Anthony Tasselli

I've actually met Mr. Moraine in person at a book fair, and he seems like a cool guy. So its with a heavy heart that I'm about to criticize his work.

First things first. There definitely some strong points in this novel that Moraine should be proud of. I like most of the worldbuilding pillars. The main characters are a race of Amazonian beast/human hybrids with scales and fox ears. They use an interesting kind of magic, too: yarik, which I guess is life/world essence of some kind. Only, they don't do it by manipulating magic directly and casting spells the way a typical D&D wizard would. They imbue it into runic stones that store it like a battery, allowing them to create magic weapons and items sort of like an artificer. If I had to describe the aesthetic in a few words, I'd say something like “pastoral crystalpunk”. Very refreshing and original.

Yet for each of these worldbuilding wins, there are also some setbacks. The biggest one I can think of is the Valkys. They're the faux antagonists of the novel, but by the end I wasn't even sure what they really are. They show up three times and each time they are characterized a totally different way. First as mindless wind-magic wielding buffalo things, again as weird bird things, and the third time as humanoid spellcasting lizard people that can be summoned by malicious magic users. Of the three, only the last incarnation shows any intelligence, but their motives still aren't explained. It kind of seems like they just like killing Manyari (whom they are related to via breeding with humans, which poses some disturbing lore implications) for...some reason. Honestly, it kind of felt like the author just needed some monsters the heroes could beat up for the action sequences, and that's about all the thought that went into them.

You could cut the Valkys out of the story entirely and it would actually improve the work. Not least because I don't think the action scenes are even that good. They're overly technical and confusing, mostly because the magic system, while interesting on the surface, isn't really explained in depth. So it was very hard to keep track of what was going on.

Actually, that goes for the first half of the book (about 100 pages) pretty much. Nothing really happens aside from some inconsistent character development told over random time skips. One character has this big failure towards the beginning that is supposed to define her entire arc going forward. She was supposed to be punished in some harsh but vague way for what was honestly kind of a BS reason, and its supposed to explain why she is so angry and eager to prove herself for the rest of the book. But in the next time skip, people talk about her as if that just didn't happen. She even has her old job and everything. Little moments of inconsistency like these (and there are plenty of them) had me scratching my head and gaslighting myself about what I'd just read.

The plot does finally start getting interesting somewhere past the halfway mark, in the lead up to the Bonding ceremony. I can't really talk about this without spoilers so consider yourself warned.

SPOILERS

Ok, so it turns out the entire purpose of the titular Son is to act as a sort of breeding slave for all the women of the tribe prior to a ritual that will kill him. The reasons why are not exactly clear, but if I had to guess: it seems like yarik actually originates from male manyari, and the tribe is scared of what they might do if they fully mature into their power. So they use special powder along with sex to somehow get the yarik out of males and into the females so they can use it. I guess the moral quandary is that they sort of NEED the yarik to create wards that protect themselves from the Valkys. But exactly why the Valkys want to kill the Manyari isn't explained, and neither is it explained why a male manyari can't just create and power wards himself. So maybe there was supposed to be some sort of moral ambiguity here, but as is, the female manyari end up looking cartoonishly evil. Like, they're just raping and stealing magical gifts from male children because it makes their lives slightly easier and cooler.

Predictable? Perhaps. Still very vague and unsatisfying? Absolutely. But I at least found something redeeming in this section, if only momentarily. The whole “breeding slave” thing isn't played for laughs. I know that's a low bar, but the trauma and hopelessness of the Son is taken seriously and explored in depth rather than dismissed just because “he's a man and men obviously like sex” as many authors would be tempted to do. There is a clear gender role reversal here where the Son is being treated how women all too often were (and still are) in real life history. That instantly made me want to root for him to escape the clutches of an evil society that wants to use and discard him like a mindless object.

I got major punk vibes from this setup and was voraciously reading to the end. I wanted to see The Son learn to harness his special gifts and transform into a badass, or at least reclaim some agency somehow.

That doesn't happen. Instead, his mommy comes and saves him. The story itself essentially treats him the same way as all the women of the tribe view him: as an object with no agency or power, even though he is literally the one with all the power. This immediately ruined all of the good will the Bonding Ceremony initially provoked in me. It would have been so cool to see him learn to use his gifts and lay the smackdown on these assholes. Sure, mommy or another benevolent female member of the tribe could have helped him, but he should have had some kind of agency. Instead he ends the book the same way as he started: a helpless object.

Considering the next book is called “The Mother” and she already overshadowed the protagonist in the first book that is named after him, I don't feel particularly compelled to read the second.

P.S. I wasn't really sure where to fit this in, but the book also has many spelling and grammatical errors. The most annoying one was that it sometimes switches tense not only between sentences, but also sometimes within the same sentence. This really could have used a lot more editing.

I desperately wanted to like this book because I'm a massive SCP fan. I remember back in the day when the “big bad” of this saga was a new SCP, and storyline was totally unresolved. I was looking forward to getting some closure. Sure, these collected stories have been available on the SCP wiki for years, but I think compiling them this way makes for a much more enjoyable reading experience. Previously, you had to sort through the wiki and try to figure what order to read these in, and it was very confusing. So I'm glad they released this.

That being said, this narrative does have some major problems. The core ideas it presents are very cool: a secret agency that fights back against supernatural things that can't be known, that erase, eat, or corrupt memories, and even when you CAN remember them, its very dangerous to do so.

This core concept caries the first half of the book that follows the plotline of Maria Quinn. I don't want to get too spoilery in this review, but lets just say that the first half ends on a massive cliffhanger. And where it picks up right after that is where we first start to see some problems.

The first problem is the heavy redactions. I understand the conceit. The author uses it to conceal information that they can't describe because the whole point is that its indescribable in a Lovecraftian way to the characters experiencing it. And hey, I'm all for that...when used in moderation. There was some of this in the first half, but it gets abused way too much in the second half in my opinion.

Not only is it really grating to listen to the screeching redactions effects for anyone with heightened sensory processing, but it also muddles what's going on far too much. It kinda feels like the author just didn't know where the story was going next sometimes and uses redactions as deus ex machinas. Is some really bad thing about to happen to a character with no apparent way for them to get out of it? Redactions. And look here, now they have amnesia and lost their memory, now they have some new items and got teleported somewhere else. How did they escape from the problem? Who knows. We don't have to explain that. Convenient right?

This really cheapens the narrative in my opinion because victories don't feel consistent or earned by the characters. They feel artificial and forced. This made it hard for me to suspend my disbelief. I'm all for the “ordinary people doing extraordinary things when pushed to the brink” trope. But at one point we have a character who is NOT a trained wilderness survivalist or military personal or scientist or anything like that travel cross country on foot, across an ocean, and who knows what else, for months? Years? And all in a world where LITERALLY EVERY OTHER HUMAN is a brainwashed cultist trying to kill them. That's 8 billion vs. 1. But hey, they blacked out their memory of the in-between so the author doesn't have to explain that.

By the end I honestly had no clue what was happening. The first half sets up a very cold, clinical, scientific world where everything has an explanation. These are scientists, not wizards. And then by the end, we have characters spontaneously coming back to life, ascending to godhood, recreating the soon and moon, and other nonsense without any explanation. It felt like I was reading a chosen one fantasy novel–a cliche one at that–and not a cold, clinical existential horror story. Heck, even if I was reading a fantasy novel I'd want some explanation of how the character is able to do this crazy stuff they never could before. The big conceit is this “super idea” the heroes are going to use to beat the big bad. But what's the idea? We don't get to know.

Its frustrating, because the buildup to the climax was so compelling. It sets up so many interesting questions you're desperately invested in getting the answers to. This story really is emblematic of the problems with modern SCP storytelling. Everything has to be extremely pretentious and needlessly confusing, or it isn't “cool” anymore. I dunno, maybe I'm old fashioned, but I think that just because an idea is needlessly technical and complex doesn't make it cool or even smart.

The entirety of this book is build on a really shaky premise. Wizards exist in the modern world, but the best way to train them is to stick them in a death school where most of the kids are not expected to survive.

A cool concept, certainly, but unfortunately I don't think it was executed well. It's a bit hard to explain why all of this is so contrived without going into minute details of the worldbuilding. Details that I'm sure would bore you because they bored me. This book is so explainy. It wastes pages and pages at a time dumping exposition on you that you have to reread several times and it still doesn't make sense. Showing rather than telling, this book does not.

The overall impression you get is that people in this world are just really dumb or really selfish because instead of just using their awesome wizardly powers to protect kids, they put them all in one place, which draws the attentions of hordes of evil magic-eating entities that they then have to devise elaborate means of containing. In other words, its a self-created problem that makes no sense.

And then you have the main character whose name is...sigh...Galadriel. And she's SO cool and SO powerful you guys, but also SO snarky and SUCH a rebel who has everything figured out and how everyone else are sheep, but she's smart because she sees how the system is dumb. The narrator in the audible version really doesn't help with this either, because she really ramps the snark up to 11.

Perhaps I could have salvaged something positive to say about all of this if the book wasn't dripping in trope-ridden tiktok YA angst. I could go on about this but I'll just end by saying that I wouldn't be surprised seeing #enemiestolovers next to this book's title.

This story purports to tell the tale of the titular characters, Indigo and Cloud, who originally founded the colony that the main characters in the rest of the Raksura series are from.

I say “purports” because this book actually doesn't do that whatsoever. In fact, it only serves to contradict the existing lore. It's difficult to explain exactly why without spoilers, but I don't suggest you read this anyway if you're a fan of the main series.

SPOILERS START

So the story opens with Queen Indigo returning from a visit to another colony with a “stolen” consort named Cloud. It's explained that Cloud's mate, Argent, was treating him extremely poorly and didn't want him, so he convinced Indigo to rescue him. This of course creates a nasty political situation that they have the dig themselves out of, as Argent shows up demanding to duel Indigo for possession of Cloud.

Shortly after, we find out that Indigo was attracted to Cloud while Cloud initially had no feelings for her. He apparently “tricked” her into rescuing him. Indigo then says that no, she tricked him. We're not sure who to believe though, because we the readers don't get to see the initial conversation that led to the rescue, so we don't know which of them is lying and why.

Regardless, the big twist is that Cloud eventually decided that he likes Indigo after all, whereas Indigo has changed in the exact opposite way and no longer desires him. I actually thought this was kind of interesting (in a tragic way) and could have been a fun plot point if were more clearly explored. Except its never clear exactly why the characters flip flop on this because there is so little interaction between Indigo and Cloud. (I think they say a few sentences to each other the entire book–seriously, that's it. Neither of them is even the main POV character, either.) As a result, it just ends up seeming like immature teen drama without that extra context to make the characters seem more developed. Readers should be able to understand exactly why characters do or don't like each other, especially in a story so focused on romance as the primary plot point.

Anyways, the big climax happens when Indigo agrees to duel Argent for possession of Cloud. Except...not really, because the terms of the duel are that if Indigo wins, she gets Cloud. If Argent wins, Cloud goes back to his birth colony. This makes absolutely no sense because it destroys Argents motivation as a character. Why would she accept such a duel if the best outcome for her is that she doesn't get what she wanted anyway? Unless she didn't want Cloud after all...but then why pursue another Queen all the way to her colony and wait on her doorstep for a month?

The second big twist is that Indigo throws the duel on purpose so that she won't have Cloud after all. Which I guess fits her character motivations since she changed her mind and doesn't like him anyway. Still, publicly humiliating oneself by losing a duel in such a primal culture that values strength so highly seems like an extreme way to go about that.

So yeah, the story ends with Cloud going back to his birth colony, implying that they don't mate after all, Indigo Cloud (the tribe) never exists, none of the main characters from the main series are ever born, etc.

Except right after the story ends, there's a framing device where Moon and the other main characters from the modern, still-existing Indigo Cloud discover a physical, in-universe book that presumably tells the same story we just read. I was waiting for a moment where they realize “hey, wait! This makes no sense! How can our entire colony exist if our ancestors never mated?” But literally none of the main cast point out this obvious contradiction. For a brief moment, it seemed like Stone, who was alive at the time, knows something he's not saying. But the book ends without him saying anything or the main characters finding any new information to explain what happened.

So yeah. Not only does this story retcon the lore of Martha Welles otherwise intricately crafted universe, but it doesn't really even provide enough character interaction and development to explain why people act the way they do. I guess its supposed to be a tragic romance or something, but even on that level it doesn't satisfy.

The confusing thing about this novel is that it seems to be trying to emulate the Paths of the Eldar series by Gav Thorpe, which is about Craftworld Eldar. However, this isn't actually what the book is at all. Where each Paths book in the latter series shows us the unique perspective of one of three main characters during the same events, this book is more or less a linear plot using an omniscient narrator and a TON of characters. I was never once sure who the titular “Renegade” character was even supposed to be.

I suppose part of the issue is that Dark Eldar don't follow a path system in 40k lore, but that invites us to ask: why pretend to follow the formula laid down by Gav at all, then?

Ok, so ignoring the whole “paths” thing, what did I think of this book? Well, its ok. Just average, really. There's nothing I can specifically point to as bad. Chamber's prose and dialogue is actually pretty similar to Thorpe's. Action sequences are engaging without being overly descriptive or technical. The characters all speak and act like how you would expect haughty, selfish, sadistic Dark space elves to do so. The plot was an intriguing rollercoaster of various schemes, betrayals, and hedonistic splendor. I especially liked the tactile descriptions of Dark Eldar society: what it actually looks like and feels like to be there. There were actually several passages I had to reread several times because the scenes they were describing were so hypnotic and beautiful, albeit in macabre way.

What ultimately bums me out though is that by the end, I had little sense of why I should care about the events of the book. They were an interesting little spectacle, certainly, but none of the characters were ever developed enough for me to actually care about them. The plot ultimately feels totally meaningless as well, since almost every character winds up dead by the end and it doesn't advance 40k lore or the universe's overall metaplot in any way. I thought perhaps that this story, being the first in a series, was going to set up future events in some way. But not so; everything gets so neatly wrapped up that I'm left wondering where we are going from here and what the second book is going to be about. I doubt I'll have much remembrance of what happened in this narrative a week from now, and I certainly don't see any reason to ever reread it.

That being said, if you like Eldar and have ever wondered what the specifics of the dark kin's life might actually be like, this is not a waste of time by any means. You're not getting as much detail and deep exploration as Thorpe provides with his Paths series, so next to those, these are clearly inferior. However, I'd still recommend them to the right sort of reader. Just know that what you're getting is actually a pretty straightforward, pulpy adventure and not a character-driven one.