The Fenris – Past

His skull continued to fill. Data was laid down in semi-organic substrates, of which so much of his body consisted, added throughout a million years of biotechnology and controlled evolution. But the data was just a lens through which he looked at the world, with the excitement of a child. Grasping his power and huge breadth of understanding, he became eager to take his place in the world. The loading continued to fill in detail about his kind, finishing with the Great Project. The audacity and high aims of this astounded him. Only on his world could something so ambitious have been attempted. Then, on checking timescales and his inception date, he realized that the experiment must have already concluded. He waited, anxious to be born into his new life to see the results.

Nothing happened.

Hours and hours passed, during which he kept pushing his concentration back to the feed to learn more, and it became clear he should not have been conscious for so long inside the cyst. Using his enhanced senses, he gazed beyond the birthing cyst as far as possible, but could detect no movement. Something was wrong. He began to squirm in the gel, to flex his limbs and stretch out one arm to the wall of the cyst, but still nothing out there responded. Finally, examining himself through the lens of that knowledge, he saw that he was way beyond the point when all his tubes and wires should have automatically disconnected. He had to do something more. Now knowing the extreme durability of his body, he began pulling out tubes. The sudden pain had him frantically searching internal control until he could shut it down and concentrate on healing processes that for him could be conscious. The gel darkened with a network of his black blood. He closed off broken capillaries, sealed entry points to his gut and other organs, closed up splits through dense muscle, and then switched over the detail to autonomics. Soon he had freed himself of all but the data and neurochem feeds into his skull. As yet, he didn’t feel confident enough to remove them, but the pipes and wires had plenty of slack, so he could free himself further in another way.

He reached out with one long arm – still far from attaining its full growth – and prodded the cyst wall again. It was tough stuff but not resistant to the sharpness of the claw he extruded from the end of his finger. With a jerk, he stabbed through it, feeling guilty about damaging the cyst. He then drew the claw down, slicing through the membrane. The gel bulged out, and the whole bubble of it, with him at the centre, slid out of the cyst, as he would have done in a natural birth. He hit the floor in a squat, the gel splashing around him then blobbing up with the pseudo-life of a Newtonian fluid. He squeezed out tears, blinked, and cleared the stuff from his eyes, then looked up at the flaccid cyst above, with the connections to his skull running up into it. He next snorted gel from his nostrils and, in a series of convulsions, expelled it from his lungs. He took his first breath. The air had a strange taint and seemed overly warm, but how could he be sure of what it should be, with these being his first breaths? Looking along the row of cysts, his among them, he saw that all the others hung like figs dried out on their tree, yet with angular structures caught inside. Much of their gel contents had pooled on the floor below and dried out to turn crusty like scabs. Amid these lay thousands of small objects of a regular shape. Focusing his superb vision on the nearest, he recognized red insect chrysalises. Now he realized that something was very wrong. He sniffed, raised analysis through his implanted database and attached the chemical signatures to a word: putrefaction. Then he heard a droning sound. A black mist arose at the far end of the birthing chamber, and he felt the first flies landing on his skin and biting.

The Fenris brushed them away. He understood their biotech purpose was to update the biology of his kind, to inoculate him against new threats, but the dry factuality of his upload told him he couldn’t trust them to be functioning correctly. He came unsteadily to his feet, seeing the larger cloud of flies boiling towards him, and he feared how their programming might be defective. They might all want to impart their information, and thousands upon thousands of bites and the ensuing updates could very well kill him. With little choice now, he reached up and pulled the connections out of his skull. Intense pain hit. He closed this off, and then the blood vessels spilled their contents down his face. Leaving the wounds to autonomics again, he headed away from the swarm towards the clean lock door at the other end of the chamber. A touch to the central pad opened it for him – like all the devices of his world, it responded to his DNA – and he entered the lock. As the first door closed behind him, he belligerently crushed every fly he could find before opening the next door. Stepping out, his foot crunched on something and he moved aside, peering down. It was a skeleton.

He recognized the bone structure of a female of his kind. As an adult, she had of course been three times his height and her bones had a bluish cast, glinting with the nacre of inlaid bio-electrics. The oddity of her presence here was no more baffling than finding that the inocular flies had managed to penetrate the layers of security into the birthing chamber. He recognized other oddities too. Nothing remained of her but bones. Besides the death of a fenris being an improbability, the decay of a fenris body would take an age due to all the protective biotech. That the body had remained here indicated no one else had been around to clear it up either. And now he looked more closely, he could see that some of the bone had turned to powder. Horrifying speculations arose about what he might find beyond this place, and then a flash of anger. He kicked a bone, skittering it across the floor. How unfair to be faced with this as a newborn!

The dry factual drone of his knowledge, stifling his youthful mind, did not allow the anger to last. He scanned around him. This circular room had semi-organic ducts, for data and materials, growing up the walls as well as branching across the domed ceiling. The trunks and branches were dull and flaking in places, and the technology here appeared to be dead. Yet the clean lock behind had worked smoothly. Fenris technology rarely broke down; when it did, other tech swiftly repaired it – it wasn’t often that a fenris had to intervene. Returning his attention to the skeleton, he now understood the breakdown here was the reason it had been left, since cleaning biomechs should have removed it, for submission to the requisite authorities or disposal. But why was this corpse so decayed, while the decay in the birthing chamber had been more recent? Just a moment’s thought rendered the answer. Fenris were not born regularly. He’d mistakenly applied the label of ‘birthing chamber’ to the hall beyond that lock, when it was in fact a storage chamber for prebirth fenris. The place should have been kept at absolute zero, with the likes of himself removed to another place for defrosting and birth. The system had obviously failed a long time after the death of the fenris here, letting in the flies and allowing the temperature to rise. He had survived the thawing process, while thousands of others had not. The fact the system had retained enough integrity to provide his mental loading must have been a matter of luck. His whole existence was.

The Fenris abruptly headed for the next door and found it did not react to him. Undoing its manual lock helped, but the door was stuck to its seal, so he dug his claws into the edge of that and heaved. The thing resisted until his arms were burning, then it finally opened with a tearing sound. Had he been an adult, it wouldn’t have challenged him at all. He stepped out into a long tube curling up to his left and right, oblate and twisted, with the walls lichen patterned. A map of his world arose for his inspection and, with his other senses also giving him the shape of his surroundings in a sphere a kilometre across, he perfectly located himself.

He turned right and began walking, carefully studying his immediate surroundings. There was no sign of any other dead but, a few hundred metres along, blue beetle cleaner bots crawled along the walls. If there had been remains here, they’d long since been removed. He needed to know what had happened, and that need boiled up into a surge of energy. He broke into a run and felt the joy of that movement, with the map and dry knowledge providing a destination where he might find answers. After branching numerous times, the tube eventually came out onto the surface of his world, and there opened a transparent band, with a view of the outside. He slowed to a walk, annoyed by the childish exuberance that had driven him to run, and annoyed by the adult knowledge implanted in his mind. The tube ran across a metallic landscape, seemingly assembled out of numerous blocks. This was what he had expected to see, but not the great scar of wreckage before him, with collapsed structures and skeletal frameworks slewing in from the right and converging ahead.

He kept walking, until he came to a safety door and looked through its window. The tube had been severed and more tangled wreckage lay beyond. Scanning further ahead with his inner senses, he saw the continuation of the tube after a hundred metres and pressed a hand against the opening pad. He received a warning straight into his biotech, though, and quickly withdrew it. The mix of air out there was lacking in oxygen, and he didn’t know why. Another thing he really needed to find out. He hyperventilated, understanding this would be all he’d need, since the distance wasn’t too far; he had no reason to switch his body over to hypoxic. He opened the door. A blast of equalizing air pressure hit him and it was freezing cold. Breath held, he walked along the bonelike beams and slabs that were like dragon scales. A building had fallen here, collapsing the tube, while deep pits delved down into a mass of fenris structure. It had the appearance of some titanic creature twisted through hard technological wreckage, and long decayed. He paused and scanned around, lost in the intensity of this new input.

Cirrus clouds frosted the deep blue sky – white above, then darkened to yellows and browns over the sunset. He walked out to the edge of a slab and leapt onto another, peering ahead to his destination. There he saw the five-kilometre black thorn of a tower rising from a spread of giant, nodular, fungal masses. At least that still stood. Just like the tube he’d walked along, and everything that lay below, the thing had grown, guided by harder technologies. Similar biotechnology covered the entire surface of the world – an ecosystem turned to fenris utility, and only scraps of old evolved biology left. But now he had no idea how much of it remained intact.

Finally, reaching the continuation of the tube and a second safety door, he entered and breathed again. Dry knowledge raised a wave of dread, for the lack of oxygen out there seemed unlikely to be a local phenomenon. The child walked on, absorbing the wonder of a world that was new to him.

The tube finally turned up into the tower, acquiring slab steps suitable for the long stride of his kind. The Fenris climbed them, made aware again of his diminutive size, but also of the growing hunger that would feed his growth. On the way up, he passed entrances into globular chambers whose outer faces were transparent to the sky, almost like eyeballs. A few of these were shattered and closed off by doors, while others somewhere in the tower lay open, with frequent frigid breezes blowing through. He found himself panting at the lack of oxygen as the biotech in the building struggled to keep it to the optimum. The chambers grew smaller as he climbed higher, and the circumference of the tower tightened. Finally he came out into the data transmission peak.

The tall room, with its ceiling closing to a vanishing point, seemed wholly occupied by standing sheets of glass and filmier substances too, all bound together with hard, fleshy biotech. The transparent walls gave him a view across his world, where the scars of wreckage formed curious, regular curves. Here and there he saw the glint of powered lights, but also fires that must be fed by biotech-generated oxygen. Up above, stars speckled the now night-time sky, a backdrop to the giant orbital structures also hanging there. One, like an ancient combustion engine a hundred kilometres across, he recognized. It was one of the engines that had driven the Great Project. The moon rose like a city dome on the horizon, with its ring system hooked up above it.

He walked through the room, the glass sheets sliding out of his path, until he reached a console. This doughnut of material held a pseudo-matter interface at its centre, which seemed to shimmer in and out of reality, but the hand-shaped imprint in the middle of it remained perfectly stable. The Fenris reached down, painfully aware of how his small hand wouldn’t fit it. Now he’d find out what had happened to his world, and to his people. And about the Great Project.

In the far past, his kind had gone to their moon and explored it thoroughly. They went on to explore their solar system and took their shots at the stars. Interstellar exploration continued, but their race then divided into two factions: those who had their eyes on the stars, and those who began to examine, and gain access to, the seeming infinitude of worlds parallel to their own. They discovered the multiverse. The latter remained in the vicinity of their world and retained much of their biological and mental history, in their forms and their technology. The former changed beyond easy conception, adapting to vacuum and the vast reaches of time that interstellar travel involved. The Fenris was of the multiverse kind.

In the multiverse, the fenris explored worlds that seemed to be shadows of theirs – or reflections in mirrors, facing in towards their own world. These stretched into infinity, with infinitesimal differences between each accumulating, until they became utterly alien places, occupied by alien cultures or no cultures at all. Oddly, those on the nearest reflections had also discovered the multiverse, but no effort had been made to explore it beyond that. His kind made contact with their mirrored kind on those closest worlds and began technological and material exchanges. Some conflicts ensued too, but his kind always seemed to come out on top. Their shadows appeared to lack substance, will and energy.

So they held dominion over many worlds and discovered flaws in the reflecting, shadow world model too. Drastic changes, or twists, in their laws of physics became apparent, and the symmetry of it all seemed to have broken. Overall it was as if, stretching out from their world, reality steadily degraded. Dirty mirrors, one researcher called it. Their growing understanding of the multiverse and these worlds then raised something concerning, and ultimately depressing: reality returned to its original form.

If they made changes in closer worlds, over periods of months and years those changes dissolved, swept away. The world concerned would return to being a weak reflection of their own. The theoreticians got to work on this, while the mathematicians and other scientists shaped and proved their model. Their own world they described as nodal; it was the only one on which drastic changes could be enacted, then these would be reflected. Any drastic changes on shadow worlds eventually came to nothing. Their ‘nodal’ world was, in essence, the only one where true free will existed. Why? There was no ‘why’, just the reality. To test this, they caused an atomic blast on a shadow world, destroying an island. Much was the furore on that world about the incident. Then the fenris tracked the changes over the ensuing months: the disappearance of information about it, the rapid drop of radioactivity on the island, and the return of its life and shape. Five years later, no one on that world had any memory of the incident. During this time the nodal fenris also brought shadow fenris to their world and it soon became evident they were sickening, growing increasingly confused and thin, until they started dying and fading completely. It seemed at first that they couldn’t exist in the harsh clarity of the nodal world. Only later did the nodal fenris discover these individuals alive again, back on their shadow worlds, some with vague memories of travelling and others with none at all.

The shadow worlds weren’t real and nobody there had any choices or ability to decide their future. The nodal world stood as the central model they followed poorly. This stabbed at something deep within the fenris concerning free will. It had arisen a million years in their past, during tens of thousands of years of authoritarian rule, when they’d lived under regimes with every thought and action monitored and controlled. Hideous wars and slaughter, and the adaptation of their own biology, had arisen to release them from that. Now it seemed they were the unwilling autocrats, and their every action dictated those of an infinitude of shadows. And so, because they were the ones who could bring about change, the Great Project was conceived, becoming the focus of their race.

What if the shadow, reflected worlds could be unlinked from their nodal world? What if they could be freed to navigate their own course? The fenris turned their powerful science to the task of severing these chains. Making engines that would feed off the power of their sun, and a million other suns, they aimed to dice up the parallels in their multiverse network. They would fold reality around those other worlds and free their brethren from this unintentional dominion. Some raised concerns and pointed to those places in the multiverse where parallel worlds ceased to be reflections, and where the laws of physics appeared broken. Could these be the detritus of previous attempts to do the same? Their concerns were ignored by the bulk of the race, though, and the objectors took what they needed and headed out to their interstellar kin. The great engines were rigged for this task, while a particular fenris was gestated in a womb cyst, and grew to the point where he could be stored. This was where he’d been just before the engines were turned on. And now he was born.

I am the Fenris.

 

The truth of that statement tore at his insides, while his secondhand knowledge didn’t give him the experience to know how to grieve, as he watched the rest of the history play out. The engines came on, and he saw their sun, as well as the many others, wink out of their existence. The sky turned black but the fenris survived with their technology intact. They found themselves caught in their own cyst of reality, much like the cyst he’d been frozen inside, even as their atmosphere itself froze and snowed down over them. Survival for perhaps millions of years remained assured, for they could burn the matter of their world to that end. But what then? With an expiration point to their existence in sight, and their world closed off from the greater multiverse, they fell into despair. Many began to die – mostly through choice and deliberate neglect. However, a small clique of scientists worked on something radical that would require sacrificing a massive amount of energy to entropy. They began to alter the engines in orbit to create a pseudo-matter tool that would be able to penetrate their enclosed reality.

Fenris continued to die, with many now sacrificing their resources to this new project. Four thousand years passed, while much of the life, biotech and even atmosphere of their world expired, and the race diminished. Finally, the engines were ready for the next step. But remaining fenris, clinging to life, baulked at turning the things on again. Autocracy arrived in the form of a science council, an echo of their despised history of societal repression. War ensued in an agreed form but, as the council began to lose, it acted independently and turned the engines on anyway. It was sacrificial and suicidal, because the plan had been to put the remaining population into hibernation. The Fenris observed the engines reach out a claw to penetrate the reality cyst around his world, and he shuddered at how this reflected his own birth. The massive drain sucked life and energy out of the world, freezing fenris where they stood, or fought, and dropped them to the ground dead. Massive feedback loops wrought destruction, as did the fall of some of the engines, with world technology failing. Then, like a wonder, the sun rose, but it was over the death of a race. Remaining technology, and the world, absorbed energy from this new continuum and began to rebuild, with many failures along the way. It was one of those failures that had allowed him to be born.

‘I am Fenris,’ he said out loud. And this was indeed the case. He could find no trace of any other living member of his kind on his world. He was now the entirety of his race.

All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or online reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying orrecording, or by information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

World Walkers. Published in 2024 in the United States by Pyr®, an imprint of Start Midnight, LLC, 221 River Street, Ninth Floor, Hoboken, New Jersey 07030. Copyright © 2024 by Neal Asher. First published 2024 by Tor, an imprint of Pan Macmillan.

Official Author Website

Order World Walker over HERE

OFFICIAL BOOK BLURB: He can jump between worlds. But can he save his own?

As a totalitarian Inspectorate tightens its grip, one man discovers the power to slip through the gaps and traverse alternate universes. World Walkersby Neal Asher is an exhilarating standalone novel set within the Owner Trilogy.

Ottanger is a rebel and mutant on an Earth governed by a ruthless Committee. But after its Inspectorate experiments on him, Ottanger realizes the mutation allows him to reach alternate worlds. The multiverse is revealed in all its glory and terror—and he understands that he can finally flee his timeline.

Then Ottanger meets the Fenris, an evolved human, visiting his Earth from the far future. He’d engineered the original world walking mutation, so those altered could escape the Committee’s nightmarish regime. Yet this only worked for a few, and millions continued to suffer. And Ottanger sees that that Committee will become unstoppable if not destroyed.

However, the Fenris has drawn yet another threat to Ottanger’s Earth. With the power of its trillion linked minds, it craves world-walking biotech and will do anything to get it. As conflict looms at home, and war threatens the multiverse—the Fenris, Ottanger and his companions must prepare for a galaxy-altering battle. . .

Q] Hello and welcome to Fantasy Book Critic. Can you tell us about yourself and how you came be in your current roles?

Tom: Hey, thanks for having us! I’m Tom, I’m based in the Netherlands, and I’m the Lead Art Director at Wraithmarked Creative. I also draw things.

I’ve worked in the ‘entertainment industry’ for quite some time, mostly in animation, games and collectibles, both as an artist and as an AD. I’ve read fantasy and sci-fi my whole life, am a big comic nerd, play way too many video games and am a Dungeon Master for two groups of players.

I’ve always gravitated towards fantasy and sci-fi art, so when Bryce o’Connor (WM CEO) approached me last year to make splash art for his Stormweaver series, I was instantly on board. Teens in alien sci-fi armor kicking ass? I’m in!

We both enjoyed working together, bounced ideas off each other, made some more stuff. We kind hit it off in a professional bromance kinda way and several months later he offered me the job of Lead AD, which I accepted and here we are.

Shawn:  Hey Mihir, thanks for having us! I’m a graphic designer (and Head of Design at Wraithmarked according to the business cards I accidentally drop in bookstores), primarily designing books (covers, interiors, cases, slipcases, and some of the cool foil bookmarks you can grab on some of the Wraithmarked Kickstarters… uhhh everything in and around a book pretty much I’ve worked on at some point or another).

I’ve been in the industry for ten years, seen lots of crazy shit, been part of lots of crazy-cool shit. But we can talk about that another time.

In 2018 Bryce O’Connor (the now boss-man of Wraithmarked) became a freelance client of mine and we pretty quickly hit it off. After a few years he started telling me plans of starting a publishing company. Our work together shifted fully to branding Wraithmarked, then putting out books under that label, and eventually he asked me to become the in-house designer for the company (I basically already was, but it became official in 2021) and I’ve been locked in his basement ever since.

Q] This is a joint question for you both (Tom & Shawn), can you tell us how the inception for these fabulous covers came to be?

Tom: Both ML Wang and Rob J Hayes had pretty clear ideas of what they wanted on the covers, but mostly let me do my thing and gave me feedback where needed.

ML wanted the cover to focus on Mamoru, Misaki and Takeru, with the ice dragon wrapped around them, and even made a quick sketch of what she had in mind. She had great feedback and a lot of references on their clothing, weapons etc, which was a great help.

Rob wanted two pirate ships clashing, a lot of pirates and ‘make it look epic’, haha, hell yeah. Both ideas, and ways of working with the authors, were a lot of fun. I learned a lot, got paid well, and on top of that, Shawn T King did his magic with my doodles, what more could I ask for?

Shawn: Bryce keeps me holed away, shackled to my desk chair. I very rarely see the light if it isn’t from the glow of a computer screen, nor feel the warmth of the sun on my skin but my body has become hypersensitive to the slight electrical heat given off by my computer and phone… 

Umm, sorry. I meant to say, while I knew about it, the concept and beginning of this project was largely done by Bryce and Tom while I was working on other things (we’re a small team and there was a lot happening all at once during this time)—I was brought in in full capacity later on to put it all together into the final covers and graphics you can see on the Kickstarter campaign.

 

Q] Talking about the design, the gold foil-look and borders look amazing. Was that the plan from the first or something that came later?

Shawn: Thanks! I kind of just went for a foil-heavy design in hopes Bryce would go for it hah. I love print embellishments on books: embossing, spot-gloss, foil, etc.—I don’t get to do much of that with my regular freelance clients, so it’s always fun to plan out what fancy stuff I can do with our Wraithmarked books.

It was my plan very early to make these fairly foil-heavy covers. We haven’t done that on anything else and I figured it’d be a nice theme to carry across a potentially (hopefully) ever-growing line of special editions.

 

Q] This is going to be an expanding design concept and with the spines lining up and showcasing different characters. Not only does this sound amazing, it promises to be visually spectacular as well. As a collector, I can’t thank you folks enough for this idea. How was this design conceptualized?

Tom: The initial idea for the spines came from Bryce o’Connor. It took us several iterations, and a lot of sketches, to figure out how we could make this work long term, without really knowing at that point what the next books were going to be. It got pretty insane at some point, super intricate, with scenery, different levels, perspectives and whatnot, before we realized that that all sounded really cool in our heads, but wouldn’t work in reality, so we toned it down. I’m really happy with the end result, but it did cause some headaches.

Shawn:  Yeah I remember Bryce came to me about it long ago and we bounced a few ideas off one another until he got the answer he was looking for, then he kicked me back down into the basement.

I’m super glad Tom was brought in for this as he is a very patient artist and managed to deliver some kickass work on the spines and covers (and endsheets), making my job easier and more fun.

Q] Tom, many congratulations on your new position as the Wraithmarked Lead Art Director, was this one of your first projects? Can you walk us through what you knew of SPFBO and how you came up with this gorgeous art?

Tom: Thanks Mihir! This was not my first project as AD, I was still freelancing back then, I joined WM as their Lead AD after my work on this was finished. ML and Rob did their own art direction on these. I felt very safe in their hands, hahaha.

Honestly, though I read a lot of fantasy and sci-fi, I only knew SPFBO from r/fantasy at that point. I had added a bunch of books to my to-read list, but hadn’t actually read Where Loyalties Lie or The Sword Of Kaigen yet. So, I had a great excuse to pick them up and read them. As a work expense too, nice.

Q] What’s next, will the follow-up books follow a similar design and art? How will you both tackle the other champions which range from grimdark to satire to cozy fantasy to romantasy?

Tom: I always try to adjust my illustrations to the mood of the book while staying true to my ‘style’. It can be a bit of a puzzle, but I’ve always managed to make it work. So, similar but different, in my case.

Shawn: My plan right now is to continue with similar foil-heavy cover designs. As to how I’ll tackle those, it’s impossible to say until we know which titles those will be and me and Tom can decide on the best composition. But you can rest assured they will look just as gorgeous as these first two 😋

 

Q] Thank you to you both for your time and consideration. Any parting words for our readers and what to expect next from Wraithmarked?

Tom: Oh boy, there is SO MUCH coming in the upcoming months… years! We’re already planning out projects for late 2026, it’s kinda crazy, ya’all. Great authors, great books. It’s going to be fun!

Shawn: I would just like to thank everyone who has supported us over these first three years of Wraithmark’s infancy. Without the readers, fans, crowdfunding supporters, none of this would be possible.

Next up for Wraithmarked is our deluxe edition for Travis Baldree’s Bookshops & Bonedust, which will launch on Kickstarter in October. After that I’m sworn to secrecy (and NDAs), but lots of cool shit.

And I’ve been told to clear something up: I’m not really locked in a basement… *slowly blinks twice*

 

OFFICIAL AUTHOR BIO: Kit Rocha is the pseudonym for co-writing team Donna Herren and Bree Bridges. After penning dozens of paranormal novels, novellas, and stories as Moira Rogers, they reinvented themselves by writing the nine-book, multiple award-winning—and extremely steamy—Beyond series, which became an instant cult favorite. They followed it up with two spin-off series, including the popular Mercenary Librarians trilogy published by Tor.

Their favorite stories are about messy worlds, strong women, and falling in love with the people who love you just the way you are. When they’re not writing, you can find them making handmade jewelry, caring too much about video games, or freaking out about their favorite books, all of which are chronicled on their various social media accounts.

FORMAT/INFO: Queen of Dreams was published by Montlake on August 6th, 2024. It is 415 pages long and is told from multiple POVs, including Sachi, Ash, and Zanya. It is available in ebook, audiobook and paperback formats.

OVERVIEW/ANALYSIS: After centuries of peace, the Court of Dreamers suddenly finds itself with enemies on all sides. It's bad enough that the royal court of mortals seems determined to break all ties with gods, declaring their followers heretics to be slaughtered. But an even worse threat has emerged: the god known as the Betrayer. After thousands of years of isolation on another continent, the Betrayer has reappeared - and he's got his sights set on Sachi, coveting her deep connection to the Dream itself. Sachi's lovers, the dragon god Ash and fierce warrior Zanya, have vowed to protect her. But when Sachi finds herself at the heart of the Betrayer's court, she'll have to use her own skills of seduction and political maneuvering to find a way to tear down the Betrayer's rule from within.

Queen of Dreams is a pulse-pounding finale to this fantasy romance duology, getting the heart racing with both scorching love scenes and epic battles. While the focus of book one, Consort of Fire, was largely on the developing relationship between Ash, Sachi, and Zanya, this second book puts the brewing world politics more front and center. Our main characters and the rest of the gods in the Court of Dreamers are gearing up for a war on two fronts, and they're fighting with every tool in their arsenal. There's politicking to be had at royal banquets, training of latent magical gifts, and a truly impressive climactic battle scene on the scale of gods.

The one slight downside here is that the romance itself ends up being more of a subplot. To be sure, there's still growth and development that happens over the course of the story, especially with Zanya. After her past traumas, she finds it a struggle to allow herself to be vulnerable in a relationship, making it difficult to find her place in the evolving relationship between herself, Sachi, and Ash. But while Consort of Fire had a fairly steady stream of spice (that fully leant itself to character and relationship development), Queen of Dreams ends up largely containing the spice to bookend the main plot in two major scenes. While those scenes absolutely earn every aspect of the description "scorching," I did find myself wishing they had been a little more spread out across the novel.

I have to take a moment to shout out Aleksi, the god known as the Lover. Although he only gets to shine in a couple of scenes, he absolutely stole my heart in his brief appearances - which is fantastic news because he will be one of the lead characters in the next duology set in this world! My hat's off to the writers, you did an excellent job of getting me salivating for your next work with just a few short scenes.

CONCLUSION: I have absolutely fallen in love with the world of the Court of Dreamers. I love the larger than life gods, I love the acceptance of love in all its forms, I love the epic stakes and equally epic battles. These books have joined the ranks of my gold standards for blending romance and epic fantasy, and I will absolutely be back for the next installment.

OFFICIAL AUTHOR BIO: Saara El-Arifi is the internationally bestselling author of The Ending Fire Trilogy and the Faebound Trilogy inspired by her Ghanaian and Sudanese heritage. She has lived in many countries, had many jobs, and owned many more cats. 

After a decade of working in marketing and communications, she returned to academia to complete a master’s degree in African studies alongside her writing career. El-Arifi knew she was a storyteller from the moment she told her first lie. Over the years, she has perfected her tall tales into epic ones. She currently resides in London as a full-time procrastinator.

FORMAT/INFO: The Ending Fire was published by Del Rey on September 10th, 2024. It is 512 pages long and told in third person from multiple POVs, including Hassa, Sylah, and Anoor. It is available in hardcover, ebook, and audiobook formats.

OVERVIEW/ANALYSIS:  After weeks and months of simmering tension, war is breaking out across the land. The Wardens face a rebellion within their capital city, but what neither side realizes is that a much deadlier force is preparing to march on them. The Zalaam have found their Child of Fire, and with their arrival, are ready to launch an assault to wipe their enemies from the map. It will take an alliance of nations to stand against the Zalaam and their god-forged creations - but even that might not be enough.

The Ending Fire takes a while to rev up, but when the final battle arrives, it's a heart pounding conclusion. This is one of those books where I'm going to recommend you have a fairly solid grasp of the factions and characters going into the finale, because I certainly struggled to lift the fog from my memory during the early pages of the book. There are a plethora of factions and types of magic at this stage of the game, and they are all crashing together in this finale. The first third of the book is an absolute whirlwind tour around the map, checking in at various locations; my struggles to remember who was who definitely hampered my ability to connect with characters, making the early parts of the book a bit slower for me.

I found Anoor's storyline the most compelling, as she struggles to find meaning and purpose in her new situation (to say more would be more spoilers than I care to share). Suffice to say, I empathized with her situation, as she is thrown into an unfamiliar land and wants to believe that those who surround her truly want the best for her and for the world. It's not easy to watch, but given the specific circumstances Anoor is in, I can buy the justification machine that she turns on in her head to give a pass to things that make her uneasy.

Hassa also has a good arc, finally hitting the point where she is no longer content to pretend to be a meek servant, but ready to stand up in open defiance of the world. She is the true heart of the story, trying to lift her people out of oppression without losing sight of the fact that they have to have a moral code at the center, or they risk becoming just as bad as their oppressors.

What really made me struggle with The Ending Fire, however, were the various romantic relationships. There was a lot of eleventh hour drama that felt manufactured and drawn out; when characters did finally get together, there were incredibly rushed scenes of spice that were over in a page. It made the culmination of the relationship feel perfunctory, a check box marked instead of a beautiful union. I don't mind spice in the slightest, but I honestly think in this case that a fade-to-black would have been the better move here. It ironically would have made the beat feel longer and more heartfelt by leaving it to the reader to fill in what happened, rather than throwing a few paragraphs on the page and calling it a day.

On the bright side, however, I do think the final battle itself is well done. After limiting the POV to our three main characters (Sylah, Hassa, and Anoor), the story opens up and jumps around to multiple side characters, letting us see pivotal moments across the battlefield, full of both heartbreak and joyous success. It's hard to put those final chapters down as multiple factions wage war for the fate of the world.

CONCLUSION: The Ending Fire had a lot to wrangle in this final book, and it definitely shows. There's a lot of rush to get pieces into place, an effort that can make the story feel both rushed and meandering at the same time. That perhaps isn't surprising given the expansiveness of the world-building, but it does make this last installment feel a bit uneven. There are definitely moments when the book shines, but it's not as well-executed a landing as I hoped.