The Crucible of Chaos by Sebastien de Castell

Review by Jordan S.

This review is harder to write than most others, and that's because de Castell's work has followed me through the ebbs and flows of life more than most. I'm realizing that his characters have lived mostly rent-free in my head for nearly a decade now. I remember first reading Traitor's Blade, sitting on the couch in my parents' basement while visiting them for New Year's 2016. 2015 had been a hard year, and I was in the doldrums of one of those moods where I found myself listening to the Counting Crows' "The Long December" over and over. In the midst of that mood, de Castell's book was a joy to read and, more importantly, despite its occasional darkness, a source of hope.

Similarly, I remember reading Tyrant's Throne in nearly one sitting on my couch in Chicago in 2017. I remember being in awe of how de Castell tied threads left untied since Traitor's Blade and created one of my favorite books that year. I remember thinking the King's Glaive was one of the coolest Greatcoats yet, and I remember being struck by how this completely new character, Chalmers, impressed me so much and ultimately resulted in one of the most deserved finales in my history of reading.

I could wax poetically and purpley for hours about Sebastien de Castell. I could talk about when January 6th happened; the first thing I thought of was Falcio's taunting of the masked army during the climax of the Knight's Shadow. I could go on for hours about how the Spellslinger series and Ferius prequel series provided me a great source of relief and enjoyment during 2020 and the years that have followed.

Unfortunately, that would probably be super boring to you, the reader, so I won't do that. I'll just sum up my feelings with this: I love Sebastien de Castell's books, and I'm so glad to finally have a new book set in Tristia in front of me. And it didn't disappoint.

The Crucible of Chaos, the prelude to the Court of Shadows, was an absolute joy to read, and I'm so excited to see where this new adventure takes us. It's been two years since the events of Tyrant's Throne, and things are in flux. The Dukes continue to be their power-hungry selves, and the Greatcoats continue to roam Tristia meting out their version(s) of justice. For the more religiously-minded residents of Tristia, the question of Gods is also a lingering question. And something strange is happening on the Isola Sombra, the island where, according to legend, the ancient Tristians first created their gods.

Enter our Greatcoat for this adventure, Estevar Borros, the King's Crucible. No, the star of this book isn't Falcio or any of the Greatcoats we got to meet during the previous Greatcoats series. In fact, Estevar despises Falcio and his style of being overly dependent on luck for solving his problems and for his brand of idealism. He's also not too happy with Chalmer's elevation to being the leader of the Greatcoats. At the start of this book, Estevar is responding to a letter written to him by the abbot of the monastery on Isola Sombra about unnatural happenings and ever-deepening divisions between the monks at the monastery. He chooses this adventure because the abbot is his friend, and he feels that it's a case that he can do despite his near-fatal wound that he recently received in a judicial duel gone astray.

Ultimately, everything we get after this is what I've come to expect from de Castell: great humor and dialogue, fantastic swordplay and battles, and one of the most interesting cosmologies currently unfolding in fantasy fiction. I've spent a lot of time thinking about this last point, and I think that de Castell has created one of the most human and hopeful cosmologies in fantasy fiction today, and that's one of my favorite parts of my books. In this book, that is well on display, and I loved every minute of it.

The scene that stands out most to me is about halfway through the book when Estevar finds himself running down a tower to save a character from being torn to pieces by what seem to be demons. As Estevar makes his way towards his possible doom, he thinks back to the reason he didn't quit the Greatcoats despite the elevation of the young and, in Estevar's eyes, undeserving Chalmers to the role of First Cantor.

"He'd come to Castle Aramor fully intending to turn in his coat, knowing she meant to force him to resume his judicial circuits, thus curtailing his passion for investigating the supernatural." 

Instead he finds himself asking Chalmers how she did her climatic act in Tyrant's Throne and her response was a key part in swaying him to stay a part of the Greatcoats.

“Somehow though, she managed to still herself, to meet his eyes and answer, 'I remembered what it is we claim to be...The Greatcoats have to be more than judges, Estevar. We have to embody the law itself. The verdicts aren't enough. We have to be the proof that some ideals - human ideals, like justice and decency  - are more powerful than armies, more righteous than gods."

It's Sebastien de Castell doing what he does best, in my opinion—offering the fantasy fiction equivalent of the best West Wing episodes. Is it preachy and maybe a bit overly optimistic? Yes, but that's why I love it so much. Despite the darkness of moments in his books, at the core of them is an idea that we, as humans, can be better than we are now and can do great things if we just treat people decently and justly, first and foremost. There's a reason Falcio's condemnation of the insurrectionist mob in Knight's Shadow has run through my head so much since J6. It's the reason the weird wisdom of the Argosi has resonated with me. Some days we need characters in the stories we consume telling us that we can be better and do great things.

This prelude offers a tantalizing hint of what might be coming. Can I even begin to hope that we might be seeing a dark anti-Greatcoats society rising up? I'm not sure, but I'm excited to see what comes next, and I can already promise that I'll be pre-ordering all of them.