"Little does Joshua know, he's about to earn his wings..."
"A dragon and then a city, drawn across worlds, all to pay tribute to the forgemaster and send cracks rippling through the boundary between Ryvarra and the Cold."
—Grimlohr, The War of Embers
The War of Embers is a fantasy novel written by James Duvall that (mostly) follows Joshua Woods, a second-generation Ryvarran immigrant born on Earth. However, after an incident leads him stranded in Ryvarra, he unwittingly becomes embroiled in the politics of the local kingdoms and finds himself torn between two worlds.
The story begins in Ashcrest, Colorado, a town founded by Ryvarran immigrants dependent on a magical barrier to keep their colony hidden from the rest of Earth. On a winter morning, to everyone's surprise, a mail truck from the US Postal Service somehow found its way past the barrier and had begun delivering phonebooks. It is evident that the machinery maintaining the barrier and the portal between worlds is malfunctioning. After being sent to investigate, the coins that Joshua had inherited from his parents reacts to the magic and he alone, is transported to Ryvarra.
The War of Embers:
The main series.
- The War of Embers (2019)
The Lion's Roar:
A side series of short novellas set in Ryvarra focused on the eponymous hunter's lodge.
- Spellhound: A Monster Hunting Adventure (2020)
- Temple of the River God: A Monster Hunting Adventure (2022)
Other
- The Ashfall Run (2019): Focuses on Caela's backstory
The War of Embers provides examples of:
- Alternate Techline: Aparently, the Calderrans were able to replicate many "modern" amenities such as running water and heated water tanks using basically only gears and steam engines. Most of Ryvarra uses rails and trains as form of central transportation.
- Anti-Magical Faction: The Calderrans are a people known for their steampunk technology and generally abhor magic to the point that mages visiting their city are treated with hostility, if not downright violence. Albeit not at the level of Calderrans, most non-mage humans are suspicious of mages due to their tendencies of sending their disciples into The Cold and also leaving their golems in the wild in which they sometimes go haywire and attack nearby villages. Conversed and Defied by Calderrans on Earth in which they recognized the necessity of magic in creating a portal between Ryvarra and Earth and also maintaining Ashcrest, although most of them still regard it with negative superstition.
- Breath Weapon: All dragons capable of magic have this. To them, the act of breathing fire and wielding magic are indistinguishable.
- Cursed with Awesome: Turning into a dragon has made Joshua much more powerful, having an inner source of magic and being able to fight off entire armies with ease, at the cost of being feared by most people and having trouble staying on Earth due to not having enough magic to sustain an alter indefinitely.
- Child of Two Worlds: By the end of the novel, Joshua is a respected "soldier" in the Fendiss army and chooses to remain this trope when he is asked whether he will permanently stay on Ryvarra or Earth.
- Church Militant: Ralians are this, in that one of them even complains about the lack of "thinkers" as compared to sychophants and warlords. The reason they are this is because they consider every other religion heresy and are at war with "more than half of the civilized world"
- Clockwork Creature: The Calderrans are famous for creating these, notably in the form of dragons.
- Cultural Blending: It's implied that the Calderrans' Victorian England aesthetics are a result of cultural contamination by Ryvarrans who have visited Earth in the past such as in an old 1823 London Police document about a patient who claims to have met a "werewolf from another world" who paid him in Ryvarran currency.
- Emergency Transformation: After being exposed to frostnettle, a poison that is deadly to humans but not to dragons, Grimlohr is forced to use Cabor's Honor to turn Joshua into a Night Seeker dragon.
- Fantastic Racism: Most humans regard non-humans with fear, although werewolves are particularly disdained due to their "instability" during certain phases of the moon. The Ralians downright hate the sadeans of Fendiss to which they accuse of "stealing their magic" and are known for ritually slaughtering and sacrificing them.
- Fantasy Pantheon: Arcamyn is said to be protected by two dragon-like gods, Sacrys, the keeper of light and Dakrym, keeper of death. On the other hand, the Ralians worship Kalthiress, the god of the forge.
- Fish out of Water: Joshua is this in Ryvarra at the beginning, by the end this is flipped in which he feels much more at home in Ryvarra than on Earth since being on Earth constantly drains him of magic and leaves him anxious and unsatiated.
- Functional Magic: Of the two elemental sources of magic mentioned there is the nightstorm and emberstorm, corresponding to the Emberfall order and Frostwind circle of mages respectively.
- Golem: The Ralians and their god Kalthiress are known for sending hordes of stone golems through portals to attack their enemies. Mages also known for building them which is partially a cause of their bad reputation among non-mages.
- Kidnapped by the Call: Besides getting teleported against his will, Joshua is also dragged halfway across a kingdom by Cabor.
- Magitek: Conversed and Defied. The Calderrans refuse to work with artificers of Fendiss due to their superstition and hatred of magic, a fact that Alirus Beldin laments.
- Masquerade: Although most Ryvarran refugees are human and could easily pass as an Earth native given enough study and effort, there are also centaurs, sadeans and formerly, a werewolf, so Ashcrest has to keep a magic barrier up constantly and force them to use illusion devices to appear human.
- My Parents Are Dead: By the start of the novel, both Joshua's mother and father had gone missing in the Colorado mountains and are presumed dead, leaving him with his sister (who is rarely discussed and had left Ashcrest) as his only family member left.
- My Species Doth Protest Too Much: Although a Calderran immigrant in Ashcrest, Brian Ketch does not regard magic as negatively and was even willing to smuggle a golem heartstone to Earth for his clockwork construct project.
- Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Discussed by Grimlohr in that it was the Ralians and their sorrows that ultimately was the cause of why Joshua was turned into a dragon and it is through their own fire magic that they worship (that dragons also wield) that will be their own undoing.
- No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: While Joshua's heroics in Ryvarra are nothing out of the ordinary, on Earth he is much less appreciated and even written up while protecting a member of the Solomon's Watch against their orders due to the prevalence of law/order and the discouragement of vigilantism. Justified in that the Solomon's Watch of Ashcrest is trying to prevent Earth from discovering their existance and that its kind of hard to hide a dragon from public notice.
- Noodle Incident: To the Calderrans, a calamity they only refer to as the day "When All the Lights Went Out".
- Our Centaurs Are Different: Besides actual centaurs, there are also Sadeans who visually are like centaurs but have the lower half of panthers and are implied to be their own race.
- Our Dragons Are Different: Most dragons are born with an elemental source of magic inside of them and those that are not are denounced as a Smoulder. There are also different "types" of dragons, for instance, Cabor is a Seeker, a type of dragon implied to be the smallest of their kind (albeit still 3x as large as humans) but the fastest. On the other hand, Grimlohr is refered to as a Slayer and there are also Guardians and Royals. Dragons can also use magic to assume an alter, a human form. As a society they also have many customs such as the First Flame in which age is counted by the first to display magical adequacy to ensure that the eldests are always those most proficient in magic.
- The Atoner: Geartooth, the clockwork dragon and Caela, his "inventor" to a lesser extent in which the human who became Geartooth was a thief that was killed by Caela's clockwork construct and had his soul trapped in its golem heartstone
- Void Between the Worlds: The Cold is the space between all worlds in which all magic flows between. People traveling between worlds pass through it, although one can also end up there due to a teleportation mishap.
