Rating: 4.5⭐️
Ashwalker, the first book in The Emberfall Trilogy by S. M. Gaither, is an excellent fantasy adventure story. It is a standout in a field filled with enemies to lovers plot lines about fierce, damaged women, and sentient dragons who have an enormous role in their future and on their magical abilities.
While there were certain aspects of this narrative that were easily figured out, how the author was going to reach there or bring them into the story was interesting throughout the book.
The characters kept my attention, especially Arowyn Vale, the ashwalker who survived the massacre of her family and fiancée years ago by dragons, and now runs the desolate Ashlands on missions.
Scarred, full of trauma and secrets, Arowyn is a terrific character, one whose development is steady and believable as she faces grief and unforeseen events that bring her new strength and magical powers. And a dragon.
The way Gaither grows this relationship between the two characters is very different from other dynamics that I’ve read. It certainly incorporates the tragedy that’s fallen into both of these characters lives.
And there’s other parties too. The enemies to lovers aspect. King Reave Callahan,someone who ends up very much a multidimensional man, who has his own demons to fight. Add in the intrigue of the vicious kingdom politics that he is trying to control. And this story is highly compelling reading, filled with magical details, fighting dragons and more mythological world building that grows as the story develops.
The only thing that I was sorry about was having to wait for the next installment to be published. Sometime next year.
If you like to read series, one book after another, you might want to check until the trilogy is complete.
Well written and beautifully crafted characters. Just a fantastic book and I think it will be a great series. Highly recommended.
The Emberfall Trilogy:
Ashwalker #1
Flamebound #2 – March 25,2027
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Blurb
Long ago, dragons were unleashed as weapons of mass destruction, igniting a war that shattered the Empire of Kaldra. Now, the survivors of that once-great realm cower behind fortified walls, while the beasts terrorize the wilds between the broken kingdoms.
Arowyn Vale survives as an ashwalker—one of the few reckless enough to brave the burned-out roads between the walled cities, smuggling everything from supplies to secrets. But when she reluctantly saves a dying dragon hatchling on a routine run, she draws the eye of the ruler of Mouren, a brutal realm directly in the heart of dragon territory.
Once upon a time, King Reave Callahan’s people wielded powerful magic, bonding with dragons in order to crush their enemies with wing and flame. But now, that magic is fading, and law decrees that anyone who manages to bond with a dragon must serve the Mouren crown—even a gutter-born, half-feral ashwalker from the slums of an enemy kingdom.
Dragged into Reave’s glittering but cutthroat court, Arowyn must navigate a treacherous new life built upon secrets, ancient magic, and shifting alliances. As her connection to the hatchling deepens—and with the Mouren king watching her with a gaze full of both danger and desire—she will have to make a decision:
To become a weapon of the kingdom that broke her world…
Or to burn it all down from within.
