When we last left our plucky heroine at the end of Fourth Wing, she had just made a miraculous recovery after having been stabbed and poisoned in her fight with the Venin and their wyvern. We’re told she survived thanks to her brother, Brennan, being a skilled healer, but I find it more likely that Yarros just felt the need to put Violet in mortal danger so Xaden could brood at her bedside while she lay unconscious.
Violet has a lot to deal with when she wakes up. First, there’s the fact that her brother is still alive and let them all believe he had died years ago.
Then there’s the fact that Xaden lied to her about being part of the resistance.
She’s barely had time to process all that before the rebel Assembly assembles to discuss whether they can trust her enough to let her out of their sight so she can go back to Basgiath to finish her training.
On top of all that, she’s still dealing with the revelation that Venin and wyvern are real and Navarrian leadership has been lying to them about it.
Oh, and she’s grieving Liam’s death. Not only was he a good friend, but he died in her arms while protecting her as he had promised Xaden he would. So there’s a lot of guilt to go along with the grief.
That’s a lot to absorb all at once while still recovering from a near-death experience, but it’s Xaden lying to her about being part of the resistance that she can’t get over. She wonders how they can have a future together if she can’t trust him.
She has a point, and Xaden doesn’t do himself any favors by refusing to volunteer information. He tells Violet he’ll honestly answer any questions she asks, but that puts the onus on her to ask the right questions.
The rebel Assembly decides to allow Violet to return to Basgiath, which she and Xaden do almost immediately.
By this time, everyone has assumed they died in the war games, so they’re duly relieved to see Violet and Xaden alive and well.
I can’t remember the reason they give for their delayed return, but of course they can’t tell them the truth, including the fact that Violet had a very close call with death.
Despite being super pissed with Xaden for not telling her the truth about being in the resistance, she quickly finds herself in the same position.
She can’t tell any of her friends about the resistance or her new role in it, much less Xaden’s, as much for their own safety, as for hers, Xaden’s, and the safety of the resistance.
Because she knows she’s a bad liar, Violet starts avoiding her friends so she won’t have to lie to them. Instead, she starts spending more time with Xaden and Imogen and their gang because they can all be honest with each other. She and Imogen aren’t exactly friends, but they start running together because Violet recognizes how important being in good cardiac shape will be when the next fight comes, and Imogen know Violet needs someone to watch her back.
Violet tells her best friend, Rhiannon, she can’t trust Xaden because he lied to her, but she can’t tell her what he lied about. Of course Rhiannon’s first thought is that Xaden cheated on her. Violet says that’s not what happened, but she can’t tell her what did happen.
You’d think being in Xaden’s position and being forced to withhold the truth from her friends would have given her a little more sympathy for his situation, but she remains blind to the parallels.
Violet, Imogen, and everyone else who disappeared during the war games also find they have to deal with assassins.
Students are still allowed to kill other students, so someone can hire someone entering Basgiath as a student to kill certain targets who also happen to be students. It soon becomes clear that someone is trying to take out everyone who knows the truth about Venin and wyvern.
Major Varrish suspects Violet knows the truth about Venin and wyvern and has joined the resistance, so he sets out to make her life very difficult, first by training her on her power to command lightning to the point of exhaustion, almost to the point of burning herself out.
Then he demands she do it again a few days later as punishment for refusing to call Andarna to flight practice.
Andarna has entered the long sleep, which is what growing dragons do around the time they enter adolescence, but for some reason, Violet doesn’t want to tell anyone that. Maybe because they didn’t realize Andarna was a hatchling when she bonded with Violet, and Violet is afraid of what they’ll do once they realize the truth.
Varrish acts like his overtraining is for Violet’s benefit as he makes her summon more and more lightning bolts in faster and faster succession. It’s not until later in the book that another character points out frequency doesn’t matter as much as accuracy, and her accuracy sucks. How is she supposed to strike at her enemies in the middle of a battle if she can’t be sure she won’t also hit her friends?
The breaking point comes during interrogation training. Since it’s a very real fear that a Rider could be captured and tortured for information, they’re taught how to withstand torture and then made to practice those techniques. They’re given random bits of information they’re supposed to protect from their torturers, but of course Violet has information she really can’t let her not-so-fake torturers access.
The second time she’s taken for “questioning,” Violet is held in captivity for five days until Dain is brought in to read her mind. Until he does so, he hadn’t realized the full extent of the situation. He hadn’t known that, by betraying her at the end of Fourth Wing, he was sending her and her friends to their deaths.
So, after reading her mind again, instead of betraying them again, he turns around and kills her torturer and they proceed to make their way out of there.
As they do, they run into Xaden who is steadily killing everyone standing between him and Violet. I think that’s supposed to be romantic because he’s so desperate to save her, but to me that just says anger management issues and disregard for human life, which is a huge red flag.
He does help Violet kill Varrish. I guess the couple that slays together stays together.
Obviously they can’t stick around Basgiath after leaving that giant mess. It’s time to join the resistance for good. They tell all the other Riders the truth about Venin, wyvern, and the resistance and give them a chance to either join them or stay at Basgiath.
Most of them choose to join them, and it’s made to sound like even the ones who stay are doing it more as a stay-and-fight-the-system-from-the-inside type choice. Or they just know they have more to learn and they want to make sure they learn it before heading into battle, which is also fair.
Violet’s sister, Mira, also joins them when she hears about what’s going on, and her response to seeing Brennan is to punch him in the face and yell at him for what he did to their parents and leaving her and Violet to clean up the mess. I think it’s even implied that his fake death played a role in their father’s death.
Of course, Mira gets over it, but not before they hash it out, which strikes me as fairly realistic.
Then they have to go make a deal with Viscount Tecarus and negotiate for the luminary, which could be a critical ingredient in creating a new ward stone to keep the rebel base safe.
Violet has been reading everything she can get her hands on to try and figure out how to create a new ward stone. They know how to keep the existing wards up, but finding information on how to create a new ward stone proves much harder.
Violet thought she had it once, but it didn’t work, leading her to agree to meet with Tecarus to get the luminary so they can take another crack at it.
When they go, they meet Tecarus’s niece, Catriona (Cat), who, it turns out, used to be engaged to Xaden. Just another small detail Xaden failed to disclose to Violet.
Their union was supposed to unify Cordyn and Tyrrendor, but it didn’t work out and they broke off the engagement before Xaden and Violet met.
Also, Xaden is technically king of Tyrrendor, which is perfect because every girl secretly wants to marry a prince who lives in a stunning palace, so of course Xaden turns out to be royalty. But monarchy is bad, so we’re not supposed to want to marry a prince, which is why Xaden insists he’s not really royalty, he’s only technically king. And, yes, he lives in a stunning palace Violet now gets to live in, too. How convenient.
But Cat isn’t one to let things go. She’s determined to have Xaden to herself again to help bring peace to her people, so she keeps messing with Violet.
It turns out Cat has the ability to amplify a person’s emotions. So she says things to get under Violet’s skin, and when it works, she amplifies Violet’s feelings of rage and jealousy until Violet can’t see straight.
Once Xaden explains this to Violet, reminds her to keep her mental shields up, and gives her a dagger with a rune on it that blocks Cat’s abilities, Violet is able to deal with her, although Cat still doesn’t make things easy.
Cat is a gryphon rider, and due to all the fighting between Cordyn and Navarre, there’s a lot of mutual distrust between the two groups. But now they have to work together.
The gryphons and their riders also need to get from Cordyn to Tyrrendor once they agree to work together, but that involves literally climbing mountains. But the gryphons can’t fly that high, which means they and their riders need to climb the mountains on foot.
Leadership decides to send dragon riders to climb the mountains with the gryphons and their riders as a team-building exercise.
But of course it’s not enough for the mountains to be treacherously high and rocky. They also have to be booby trapped.
When a trap is released, one of Cat’s friends falls to her death, and just like a dragon Rider will die without their dragon, even if nothing is physically wrong with them, the same is true of gryphons if their rider dies.
Cat blames Violet for her friend’s death, which of course Violet did everything she could to prevent.
So, yeah, teambuilding exercise was definitely a failure.
It’s not until they’re in a training session and they find themselves in a cave, face-to-face with an angry dragon that Cat starts to warm up to Violet.
The dragon is none other than Solas, Varrish’s dragon, so of course he’s pissed at them for killing his rider.
Andarna manages to protect Cat and Violet from Solas’s dragon fire, Violet manages to get one good stab in, and Andarna kills Solas.
A dragon killing another dragon is normally a big no-no in the world of dragons, but the elder dragons decide not to punish Andarna.
Andarna, btw, has since awoken from her Dreamless Sleep, but because it was cut short, and because she was woken too many times, and because of all the energy she expended at Resson, she hasn’t developed properly. Her muscles aren’t strong enough to support her new wings, and it takes some training and exercises for her to be able to fly at all. Tairn says it’s unlikely she’ll ever be able to carry a Rider, but knowing this gang, I’m sure they’ll find a way around it.
They get a warning that a horde of wyvern are on their way, so Violet rushes to fix the wardstone according to the latest instructions they got with another attempt at the translation.
At first, the wardstone appears to work as wyvern drop like flies, until one of the fliers points out that she can still use her magic within the confines of the ward. She shouldn’t be able to do that if the wardstone was working at full capacity, so it’s back to the drawing board … or in this case, translation.
It turns out they need dragonfire from seven different kinds of dragons. Which is impossible because there are only six kinds of dragons.
That’s when Andarna reveals that she’s not really a black dragon. She’s another type of dragon all together. One who waited to be born until after Violet had been born so she could bond with Violet.
Violet’s mother shows up, along with Melgren, who has the ability to see the outcome of battles that haven’t happened yet. He says the wyvern are going to attack Samara and win … if the rebels don’t come to their aid.
Brennan refuses to help since, as he sees it, his mother had no qualms about sending him to his death, so why shouldn’t he send her to her own death?
General Sorrengail and Melgren leave, and Violet tries (unsuccessfully) to talk some sense into her brother.
Then Violet realizes what Melgren doesn’t. Wyvern are attracted to magic, and every child of a rebel leader carries relics of protection, which means the wyvern aren’t going to be attracted to Samara. They’ll be drawn to Basgiath.
So she and Xaden take off for Basgiath.
When they get there, they find the wardstone broken by Jack Barlowe, who was brought back to life by Nolon, Basgiath’s healer. He hasn’t been after Violet since he came back, though, and even saved her life at one point.
Now they find out he’s Venin and tries to draw energy from the ground to fight off Violet and her friends and prevent them from reactivating the wardstone.
Xaden manages to knock him out so Violet is able to reactivate the wardstone, but it has to draw power from her – more power than she can give without draining her life force.
Violet is ready to sacrifice herself, because of course she is, but her mother steps in and offers up her own life force instead. She dies, the wardstone is reactivated, and all the wyvern drop like flies.
But not before Xaden apparently strikes some sort of deal.
The book ends with the revelation that Xaden is now Venin. He goes to Jack to demand to know how to reverse it, but Jack says there is no reversing it.
But of course they’re going to find a way to reverse it, however improbable, because that’s how this series rolls.