Urian, our main character, is the son of Styxx and Bethany but grew up believing he was the son of Stryker. Kicking off before he was even born (when Acheron was killed and his mum Apollymi went nuts on the world) through to 2017. Given we’d discovered in an earlier book that he’d married Phoebe, I wasn’t too sure how this was going to play out.
Cue a first love we didn’t know about, Xyn, and we’ve got the makings of a love triangle that goes across millennia. Makes it pretty interesting to see what happens!
The first portion of the book follows Urian for the first couple thousand years of his life, most of which was spent in Kalosis. On his few forays into the human world we see him cross paths with a few different Dark Hunters, Were Hunters and even Acheron and Savitar.
We even get to see a fair bit about Urian’s relationships with his brothers and sister’s. During these interactions and his various interactions with Xyn and Phoebe over the years we learn more about Urian than we have in all the previous books he’s featured in.
The first part of this book was a bit repetitive since it was taken pretty much directly from Acheron’s book from just after his death. And there were a few other sections that felt like this as well. Which can’t really be helped given how long Urian has been alive, and how much he’s been involved in other books.
What I didn’t like about how Sherrilyn did it is that she didn’t even try to re-write the scenes that Urian was in from his perspective. It felt more like a copy and paste from previous books.
Sherrilyn adds complexity to the story by having conflicting emotional responses from Apollymi towards Urian. We know she hates his true father, so why would she be close to him? Why train him to be amazing? Why be ok with him having Styxx’s emblem on his shield? Her love of him just felt so strange to me but at the same time so nice.
The biggest thing that was strange to me was Urian’s first love. And that it was to a dragon. From everything we knew about Urian until this point in time he has never ONCE mentioned loving anyone other than Phoebe. So to hear that he loved Xyn, and had a relationship with her over a span of hundreds of years. He loved her so much that he was devastated when she didn’t meet him and went back to her cave to check on her and found it abandoned and her long gone.
So my problem then became a matter of. Was Phoebe or Xyn his true love? Or is there someone new who has entered his life? Well after a whole lot of drama, adventure and tension it turns out Xyn was alive and locked as a statue all this time. Cue a bit more drama coz turns out Phoebe is alive as well and he ends up going back to Xyn and leaving Phoebe to try and enjoy what remains of her life.
Just like with Styxx’s book I was grabbed in, sucked in emotionally and really felt like I was there with Urian. The loneliness he’s experienced his whole life, as if he’s not like everyone else? It’s a feeling I’ve felt most of my life and its something that can isolate someone further than they already feel.
