Empire’s Passing
Series: Empire’s Legacy, #8
Author: Marian L Thorpe
Genre: Historical Fantasy
Release Date: February 22nd, 2024
Book Description:
Gwenna, Principe of Emparias, is witnessing an empire’s fall. She must not only predict the future, but create one – without the advice and support of her father. Her partner Lynthe is challenging her leadership; her mother and Sorley are struggling to find their own futures without the man they both loved. Can she shape the world envisioned by Cillian, the world they have all worked towards for the last thirty years?
Lena, newly bereft, can find no peace in the walls of a fort or the duties of a general. In a divisive decision, she chooses to travel east, to find her son, to judge the progress of the war for herself, and to search for both memories and a future. Where is home for the falcon, when there is no falconer to hold out his arm?
Review:
To me, Empire’s Passing binds up the threads of the whole series – and I’m not thinking primarily of a plot thing, but more of themes and relationships. Not everything is resolved – which is at it should be. There are always questions unanswered and thoughts unspoken. Nothing is ever finished.
Once again, I really felt the characters and found them vibrant and real. This story enriches all the others with its look into deeper conflicts and sorrows in relationships – and love that does not end with death, even as people’s worlds come to an end. I loved the spiritual touch that’s stronger in this one – but still without any organized religion.
It weaves things into a whole, and fills in some of the things I found lacking in the previous books. It is a story of things broken, of grief, both new, raw-edged grief, and older griefs, longings never fully satisfied. It is a story that shows some of the darker things underneath, some of the flaws and difficulties in relationships we’ve seen before, brought to the light.
But that doesn’t mean it’s all darkness, or even mostly darkness. I think that is what stood out to me most about the book. It’s a story about loss and grief. Lena’s – and Sorley’s – whole lives have been bound up with Cillian. The love between them is real, and they feel lost without him. Bereft, and perhaps forsaken – long ago, Lena and Cillian were exiled, together, and that’s how they found their love. But now, this is a far worse exile.
But is it really that?
Lena fears, at times, she’s going mad. She feels Cillian’s presence, hears his voice, sometimes. Yet I do not think it’s merely a phantom of her imagination. The presence feels real; the voice is very much Cillian’s – the real Cillian, not a merely imagined one. It seems too real to be fake. Cillian hasn’t forsaken her – and though all things may come to end, and the god of death comes for all, yet love lives forever.
And even if Lena’s mind and her imagination are the means through which Cillian’s presence is communicated to her, is it therefore false? Is it therefore merely imagined? People’s presence is always communicated indirectly, through our senses and perceptions. The physical might not be the only way for something real to be apprehended. What Lena knows, what Lena hears, what Lena feels, is true.
So I really liked that. Throughout these books, there’s been relatively little spirituality, and the people of Esparias had no religion. Yet I truly enjoyed the touch that seems the gods are realities, even if those realities might not align with people’s images of them. It’s soft, just a touch here or there – but all the stronger for that touch, that sense of meaning and purpose that comes from beyond. Of a personality that transcends. You can try to ignore it, brush it off – yet it’s there, teasing at the edges, not easy to quite explain away. To try, yes, but to really do, no. A sense of soul and meaning, and you can ignore it, but it’s still there.
And above all, I really liked the sense of love not ended by death.
For the darker, I appreciated much of it, also. I remember having some mixed feelings of a sort about how Cillian returns Sorley’s love. As if something were perhaps just a little too “perfect.” But this one shows the other side. The questions Sorley raises, the fears or complaints that he was always second to Lena in Cillian’s life and in his love – they cannot be born only from the grief of the moment and loss, or they would not be thought and said even then, not the way they are. He knows Cillian loves him, always has loved him, and loved him enough to give everything for him – perhaps to give things for him that might not have really been love, but that is beside the point.
But in the way Sorley wanted? Some of it, yes. But there are wounds there, or at least bruises, sore spots. Doubts that lingered. Yearnings that weren’t quite fulfilled. Maybe for Lena, too. Some of them due to Cillian’s flaws, some of them due perhaps simply to the fact that Cillian, too, is human with his own weakness, incapable of being everything to everyone. Some of them due to the society within which they lived.
And some of them due to their own flaws and failings, even now. And to the particular difficulties of a relationship like theirs.
And then there is Gwenna’s story, too. I loved her protectiveness as a mother.
One never really finds out exactly what is going on with Lynthe and that is something I liked, and that I think adds depth to the story. Not all stories are told, not all motivations known, and the realization of that can be a very important part of a story. It can be essential. I do not really want to know what is going on with Lynthe; maybe, in a way, but that feel of some things never revealed is a quality I would not want to miss. The humility of that understanding that one doesn’t really know precisely what went wrong and when and why. Perhaps some guesses can be made. But Gwenna does not know and, in this story, neither should we.
Gwenna can only grieve for what seemed to be, for what might have been, and for what now is not.
There is more, also. The characters, including all the new ones, continue to be vivid and real. From the prologue, to every gesture and word of Lena and Cillian’s son, Colm, he is very much his own man, his own character. Not one easily described, but one that breathes and feels real. One I can see, know, recognize. One that leaves an imprint.
This is not to say there aren’t choices and characters I have mixed feelings about. Lena remarks at one time that Eudekia is a far stronger woman than she is, and I can only ask what her strength is for. Is any human ever meant to be that kind of symbol? Is it really good – for anyone, that human or any others? Is that sense that she is a greater woman, a stronger person, a healthy thing for her to invoke in others, for Lena to feel about her?
At the same time, I liked the interactions between her and Lena in this story. There was something human and real about her, even if she’s one of the few characters in this series that feels like she might not be the same person all the time.
There’s more here, but I can’t talk about all of it. Only that there’s a balance between the grief and the loss, and a satisfaction, a healing, a light. One wonders even if Cillian is to bring a healing for Lena and Sorley in the pain and wounds of his death they maybe could not find in life. To find who they are in a new way. To be themselves with him in life, and to find themselves also, in a new way, without his shadow. But still, always, ever, beloved by him.
And maybe be together again, freer, more themselves?
But it’s not just Lena and Sorley who find a new healing, and perhaps a deeper, truer knowledge of what it means they are loved – by a man who struggled to ever say that. Others find healing, completion, new beginnings also.
There’s life. And new life.
Review for the first trilogy (Empire’s Daughter, Empire’s Hostage, Empire’s Exile)
Enthralled By Love 