/lit/ - Literature

The Trials of Empire, Empire of the Wolf #3 - Richard Swan (2024)

The Trials of Empire took a more conventional path than I was expecting. The vast majority is recruiting allies for a final battle. That means it's mostly traveling around from place to place then negotiating the terms of alliances. Despite that I still greatly enjoyed its execution, which tends to matter more for me than how common the narrative choices are.

I enjoyed the adventure, warfare, and other action-oriented aspects, especially the final battle, which had numerous evocative scenes. However, what primarily appealed to me were the discussions and the character development. Common law, ethics, and politics were the most common topics for the characters to argue about. There's a lot that I found easy to relate to current events, though I don't know how intended that was.

As with the prior books, the greatest development is with how Sedanka observes the changes that Vonvalt goes through as a result of the choices he feels must be made. I continue to believe that it was a much better choice to have Sedanka be the viewpoint rather than Vonvalt specifically for this reason. I wrote about the first book that the most important and viewpoint character weren't the same person, though with this one, they arguably were.

Tragedies keep happening. I've read some say that this was more horrific than they preferred, though I didn't feel it was all that much. I wouldn't call this grimdark because the characters are striving to be as good as the situation allows them to be and are doing this for others rather than themselves. That being said, with all the trauma and failures they've endured, their hesitancy towards employing extreme measures lessens as the demands upon them increase. Whether war requires atrocities to be victorious was one of the most discussed questions.

The aftermath to the final battle and the epilogue were among the most satisfying I've read in a long time. It concluded everything that needed to be while allowing for the possibility for more. It's somewhat similar to how Abercrombie ended the Age of Madness, though the ending was done much better with The Empire of the Wolf.

Each book in this series has been progressively better for me, mostly in that each book has had considerably less of what I dislike. When I first started reading this series I had various concerns, though I now believe that I overstated them to the point where I'm somewhat unhappy with what I wrote about the first book. The rating would probably still be the same, though possibly I'd simply give it a 4 now rather than 3.5. Although there's a lot more that could be written in this setting I'd be entirely content with whatever else Swan writes next. I'll eventually be checking out his previous self-published books as well.

Rating: 4.5/5

Previous books in the series
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