As Dillon’s novel opens, the lands of Maetlynd and Taldreas and other territories are still fragmented. They are reeling from a great conflict called the Reckoning, in which the powerful, mystical objects known as Tears were scattered so they could never fall into the wrong hands again. As the story begins, a man named Harglon, who before the Reckoning had been part of an order whose members used mystic Runestones to augment their physical powers, has been tortured and transformed into a relentless killer. He and his men track down Alevist, a former knight of the Nine Runes, and brutally murder his wife and family. The tragedy is so bitter that it seems to turn Alevist into a different person. “The paragon his mother had spoken of wouldn’t have done that,” thinks a character of Alevist after hearing an unsavory account about the former knight. “The paragon from the stories told in the early days of his time as a Kaledar—he wouldn’t do that.” Harglon and Alevist had clashed prior to the Reckoning. Now, the two find themselves on opposite sides again, this time in a growing conflict that pulls in the rest of Dillon’s cast, primarily Erevayn, a man wounded by his own tragedy when readers first meet him hunting fugitives. Later, he allies himself with Alevist. “So much of the history was filled with deceit and manipulation, but also sacrifice,” Erevayn realizes at one point. “So much of what he had learned, now revealed to be false.”
In the book’s “About the Author” section, a mention is made that some of Dillon’s writing influences include Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen series and Joe Abercrombie (presumably his First Law trilogy). Readers familiar with those authors will see them all over this fast-paced series opener. The usual trappings of epic fantasy are present—maps, glossaries, etc.—but they’re amply augmented by some of the hallmarks of grimdark fantasy, including bouts of gory violence and the liberal deployment of expletives. The characters wield magic in a world of supernatural beings, but most of them sound distinctly contemporary in language and attitude. The novel is also characterized by a great deal of the cynical nihilism that fills the books of the author’s storytelling predecessors. Dillon takes the risk of front-loading his narrative with the intricate vocabulary and proper names of his story, and despite the presence of glossaries at the front and back of the novel, this gamble doesn’t entirely pay off. Readers unfamiliar with the shotgun-style worldbuilding of the Dungeon Master’s Guide may find themselves swamped by the tale’s arcane terminology. But the author usually overcomes this lack of punchy exposition by keeping readers hooked the old-fashioned way, with well-developed characters and smoothly realized dialogue. Alevist dominates the bulk of the story so completely that it’s fortunate he’s drawn as compellingly as he is, a deeply wounded man who’s nonetheless emotionally honest. But even the tale’s main villain, Harglon, often manages to be more than a simple, one-dimensional bad guy. In his first novel, Dillon accomplishes the crucial feat of making his readers want to move on to his next book.
