![]() ![]() ![]() On top of all of that, there’s a mysterious and powerful new Arcanum in town who has just murdered a large number of people inside a rejuvenation clinic and shown access to powers that the Arcana had previously thought lost after they left their homeland. On top of that, Rune’s found family keeps growing, and so do their (often humorous) problems: there’s a whole gang of teenagers who require some degree of co-parenting, a young boy and his adopted dinosaur, seneschals to be hired, relationships with fellow Arcana to be managed, and, at the heart of it all, Rune’s relationships with his human companion Brand and his lover Addam Saint Nicholas, a scion of Justice. Alongside his social and political status, Rune has also come into a new understanding about how the powers of the Arcana work, particularly the specific secret magic called the majeure which only Arcana can wield, though at the cost of shortening their own lives. That Rune’s greater resources have allowed him to overcome this problem so quickly-practically offscreen, as even “Scenes from Quarantine” doesn’t go into much detail on how the reclamation took place-works to shift his status from plucky outsider to independent player in New Atlantis’s elite. In the previous two books, the Sun Estate has been depicted as dangerous and almost completely inaccessible to Rune and Brand, to the point that the first chapter of The Hanged Man involves a carefully planned, tense expedition into the house’s attic. He has also, as of the pandemic-set “Scenes from Quarantine,” cleared the various demonic presences which were haunting his family estate, and that’s our first clue that things are going to look quite different in The Hourglass Throne. Rune has now claimed his title and a seat on the Arcanum, making new allies in the process. John, his search for the truth of what happened to him, and his ascent to power among the Arcana of Atlantis.Īs of the events of The Hanged Man and the additional free story “Scenes from Quarantine” (which was written serially in 2020 during the first peak of the COVID-19 pandemic), that ascent has begun to gather a lot of momentum. It sounded fun, but was it for me? It turned out, after reading The Last Sun (2018) and The Hanged Man (2019)-the first two books in the series-the answer was a surprisingly passionate “yes,” and I’ve joined many fans of the series in awaiting The Hourglass Throne, which rounds out the first trilogy in what promises to be a nine-book series about Rune St. Edwards’s urban fantasy series about a traumatised, orphaned heir from an Atlantean ruling family who is now trying to make his way in a society that by turns shuns and tries to use him, all while living with his human life partner (with whom he shares a telepathic bond from birth) and being supported by a benevolent but strict and distant mentor figure. That’s how I felt about The Tarot Sequence, K. ![]() Not because they’re particularly groundbreaking on their own, but because everything about them seems like it should pass you by-they sound fun, they’re interesting to listen to your friends gush about, but, you know, they’re maybe not for you. Every so often, stories come along which really challenge how you thinks of yourself as a reader. ![]()
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