Sword of Shadows

The Sword of Shadows is a High Fantasy series by JV Jones set in a dark, subarctic world inhabited by a loose alliance of city-states, the Clanholds, and the enigmatic Sull, which is under threat from the Endlords, a group of godlike Omnicidal Maniacs.

The story follows two main characters: Raif Sevrance is a young clansman with the ability to hit any animal through the heart with his arrows, and Asarhia (or Ash, as she prefers) is the adopted daughter of Penthero Iss, creepy ruler of the city-state of Spire Vanis and a dabbler in sorcery. Against a backdrop of internecine war among the clans, Iss's ambitions for conquest, and the looming threat of the Endlords and their minions, Raif and Ash's parallel stories will eventually intersect, and both of them will find destinies beyond what they'd dreamed of... or wanted.

The series was put on hold for several years, but Jones has as of autumn 2017 resumed work on book five; Sword of Shadows is projected to be six volumes in total when completed.

The books so far:

1. A Cavern of Black Ice (1999)
2. A Fortress of Gray Ice (2002)
3. A Sword from Red Ice (2007)
4. Watcher of the Dead (2011)
5. Endlords (TBR)^note  Tentative title, release date unknown
6. Title TBA

This series is set in the same world as Jones's earlier Low Fantasy trilogy The Book of Words, which takes place a generation earlier and in a different part of the continent. Because of the geographical difference (and the fact that a number of key worldbuilding elements, including the Sull, the Old Ones, and the Endlords, weren't introduced until Sword) it isn't necessary to have read the earlier series to understand this one. However, certain characters' backstories will make more sense with knowledge of the events of Book of Words.

Provides examples of:

• Action Girl: Ash isn't one when we meet her, but is growing into the role. Most Sull females, and more than a few Clanswomen, would also qualify.
• A Father to His Men: Marafice Eye is a rather despicable person, on the whole, but he is a very good leader of men.
• And I Must Scream: Baralis's imprisonment under Iss involved a great deal of sensory deprivation, torture, crippling, and being bled constantly. Yikes.
• The Anti-God: Make that the anti-pantheon. The Endlords are explicitly described as the opposite of the gods.
• Anti-Villain: Vaylo Bludd, the Dog Lord, is a menacing enemy, but he's also at times one of the most sympathetic POV characters.
• Anthropomorphic Personification: In addition to the Endlords, Death exists as a definite entity in this Verse. She's female, tied to Raif's powers, and has spoken to him directly.
• Arc Words:
  • "Days darker than night lie ahead," repeated by numerous characters across the series as a threat or warning.
  • The Clan Bludd^note We are Clan Bludd, chosen by the Stone Gods to guard their borders. Death is our companion. A hard life long-lived is our reward. and Clan Blackhail^note We are Blackhail, first among clans. We will not cower and we will not hide, and we will have our revenge. boasts serve as arc words for characters associated with those clans, as they wrestle with the boast's meaning and application to their own situations.
• Badass Boast: All the Clans have one. Crosses over with Badass Creed, as each boast is ritually memorized by all of the clan's members and repeated at dramatically appropriate times.
• Big Bad: There are numerous mortal villains running around, but they all pale compared to the incoming threat of the Endlords, nine godlike personifications of destruction and entropy.
• Big Bad Duumvirate: Of sorts. There are nine distinct Endlords, but so far they've pretty much been treated as a monolithic force of destruction.
• Black-and-Grey Morality: The Endlords are pretty undeniably evil, but most of the major mortal factions aren't exactly what you'd call "good" either, to varying degrees, and as of the end of Watcher, Raif is dangerously close to going off the deep end completely.
• Blood Magic: Iss may not be much of a sorcerer on his own, but by draining blood from his bound sorcerer Baralis, he's still capable of impressive feats of magic.
• The Chosen One: Raif (as Watcher of the Dead) and Ash (as the Reach) would both qualify. Unfortunately, as Raif's destiny apparently puts him at odds with the Sull, and Ash's destiny is with the Sull, this may well pit them against one another.
• Court Mage: Sarga Veys to Penthero Iss; Iss is a sorcerer himself, but Veys is much more giften in his own right.
• Covers Always Lie: The American covers for Cavern and Watcher fairly accurately depict scenes from the books; Fortress and Sword aren't so lucky:
  • The cover to A Fortress of Grey Ice depicts Raif and Ash fighting the Shatan Maer together. Not only does Raif face it alone, he and Ash spend almost the whole book separated! Also, Ash is depicted using a bow, which is Raif's weapon; Ash uses a paired dagger and chain.
  • Sword is better, but no Endlord erupts from under the Red Ice to attack Raif when he claims the titular weapon; he has a brief vision of them, but it's more a sense of their presence than an actual image, and certainly doesn't involve him being physically attacked.
• Dark Action Girl: Magdalena Crouch, AKA "The Crouching Maiden". The most feared — and expensive — assassin in the North, she has killed dozens of high-profile targets in her time, including sitting monarchs.
• Dark Magical Girl: Ash. Being potentially able to unleash the Endlords is about as dark as it gets. Luckily, she's got the power to fight them too.
• Dark Messiah: How the Sull see Raif, who as the Watcher of the Dead is supposed to help defeat the Endlords, but also to preside over the end of the Sull. Needless to say, they're not that fond of him.
• Deuteragonist: Ash; Raif gets enough more page time than her (particularly in later books) that he's pretty undeniably the protagonist.
• Disc-One Final Boss: Penthero Iss is built up as a major antagonist, but dies anticlimactically at the end of the second book, leaving Marafice Eye to pick up the pieces.
• A Dog Named "Dog": Vaylo Bludd, the Dog Lord, keeps a pack of five war dogs, all of whom he simply calls "dog" (or by description if he needs to single one out, i.e., "the wolf dog"). Apparently, Vaylo has owned so many dogs over the course of his life, and his identity so strongly tied to that fact, that naming them would feel as strange — and unnecessary — to him as naming his limbs. Vaylo's grandchildren, however, don't share his restraint and named the wolf dog — the largest and most aggressive of the pack — "Fluff". Vaylo considers the fact that the wolf dog actually answers to that name to be the funniest thing he's ever seen.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: Crope kills Iss almost incidentally while rescuing Baralis.
• Eldritch Location: The Great Want is a cold subarctic desert where the Blind closely overlaps the physical world. Time, space and distance are all warped so that it's almost impossible to find your way out before you die once you get in (to the point that at one point a character who is lost in the Want sees the Sun rise from six different directions at once) and that's just what it's like normally — it's also full of places where the boundary between life and death is so thin that the Unmade and potentially their masters the Endlords can cross over and walk the living world. The worst of these gateways is the Rift, a seemingly bottomless canyon whose human inhabitants toss their dead into it in the desperate hope such sacrifices will keep the gate shut. It's worked... so far.
• Evil Cripple: The Maimed Men (the raiders who live just north of the Clans) are certainly considered evil by the Clansmen, and they get their name because they disfigure anyone who joins them as a brutal initiation ritual — except for one, Stillborn, who was so ugly they decided he was disfigured enough. When Raif joins them, he's lucky to end up losing nothing worse than part of a finger.
• The Fair Folk: This is how most humans see the Sull — alien, inscrutable, sometimes helpful, sometimes enemies, and above all, dangerous.
• Functional Magic: Inherent Gift is in the spotlight the most, Raif and Ash's inborn abilities most notably. Rule Magic practiced by sorcerers also exists — the fact that Sarga Veys has an Inherent Gift for sorcery is what makes him such a formidable magic-user (not to mention so arrogant).
• Gonk: Stillborn is considered the ugliest man in the North, described in vivid detail. He's a member of the Maimed Men, a renegade clan of outlaws so called because they typically ritually mutilate all new members. Stillborn escaped this fate, mostly because he was so ugly the other Maimed Men decided there really wasn't anything they could do to make him look worse. He's actually a pretty decent guy once you get to know him.
• The Grim Reaper: Death has appeared as a character briefly in some of the books. She's female, extremely beautiful, and tied to Raif's magic in some unspecified way (she requests at one point that he "kill an army" for her). She may or may not be an Endlord.
• Grim Up North: The books take place in the north part of their world, and the setting is rather grim, but go even further than that and you get to the Great Want, a thoroughly unpleasant arctic Eldritch Location where time, distance, and direction become confused.
• Half-Human Hybrid: The Racklanders live on the border between the Clanholds and Sull territory, and at least some of them have actual Sull blood in them. Ash might be considered one too — she starts out human, but undergoes a mystical ritual to "become" Sull and afterwards begins to gradually take on more Sull traits.
• Humanoid Abomination: The Endlords look like tall humans in dark armor, but it's made quite plain that they are in fact cosmic forces of destruction which have been compressed into this shape, and are utterly inimical to life as we know it.
• Impoverished Patrician: Disc-One Final Boss Penthero Iss used to be this; his family were of noble blood but lost all their fortune generations ago and by the time Iss was born they'd been reduced to onion farming. By the time the series starts, however, Iss had clawed his way out of poverty and become Surlord of the city-state Spire Vanis by the usual way. Notably Iss's dragon, Marafice Eye, was born as an actual commoner; though they both pulled themselves up from humble origins through sheer determination, bloody-mindedness, and ruthlessness, the wildly differing backgrounds of their families gives them very different perspectives on things and serves as a source of tension between the two men.
• It Sucks to Be the Chosen One: Neither Raif nor Ash have it easy, to put it mildly; Raif's powers give him a connection to death, and Ash's to the Endlords, and there are plenty of people who want to exploit them or kill them. Early on, Ash definitely has it worse, being doomed to either release the Endlords or go insane and die horribly unless she releases her power in the Cavern of Black Ice, but as of Watcher of the Dead Raif has definitely eclipsed her in the suffering and angst department.
• Klingon Promotion: The generally accepted way to succeed the Surlord of the city-state of Spire Vanis is to off him (though if you're not of noble blood, you probably won't keep the title very long). In the later books, it becomes a plot point that Surlord Penthero Iss chose his own successor, his commanding general Marafice Eye. Since Eye didn't kill Iss himself or arrange for it to be done (in fact, Iss was killed almost incidentally during the rescue of an important prisoner), and is a commoner to boot, he has to fight tooth and nail to keep his throne once succeeding to it.
• Knight Templar: Yiselle No-Knife, who wants to turn Raif into a weapon against the Endlords and will do anything she sees as necessary to accomplish that.
• Leaking Can of Evil: The Endlords and their minions are sealed in a hell-realm called "the Blind". Every thousand years, a mortal called the Reach is born with the power to unleash them, and will inevitably do so unless they discharge their power safely in a controlled environment. The current Reach, Ash, managed to do so — but not before she made a tiny, hairline crack in the walls between worlds, which another sorcerer was then able to widen. The Endlords themselves are still trapped (though they're working on it) but their Taken have been able to escape in increasing numbers, working their masters' will in the mortal world.
• Luke Nounverber: The Sull all have names like this, though they're chosen epithets rather than family names.
• Magic Knight: Raif becomes one as he further develops his abilities.
• Meaningful Name: A Sull's epithet will generally tell you something significant about that Sull's personality, goals, or methods.
• Mirror Character: Mace Blackhail and Robbie Dun Dhoone; they're both young, charismatic, and extremely ambitious and ruthless leaders among the Clans, both lead ancient clans they intend to return to glory, and both came from humble origins before getting adopted into (Mace) or openly declaring themselves members of (Robbie) their clans' lead families.
• Mystical White Hair: Ash March has very pale blonde hair, putting her right between this and hair of gold, depending on the lighting. She's also the Reach, the one human in a thousand years who can release the Endlords from their prison, and has various abilities related to that theme.
• Night of the Living Mooks: The Unmade, undead beings who've been corrupted by the Endlords and form the bulk of their army.
• The Nondescript: The Crouching Maiden; she's so bland looking that people's imaginations strongly influence their perceptions of her to the extent that it's rare for two descriptions of her to even sound like the same person. Even her age is nigh-impossible to pin down. Needless to say, this is a large part of what makes her such an effective assassin, and it's hinted there's something supernatural about the effect.
• Omnicidal Maniac: The Endlords are literally destruction incarnate.
• Our Elves Are Different: The Sull aren't quite elves, but fill essentially the same niche within the setting, as an elder race in decline, who live in isolation from humanity and are known for their great skill in battle, craft, animal training and mysticism.
• Out of Focus: The two most recent books have done this to Ash, giving her only a few chapters each while focusing heavily on Raif.
• The Power of Blood: Blood is sacred to the Sull, who ritually bleed themselves. Penthero Iss does Blood Magic.
• Precursors: The Old Ones, ancestors and predecessors of mankind and the Sull. The Sull themselves are a borderline case, as they're still around, but are no longer the dominant power in the world they once were and are considered near-legendary in many places.
• Princess in Rags: Ash, after running away from Iss's fortress. Considering how she has no experience taking care of herself, to say nothing of the hostile subarctic climate, she almost certainly would have died if Raif and Angus hadn't found her.
• Professional Killer: The Crouching Maiden is an assassin, and a very good one.
• Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: Mace Blackhail is always portrayed as a slimy opportunist looking to grab as much power as he can within the Clanholds, but it's his rape of Raina (the clan chief's widow and his main opponent) which is his Moral Event Horizon, cementing him as a truly evil character who needs to go down hard.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Angus Lok goes on one against the Crouching Maiden after he finds out that she killed his family.
• Sealed Evil in a Can:
  • The Endlords and the Unmade are sealed in Another Dimension behind the Blindwall. Every thousand years, though, a Reach — someone who has the power to release them — is born. This millennium, it's Ash. After she makes a hole in the Blindwall, with some help from Baralis, it's started crumbling — the Endlords aren't out yet, but more than a few Unmade are roaming around the mortal world now.
  • Baralis is an example where the evil was sealed by another evil to leach off his power.
• Spikes of Villainy: The Endlord on the cover of Sword has them.
• Standard Fantasy Setting: The setting resembles the standard, but is set in the subarctic regions of its world, is missing nonhuman races except for the Sull (a Proud Warrior Race of elf-equivalents) and the Unmade, and the focus is more heavily on the "barbarian" Clansmen than the "civilized" part of the world.
• Survival Mantra: Ash has one — "I am Ash March, foundling, left outside Vaingate to die". It's her way of reminding herself that no matter what life throws at her — and it's thrown some nasty things at her already — she'll knuckle down and make it through.
• Took a Level in Badass: Raif, Ash, and Raina Blackhail all take several levels throughout the course of the books.
• Undying Loyalty: Crope to Baralis. Played with in terms of Marafice Eye and Penthero Iss; Eye is absolutely loyal to Iss, but it's because he needs Iss's political patronage rather than any sense of personal liking. This is most strongly emphasized in the second book when Eye convinces Iss to name him as his heir in order to keep said loyalty undying.
• The Vamp: Explicitly averted; the Crouching Maiden takes pride in the fact that she's one of the best assassins in the North and doesn't use sex appeal as a crutch. In the course of her work, she'll occasionally mentally deride female assassins who do.
• Villainous Valor: Marafice Eye is a very bad man, but he's also very badass.
• Villain Protagonist: Marafice Eye probably counts in his own POV sections in the later books. Arguably also the Dog Lord, for a given value of "villain".
• Villain with Good Publicity: Mace Blackhail, initially, at least among his own clan. Thanks to Raina, not anymore...
• Vicious Cycle: The Endlords, chaotic beings seeking to dissolve the very universe into a hell of anarchy, are locked in a dimensional prison. Every 1,000 years, someone is born who, if they lose control of their mind for a moment, can unlock the prison, unless they do it in the eponymous cavern. The longer they resist the temptation to lose control, the more their body fails, until they die and in doing so unlock the prison anyway.
• Weak, but Skilled: Iss, as a magic user, is not very impressive, as Sarga Veys is quick to note, but he is clever, and he's got some nasty tricks up his sleeve. See Blood Magic.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Sarga Veys hasn't been seen since he ran off near the end of Cavern.
• You Kill It, You Bought It: The way the succession works in Spire Vanis; the accepted way to become the new Surlord is to off the old one. This is how Iss got the job, but the fact that he actually names his own successor, Marafice Eye, does not go over well with the local aristocracy. The fact that Eye is a commoner — Iss himself came of noble, albeit not very significant, blood — just rubs further salt in it.