Jen Williams' WINNOWING FLAME TRILOGY

I've been following Jen "Sennydreadful" Williams' career with more than casual interest since pretty much the dawn of Twitter, when she was still working up the guts to go for the glory and letting goober nobodies like me beta read her early novels (*cough* Ink for Thieves when? *cough*), including the entire Copper Cat Trilogy. It has been an experience I can only describe as extra to watch her bust out with an even more imaginative triple-threat follow-up, and then to branch out into whole different genres from epic fantasy. 

In other words, this is one of those posts I've got to issue with a caveat: I have zero objectivity where this writer is concerned. 

For her Winnowing Flame Trilogy, consisting of The Ninth Rain, The Bitter Twins and The Poison Song, Williams has created a fascinating and deeply realized original fantasy setting... and then subjected it to centuries of periodic attacks by eldritch horrors from outer space that would give H.P. Lovecraft hives. And then hollow him out from the inside, the better to provide raw material for a horrifying green varnish with which the invaders intend eventually to coat and cover the whole world of Sarn.

Opposing the mysterious and terrifying invaders, the Jure'lia, are the progeny of a vast god-tree, Ygseril, which drops fruit-like pods each time the invasion resumes. The pods, in turn, hatch into war-beasts, giant beings, some familiar to fantasy fans like dragons and griffins, but also giant bats, giant flying cats and wolves and... whatever Helcate is. We'll get back to poor sweet Helcate later. Point is, these creatures are huge, big enough for people to ride them like the dragons of Pern, and they are intelligent, able to talk and plan and strategize and bond deeply with each other and their riders, who are traditionally Eborans, members of an elf-like (or, really, Melnibonéan) race who tend to the tree between invasions, or "rains" in their parlance, and in the periods between rains enjoy incredibly long lives (courtesy of Ygseril's sap) and a high degree of civilization and culture which sets them apart (or, if you ask them, above) the mere humans who live everywhere else on Sarn.

As The Ninth Rain opens, Sarn has long been at peace after the Eborans and their war-beasts defeated the Jure'lia and sent them retreating to... wherever they go after their asses have been kicked again, but the Eighth Rain was only ended at great cost: Ygseril has gone dormant, if not died outright, and stopped producing the life-extending sap the Eborans rely on to stay healthy and ready. Alas and alack! But this isn't the worst of it. 

A century or so before The Ninth Rain begins, the Eborans discovered a handy substitute for Ygseril's magical sap: human blood. And so occurred a reign of terror as the Eborans' new bloodlust made them a scourge almost as terrible as their ancient enemy as the Carrion Wars pitted them against the humans they'd always defended -- until it turned out that drinking human blood instead of Ygseril's sap produced a terrible and degenerating disease in the Eborans. Meaning that by the time we meet our handful of Eboran characters, there's only a handful of them left in the world.

Meanwhile, while only a small percentage of Sarn is covered in green alien varnish, other Jure'lian effluvia have had a mutating effect on the world's flora and fauna, making large swathes of the countryside dangerous and wild and full of bizarre monsters that barely resemble the ordinary wildlife from which they degenerated.

Oh, and there are also "Parasite Spirits" now, only approximately corporeal beings that turn living things inside out on contact.

Jen Williams sure do have an imagination on her. 

Against this backdrop, we meet a small and ragtag band of misfits who are soon going to have to try to perform the same tasks that the entire Eboran civilization barely managed in its prime. Hestilion, an Eboran noblewoman, has devoted her life to finding a way to revive Ygseril and has resorted to ever more desperate and depraved measures. Her brother, Tormalin the Oathless, has decided to chuck his Eboran birthright and become a sword for hire. Their cousin, Aldasair, has slowly lost his mind over the centuries and now just kind of sits there in his family apartments, barely even breathing.

Not very promising, eh? But wait, there's more. Like Noon, a young human woman with the ability to conjure a searingly hot green fire from her hands with the life energy she can absorb from others at a mere touch (this is the Winnowing Flame that gives the trilogy its name). More promising, right? Wrong. Noon, like nearly all the similarly gifted women of Sarn, was collected by The Winnowry, an institution dedicated to sealing such women away from the rest of humanity for humanity's good. Their "Fell-Witch" prisoners are kept in complete isolation, underfed and kept as weak as possible, except when they are periodically allowed to draw a small amount of energy from a member of staff for the purpose of cooking up a batch of a powerful drug with a high black market value. Sad trombone.

Elsewhere, there is Lady Vincenza de Grazon, of a wealthy human family in the sunny south of Sarn's prime winemaking country - hence her preferred nickname, Vintage. Vintage is a restless middle-aged soul still pining after a romantic youth spent exploring and studying Jure'lia relics and remains with her lover, the long disappeared Eboran Lady Nanthema. Vintage, whose family makes the best wine in Ebora because they use mutant grapes, occasionally still goes out adventuring, hoping to find a trace of Nanthema, and has hired a certain Eboran renegade to be her bodyguard-assistant; Tormalin (remember Tormalin?) will work for wine, so it's a cozy arrangement...

Until The Plot happens! The Ninth Rain eventually brings all of these characters together as they discover that another Rain is imminent, unravel a few mysteries with very unpleasant solutions, and, well, do actually manage to get Ygseril to poop out a few new war-beast pods for them, but at tremendous cost.

The Bitter Twins explores the immediate aftermath of the tiny victory won in The Ninth Rain; Sarn is again home to war-beasts, but only five have hatched and they are somewhat crippled by the weird circumstances of their rebirth. Where ordinarily war beasts re-emerge with the very souls and memories of all of their previous incarnations, only one, the beautiful white dragon Vostok, possesses this advantage. The rest are blank slates, only just able to employ the telepathic link they have with one another and with the Eborans -- and one human -- with whom they bond. Vostok is paired with Noon; a giant flying cat named Kirune*   pairs with Tormalin; a huge and feisty griffin, Sharrik, bonds with a character who barely figured in the first novel but comes into his own here, the human warrior Bern; a flying wolf, Jessen, bonds with a much-revived Aldasair, and the runt of the litter, Helcate (who, I never really got a mental grasp on what he looks like, but when he grows up he can spit acid) bonds with a young Eboran boy discovered orphaned in an outer settlement, Eri. Not a lot with which to save the world, but sometimes ya gotta make do.

Of course, since only Vostok has her memories, she assumes a leadership role that not all of the others, all of whom have war-beast pride if not war-beast collective memory, necessarily feel she deserves, and there is friction only increased by the Eborans' slight but undeniable discomfort that the human, Bern, is in their number, although if anybody deserves to ride a griffin, it is Bern. Bern is a prince of one of those loose collectives of tiny city-states near the coast that is still host to a whole lot of Ju'rellian ruins, ruins that began to stir unsettlingly in The Ninth Rain, sending Bern and a delegation of his countrymen to petition the Eborans for aid. Once the reality of the Eborans' situation was made plain, Bern set to work trying to set things right, repairing, restoring, replanting with his prodigious strength and kind heart. In the process, he also brought Aldasair out of his stupor, beginning a relationship that deepens in The Bitter Twins to the point where Bern gives Aldasair one of his two beloved axes, which he calls the Bitter Twins, to wield as his primary weapon. But Bern's axes aren't the only bitter twins in the novel.

Once upon a time, a great artist fashioned incredible tablets that were not only visual but also dream-memory records of the war-beasts in their prime in the Eighth Rain, as Vostok recalls. But when the blood disease began to wipe out Ebora, the artist, his twin sister, and a handful of followers sailed away to start a colony somewhere else, and were never heard from again. Soon Team Sarn forms the notion of having Noon/Vostok and Kirune/Tor set off on a mission to find the artist and/or his art in the hope that it might rekindle at least some of the war-beasts' lost memories.

Meanwhile, Vintage kind of takes over as the unofficial new ruler of Ebora, together with Aldasair, Bern and Eri, who continue trying to train and prepare for their historic responsibilities -- while the revived and returned enemy Jure'lia begin a program of regrouping and, soon, attacking Sarn anew with their terrifying combination of bizarre insectoid monsters**, and begin considering how best to exploit a turncoat and the resources the turncoat brought along for the nauseating, weird, destructive ride.

What the Away Team learns about the artist and his sister, and about the true nature of the Eboran people, leaves everybody shaken with perhaps less confidence than ever and things truly don't look great for Team Sarn as this middle chapter comes to a close, the way middle chapters should.

The extraordinary emotional intensity of the trilogy comes to an all-time high in The Poison Song, as the advantage seems to brutally see-saw between Team Sarn and its enemies (which now number more than just the seemingly infinite resources of the Jure'lia when some human kingdoms, still bitter at the memory of the Carrion Wars, seem poised to try to strike out on their own, or are conquered by traitor Fell-Witches, or are just finally playing the price for lifetimes of derring do and famous exploits). In this post-George R.R. Martin age, we can't assume that the beloved main heroes aren't going to die in emotionally gutting ways (as indeed the loss of one member of Team Sarn in The Bitter Twins motivates more than a little of what happens in this third volume), and Williams isn't above letting truly extraordinarily strange and cruel twists of fate remove crucial players from the board at crucial times to face their personal demons and buried past trauma instead of being there to help their friends in present battles, tuning the emotional pitch of this volume to a shriek that only, say, the flying wolf could hear. Like, almost unbearable amounts of tension, you guys.

As I finish this post, we have just had an announcement that Jen Williams is back on her fantasy bullshit after a very good sojourn into the straight up suspense genre, proving that she really can do pretty much anything. I, for one, ambivalent as I am about epic fantasy to this day, am pretty glad to see she's going back to her first love again for a while. Bring it, Senny!

 *That cover artist Patrick Insole rendered as a tiger but I imagined while reading as something more like a Sphinx cat. For much of the trilogy, Kirune is kind of bratty and uncooperative and standoffish and that also reads more weird housecat than tiger, but maybe that's just me.

**Which, get ready for these. If you have a serious insect phobia, you might find these a lot scarier than I did. As it was, well, I might have been rooting for them for a teeny bit, for a while, until the Jure'lia queen became a character instead of an abstraction.