Book Review: Shadow & Storms

Title: Shadow & Storms
Author: Helen Scheuerer
Genre: Romantasy, Fiction, Fantasy, Romance

What It’s About: Wilder is hanging on in the Scarlet Tower, as he is drugged and made to do things that he doesn’t know whether they are real or not. He comes to have a cell mate after one such incident, that is none other than the man who had tried to poison King Artos during Thea’s visit to Harenth to plead her case. At some point, two of the creatures that guard the Scarlet Tower take him down to the lab where he can see his swords, and they tell him that they are going to experiment on him and make him into a general of their cause.

Thea and Talemir have been traveling for two weeks to the Scarlet Tower, and they use Talemir’s shadow power to cloak themselves until they get into the courtyard of the Scarlet Tower, where they start fighting, and Thea holds her ground with the monsters there, while Talemir fights from the air. She gets to Wilder, after sending her magic out to find him, and gets him out. Once they out of the Scarlet Tower, she is furious with what was done to him, and she destroys the tower using her storm magic.

Talemir drops them off at one of the taverns, and they stay there until he tells them that it is safe to transport them to the University of Naarva, which is where they go the three of them. When they arrive, they get shown around to their room which is by the library. Thea and Wilder have sex but he’s not willing to be touched yet after the horrors that he suffered in the Scarlet Tower. Slowly over the next few days, Thea learns about what Wren has been doing during her time in Naarva—which was really about working with the plants that they have there that can produce magic that combats the shadow magic of the monsters. She had helped create the bombs that Talemir had used at the Scarlet Tower. At the same time, Wilder begins to recover, and he’s ashamed of how he left things with Talemir after their brawl, but Talemir tells him that all is forgiven. Wilder is even more bewildered by the fact that Talemir and his wife had a child, and that Talemir took really well to fatherhood. Malik joins them in Naarva along with his dog, Dax, and Wilder is grateful to have him.

Thea realizes that her time draws to a close as she is turning 27 soon, when she is supposed to die. So she decides to leave a notebook full of letters to Wilder about her thoughts and things that she wants him to know. After a meeting that they have with their friends, the notebook falls out, and Wilder reads some of it, realizing that she had written him a death book. They have an argument, but then they make up and have sex in the war room that pretty much everyone hears.

There is an attack by some of the Reapers on the University, and so they fight them off, but Talemir and his wife are in a panic because they cannot find their child. Wilder eventually finds the boy with Gus, one of their teenage shadow-touched members, who explains that they had gone out to the fields and were heading back when they saw the attack, so he had kept the boy busy until that was taken care of. Talemir and his wife end up talking because he wants to send them away, but his wife tells him that she doesn’t want to be anywhere but by his side, to fight with him so that their son could have a better future, one where he is not treated as evil for being shadow-touched.

Anya and Wren had gotten close over the time that Thea had been gone, and she is sad about it but also is glad that they had gotten close because she is going to die soon anyway, but they want to do as much as they can to get to know one another. When they find out that Artos is making his way to have an attack on Queen Rayna’s land, and they have confirmation through Wren’s alchemy that Artos is the one who had poisoned the Pools at Aveum that had been the ones that had given the water that can save lives, the three of them make their way to the Queen. After a while they do speak to her and she gives Thea one vial of the water—the last one that she managed to save before the pools got poisoned because she knew Thea would become a Warsword—and thinks on whether or not to give the women an army of her own to fight back against the invading army. She ultimately does, and the three sisters take the army to meet with their group in a pass to make their stand.

Wilder, Talemir, and Torj had been working on bringing the shadow touched who are willing to fight up to speed and how to fight, but once they are joined by Aveum’s army, there is a lot of distrust of each side. One of the commander of Aveum’s army makes crude comments about Thea, and Wilder puts him in his place, after which Thea tells them that they are reporting to Torj.

The battle takes place and it is as gruesome as it can be, with more monsters showing up. During the battle, Kipp nearly dies and Thea uses her vial from Aveum on him to save his life. Ultimately, the group prevails, and they even catch King Artos in the end. They take him to one of the taverns nearby, have him in the cellar, while they feast and have a good time to celebrate winning the battle. There is something off about the King however, and they realize that he’s going from extreme emotion to another extreme emotion. Wren is able to get something to pacify him, but King Artos doesn’t give much detail around the nests for the Reapers. When they are done with him, the tavern had been emptied out and it turns out that shadows had come into the taverns then disappeared and scared everyone off. Also news comes that Sebastian had been killed, and Vernich is glad, though he will have to tell Sebastian’s uncle, who is none other than Osiris. He explains that he had to take Sebastian on, but that he had tried to disown him as an apprentice after the battle in Harenth. What Wilder figures out but that no one else knows is that Thea had run into Sebastian in the woods, and he had tried to rape her, so she killed him, and then Dax had mauled him.

News soon comes that Thezmarr had been overrun—that Osiris had let the monsters into the stronghold, and so he has been collaborating with them. They realize that it will be a tough battle, but Kipp comes up with a plan, and so they head over to Thezmarr to fight, with Wren also a part of the waring party.

Torj, Wilder, Thea, and Vernich ride up to the gates, while Kipp sneaks into the fortress, and the battle begins. They aren’t doing so well, but they are able to hold their own. Thea realizes that she is going to most likely die here as part of her fate stone, and she takes a monster off the wall to fight with it. Anya arrives along with Wilder, and Anya tells her that the fate stone is not Thea’s but her own—that she had come back once and asked Thea to remember her, while shoving the fate stone into Thea’s hand, because the fate stone always calmed Thea. In the fight, Anya ends up dying at 27—she was only 10 months older than Thea—and Audra shows up with her contingent of women fighters to help them fight off the Monsters. It also comes out during the fight that it was Princess Jasi who was behind all of the monsters, as she is the strongest empath in history. She thinks that the prophecy is all about her, and how she will remake the world, but Thea tells her that it’s not about her, and manages to kill her. This results in the veil to fall down between the different worlds. Also during the fight, Torj had gotten into battle and Wren had gotten worried about him almost being killed, so she threw her lighting onto Torj’s war hammer and help saved his life, but as a result of that, Torj’s look has changed which they all find bizarre.

Wren is distraught about Anya, and Dratos is destroyed about it, so he goes flying off after realizing that Anya is dead. They burn her after the war is over on a funeral pyre, and Thea leaves the fate stone—which is now just a piece of stone without a number— on Anya’s neck. Then they go about fixing things. In one of their councils, Thea gets offered to be the Guild Master, but she turns it down and instead offers it to Audra who she feels is the better fit. Besides, all Thea has ever wanted to be was a Warsword. The council also decides that Osiris is to die, and while the conversations keep going, Torj asks where Wren is. The group rushes down to the cells where Thea finds Wren having Tea with Osiris and realizes that her sister had used her teapot invention to poison Osiris, whom she blames for their separation from Anya, and ultimately her death. Wren tells the group that they had sentenced him to death and she wanted to be the one who exacted revenge.

Three months later, Thea and Wilder meet up with Torj, Wren, Cal and Kipp, and they learn that Cal had gotten his Warsword totem. At one point Wren and Torj disappear, and Cal tells them that they had gone through a particular door in the tavern together, before he leaves. Then Wilder asks Thea if she wants to hunt more monsters with him, as that is the news that they received from their friends.

My Thoughts: I was really happy to find out that the fate stone was not for Thea, because my heart was really cheering for Wilder and Thea to be together and live for a long time so that Wilder’s dreams of their life together could come true. I feel like they are such a lovely couple. Still that meant that Anya was the individual that died instead, and while I do feel sorry for both Thea and Wren not getting to know their older sister that well or having many more years with her after having all of that time stolen from them, I do not feel like Anya was an important character in their development—she was more of an element of the story that helped move it along, so I don’t feel sorry about losing her. That said, I know that there is a new spin-off series from this series, this time focusing on Wren and Torj, and based on that last scene in the epilogue, I am going to guess that their relationship is just as fraught with danger and romance that heats up. I can’t wait to read it!