a run for her money in terms of purity of his heart and his love, at least when he is compared to Violet.

You deserve better than Violet, Xaden.

Also, in the Chapter 11 epigraph, we get a quote from Xaden’s letter to Violet.

Garrick has always been my best friend. His father was my father’s aide, which in a way makes him my Dain, except trustworthy.

Unlike Violet, Xaden does not have a prior friendship with Dain. He did not spend the last book lashing out at Dain for not morally and emotionally validating him. Dain is Xaden’s enemy, an agent of the state that Xaden opposes, capable of exposing a delicate operation by reading minds - and Dain has already done so, setting in motion the trap from the climax of Fourth Wing. On top of this, Xaden realizes that Dain is a romantic rival at least in the sense that Dain’s interest in Violet will lead him to do things that could present obstacles to Xaden. Violet then complicates this by refusing to fully let go of the idea that Dain is her friend. Xaden will want to disabuse her of that notion.

Therefore, unlike Violet, it makes perfect sense for Xaden to make an offhand remark about Dain being an untrustworthy person. I don’t feel sickened by this. It is a moment that builds Xaden’s character up rather than merely spitting on Dain’s.

Tara

Tara is the Token Queer Girlfriend to accessorize Rhiannon, the Token Queer Best Friend to accessorize Violet. In Fourth Wing, she was nothing but a piece of ass to give Rhiannon “a few much-needed orgasms”. In Iron Flame, her first contribution to the plot is Rhiannon talking about her.

[Rhiannon] sighs. “Neither of us has enough time for the other. It sucks, but maybe it will ease up next year when neither of us are squad leaders anymore.”

I’m touched, Rhiannon. At least, I would be. Your longing is somewhat dampened by how open you are about sleeping around.

Regardless of Rhiannon’s fidelity, Tara’s name appears five times in this entire book. After this, she:

• Is named twice in Chapter 17, wherein she appears to hand Violet a letter that advances the Rebellion plot.

• Is named once in Chapter 45, wherein Rhiannon thanks Violet for giving her and Tara privacy to have sex.

• Is seen in passing in Chapter 51, where she is in Rhiannon’s room, and we are expected to buy that the pair are “blissfully” happy.

I am not merely bringing Tara up to highlight Yarros’s compulsive and hollow virtue signals. Tara is important because, much like Anden’s crush in Jade City, she showcases how little Yarros actually cares about her tokenized characters.

By the time we get to Chapter 51 (many weeks or months from now), there will be another romance happening in the background of Iron Flame, to which a direct comparison can be drawn to Rhiannon and Tara’s relationship. The glaring divide as to how the two relationships are handled is not quite as sharp as that between Anden’s crush and the plot-essential romances of the other Kauls. However, it will provide a valuable insight into how to properly write romances that happen in the background between secondary or tertiary characters.

WORLDBUILDING

Dragon Agency

I promise we’ll get to this next week. For now, I just want to flag that Draconis is trying to bypass his ability to order dragons around by ordering Violet around, thereby allowing him to sanction her if she fails to produce Andarna. This seems like a loophole that dragons should be smart enough to close.

Accommodations

If Tairn is ready to challenge regulations to help an incapable rider graduate, why aren’t other dragons? What is the point of having requirements on the riders at all if the dragons can do this? Come to think of it, given how Tairn is a military asset, as is Violet’s Signet, what value do any requirements have? Wouldn’t exemptions be granted left and right to get the dragons onto the field?

Actually, that makes me wonder: do dragons need their riders with them in battle? We know they need their riders to power the wards. It’s vague as to whether or not distance affects the riders’ Signets. Nothing has been established about the limits of the dragons’ other abilities, though. If Violet can’t execute the maneuver, why not stick her in a fort somewhere while Tairn goes out to do the fighting?

Regardless, Violet’s (and Tairn’s) attitude towards her need for accommodations flies in the face of the world that has been introduced to us. This is very much a modern attitude towards accommodating the disabled. It actually goes beyond modern attitudes - even with modern militaries loosening their requirements for fitness (physical or otherwise), there are still rules that can’t be bent or broken without compromising the efficiency of the military. That anyone could even conceive this as a possibility is this supposedly brutal setting where Survival of the Fittest is a virtue is laughably unrealistic.

Knives in the Dark

Chapter 12 caps off with the explanation of the venin-killing daggers and how the alloy sustains the wards.

The dagger itself is a silver blade, with alloy being integrated into the hilt. The alloy is imbued with power from a rider. This power is what makes the dagger lethal to venin. It also allows the daggers (or any imbued piece of alloy) to sustain the wards. By stockpiling imbued alloy at border forts, Navarre is about the expand the bubble generated by the wards. The power will fade over time, though, so freshly imbued alloy needs to be cycled in. (It’s not made clear what happens to the expended alloy.)

The reason that Navarre is now forging the metal into daggers is that Melgren has foreseen that they will be important to victory over the venin. These daggers are being stockpiled in the forts in place of the usual ward-sustaining alloy for that eventuality. When Xaden was chosen by Sgaeyl at Threshing, the pair began working to smuggle daggers out.

Exposition

I want to give Yarros credit where it is due: I think she does a good job of pacing the exposition about the alloy. The topic of the dagger comes up naturally in the course of the scene in which is occurs. While the way the scene ends (Xaden plays the, “It’s classified,” card when Violet has asked all the questions Yarros wants her to ask) is very artificial, the density of information we receive is not too heavy. We learn the basics of the knives and how they are linked to the wards. Details like the composition of the alloy aren’t necessary at this point, so we are not expected to remember them.

Incompetence Thrice Over

By Xaden’s own admission, he has not only been smuggling weapons out of Basgiath and to Poromiel for three years, but he started this operation by stealing completed daggers.

How was the disappearance of these daggers not noticed? These were weapons being forged for a critical purpose at the instruction of the highest military authority in the land. They are not cookies being stored in a jar. Their disappearance would be noticed, and questions would be asked. I could buy Xaden getting away with this one time - that the rider leadership would notice the theft, launch an investigation, and then be forced to give up when they couldn’t find the culprit - but that he could get away with this multiple times, and then expand his operation to using the luminary itself, defies all logic.

Any antagonist with the slightest amount of intelligence would tighten security, thereby either catching Xaden or at least shutting down his operation before it could get off the ground.

What Are Your Orders?

Melgren is having these weapons stockpiled in the border forts.

So … all the people at the border forts know about the venin, right?

Everyone responsible for cycling the alloy in and out of the forts would notice that they are suddenly getting daggers instead of whatever form the alloy was previously delivered as (or, if they were also getting the normal alloy, they would notice the additional weapons). The officers would need to be given instructions on when to distribute the daggers. If the venin threat in looming, surely they would also want to put their riders through drills to ensure that everyone is able to effectively use knives of the shape, length, and weight of the venin-killing daggers.

I can buy that the military would want to keep a classified stash of weapons for emergencies, but if these weapons are being stockpiled for a specific eventuality that the nigh-omnipotent general knows is definitely coming, why aren’t the border forts training personnel to use them?

Blade Runners

The gryphon fliers come from Poromiel into Navarre to raid stockpiles of venin-killing daggers from the border forts. This works at least superficially to explain why the two powers are fighting … now.

What have they been warring over for the centuries before Melgren came along?

Nothing has been established about riders having extended life spans. Given the brutal physical demands of being a rider and the strain that age puts on even the most physically fit individuals, it is unlikely that Melgren is older than seventy (meaning he has been a rider for fifty years, at most). Since Melgren is linked to the daggers specifically, that implies that there were no daggers prior to him.

Was Poromiel just raiding to steal the alloy?

If so, it seems like Navarre would have learned a thing or two about security over the course of six centuries, and simply sealed the alloy into a vault that the fliers couldn’t breach even if they took over a fort.

What was Poromiel using to fight venin over the previous centuries? Were the daggers originally something that they invented and Navarre just copied? If so, that implies that they had their own means to make the daggers. Why not tell Xaden, “Just the alloy will be fine, don’t add risk to this operation by making it into weapons as well”? If not, then why haven’t the dozens or hundreds of daggers that Xaden has funneled to them over the last few years turned the tide against the venin?

The Bad Guys

Let me get this straight:

Melgren foresaw a future in which the daggers would defeat the venin and save Navarre. He planned out Navarre’s miliary strategy on that basis. He distributed the daggers for that purpose, using them to either supplement or replace the alloy already sustaining the wards. Given that Poromiel is not a real threat to Navarre, and Navarre only benefits by using Poromiel as a buffer state against the venin, for Melgren to not start trading these weapons to Poromiel implies there is not enough alloy to both protect Navarre (with all its peoples and the nesting grounds of the dragons) and pursue the buffer state strategy, or else he foresaw that arming Poromiel would create a scenario in which Navarre fell.

And then a group of people who are fully aware that their mere existence disrupts Melgren’s visions of the future began stealing those daggers and the alloy used to make them. They not only invalidated Melgren’s vision, thereby compromising the strategy that would save the lives of countless innocents in Navarre, but directly contributed to activities that compromise the wards. They turned victory and survival into chaos and the potential deaths of everyone.

It’s almost like the people involved in this smuggling operation are knee-jerk activists who are incapable of comprehending the consequences of their actions. All they want to do it Burn. It. Down.

This would be fine in a story with flawed protagonists, but Yarros wants us to think that Xaden and his cohort are the undeniable good guys.

Sign Language

As touched upon in Story, Imogen is present with Violet when Jesinia arrives in the Quadrant. This is the exchange we get before Imogen departs.

“I’m fine,” I tell Imogen, signing at the same time. “Jesinia isn’t going to try to kill me.”

Imogen tilts her head, her gaze dropping to the cream satchel Jesinia carries.

“I’m not going to try to kill her,” Jesinia signs, her brown eyes widening. “I wouldn’t even know how.”

“Violet knew how to kill just fine on a scribe’s education,” Imogen replies, her hands moving quickly.

Jesinia blinks.

I lift my brows at Imogen.

“Fine,” she replies, signing as she backs away. “Bu if she comes at you with a sharpened quill, don’t blame me.”

First - yes, Yarros does format sign language the same as regular dialogue. It is very confusing. I think the idea that she is going for is that sign language shouldn’t be viewed any differently from any other form of communication. This is a nice sentiment, but given that telepathic speech is formatted differently, it instead comes off lazy.

(Prior to this point, any time when I referred to a character as “speaking” sign language was a mistake on my part. Going forward, however, it is deliberate. Yarros chose the formatting. I will now comply to that standard. If this comes off as aggravating or silly, then I have successfully conveyed the experience of reading any entire book like this.)

More importantly, we learn that Imogen, much like Liam before her, speaks sign language. This was a curiosity with Liam. For Imogen to also be fluent demands explanation. This clearly is not normal in the world, as Jesinia is taken aback when Imogen understands her and signs back at her.

This will become a pattern as we go forward. Nearly every secondary character who shares a scene with Jesinia will speak sign language, despite further confirmation down the line that this is not normal within the setting. In the moment, these interaction almost always reads as lazy writing. They don’t accomplish anything that couldn’t be accomplished by just having a short phrase to confirm that Violet is translating for all parties involved. Taken together, they build up to an insufferable loud virtue signal in Chapter 45. I will reserve my complete thoughts on this virtue signal until that point. In the interim, I will merely flag each instance as it pops up and keep a running tally of just how many non-deaf people speak sign language in this story (and how many deaf people there are who benefit from that).

So, thus far:

• Deaf People: 1

• Non-Deaf Speakers: 3 (yes, I am counting Liam, as him being dead does not cancel out the oddity of him being among a growing number of sign language users)

Military Discipline

This is a small detail, and not necessarily a plot hole, yet I think it’s worth considering for developments further down the line.

When Violet is watching Xaden in the fighting pit at Samara, she ends up chatting with another rider about the fights, and in particular, the practice of gambling for leave.

“They have to fight for passes? Isn’t that brutal?” And wrong. Extreme. Horrible. “And detrimental to wing morale?” He’s fighting so Sgaeyl will have time off to spend with Tairn, so he’ll have time with me.

“Brutal? Hardly.” She scoffs. “No blades. No Signets. It’s just a fistfight. You want to see brutal, go and visit one of the coastal outposts with nothing to do but turn on one another.”

The riders turn on one another if not kept occupied? Where is their discipline? How does this military (or, at least, this branch of the military) remain at all functional?

What’s particularly strange about this is the fact that multiple restrictions included within the Codex are justified as being a means to build loyalty to a rider’s wing - in other words, the exact opposite condition from riders turning on one another while on duty. Given that dragon riders have been around for centuries, and how the military has been involved in one long conflict for that entire time, why haven’t the rider leadership identified this problem and adjusted protocols (and the Codex) as necessary to address this problem?

Oh, well. I suppose it’s not like Navarre has other military branches that could serve as an example of discipline that the riders could look to. That would make the riders look like a bunch of arrogant, hotheaded, incompetent thugs, wouldn’t it?

PROSE

But there’s no mat beneath them, only a packed-dirt floor decorated with suspicious splatters of crimson, both old and fresh.

I think Yarros meant to imply that the fighting pit at Samara is splattered with blood, except blood turns brown as it oxides through exposure to the air, so I don’t see how the “old” splatters” would still be crimson.

“A friendly drift?”

“Define friendly.”

Great. We’re not on the front; we are the front.

This conveys zero new information and emphasizes nothing. Are we supposed to think that Violet doesn’t know how military fronts work?

We might not be together, but jealousy’s not exactly a rational emotion.

Yarros throws in these lines to try to convince us that Violet is a rational person. They really don’t work in light of all of her irrational moments. People certainly act like this in real life, but when it comes to building investment in fictional characters, consistency is key.

DRAGONS GIVE THEIR OWN ORDERS

Next time, we will review Chapter 13.

In terms of plot, not much happens in Chapter 13. It’s mostly setup for things to come. However, the first part of the chapter covers how Draconis Umbridge punishes Violet for failing to bring Andarna to flight exercises. The lengths he goes to in the process make the mishandling of dragon versus rider agency within this book glaringly evident.

As a result, next week will be as quick an analysis as possible of Chapter 13 itself, followed by a breakdown of the agency issue specifically. We will review the established groundwork - and existing contradictions. There will be some minor spoilers for events later in the book, in the interest of not having to rehash the issues when we hit the chapters in question, but these will be limited to the bare minimum needed to support the discussion.

It’s coming your way next Friday. I hope you’ll all join me then. Have a good week.