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Blurb 

Lost among the dune-swept ruins of ancient glass towers, 14-year-old Spiric hunts for his stolen memories. Guided by the exiled scholar that found him, he embarks on a perilous journey across the Droughtlands to uncover his origins.

He’s told his red eyes mark him as a Hytharo, one of the long-extinct storm callers that sealed all water into the air itself before they were erased from history. In the thousand years since, thirst has been quenched simply by breathing, but that hasn’t stopped the surviving runic peoples from wanting water any less.

For without it, there’s no ink, no runes, no magic, and in the vast desert wastes of the Droughtlands, magic means power.

To Spiric, the mantra is eerily familiar.

Word of his presence ripples across the Droughtlands and pressure mounts on him to reverse the Hytharo’s final, sacrificial act. It’s only as his memories begin to return that he realises the true reason his people were wiped out.

With the fragments of Spiric’s memories growing bloodier and more desperate, he must determine whether carrying out his supposed fate will cause history to repeat, or if he can forge a new destiny, both for himself and the Droughtlands.

My Review

Thanks to Kelly from Love Books Tours for organising this tour and sending me a copy of the book.

This is a chunky book at 455 pages. I got through 305 pages in one sitting then had to go to bed because it was late, and finished the last 150 pages the next afternoon. I had to have a break afterwards to process my thoughts on this complex novel.

I liked the characters of Spiric, Grethard and Byreth. Their relationships as friends and mentors to each other, as they try to work out what is happening and what has happened, is supportive and loving, without romance. The distress of Spiric and Byreth when the think Grethard has died is moving and shows us just how far from the suspicions and distrust that they started with, they have come. The way Spiric realises his true identity, the terrible acts of the Hytharo Empire and the way it fell.

The relationship between Arallak and Spiric, from fear to trust to sacrifice for each other, is lovely, although it could be more developed and there are times when it feels deus ex machina.

The Scythes are terrifying! They are a straightforward representation of the well-intentioned evil actors of the world. People who think that they are doing bad things for good reasons – like concentration camp guards, or Winston Churchill – kill millions to save billions, or something. Their leader Vorric, truly believes and needs to go through his own journey of development.

The Blood God of Memory, Onassis, is not what you expect, at all. He isn’t evil; he’s another true believer. He really believes Spiric shouldn’t exist, and is doing everything he can to make that true. If that involves breaking the world over and over again, then he’ll do it.

The world building is really good. I think it’s a far future Australia (given the red sand and the author’s origins), or at least that’s the origins of those-of-glass. The skyscrapers, underground and electric lighting suggests a modern city, but hidden below many centuries and millennia of sand. The magic system is well thought out, and each type of magic user has their strengths and weaknesses. I found the descriptions of the landscapes and the ruins tactile. As an aphant, I need good description to ‘see’ a world, and I got that here. I loved the idea of fractures, and the technology in the world that people are trying to use or salvage from the past.

I had some minor quibbles about word use; that’s probably just a dialect difference though. Might benefit from a little more editing, but nothing major.

This is a really good story; I was engaged throughout and found the world building compelling. The characters were interesting and the plot gripping. A good indie science fantasy.

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Author Bio:

Jonathan Weiss is an Australian Fantasy & Science Fiction author of The Flux Catastrophe and The First Hytharo series. He has a background in Journalism and commercial cloud sales and lives with his wife and three budgies in the Illawarra region of New South Wales.