Age of Myth
The Legends of the First Empire series, Book 1
Michael J. Sullivan
Del Rey
Fiction, Fantasy
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: Since time before memory, mortal men and women have lived in Rhuneland, the wild lands beyond the river, forbidden to cross into the lusher, green realm of the Fhrey - the beings that have long been worshiped as gods, and who in turn see humans as despicable animals. It was only desperation that led Raithe and his father to cross the waters in search of better lands to homestead, the older man counting on good will earned fighting in one of the Fhrey's occasional wars... but things go terribly wrong, and soon there are two dead bodies on the ground: one Raithe's father, and one a Fhrey lord. With those deaths ends many human lifetimes of relative peace between the races, and even as Raithe and a former slave of the fallen lord flee into the wilderness, the repercussions spread.
In the fortified hill settlement of Dhal Rhen, the widow Persephone was once the most powerful woman, second chair at the side of her chieftain husband... a husband who is now dead, slain by a vicious brown bear prowling the forests, a bear that already killed her last surviving son. Displaced from her home by the new chieftain and his ambitious wife, who wastes no time spreading dark rumors about Persephone, her future couldn't be much worse - but the young seer from the woods, Suri, comes bearing grim news. Dark times are coming, the seer warns, terrible threats that may well end not only Dhal Rhen but humanity's tenuous toehold on survival. Someone has angered the godlike Fhrey, who are turning their near-divine powers and wrath upon the people of Rhuneland, a brave (or foolish) warrior who already has been dubbed the God Killer... a man who turns up in Dhal Rhen just as Persephone and the settlement could use the disruption the least.
Back in the capital of the Fhrey, the rise of a new thane brings with it a tangle of politics and grievances as one clan among them seeks to secure a stranglehold on power, for now and the future. Rumors of a human killing a Fhrey lord on the barbaric frontier only further feed what could become a grand conflagration, threatening to split apart the monarchy, the capital, and perhaps the world itself.
REVIEW: I've heard decent things about Sullivan's other series (the Riyria Chronicles books), so when I found this title available through Libby - the start of a new series, technically related to Riyria but self-contained - I decided to give it a try. As promised by the cover and blurb, Age of Myth is an epic fantasy with many familiar trappings dating at least back to Tolkien, set in a world where humans have yet to enter the Bronze Age and where superstition mixes and mingles with true powers and inhuman beings, often in unpredictable ways; not every dark shadow is a demon or lurking witch, but not every omen is a false alarm, either. The Fhrey are cruel elven beings, exceptionally long lived and highly cultured, who barely consider human beings as more than bipedal rats despite the possibility of them being distantly related. Even among their own kind, there are hierarchies and prejudices that belie their seemingly more evolved veneer, with Fhrey proving every bit as manipulative and prone to lies (to each other and themselves) as the lowest of humans, not to mention every bit as prone to hubris. The humans (or "Rhunes" as they're often called, a Fhrey word that has crept into common mortal languages as part of the overall - if generally distant - Fhrey dominance of the world) are consumed by their own struggles, for power and mere survival, with everyone in the story pulled into at least one machination or another. Most are convinced of the divinity of the Fhrey, even though they also worship less tangible gods and spirits, and even though the capriciousness of divnities is well known, many are convinced that their adherence to the Fhrey treaties means that the anger of the near-immortal beings will spare them. Meanwhile, greater threats and portents loom over everyone, the promise of a coming storm that will remake (or destroy) the worlds of Rhune and Fhrey alike if they can't stop their squabblings to notice the danger. Of such grand, world-altering movements are epic fantasies made, but without the human (or human equivalent) elements, they can fall flat as easily as they soar. Sullivan presents a collection of decent, if not wholly original, characters to move things along and give the world life, and if they sometimes felt a little too familiar, they did a decent enough job keeping the story moving. There are few lulls in the plot, and it all builds to a solid climax that sets up future complications and installments in the series. The whole makes for a fairly good epic fantasy with an old-school feel, set in a nicely lived-in world of magic and myth.
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