I had a blast with Marvin North's thoroughly unconventional 'Searching for the Eminent' trilogy that mixed fantasy and science fiction in ways I utterly wasn't expecting. We were both vendors at the infamously-cut-short Wild Wild West Con 13 and he kindly gave me a copy of the first two books in his new series, 'The Last Battlefield for Light and Darkness', to review. While an aside suggests that they're technically set in the same universe, they play very differently. Or at least they do so far. Knowing Marvin's work, there's no guarantee that book two will stay as grounded on the planet of Antorris.

Initially, there's a clear comparison and it's 'The Witcher'. I must confess that I haven't read any of Andrzej Sapkowski's books, though I have seen the Netflix TV show. We're following a warrior, Inos Sevrence, as she takes down monsters who have been Corrupted, even though she's secretly been Corrupted, too. The first is a Snarling Ripper, which saves the town of Krudgeon, but there's quickly another, some sort of giant talking rabbit monster who trawls regular-sized rabbits on a line as a lure. These monsters arrived fifty years earlier when the land went dark, but the light that replaced it was just as dangerous. Now Corruption is a thing and she's a Corruption Hunter.

While Inos's life is mostly on the road, she does get to go home, which is in Witen, the capital of Bosner, where the vast Dreamen Tree is a beacon and her blacksmith father Attus designs her weaponry. There are plenty of humans in Bosner, but they're not alone as there are Tymerians and Gnomen too, each of which have their own culture and character. North does a great job of worldbuilding here, covering a lot of ground as he introduces us to different nations, races and cultures, which are admirably varied and trivial to delineate. You'll never conflate Gnomen with Bugrains, for example, and that holds across the board.

Talking of Bugrains, you'll find those huge creatures in Dalik, where Inos's mother lives. She and her father split up a long time ago and ended a war in the process, but after a dozen years, she invites Inos to visit, clearly for reasons. Dalik is the capital of Basik and it's a city nestled in the mountains and mostly built underground. War is coming again, because the stubborn Bugrains believe that Corruption stems from the Dreamen Tree. Inos is arrested and secretly released by her mother, but her time with Dalik isn't done. She'll be back to play a major part in some of the most emotional moments of the book.

In between her two sojourns into Dalik, she acquires an unusual sidekick, a boy named Kosinki who the Gnomen elders can't read. It's like he didn't exist until a few days ago, but he's no baby. She kind of saves him in the usual heroic fashion but he doesn't actually need her help, because he can manifest a magic gun out of nowhere and shoot it like a real one. He doesn't know how but he does it anyway. In fact, he doesn't know much, because he has no memories, which adds an agreeable sense of mystery to proceedings. A short section of the book is dedicated to him studying in the magical academy in Witen, only to discover that he can't do their magic just as they can't do his.

While it seems for a while that we're going to follow Inos and Kosinki as they wander through the lands of Antorris hunting Corruption by destroying the monsters who are Corrupted, while keeping a firm track of just how Corrupted she is herself, this is a Marvin North novel, so things aren't going to remain that simple. Just as the 'Searching for the Eminent' trilogy started out as fantasy before shifting emphatically into science fiction on a wildly different scale, there's a point here where he pulls back from the characters and lands of Antorris to show us that it and we are caught up in a bigger story on a much more grand scale.

That's where we discover the Lords of the Sturm like Daeamus Forthall and Lith Vairdain, who are about to begin the Deciding. And it's here that we realise that we have two comparisons in play, not just one. Sure, Antorris feels rather akin to the unnamed world of 'The Witcher', with its monster hunters and its Corruption, and to its people it must feel like that too. However, to the Lords of the Sturm, it's a game board, nothing more than a location in which they'll battle amongst themselves for supremacy, in a similar vein to 'Highlander' without the shenanigans that series used to justify its logic. The question is whether its people are going to stand for it and I'm sure that's where the series will take us.

And, quite clearly, first and foremost among "its people" is Inos Sevrence. She's special in ways that are both obvious and not. Some we see from the outset: she's a talented monster hunter on whom towns and villages rely to keep them safe. Some only become clear as North lets us in on details about what Corruption is and how it works. While his worldbuilding was immediately immersive, there was one particular detail within that that made absolutely no sense to me, or presumably to people like Inos who deal with it constantly. However, North does eventually let us in on why and suddenly it made sense. I still wonder how many people on Antorris wonder.

However, she's not going to be alone and I wonder who else will play a major part. Presumably, Kosinki will be one of that number too and I'm looking forward to finding out more about him, as I'm sure he is as well. North floats some hints about that at the very end of this first volume and I'd guess that there's going to be a lot more than hints in 'Paragons of the New Moon', the second book in the series. Surely, Rayeen will be a third, a soldier who dies in a battle, but then finds himself raised from the dead by cultist necromancers. He has an immediate impact on the war but then shifts away from it with a mysterious character called Shamooga, Overseer of the World. Will he be another of these pivotal people? Only time will tell.

Frankly, I might have met a bunch more already without realising it. This book isn't tiny but the scope of what North covers within it could have encompassed a page count far beyond its three hundred and change. This feels like epic fantasy, at two very different levels that will be pitted against each other, and there are plenty of sections that may or may not become important in the story to come. Clearly there's more to the Bugrains than we initially see, but I have no idea what it might be. What's behind the Choke Point in Xarcart? What part will the Cyndicate play and what part the Displaced in their secluded forest? I have a lot of questions.

Maybe North's crowning achievement here is setting up all those questions while delivering on a visceral level. Inos gets to fight a lot of monsters, not just small C-rank beasts that threaten a single town, like sandstorm wolves and snarling rippers, but far more unusual threats like Lord Hecatomb Valz's giant mechanical dragon that appears on the front cover art or the Black Lake, which floats across water resembling a Corrupted oil slick. There's no shortage of action in play, even as North deepens his mythology and sets all sorts of subplots into motion.

'The Sturm Awakens' has been out for a couple of years, released in 2023 after North concluded his 'Searching for the Eminent' trilogy. Next month I'll tackle 'Paragons of the New Moon', the second book in this series, which came out right after Wild Wild West Con in March. I'm not sure at this point whether this will be another trilogy or an ongoing series, but I'll ask Marvin later this year, because I expect to see him at TusCon in November. I'll also ask when we might expect to see book three, because I'm looking forward to that already. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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