Book: Cinnabar Shadows by Lynn Abbey | Series: Dark Sun - Chronicles of Athas, Book 4 | ISBN: 0-7869-0181-0
After nearly dying on the Codesh killing floor, Pavek and his companions get the royal treatment. Luxurious rooms, incredible food, hot baths. It should feel like a reward. Instead, it feels like the calm before something terrible. And they are right.
Book: Cinnabar Shadows by Lynn Abbey | Series: Dark Sun - Chronicles of Athas, Book 4 | ISBN: 0-7869-0181-0
After the emotional bomb that was Chapter 6, this chapter slows down and lets Pavek sit with his thoughts on a ten-day kank ride across the Tablelands. And honestly, I needed the breather too.
This chapter is basically a heist movie set in a fantasy hellscape. Three guys with obsidian knives break into an interrogator’s fortified house to rescue one woman. It goes sideways almost immediately. They barely get out alive.
This chapter is where we finally see the story through Akashia’s eyes, and it makes her way more sympathetic than I expected.
Book: Cinnabar Shadows by Lynn Abbey | Series: Dark Sun - Chronicles of Athas, Book 4 | ISBN: 0-7869-0181-0
Chapter 3 opens inside Mahtra’s recurring nightmare, and it’s rough.
Book: Cinnabar Shadows by Lynn Abbey | Series: Dark Sun - Chronicles of Athas, Book 4 | ISBN: 0-7869-0181-0
Chapter 2 shifts us completely away from Kakzim and Codesh. We enter Urik itself, in the predawn hours, and meet one of the most unusual characters I’ve come across in fantasy fiction.
Book: Cinnabar Shadows by Lynn Abbey | Series: Dark Sun - Chronicles of Athas, Book 4 | ISBN: 0-7869-0181-0
The book opens with a bird’s-eye view. Literally. We see the city of Urik through the eyes of a soaring kes’trekel (a scaled bird native to Athas). The city looks like a giant sulfur growth rising from a green plain, its walls covered with murals of the same figure over and over: a powerful man with a lion’s head, bronze skin, black mane, and fierce yellow eyes that flash in the sunlight.
Book: Cinnabar Shadows by Lynn Abbey | Series: Dark Sun - Chronicles of Athas, Book 4 | ISBN: 0-7869-0181-0
So I picked up Cinnabar Shadows by Lynn Abbey. It’s the fourth book in the Chronicles of Athas series, set in the Dark Sun world. If you’re not familiar with Dark Sun, you’re in for something different. This isn’t your typical swords-and-sorcery setting with lush forests and noble kings. No. This is a post-apocalyptic desert hellscape where magic has literally drained the life from the planet.
Living with Zvain is a special kind of torture.
Every morning starts the same way. Pavek is trying to sleep, and Zvain is running his mouth. “What’s it going to be today, Pavek? Some more groveling and toe-kissing at the west gate?” The kid has perfected the art of the early morning insult. He calls Pavek a belly-crawler, a yellow-lover, a dust-licker. He questions his manhood, his courage, his pride. All before breakfast.
Chapter 4 hits different. Up until now Pavek has been a templar with problems. Now he’s just a man with nothing.
Chapter 3 opens with Pavek still tasting zarneeka. The numbness is gone but the bitterness lingers. So do the jeers from the other templars at the gate. He’s used to being laughed at. His pursuit of spell-craft, the way he haunts the archives studying scrolls he can never actually cast, makes him a running joke in the civil bureau. Big, ugly, dirt-poor templar with a romantic curiosity. That’s how they see him.
Chapter 2 picks up a few days later. The bruise from the orphan boy’s punch has faded. Pavek is back to his regular duties, transferring salt sacks in the customhouse, ticking off counts on a wax tablet. Just another day of grunt work for a third-rank Regulator.
Chapter 1 opens with a scene-setter that tells you everything you need to know about Athas. The twin moons have set. The sky is black. The heat of day has turned to bone-numbing cold. And the first thing Abbey tells us is the law of this world: nothing changes. What was will always be.
Book: The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King | Author: Lynn Abbey | Series: Chronicles of Athas, Book 5
So here’s what happened. Hamanu has been sitting in his workroom for three straight days without moving. Not sleeping. Not eating. Just writing his history and drowning in memories of the past. His loyal dwarf steward Enver finally breaks through the warded door with a loaf of bread and a room full of worried faces.
Book: The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King | Author: Lynn Abbey | Series: Chronicles of Athas, Book 5
Book: The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King | Author: Lynn Abbey | Series: Chronicles of Athas, Book 5