Forge of Darkness

About Forge of Darkness

Before the Malazan Empire, before the Bridgeburners, before the events of the ten-book main series — when the Tiste Andii, Tiste Liosan, and Tiste Edur were young peoples still learning what they were capable of doing to each other — there was the civil war that shattered Kurald Galain and set Anomander Rake on the path that would define him across hundreds of thousands of years of history. Forge of Darkness is the first volume in Steven Erikson's Kharkanas trilogy, a prequel series set in the distant past of the Malazan world, and it is a demanding work even by Malazan standards. Erikson strips away the imperial infrastructure, the elaborate military hierarchies, and the accumulated centuries of history that give the main series its texture, and writes instead a story about the precise moment when a civilization fails its own ideals — the sequence of decisions, betrayals, and self-deceptions by which a culture tears itself apart from the inside. The prose is denser and more interior than in the main series, suited to a story set before the ironic distance that characterizes much of the ten-book arc. Anomander Rake, known in the main series as a figure of immense age and controlled sorrow, appears here as a young man making choices he does not yet understand the weight of, and watching those choices accrete into the person readers of the original series already know is one of the most interesting character experiences available in the Malazan world. Draconus, Osserc, and the other figures from the main series' ancient mythology are rendered as people with comprehensible motivations, which makes the knowledge of what they eventually become more disturbing rather than less. Forge of Darkness is not an entry point into Erikson's work but a deep extension for readers who have finished the main series and want to understand its mythological foundations.

Tropes & Themes