Of Blood and Fire

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Book of the month (January)

I want to present this book that I read some time last year. It is a debut book by Ryan Cahill launched in 2021.

If you dont know anything about fantasy books, this may be a good start, hence why I am posting about it. The book has a very good prose, it is recent and have the general themes a good fantasy book has: coming of age, dragons, magic, a villain, friendship.

It may not be perfect, but it is good enough. Specially if it is one of your first fantasy books. I like how the themes escalate over the book, it does not drag at all and you can feel the progress of our characters as we go. The book has 541 pages, it is not short, but not long, ideal in my opinion.

Some elements are difficult to grasp at, like the Knights of Achyron. For that, some people recommend the prequel short novel “The Fall”, which I will not cover here.

One of my grips with this book is that it depicts “Dragons” but describes “Wyverns”. I even emailed the author to ask why he chose to do that (I got no answer). I grew playing DnD and in 3.5 Draconomicon book, it also explains a bit about dragons, in general it follows the rule below:

In the series, called “The Bound and the Broken”, dragons are rare, and they are born from eggs, which are bound to humans in order to hatch. Once hatched, they kind of share the same soul with the bounded human. This is a new approach to the mythology and I liked that.

Those bounded are called Draleid, and they are exceptional warriors. There are only 9 Draleid left in the world and they are known as the Dragonguard.

The magic system has 2 types of magic: The Spark and Blood Magic. More is to be explained about it during the book, but in general terms, it allows you to cast spells as the more general know spells in fantasy (healing, elemental damage spells, etc.)

If you got interested, give it a go. A new version of the book is about to be released: here.

Cheers,

Ren