Iron Flame (Chapter 22 to Chapter 26)
Before we start, a little housekeeping.
Yesterday, Yarros revealed on Good Morning America that the third book of The Empyrean shall be titled Onyx Storm.
"Good Morning America! I’m excited to finally announce that the third book in The Empyrean series will be released January 21, 2025," Yarros said. "I can’t tell you much yet, but I can tell you the title: 'Onyx Storm.'"
"There will be politics, new adventures, old enemies and of course, dragons," she added. "I can’t wait to share more details with you later."
Yes, I will be reviewing it. Yes, I anticipate a lengthy teardown series.
Despite the utter disaster that this series has been thus far, I nonetheless find myself hopeful that Onyx Storm will be better than the previous two entries. Not because I think Yarros has learned any lessons, mind. Rather, Yarros has previously stated that she overloaded herself during the writing of Fourth Wing and Iron Flame, sandwiching In the Likely Event between the two. She delayed the release of Onyx Storm because she couldn’t keep up that pace. While I’m not about to cut her slack for trapping herself in an insane release schedule, I will express some optimism that, with a little more time to draft and edit, she will be able to avoid many of the mistakes she made thus far. She might be able to produce something that at least doesn’t eat itself.
Then again, I also thought Yarros was a good writer after finishing Fourth Wing. Iron Flame has disabused me of that notion. Onyx Storm may yet crack through the 1/10 floor and descend into fractional depths of illegibility.
Time will tell whether my hope is in vain.
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 has a dream about being chased by a Sage, a high-ranking venin who wants to exploit her Signet. She wakes up and reassures herself that it was only a dream.
When Xaden next visits Violet, he plans to take her down to “Basgiath’s forge” (implied to by the luminary). However, they are intercepted by Draconis Umbridge and Professor Grady (the RSC professor), who has come to personally escort Violet to her first interrogation exercise. Xaden has harsh words with Draconis for scheduling this exercise during the period when he is visiting Violet. Violet talks him down; Xaden reminds her that she is “unbreakable”, which she affirms before being led off.
Violet is undergoing the exercise with her accessories. Each of them is given a piece of intel to protect, asked to shared personal secrets as a secondary objective to protect, told they will be rewarded if they can break out of the prison used for the exercise, and given mountains of warm and validating reassurance that the torture is not meant to be taken personally. The accessories and Violet banter a bit, with Ridoc and Sawyer clueing into Violet and Rhiannon’s tension. The group realizes that food and drink that they were given at the start of the exercise is laced with the Signet-blocking elixir. They thereby avoid consuming it, though they pretend to have done so.
The interrogation consists of a mild beating, with the only significant moment being when Violet’s EDS is exploited by striking her previously dislocated shoulder. During this interrogation, Draconis brings in Dain and tries to tempt him into reading Violet’s mind, which Dain refuses to do on the grounds that Violet is injured. Draconis then has Vioelt beaten unconscious. When she wakes up, healed by Nolon, Nolon tells her that Draconis is clearly trying to extract secrets besides those of the exercise. Nolon leads Draconis out of the prison, thereby leaving Violet and her accessories wholly unguarded. The group use their Signets and Violet’s daggers to break out, thereby earning the patch.
The story then cuts to a Battle Brief class. Someone has left out propaganda leaflets about Poromish cities being destroyed by dragons. Colonel Markham reassures the class that this was an exercise to test their ability to detect misinformation. He then brings Jack Barlowe into the class. It turns out that Nolon has been spending the past months healing Jack. This is briefly acknowledged as a threat for tension’s sake and then immediately dismissed when Violet remembers how limp a threat he was even in the last book. As the brief continues, Violet learns about an attack on Samara. Fearing for Xaden, she flees class early and flies to Samara with Tairn.
PLOT
The Dream
Just a dream. Just a dream. Just a dream
Clumsy writing like this just telegraphs that it is not a dream. That’s probably why there are fan theories that Violet’s second Signet is the ability to see the future.
RSC Exercise
This whole exercise is a horrific mess. I’m going to hit the big points first and then double back for all the mountain of compounding issues that make these points even worse.
Low Pain Threshold
The torture exercise consists of … slapping and punching trained fighters in the face a few times.
Yarros treats this as if it’s actually supposed to be serious. Violet and the accessories experience “horror”, “disgust”, and “rage” in reaction to one another being struck. The Ridoc caps off the ridiculousness with this line.
“If that’s their opening, what’s next?” Ridoc asks. His cheek is split wide open.
Having endured multiple blows to the head, I am aware of how unpleasant they can be, but still, this is pathetic. Why is this being treated as legitimate suffering? Don’t Violet and the accessories endure far worse on a regular basis while sparring? By setting the bar this incredibly low to trigger such visceral reactions, Yarros undermines all subsequent descriptions of torture, especially when she avoids directly describing the torture and just describes the injuries it inflicts (as she does later on the same page as the Ridoc line).
I will not expect any writer to have firsthand experience with being tortured, but basic research and common sense would have avoided this problem.
The Antagonist With No Credibility
Draconis Umbridge is co-opting the interrogation exercise to pump Violet for information on Xaden’s operation. This was implied the moment he personally showed up to oversee events, doubled down on when he brought in Dain to read Violet’s mind, and then explicitly spelled out by Nolon.
No antagonist with any amount -
Oh, that’s right. The rider leadership has no credibility as antagonists.
Here is a list, purely off the top of my head, of how Draconis could have won at this point in the story.
Since Violet is at his mercy, and no one will question if she dies in this exercise, he can torture her to death. If he can’t do that without her accessories witnessing it, he can kill them and say that the whole squad broke during the exercise.
He could force Violet to talk by forcing her to watch as he tortured the accessories to death (or simply started executing them one by one, promising to stop only if she told him everything).
Draconis brings two associates with him to this exercise, both of whom have a Signet that allows them to detect lies. He could ask Violet a series of direct yes-or-no questions and extract the necessary information that way. (He will use these associates to help with an actual interrogation later in the book, so the fact he fails to think of it here is inexcusable.)
He could simply order Dain to read Violet’s mind, rather them tempting him. Given that Dain’s reason for refusing is that Violet is injured, he could summon Nolon to heal her first. Failing that, he could threaten to kill Violet if Dain refuses, then execute Dain after the fact to tie up the loose end.
Failing all of the above, he could force Violet to ingest the elixir and transport her away from the interrogation test prison, thereby moving he to a more secure location for focused interrogation without the knowledge of either Tairn or Xaden.
The Temptation
The scene where Draconis tries to tempt Dain is very strange precisely because it is framed as a temptation.
Why was Dain even allowed a say in this? What did Draconis think was going to happen? Why was Draconis not prepared for a legalistic excuse, especially when he is perfectly aware of the legalistic nature of the Codex?
Additionally, the nature of the temptation is that Draconis plays of Dain’s pain at being mistreated by Violet. Why would he not instruct Dain to extract memories of specific relevance to the rebel children’s activities (something he will also do later in this book)? Does he really think Dain will extract what he needs if Dain is laser-focused on recollections relevant to him personally?
There is also the slightly awkward matter that Dain, at this point, has not been read in about the venin and wyverns. We know this is the case because, otherwise, he would have brought them up in Chapter 21. What does Draconis think will happen when Dain reads Violet’s memories and ends up seeing the reason why she is involved in Xaden’s smuggling operation?
The Escape
If Violet and her friends could get out of the prison, surely every other rider could, too.
First, why were Violet and the accessories not being monitored during their chit-chat to confirm that they ingested the elixir? Surely, the riders overseeing the interrogation exercise would want to know what personal secrets were shared in advance, thereby allowing them to know when a secret was actually revealed. Barring that, why would they not assume that the riders, who were very angry about being blindsided by the elixir during the land nav, would be extremely suspicious of any food or drink given during an exercise? If, by some act of supreme neglect, the riders were ignored, then every single squad should have expected, detected, and thus avoided the elixir, thereby providing them with the tools needed to escape.
Second, the elixir is a new invention, introduced this year. Why was this prison not designed with Signets in mind? How did the instructors prevent riders from escaping in however many years this exercise has existed, given that every previous year would have been fully armed with their Signets?
Third, why were there no guards? How was Nolon able to lead literally everyone away? It’s not like Violet and the accessories crawled up an air shaft or down through a toilet - they went through the door of the room they were held in, followed by the outer door. Of course people are going to break out if they are left unsecured and unattended. They will probably be guarded if ever they are captured in battle and interrogated for real, so why would the simulated prison not account for this, especially if the squad that escapes is getting special recognition (in this case, a patch to add to the collection on their … not uniforms. Cool OC outfits)?
Jack’s Back
This is perhaps once of the worst twists Yarros could have possibly conceived.
Nonsensical
Let’s refresh our memories on the manner of Jack’s death to back in Fourth Wing.
The bluish streak of silver death slams into the tower, and sparks flare as it explodes in a blast of stone. Tairn banks to avoid the blast, and I pivot in the saddle.
Jack falls down the mountainside in an avalanche of rock that I know he can’t survive.
This is what Markham adds when reintroducing Jack.
“He was crushed under the weight of a mountain a few months ago, but Nolon has mended bone after bone to return him to your quadrant.”
In other words, Jack was:
Electrocuted by a bolt of lightning that was powerful enough to not only shatter the tower he was standing on but also drop the mountainside on top of him.
Even if none of the electricity actually flowed into Jack’s body (and, to be fair, Violet having an aiming problem is used to lend the illusion of character growth later in this book), he suffered the concussive shockwave of the explosion that was described.
Fell from a lethal height, which would rupture his organs and lead to death by internal bleeding, regardless of what happened to his bones.
Had stone rubble fall on top of him, compounding the problems of the fall.
Trapped under rubble, which should have caused him to suffocate, dehydrate, and / or starve before he could be dug out.
Jack is absolutely dead. The question of how he survived all of this is not some intriguing mystery to lure the audience deeper, nor does the story invest time to treat it as one. This is a plot hole that we are supposed to ignore.
Add on top of this the fact that his survival was somehow kept a secret - a plot hole that Yarros was kind enough to highlight and then not plug.
“It’s him,” Tairn growls. “Baide has kept the truth hidden for these months.”
“I can see him.” I’d ask how the fuck a dragon hides something in the Vale, but Andarana isn’t exactly common knowledge, either.
Andarna IS common knowledge within the Vale. The dragons are (allegedly) hiding her from the riders. They don’t care about hiding her from each other.
How did no one notice that Baide was not mourning Jack? Fourth Wing noted that she “cries” when Jack falls. When did she realize Jack is not dead? Has she been acting out the stages of mourning this whole time, with no one being the wiser?
How was Jack retrieved without the knowledge of multiple dragons? It takes massive expenditures of manpower and resources to shift large quantities of rock. Either dragons would be needed, or riders with powerful Signets would. Or are we supposed to believe that no one noticed Baide digging Jack out by herself, over the course of days or weeks, and then bringing him to Nolon?
For that matter, surely Nolon’s dragon knew about Jack. Why did that dragon not tell the others?
Yarros either knows that this twist is nonsense or is supremely smug about it, because she feels compelled to explain how well she set it up to the audience.
It all makes sense now. The secrecy. [Caroline Ashton] visiting the infirmary. Nolon’s exhaustion.
There are books where you can get away with explaining your plot, but those are usually mysteries. Such explanations are meant to reward the audience by answering questions and also acknowledging pieces that they may have been stitching together on their own as they read. The Harry Potter books did a lot of this.
Iron Flame is not one of those books. What was happening in the infirmary was an unanswered question, sure, but not a mystery that was actively being explored. We didn’t have anywhere near enough information to reach the answer of Jack being alive. Using Caroline, a character barely mentioned in the last book and used only in utilitarian terms in this one, as a stand-in for Pansy Parkinson is nowhere near enough information to go off of.
Hollow
I’d explain why Yarros’s effort to milk tension out of this reveal is pathetic, but she helpful does that for me.
Jack is alive. Fine. He’s hardly the worst thing I faced last year. I brought down not only one by two venin. I destroyed an entire horde of wyvern with Xaden. Maybe Jack’s changed. Maybe he hasn’t. Either way, my Signet and hand-to-hand skills have only improved, and I doubt he’s been sparring in the infirmary.
Chapter 60 (Heavy Spoilers)
Chapter 60 will provide further context on how Jack survived. This is, in fact, the big … “twist” … of that chapter.
I won’t go into that mess here, as it deserves its own breakdown. However, I would like to preemptively address some points for those people who have read through the end of the book and might dismiss this part’s analysis on the basis of that twist.
First, that twist is a good half of the book’s length away. As mentioned above, Jack’s survival is not a mystery that gets explored. All these unanswered questions are therefore plot holes that the audience will need to cope with for far too long. If Violet had investigated this as a mystery and been rewarded for it, then maybe the answers might have some relevance here. With things as they stand now, this nonsensical reveal becomes, at best, very poorly handled setup. It would still be worthy of the above criticisms.
Second, while the twist may, at first glance, seem to answer some of the questions, it actually fails.
Jack might have been able to survive most of the causes of death listed above, but he should have still be electrocuted by the lightning. He should be dead regardless. It’s not impossible that Violet missed him and only hit the tower beneath him, but if we are seriously stooping to the level of, “Violet just barely missed him,” to justify this twist after we were shown her outright killing him, then this series has stooped to the same level as Disney Star Wars has done for surviving lightsaber stabbings to the torso.
The twist might explain how none of the dragons noticed Baide acting unusually. Unfortunately, this setup primarily leans upon assuming that the twist also applies to Draconis, as he is the one who actually sets up the idea with his blather about having influence over the dragons. Since Iron Flame never explicitly confirms this, it is head canon at best. It is us doing the writing for Yarros.
Third … in light of this twist, it is not believable that the rider leadership would allow Jack out in public. They know the twist already. Nolon’s efforts to mend Jack are heavily implied to be about the twist specifically, not the healing of Jack’s body. And since the rider leadership knows the twist, they cannot allow Jack to mingle with the rank and file of rider cadets. He knows too much. If the rider leadership executes random cadets for the mere act of requesting a classified incident report through official channels, then they should have been prepared to incarcerate Jack indefinitely. He shouldn’t even have been kept in the infirmary while Nolon mended him; he should have been kept in some off-site prison or dark hole in the bowels of the Quadrant, with Nolon visiting as necessary to work him. (On that note, Caroline has probably been read into the twist, too, so she is likewise too dangerous to be allowed to walk around the halls of the Quadrant.)
All this is to say that the Chapter 60 twist solves nothing that we have covered here. In true Yarros fashion, it doubles down on the problems.
The Battle Brief
I like the Battle Brief scene in concept. The issue here is purely in execution.
The propaganda IS a mystery. As Violet swiftly deduces upon examining one of the leaflets, it is not marked with the seal of Navarre or Poromiel, and because the ink hasn’t fully cured, it had to have been printed on a printed press within Navarre, perhaps even at Basgiath itself. This then leads to Violet trying to assess if Devera is a Good Teacher (a subject that we’ll explore properly in two weeks’ time, when we get to Chapter 29) based on Devera’s reaction to the propaganda.
Problems start when Markham arrives on the scene.
Markham tries to diffuse the tension by telling students that the leaftlets were a test, gaslighting them for not being able to identify obvious propaganda. This is true to his character (in this book, at least). Here, though, Yarros’s lack of subtlety rears its ugly head. She insists of explaining every turn in the conversation in mind-numbing detail. Violet tells her accessories that Markham will, “discredit, deflect, then distract,” and proceeds to deliver a play-by-play commentary within her internal monologue.
Perhaps Yarros intended this to make Violet seem clever. Maybe she thinks her audience are all idiots who can’t pick up on nuance. Maybe she really is just that smug about how good a writer she thinks she is. Whatever the reason, the play-by-play ultimately drains any tension or intellectual engagement from the scene. We are not experiencing the gaslighting with Violet. We are being provided a very dry instruction manual on how to gaslight someone.
Also, by doing this, Yarros establishes that Markham reintroduced Jack to the Quadrant as a distraction. This makes the scribes as incompetent as the rider leadership. On top of all of the problems listed in the previous section, are we really supposed to believe that a high-ranking officer within an organization that has blinded Navarre to the truth of the venin crisis for four hundred years would be so unprepared for someone spreading a counternarrative that he would resort to desperately flailing around and revealing Jack prior to when the rider leadership intended to reveal him (assuming that they even did)? Why would he not simply trust that his gaslighting would be effective? Violet herself acknowledges that he was convincing people even before he used Jack to “distract” them. Why not simply hurry the class along to the report of the attack on Samara? That would be plenty distracting.
Hanging Without a Cliff
The transition from Chapter 24 to 25 is where I clued in to Yarros’s efforts to manufacture cliffhanger endings.
At multiple points in this book, Yarros will terminate a chapter at an arbitrary point in the middle of a scene. She will then finish the scene in the next chapter, without any cutaways to intermediate scenes. This isn’t done in response to a twist or a reveal or some other factor that fundamentally changes the nature of the scene. She just inserts a page break between two paragraphs, adds a chapter title and an epigraph after the break, and calls it a day.
This first happened in the transition from Chapter 5 to 6, when Colonel Aetos threatens Violet. On its own, this example might not be noteworthy, but upon reread, it becomes clear that there’s no narrative purpose to breaking the chapter right after the threat.
It happened again from Chapter 14 to 15. This is also a fringe case. The scene with the riders and Baide did technically end, albeit abruptly, and then the story timeskipped to a new scene. The issue, again, is that the break serves no purpose. There’s no actual development from the encounter with Baide. An epigraph is just being jammed into a gap between two scenes, when the whole RSC exercise makes sense as a single chapter.
With Chapter 24 and 25, things are so clear cut that the previous two examples are dragged down along with it.
Chapter 24 ends with Violet and the accessories escaping the prison. Chapter 25 begins with them running outside, immediately encountering Professor Grady, and claiming the patch for escaping. The whole scene at the start of Chapter 25 is maybe a page, at most. It would have made far more sense to just have the entire escape fit into Chapter 24.
As for Chapter 25 and 26 …
Glacial blue eyes meet mine. Any doubt I had dies a swift death. It’s him. My pounding heart jumps into my throat.
“Maybe he learned his lesson?” Rhiannon’s voice pitches high with empty hope.
“No,” Ridoc says, letting his hands fall into his lap. “He’s definitely going to try to kill you. Again.”
“Not helping!” Rhiannon hisses as we all stare at Jack-fucking-Barlowe.
A small, almost soft smile curves his mouth for an instant, and we fall silent as he nods at me then looks away quickly before he takes his seat.
“What the fuck was that?” Ridoc asks.
In the actual book, there is a chapter break somewhere within that excerpt. I wish I could understand why. The entirety of Chapter 26 is nothing but the back half of the Battle Brief scene started in Chapter 25. It’s not even like this is where we got the twist reveal. Jack was revealed a couple of pages earlier. There is simply no narrative benefit to breaking what should be one long chapter into two mid-sized ones.
CHARACTERS
Violet
The self-insert Mary Sue does not get any new development in these chapters. At the very least, her characterization remains static. There are four odd passages that pertain to her dynamics with other characters. All of these appear during the Battle Brief scene.
Privacy Violation
This is how the Battle Brief scene starts.
Dain doesn’t look me in the eye at any point over the next few days, and I don’t make the effort to talk to him. What could I even say? Thank you for doing the only decent thing and not violating my privacy?
Violet’s steadfast spite of Dain is consistent and predictable, to the point that I honestly question why Yarros bothered having Dain’s temptation be a thing in the first place. My issue here is with the context in which Dain refused to read Violet’s mind.
Violet was in interrogation training. The whole point of this exercise was for her to have to at least simulate the protection of secret - in other words, private - information. Violet knew this going into the exercise. She consented to it so that Xaden wouldn’t do anything rash.
What grounds, then, does Violet have to believe that Dain taking that same information with a Signet is morally wrong? At no point does she indicate that the interrogation itself is a violation of her privacy, and that’s despite the fact that she is being subjected to (Yarros’s limited conception of) torture. For that matter, those two people Draconis brought to the exercise also use Signets to extract information. Isn’t the ability to gauge if she’s lying a violation of her privacy?
And that’s before we consider that Yarros insists on framing Dain’s Signet as a form of sexual assault. She is condemning him specifically while giving a free pass to more obvious and intrusive Signets and the use of physical force. The hideous implication that results is that sexual assault is wrong when the victim is blacked out but acceptable when the victim is able to remember the experience and / or is beaten into submission to facilitate the assault.
Established Relationship
This is how Violet reacts to Devera seeing the propaganda leaflets.
But my eyes are locked on the recessed floor and Professor Devera, who has just been handed a leaflet.
Please be who I think you are.
Where is this coming from? Violet has no established relationship with Devera. Devera was a mob character in Fourth Wing. Battle Brief classes in that book put all the focus on Markham, to the point that, much like Nadine, I had to double back and run a keyword search to confirm that Devera did indeed premiere in the previous book. In this book, she has appeared in only three scenes prior to this. The first two of those scenes just used her as a foil to facilitate Markham’s assassination, while the third just had her validate Violet’s morality. Why, then, is Violet acting like Devera being a Good Teacher is so important on a personal level?
This gets even weirder at the end of Chapter 26, when Violet is prompted to run out of Battle Brief.
“While no riders were killed in the assault” - her gaze snaps to mine - “there was one rider severely wounded.”
No. The denial is sharp and fast.
Rage and terror pump through my veins.
Professor Devera lifts her hand and scratches the left side of her neck before looking away. “What questions would you ask?”
The left side of her neck.
Right where Xaden’s relic is.
Since when were these two close enough that Devera would feel personally invested in Violet and Xaden’s relationship and be ready with a coded signal that Violet would immediately understand?
Chapter 27 is going to acknowledge that Violet did indeed misread the situation (before turning around and reassuring us that she was right in the end, but we’ll get to that next week). I should be able to praise that. Unfortunately, it is very hard to ignore that (A) Yarros wants us to think that Violet is a “rational woman”, not a slave to her emotions and (B) that doesn’t address the question of why Violet feels this personal connection to Devera that would lead her to think that Devera was signaling her. How did Violet ever connect these dots?
The Disapproval
This is how Violet initially reacts to Markahm’s gaslighting.
Suddenly, I feel fifteen again, my self-worth determined by this man’s opinion of my intellect and control.
This is a different form of the same problem as Devera. We actually do have a history and a relationship to work off of with Markham. What we lack is anything about Violet’s self-worth being tied to his approval. He was a kindly mentor who was disappointed to have lost his best student in the last book. In this book, he is a “Fucking. Liar.” At no point prior to this has it been established that he has a powerful hold over Violet.
The Accessories
During the scene where Violet and her accessories exchange personal secrets for the interrogation exercise, Yarros once again tries to milk value from relationships that she has not developed anywhere near enough for them to actually have value worth milking.
They’re supposed to be my center, my backbone, my safe place. That’s why squadmates are forbidden from killing each other.
It’s really getting tiresome that Yarros keeps hammering on this. It’s so unearned.
However …
There is a reason that I say, “not developed anywhere near enough,” rather than, “at all.”
Chapters 23 through 25 finally start to give Violet’s accessories more depth than being Friends archetypes. It adds more to their relationship than Violet’s angst about that relationship being absent. What it gives us is very thin - there’s still a sense of blandness to their reactions to Jack’s return during the Battle Brief scene - yet I now believe that Violet is friends with these people.
The improvements start during the exchanging of secrets.
“Oh, Violet’s full of secrets, aren’t you?” Rhiannon shoots a look my way and hands me the knife.
“Really?” I dish out the jam a little too aggressively.
“Whoa.” Ridoc glances between us. “Am I picking up on some tension?”
“No,” Rhi and I simultaneously answer, then look at each other. Both our shoulders sag, and she sighs, looking away. I guess that’s where our line is drawn. This thing we’re going through is just between us. “We’re fine,” she says.
At first glance, this resembles all of the other interactions in this book of Violet keeping secrets and Rhiannon being mad about it. The banter that follows is a lot of the same superficial and interchangeable dialogue that has plagued the accessories and so many mob characters. However, what sets this interaction apart is that I actually believed for a moment that at least Rhiannon and Ridoc are actual characters. They are not, in this moment, existing purely as objects for Violet’s sake. Rhiannon snipes at Violet, and Violet snaps back. That’s two people engaging with each other. Ridoc comments upon it as a third person who is observing. Violet and Rhiannon try to avoid the natural course that such an observation might impart upon the conversation, the way that people work when dancing around an uncomfortable topic.
Then there is the torture scene itself. The overreaction to a few strikes to the face may be laughable, but it still represents empathy and shared suffering. The group is united through both this and their effort to escape. As a result, when the group rallies behind Violet after the exercise, it feels earned. We the audience have finally been shown a shared experience among the members of this group.
This is only a start. More is needed for this relationship to actually withstand the load that Yarros has placed upon it (and will continue to place upon it). Nevertheless, it is a start.
WORLDBUILDING
Chain of Command
You may recall how, back in the analysis of Chapters 3 and 4, I called out Chapter 22 as confirming that realistic military chains of command are indeed a thing in this setting. This is explicitly told to the audience while Xaden is arguing with Draconis.
“I’m not in your chain of command, therefore I’m under no obligation to follow your fucking orders, and there is always something I can do. She’s in no condition to be tortured, and if her fucking wingleader isn’t here to advocate for her, then I will.”
To which Draconis responds:
“You’re right. You’re not under my chain of command, but as I had to remind her dragon, she is.”
Yarros has just confirmed that personnel assigned to the Rider’s Quadrant have no authority over personnel in border forts. Colonel Aetos therefore could not have emptied out an active border fort for his trap without the approval of someone above General Sorrengail. The only established officer above General Sorrengail is General Melgren. Why did Colonel Aetos not invoke Melgren’s name to secure victory back in Chapter 4? Why did no one question how Colonel Aetos managed to empty a border fort? Why did no one question General Sorrengail for putting him on the spot for something neither of them should have the authority to do?
Also … not being in a chain of command is not carte blanche to disrespect a superior officer (let alone one with as much seniority as Draconis as over Xaden). I’m quite certain that Xaden can still be disciplined or court-martialed for talking this way to Draconis.
For an example of how to do, “I’m not in your chain of command, so I will not follow your orders,” right, we can look at the HALO novel Shadows of Reach. There is a scene in that book wherein the general in charge of overseeing a de-glassing operation on Reach directly orders Master Chief and the rest of Blue Team to aid her in repelling a hostile military force. This would potentially compromise Blue Team’s actual mission on the planet. Master Chief therefore tells her - in a professional, polite, and overall respectful manner - that he and his team are under the authority of the Office of Naval Intelligence, and that he therefore cannot obey any order from non-ONI personnel that might run counter to his objectives. This displeases the general, but she respects the chain of command (as any sane person would, when ONI is involved), and thus she backs down from ordering Blue Team to help and merely requests any aid that the Chief is willing and able to render.
Ranged Combat
We’re told at the start of the Battle Brief scene that a Red Shirt died during the interrogation exercises.
“The girl with the kick-ass bow skills?” Sawyer gapes at Rhiannon as she scoots between us.
“Yeah,” she says quietly.
Bow skills?
Since when has the Quadrant trained the riders to fire bows, whether they be crossbows or hand-drawn bows? There’s never been any mention of archery or any other form of ranged weapons class. All ranged combat we’ve seen is with throwing knives. When has anyone had the chance to demonstrate these skills, much less be assessed for them? Did this Red Shirt (and, come to think of it, that girl from the last book whose identifying feature was walking around with a crossbow) bring her own bow and ammunition to the Quadrant just to show off?
The thing is, it makes far more sense to train riders to fire bows than to be experts in melee combat. Basic self-defense is all well and good for if they get cornered on the ground while trying to get to their dragons, but once they are up on their dragons, melee is very pointless. (The fights we’ve been shown and will be shown on the backs of dragons do not justify this, as the established danger of falling off should make these fights impossible, or at the very least, something that anyone not exposed to the venin would dismiss.) They need weapons that can reasonably be used to attack targets on the ground while they are up on their dragons’ backs. Bows or crossbows make far more sense for this than throwing knives, as its easier to replace a bolt or an arrow than a knife.
Much like with military ranks, this really should be a nitpick - except that, much later in this book, Yarros is going to demonstrate just how incredibly effective crossbows are when fired from a dragon’s back.
RSC Exercise
The setup for this exercise, much like the land nav, exposes the artificiality of first-years not knowing about it.
Violet and her accessories are not drugged and abducted this time. They are brought down to the interrogation exercise with full awareness of what is in story for them. To make matters worse, Professor Grady’s layers of warm validation and reassurance blunts the edge of what’s to come.
Does this not go against the whole premise of surprising the cadets to get their realistic reactions? Why not disorient the cadets by using bagmen again, especially if this tactic was used for a mere land nav exercise? Why coddle the cadets, which is something that they are vanishingly unlikely to get if they are imprisoned and interrogated for real? Why remind them of their training (something Grady does near the end of the coddling), thereby helping them to think clearly and feel secure (the exact opposite of what they are likely to feel when taken prisoner on a battlefield)?
Keys
Violet and her friends get through two doors to get out of the interrogation exercise.
For the first door, Sawyer uses his Signet (he manipulates metal) to superheat and metal the hinges. The group are able to escape into the outer chamber, where their weapons are being held. Before Sawyer can melt the hinges on this door, some magic imbued in Violet’s daggers disables the ward on that door, allowing them to simply walk out.
I think this scene is slightly confusing in its phrasing. The group seems surprised that the outer door is warded, despite that being implied to be the reason why they needed to melt their way through the first door. Still, I think it works overall as a way to set up Violet’s daggers as having this power.
There is one line that does cause some confusion over the limits of Sawyer’s Signet.
His fingers tremble and the hinges smoke, then melt. Hot metal drips down the edges of the door as he works.
“Quick, before you accidentally weld us in here,” Ridoc lectures.
Couldn’t Sawyer just melt any welds that form, especially if his power has the effects shown? He’s not wielding an arc welder. He should be able to just heat up the welded metal until it too sloughs away.
REPRESENTATION
The torture scene finally marks the point where Violet having EDS has some sort of impact on the story.
During the torture, the two riders with the lie detector Signets try to drive a wedge between Violet and her accessories by pointing out that Violet is a liability. What’s more, her dislocated shoulder is exploited as a weak point.
These are small things, but much like the treatment of the accessories as actual characters, they are a step in the right direction. After an entire book where Violet’s small stature has more of an impact than her EDS, and after this book merely paid lip service to her condition by reminding us that she needs to wrap her joints, we are at last getting a see a scenario where her EDS is more than a label slapped onto her. This scene even retroactively upgrades the lip service, transforming it into setup for her joints being weak points.
It’s not all perfect. I think that the effort to call out Violet as a liability is dampened by the fact that none of her friends consider it for even a second. Still, this is a step in the right direction. More interactions like this might not save the entire book, but it would at least turn Yarros’s blatant self-insert into something meaningful.
PROSE
There are two lines in the Battle Brief scene that are both puzzling and forced. Also, while writing the commentary about Violet’s dynamic with Markham, I came to a rather humorous revelation.
The Confrontation
As Violet and her accessories try to enter Battle Brief, second-year cadets from a couple squads try to find out how they escaped the interrogation exercise. Caroline acts as the spokesperson for this gaggle.
“We just want to know how you did it,” Caroline whispers as the crowd pushes by us on the side to get to the briefing room. “Rumor is, it took them an entire day to reset the interrogation room after you guys.”
The fact she calls it a room and not rooms lets me know no one is really talking.
Where was Yarros going with this? That Violet’s squad got farther than anyone else? That Caroline is actually asking on behalf of Draconis? That Caroline and the people with her are the only ones who actually want to know this information, and that the other squads who already did the exercise are keeping their mouths shut? I honestly have no idea.
Also, what is this line of logic from Violet? They only damaged one door in their escape. That’s only one room that needs to be repaired. There’s no revelation to be had from Nadine saying, “room,” instead of, “rooms.'“
Newspeak (?)
While Markham is gaslighting the class, we get this forced effort to make Violet seem clever.
The propaganda leaflet includes the following line.
THE THIRD LARGEST CITY IN THE BRAEVICK PROVINCE HAS FALLEN TO THE BLUE FIRE DRAGONS AND THEIR RIDERS.
Then, when Markham is gaslighting the audience, we get the following line and Violet’s subsequent reaction.
“When, in the history of Navarre, have we ever flown a riot comprised only of blue dragons?” He look us over like we’re children. Like we’ve been found wanting.
Clever. He’s so fucking clever. With the leaflets collected, every cadet in the room will question the exact working. Every cadet except the riders who know the meaning of that entire paragraph came down to the placement of the word fire.
The placement of the word “fire” has no impact on the meeting of this flier.
It’s not like the wyverns are not described as the “blue-fire dragons” or “the Blue Fire dragons.” (The last was made impossible by formatting, but Yarros is the one who chose to format it in all-caps, so she must live with the consequences of that.) They are described as “the blue fire dragons.” A legitimate interpretation of that phrase - and, in fact, one that makes sense even if one is aware of the wyverns - is that the writer of the flier wanted to refer to the dragons as “fire dragons”, much like how Smaug was referred to as a “fire drake”. After all, if the writer had, say, seen a scorpion-tailed, two-legged, grey-scaled monstrosity that is bigger than any dragon, surely that writer would describe that monster, rather than expecting an audience that does not know about the wyverns to understand that different wyverns breathe different colors of fire (the importance of which has still not been conveyed to even “the riders who know”).
Markham doesn’t have to confuse people about the wording of the flier. The flier, in and of itself, does not convey any information that would expose the truth, because the creator of the flier (who will be revealed later) was a moron who failed to consider the audience to whom she was directing her propaganda.
Foul-Mouthed
The end of Chapter 26 marks page 302 of 745 (as measured by the e-book version). By this point in the book (technically, by page 299), the working “fucking'“ has been used 74 times. That’s at least one instance for every four pages.
Not the work “fuck” and all its variations. Just “fucking”. If we expand our search to the word “fuck” and all its variations, the total rises to 128 times - at least one instance for every two and a half pages.
This doesn’t make the story feel gritty. It doesn’t inform us about any characters. It just feels like Yarros is desperate to ape A Game of Thrones and thought that vomiting all over the text would produce high art.
PORN AND OTHER SELF-DESTRUCTION
Next week, we dive into Chapters 27 and 28.
Originally, I wanted to go all the way to Chapter 31 in this next part, but when I started to draft up the part, I realized that this just wouldn’t be practical. I had forgotten that Chapter 28 managed to fundamentally break the dichotomy between the rebel children and the rider leadership. Yarros manages to pull a 180 and outright tell us that the rider leadership is in the right, thereby undermining all of the work she’d done to try to give the rebel children the moral high ground. When tossed on top of the pile of other issues that warrant exploration by the end of Chapter 31, it was just one thing too many to have to cram into a single week. We’ll have to push Chapters 29 to next week and then lump Chapters 30 and 31 into the analysis for the week after.
That’s just as well. Chapter 27 manages to invalidate the entire romantic subplot up to this point. We might as well take some extra space to explore just how badly this was botched, too.
Also, I should note that Chapter 27 marks the first scene of pornography in the book. As with Fourth Wing, the pornographic content itself shall not be analyzed. What we will do is take a moment to touch upon the role of sex scenes in literature and how Iron Flame demonstrates pornographic excess. This won’t be a full editorial to express my views on the matter, but I do think that this is an interesting case study for us to reflect upon.
I’ll see you all on April 5th. Have a good week.
