THE DRAGON IN WINTER

In the final installment of a trilogy, a guard captain turned hero plots the final confrontation with an evil sorcerer seeking divinity.

The Witch-king of Hakkia gathers an army of soldiers, mercenaries, vampires, and beasts brutally altered by magic, intending to bring the rebellious kingdoms of the destroyed Silver Empire to heel. He also prepares for an elaborate, painful ritual that will transform him into a demigod and bring his patron, Hastur the Shepherd God, into the physical world. Meanwhile, the former imperial guard captain Kagen the Damned helps rally a response and stop the ritual, while his brothers, Jheklan and Faulker, go on a dangerous journey into the Winterwilds to free the world’s last dragon, Fabeldyr, the imprisoned and tortured source of all the world’s magic. The ending, as armies clash, the ritual advances, and divine and monstrous beings enter our reality, goes pretty much as anyone who reads or watches fantasy would expect, although the clarification of the Witch-king’s identity is a nice twist. But, like the previous books, this one could have used a more rigorous editor. Characters behave inconsistently. It's not entirely clear whether the Witch-king’s ultimate goal is to reestablish an empire, conquer all of reality, or shatter all of reality—he says different things at different times. Several plot threads prove to be dead ends; the magic books won at such great cost in the last volume, Son of the Poison Rose (2023), end up being of little utility. Other aspects are never completely explained, possibly by design? We never learn if Kagen is truly damned; it’s heavily suggested that there might be another meaning to his gods turning their backs to him in Book 1, Kagen the Damned (2022), plus his interactions with other beings seem to convey blessing, not damnation, but it’s not fully explained. The book, and the series as a whole, offers an intriguing mashup of epic fantasy and cosmic horror lore and tropes, exciting action sequences, and interesting, sympathetic characters. But the potential to be a tighter work is clearly there, if only the time and the effort had been put in.

Fun and clever, but decidedly sloppier than it should be.