A Sky Beyond the Storm finishes what An Ember in the Ashes started

Sabaa Tahir concludes her ambitious Ember in the Ashes series with A Sky Beyond the Storm, a massive tale of war, loss, memory – and love of all kinds.

A Sky Beyond the Storm is the fourth and final novel in Sabaa Tahir’s sweeping Ember in the Ashes series and, like many series-ending conclusions before it, it doesn’t quite stick the landing. But its attempt to do so is nevertheless an entertaining and generally worthwhile one: A massive story of war, loss, memory – and love of all kinds.

The themes of this book – and this series really – still resonate throughout this final installment: The potency of memory, the power of love, and the beauty of serving something larger than yourself. The world-building remains as rich as it ever has, as the story switches between the Tribespeople, the Marinn kingdom, Helene’s Empire-in-exile, and several other locations at a rapid clip, allowing us to see the breadth of its scope.

Maybe it was always too much to expect for any author to wind down a series that has grown as large and unwieldy as the Ember in the Ashes universe has, and still wrap up every plot satisfactorily. After all, what started out as the story of a young girl attempting to rescue her captive brother has grown into a sprawling, complicated tale about magical jinn and the potential end of humanity.

Small stakes, these are not. At this point, it’s difficult to explain what this series is even about now to someone that’s never read it. And one of the consequences that come from growing the scale of the story is that the series has lost a little bit of the character work that made it so special. I don’t necessarily feel like I know any of these characters – save perhaps Helene – as well as I once did, and much of what happens to them in this novel seems to have as much to do with moving them into place for its conclusion as it does with character development. (Save, again, perhaps Helene.)

Sure, Sky Beyond the Storm spends a lot of time on Laia and Elias pining over one another, but because he cannot relinquish his duties or responsibilities as Soul Catcher until the end of the novel for various reasons, the pair tend to cross and recross the same ground repeatedly. We get it: Laia is upset that he’s cold and trying to push her away. Elias is equally tormented by memories of the two of them together back when he was human and his vow to take care of the ghosts in the Waiting Place.

After the fifth or so awkward interlude between them, you can’t help but sort of start wondering how this narrative time might be better spent. Personally, I wish we’d spent more time with Laia, herself, and not Laia and her feelings about Elias if that makes sense. Especially because she is repeatedly asked to make such big, potentially world-altering decisions in this book. We deserve more time with her than we get, if only to fully see how she gets there.

This is all the more unfortunate because A Sky Against the Storm is definitely too long, and could probably drop a hundred pages or so with no real loss to the story. I’m not sure who really wanted to hear more about the Nightbringer’s sad backstory in varying levels of detail, but that’s here in spades, as is a new character from his past that sort of but not really helps explain some of Laia’s magic.

In some ways, the addition of a new, threatening aspect of the construct of the final battle – that Death holds back a literal Sea of Suffering that could wipe out the world, and apparently the Nightbringer wants to unleash it because reasons, deserved more attention than it got.

We at least get to see much of Elias’ internal struggle between his heart and his duty, and his increasing desire to restore balance and protect the jinn from harm – despite the wishes of multiple other major characters – could really have provided some interesting conflict between them all, had it been properly introduced before the final fourth of the story. (In all honestly, I’m not sure that this series has ever really fully explained its jinn-based lore to my satisfaction and this would have also likely helped there as well.)

Much like this novel’s predecessors, A Torch Against the Night and A Reaper at the Gates, the character who has emerged as this series’ true hero is Helene Aquilla, Blood Shrike of the Empire, who suffers tremendous losses throughout the story, but still keeps standing, because it’s what she’s been trained to do, and it’s who she is. Her determination to fight for her people, to free them from the threat of Keris Veturia’s vicious rule, and to protect her nephew’s legacy give her the most defined arc in the entire series and make her the easiest character to both root for and love.

When we consider how far she – initially introduced as an unrequited love interest for Elias – has come, it’s a remarkable bit of story craft. Her story in this final novel is one of both triumph and tragedy, and out of all the main characters, I love her ending the most. It feels fitting for the woman and the leader she has grown up to be.

While A Sky Beyond the Storm is perhaps not everything we may have wanted it to be as a finale, author Sabaa Tahir deserves so much praise for landing this massive epic at all – crafting a vast, expansive fantasy universe with diverse characters who all have agendas and defined stories of their own. I can’t wait to see what she does next as a writer, and to meet the characters she’ll create in the future.

A Sky Beyond the Storm is available everywhere now.