A battle-hardened blood mage, a girl touched by the gods, and a monster forged by magic each have one goal: to overthrow the king. Delicate alliances, heartbreaking betrayals, and devious machinations fill the pages of Wicked Saints, the first book in Emily A. Duncan’s young adult fantasy series Something Dark and Holy. I picked up a copy of this book back when it first came out in 2019, but only just now got around to reading it—right in time for the trilogy’s conclusion! Book 2, Ruthless Gods came out last year and now the final book, Blessed Monsters, comes out tomorrow, April 6. If you haven’t hopped on this bandwagon yet, you’ll want to dive right in with Wicked Saints and then keep on reading the next two books. Just brace yourself to fall in love with some monsters!
Nadya is the first cleric—and an unusually powerful one—to appear in Kalyazin in decades. Her ability to channel the power of the gods may be what finally turns the tide in the war against the godless country of Tranavia. But when her monastery is attacked, Nadya has the rare opportunity to stop hiding and take control of her own destiny for once. Serefin, the High Prince of Tranavia and a powerful blood mage, is ready to win this war once and for all. But when his father calls him back to the capital city on a flimsy pretext, Serefin knows there are darker schemes afoot. Malachiasz is a mystery. Forged into a monster by the vicious magic of Tranavia, he has fled from his life there and now roams the countryside with a small band of refugees. He claims to want to end the war, and is ready to ally himself with a cleric like Nadya, his natural enemy. But can she trust him? Together, Nadya and Malachiasz plot to bring down the king of Tranavia, while Serefin races to uncover his father’s secrets before they turn deadly. However, bringing down a tyrant is never so simple, and in a land of gods and monsters there’s always a price to pay—in blood.
Wicked Saints does some pretty interesting things with the themes of religion, faith, and heresy. In this world, the people of Kalyazin worship a pantheon of gods that occasionally bless their followers with access to holy magic, while the people of Tranavia have intentionally abandoned the gods in favor of more direct access to magic of their own. A holy war rages between the two countries and the citizens of each view their opponents’ beliefs with disdain and disgust. Nadya begins the novel with complete faith in the gods whose presence is a real, tangible, and powerful thing to her. Over the course of the novel, however, she is faced with difficult questions that shake her faith: Is every god worth worshipping? Is depending so entirely on a being other than yourself a liability? And what even is the difference between a god and a monster? Interestingly, the Tranavian characters do not deny the existence of the gods, merely their value. Preferring agency and power over blind loyalty, the Tranavians discovered a way to cut themselves off from the gods and harness a personal form of magic using blood and spell books. Does this truly make them heretics? Where is the line between the entirely reasonable desire for personal freedom and the dangerous thirst for power over others? This war—and its ideological underpinnings—is more complicated than it first appears, and you’ll find yourself questioning everything Nadya believes, even as she fights to hold onto her faith.
Fittingly, the focus on religion in this book gives us some gloriously Gothic settings. The borderlands between the two countries are littered with ruined churches, looted and left to crumble after the Tranavians abandoned their gods and war shook the region. Nadya and her band of refugees hide out in one such church, the perfect backdrop to this ongoing battle between faith and apostasy. Perhaps even more classically Gothic is the corrupted cathedral at the heart of the Travanian capitol. Right beside the royal palace stands a towering cathedral painted black to symbolize its shifted role. Once a site for worshipping the gods, the cathedral has since been converted into the headquarters for the Vultures—an organization of monstrous beings created through the most extreme forms of heretical magic. The floor of the sanctuary is littered with bones, and in it the Vulture King sits upon the Carrion Throne atop a pile of gilded skulls. You can’t really get any more goth than that!
[Edit:] I’ve recently become aware of some concerning behavior of the part of this author, so I no longer feel entirely comfortable promoting them here. For that reason, I’ve deleted my usual buy links at the end of the post.
I find it interesting that you use the term “holy magic, ” We tend to associate magic with tricks, illusions, or some supernatural force (magick) that is evil. I’ve recently been exploring the witch Hekate (Hecate), who has a mixed reputation of the evil witch and goddess of good powers. Good post today!