Well, I can’t re-read the Shard Axe and then not re-read Skein of Shadows, can I? Skein of Shadows is part 2 of this Eberron-advertorial-book by Marsheila Rockwell, and it picks up relatively shortly after the events of book 1.

Let’s not mince words: It has the same strengths, and the same faults, as part 1.
I am going to avoid spoilers.

The Strengths

Once more, we see Marsheila Rockwell’s great hand for action scenes. Whenever the Shard Axe comes out of its quick-release harness and blood and teeth spatter out onto the dunes, she’s in a flow. The tempo is right, the descriptions are vivid – this is the core of Sabira’s being and it shows. She’s a warrior and this is what she does best.

The same is true for her moments of introspection, because now she isn’t alone, she has underlings, and her doubts as well as her instinctive decisions as a leader are believable, and well in tune with her rejection of “Fate” or “Prophecy”, or “orders from higher ups” for that matter, things that are designed to take away her agency. We have seen Sabira as a loner in The Shard Axe, and while her rank and station have changed, her (endearing) personality has not.

Speaking of personality: Once again Marsheila Rockwell manage to capture people: Every one of the crew is an individual, and not even an expressionless robo-face can erase the qualities of a soul. Be it pirates, desert hillbillies, warforged, cultists or mercenaries, every one we meet has a personality, is an individual that we know has a whole life story that we simply won’t get to know, but we get a small taste of it.

For gamers, it is fun to notice the little quirks in the scenes that we know from roleplaying games. The dice rolls and the spells, spells interrupted by lost initiative… these elements flow in the subtext and tie the book to Dungeons & Dragons, as they meant to do.

The Faults

A bit of sequelitis: the plot struggles to get going because it does not flow naturally from the first book. More like a “the board of directors wants this to have a part 2, or maybe it gets to be a trilogy, we will see.” But that is not how real trilogies work.
Which is on the publisher, not on the author.

Then: The Pacing! Like in the Shard Axe, it is off.
For one, like in book 1, the hand of the corporation: Exposition, exposition, exposition, too much of it. How many gates there are in Vulyar and what dragonmarked families exist… that is all well and good for selling the game, but strictly bookishly it is too much fluff. The geography is explained too in-depth in some parts and too loosely in others.

“Sharn was situated on a series of five plateaus bounded on two sides by rivers and on the other two sides by cliffs. It was divided into districts not only by plateau, but also by height. Sabira was supposed to meet X at the X in Korran-Thiven, one of the financial districts in Upper Central Plateau.“
I get the impression this is supposed to trigger recognition among D&D Online players. And there are just too many of these sprinkles all over the place. Or, to be more precise: this information could be conveyed more elegantly than in these bursts, as if the book was ready from the author’s point of view and then she was told to add X geography references and Y legendary items, family names or dates of Eberron history in the narration.

But again, the weight drops from the narration as soon as we get up close and personal. When the axles splinter and the crossbows thrum, the book shines. Which again gives me the impression that there were orders in place that the author had to follow. I have already forgotten most of these parts of the first third of the book, because they are just not important in the story. An editor interested in the story rather than presenting D&D Online would have cut down on these extra infos.

And this time the ending is tied up better, fulfilling the arc, with just a subtler nod towards a potential book 3 (which never materialized).

For another, like in book 1, the overall structure is ruffled. We spend a long time in the beginning, then travel through the Blade Desert for a good long time, and then go underground, but the parts seem slightly out of balance, and suddenly we have a “two weeks later” jump. Overall it is the structure of a roleplaying game, where some scenes take longer and others less long, and there are more or less arbitrary moments of “nothing in particular happens” in between, rather than the more deliberate story arc of a planned novel.

Conclusio

Better than I had remembered: It is a forced/artificially added, but worthy successor to the first, or rather main, Shard Axe book. It builds well on the relationship that was a side plot in the first book, and gives it more depth, even though Elix, despite that really breathtaking grand gesture of a gift, feels like the least tangible of the figures. Which may be on purpose.

If you like The Shard Axe, it is good to read the Skein of Shadows just to get to spend some more time with Sabira, who holds up well and stays the lovable rogue we met in the first book, just a bit wiser, and minus the death wish, a character development that is sold wonderfully.

And the pacing?
Again, we can forgive that, because the characters and the well-written action scenes more than make up for it.