Queen Amid Ashes
Ratings33
Average rating4.1
A Sun Eater novella that captures the brutality of invasion and how leadership responds in its wake. Seductive, bloody and a nice dose of tension.
Queen Amid Ashes really was Sun Eater 2.5. The story takes place between Howling Dark and Demon in White and also follow Hadrian with the well known first-person narration.
While The Lesser Devil felt like an action packed side step, this felt more like a must read addition to the main story. There are nice elements that deeper the world building and Hadrian has some small, but important, character development.
4.25 Stars
Very good novella that continues to fill in pieces of this universe. Useful Appendixes (reminds me of the appendices in LOTR and Dune) if you like that sort of thing :)
Continueing to love Hadrian's POV and the storytelling is fantastic. Looking forward to continueing the series with Demon In White.
Contains spoilers
This is one of the filler novellas sitting after Book#2 of the Sun Eater series. Hadrian Marlowe has been made a Knight of the Empire and given a high class space ship and sent off to mop up after a Cielcin invasion of a distant planet. The Cielcin fleet has been blown apart by Empire forces and their main worldship has disappeared into hyperspace.
He finds the planet devastated and the main city burnt to ashes. The Baroness who rules the planet is hiding with many thousands of her retainers and general population in underground tunnels.
It is when he is clearing out the remaining Cielcin that he makes a horrifying discovery and in that moment his whole purpose on the planet has changed. Hadrian has to take his newly given authority as a Knight of the Empire to an expected level as he seeks to give the planet a new future.
The story ends suddenly at the 75% mark and the rest is back-matter. There is a long history of the Marlowe dynastic line with a reference to the erroneous claim by some that they are descendants of Christopher Marlowe the English playwright of the 1500s. Coincidentally, Hadrian's new space ship is called the Tamerlane, similar to the original Marlowe's play 'Tamburlaine the Great'. Some characters in Hadrian's story are similarly named after characters in that play.
Other back-matter sections are various personae and a thesaurus of Ruocchio's terms.
A fun little story about a ruler of a planet who's people have been annihilated, but Hadrian must find out if it was the evil Cielcin or the Queen herself who did it. It's also followed by a history of the Marlowe family