Blood of Empire

About Blood of Empire

Blood of Empire is the third and final novel in Brian McClellan's Gods of Blood and Powder trilogy, the sequel series to the Powder Mage Trilogy following the Dynize occupation of Landfall. The resistance has been building — in casualty counts, in territory, in moral cost — toward a confrontation that Ben Styke has been preparing for since before the occupation began, and Blood of Empire is that confrontation drawn out across a siege and its aftermath. McClellan is good at endings. The Autumn Republic, which concluded the original trilogy, demonstrated that he can close multiple storylines without sacrificing any of them to efficiency, and Blood of Empire does the same thing under harder conditions: the Gods of Blood and Powder cast is larger, the political situation is more tangled, and the divine-level conflict that runs through both series is reaching its own resolution simultaneously. Ben Styke is a character who has been kept deliberately morally complicated. He is not a hero in the conventional sense — he is a man who is very good at killing, who has committed atrocities in the service of institutions that deserved what they got and others that didn't, and who has spent both trilogies working out whether there is a version of himself worth keeping after the war is over. Blood of Empire is where that arc reaches its answer. McClellan gives Styke the kind of ending a character like him can earn without pretending he's something he isn't. Michel Bravis's spy thread resolves with similar care. The Dynize characters, slowly humanized across the trilogy without being excused for what they've done, get enough resolution to feel like the story acknowledged their complexity. The powder mage action sequences in the final battle are among the most elaborate in either series — McClellan has spent five books expanding what these abilities can do, and the climax uses all of it. A satisfying close to an underrated pair of trilogies, and a strong argument that McClellan has earned a place alongside the other writers working in Sanderson's vicinity without being reducible to the comparison.

Tropes & Themes