Onyx Storm

Fantasy

First published: 2025
Print length: 544 pagesLittle, Brown Book Group Limited, 2025

Description

As a venin army threatens the allied kingdoms, Violet Sorrengail searches for a cure for Xaden Riorson. She believes the answer, and a key to the wider war, may lie with a seventh dragon breed. Research left by her father sends her team toward the island kingdom of Deverelli in search of clues. Meanwhile, supernatural storms batter Navarre, and venin infiltration and attacks destabilize its defenses. The crisis forces uneasy political cooperation among Navarre, Poromiel, and Tyrrendor’s revolutionaries, including an alliance with gryphon fliers. Xaden’s political elevation separates him from Violet, while his use of venin power threatens their alliance. Rebecca Yarros’s romantic fantasy sequel joins a dangerous search to an escalating military and political crisis.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Conversational · Dialogue-driven · Direct

Pace

Fast

Tone

Dark · Romantic · Suspenseful · Tense

Structure

Linear

Focus

Plot · Relationships · World

Emotional intensity

4 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 2 / 5
Ideas: 3 / 5
Structure: 3 / 5
Background knowledge: 4 / 5

Themes

Knowledge and truthLoveMoralityPowerSurvivalWar

About Rebecca Yarros

Rebecca Yarros is an American novelist whose work ranges from contemporary and historical romance to the dragon-rider fantasy of the Empyrean series. She builds stories around pressured relationships, placing intimacy inside systems of duty, secrecy, and physical danger. Her prose is direct and conversational, with dialogue carrying conflict and disclosure, while plots move through withheld information, shifting loyalties, and escalating threats. In Fourth Wing and Iron Flame, Violet Sorrengail’s training at a lethal war college expands into political conspiracy and magical warfare. The academy trials, dragon bonds, forbidden records, and uneven knowledge between lovers let Yarros develop the world and the central romance along the same narrative track. Her romance novels use related methods on a more domestic scale. The Things We Leave Unfinished interlaces a present-day collaboration over an incomplete manuscript with a wartime love story, allowing authorship and family history to revise one another. In The Last Letter, a soldier’s promise leads into caregiving, grief, and the practical demands of joining a vulnerable household.