Having read and enjoyed Marvin North's 'Searching for the Eminent' trilogy, which flouted no end of standard rules of how writers build such things, I had no expectation that he would follow any of them in his follow up series, 'The Last Battlefield for Light and Darkness'. Shock horror, he doesn't.

For instance, the lead character in the first book, 'The Sturm Awakens', is a warrior, Inos Sevrence, whose life as a Corruption Hunter resembles the title character's in 'The Witcher'; wandering the lands of Antorris killing giant monsters that have been Corrupted by some esoteric process that's tied to the land going dark fifty years earlier. It wasn't all about her, but she led the way and so is clearly going to play a major part in the series. So, she's not in this book.

The lead character here is arguably Kosinki, the mysterious young man that Inos found and saved at random during one of her monster-hunting expeditions. He was always special from the outset, as he seemingly can't do much of what everyone else can do but nobody at all can do what he can do. The Gnomen elders can't read him the way they can read everybody else and it may well be that he didn't even exist until a few days ago, with all the ramifications that spring from that idea.

So we always knew he was going to be important to wherever this story's going to take us. I didn't expect that he was going to be the lead in book two, even if he somehow also plays sidekick to the new pivotal character, the mysterious swordsman known as Kaiten who first appeared at the very end of the first book. However, he isn't the only lead, as Rayeen Benta is back, too; the soldier who fell in battle in book one only to be resurrected by cultist necromancers and practically wins a long fought war singlehanded.

Rayeen is the one who leaves the planet, whisked up into wherever by Overseer Shamooga and set on a number of tasks, most importantly to retrieve Kosinki, who may well be the Overflow. We still have little idea of what most of that means unless we've read 'Searching for the Eminent'. There's a detail dropped most of the way through this book that specifically connects that series to this. It hasn't crossed over any characters yet, at least as far as I noticed, but that's always a possibility in a future book. I don't know if this is planned to be another trilogy or a longer series or even if the author will spin up another one that cohabits the same universe. I wouldn't put it past him.

I like Kosinki and Rayeen both, which is a good thing because I liked Inos even more and she isn't in the book. The suggestion here is that she's gone, but gone doesn't necessarily mean dead, and so I assume there's the potential for her to return in the next episode. Kaiten has his moments as well and I wasn't unhappy to see some back story for Overseer Shamooga. When you're writing about a game of celestial chess, it's not a bad idea to tell us something about who's playing, rather than to merely zoom in on the board and watch the pieces move.

North is telling this story in parts and, so far, each book has had two of them. Here, the first part is largely focused on Phanton, a city that sits between the three continents we know about thus far. Inos's story was mostly told on Bosner and she hails from its capital, Witen, but she did visit Basik, the home of the Bugrains. The conflict between those two continents surely isn't done yet, but is not a focus here. This time out, we're in between the two, the first part set in or around Phanton, a city that floats in the air but is connected to all three continents by sky bridges, and the second mostly in Shaddoir, an island in the Ragedeb Sea in between Bosner and Basik, south of Phanton.

I liked both these parts but they have very different feels. The part in Phanton is more traditional fantasy, in that we learn a lot about a showcase fantasy city, what goes on there and the threats it has to endure. We even witness an airship struck down by the flying Chariot Beast, presumably an A-rank Corrupted monster. There's a derring-do to this part, with two of our leads followed by the third with a battle between them inevitable. It all felt busy and bright to me, even during attacks by flying Corrupted behemoths, as if all the world was in Phanton and we could see it all, if we only knew where to look. We don't want to focus here because we'll miss something there.

By comparison, once Kaiten and Kosinki get to Shaddoir, not an easy place to visit unless you're an Elementalist like Kaiten, the tone shifts to quiet and dark. It takes a while for us to actually reach the Paragon's Path, but it dominates the entire second part. Kosinki has to be specifically trained if he's going to survive it and even he's not guaranteed to make it through. Even before we get to the start of this crazy dangerous obstacle survival course from Hell, the tension has been ramped up and we're zeroed in on the two of them, just in case we might miss a tiny detail.

North wisely delivers a powerful finalé to defuse all that tension, which isn't just ours. For all that this review might suggest that it's all about cool locations and setpiece action, North does a great job at deepening character. Kosinki is simply aching to learn and grow into his destiny and Rayeen literally begs to be let off the leash, but both are held back, whether it's by the writer himself or a character like Shamooga, who's always happy to not explain things. These aren't average human beings or, in Rayeen's case, he isn't any more. Both have serious powers and can make a difference on a huge scale. After all, Rayeen ended a war. They want to do things.

However, they don't grasp the scale yet and it may well be that we don't either. The 'Searching for the Eminent' trilogy played with scale like no other trilogy I've ever read. The first book was small and local and, incidentally entirely fantasy. The second was big and sprawling and as much science fiction as fantasy. The third, against all expectation, grew again by orders of magnitude, ramping up to cosmic level. 'The Last Battlefield for Light and Darkness' has mostly remained fantasy even as North gave us glimpses of the cosmic, but he's seriously expanded the scale yet again from book one to book two and I now have no expectation that he won't do the same next time out.

The questions I have tie to how he can bring everything together coherently in another volume, if he's sticking to trilogies. There's so much more I want to know, not just about Kosinki and Rayeen but also Inos and a slew of others. Are we going to stay local enough to care about the Displaced in their forest or are we going to ramp up to see who's going to be part of the Ten and how that will work out, not just for this series but for the 'Searching for the Eminent' trilogy too? Of course, he had a heck of a lot to do in 'The Collapse of Reality' to wrap that one up and he nailed it. Let's see if he's going to put lightning in a bottle again. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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