Initiate’s Trial: The Wars of Light and Shadow, Vol. 9

Magical factions scheme in the shadow of impending religious war in the hefty ninth installment of Wurts’s Wars of Light and Shadow. After 249 years of imprisonment by the Koriathain, the captive prince Arithon is freed but left amnesiac and alone. Pledged to noninterference, the Fellowship field sorcerer Asandir cannot intervene directly as the Koriani Prime Matriarch’s search for the lost prince stirs to action both the fanatical True Sect and Arithon’s accursed half-brother, Lysaer, whose precarious self-control is challenged by Arithon’s reawakening powers of shadow. Though this installment is burdened by overornate language (“Sweated by the fact she laid bare his worst fear, Lysaer slashed back with as brutal an honesty”) and challenging to the new reader, Wurts (Stormed Fortress) neatly balances both the epic scale of the coming clash and the individual perspective of those swept into it while weaving an impressive tapestry of politics, religion, and magic. (Mar.)