An unusual review from me today. The subject of my ire for this piece is The Sword Triumphant by Gareth Hanrahan. The final book in the Lands of the Firsborn trilogy, this was one of my more anticipated reads of 2025. Hanrahan has been one of my authors to watch recently. I am now six books into his collected works, and until The Sword Triumphant, I had been in love with them all. His writing consistently impressed with his boundless creativity, unpredictable character stories, captivating worlds, and fresh themes. His Black Iron Legacy stuck the landing and has remained one of the more memorable trilogies I have read in the last few years. Books one and two of Lands of the Firsborn were fabulous; you can see our lauds in multiple best of the year lists. So what in God’s name happened with The Sword Triumphant?
The plot here is massive spoiler territory for the first two books, so I am going to skirt around actually listing what the core story of the book is about. Instead, let’s talk about the general status quo we find ourselves in with this third and final entry of the series. After two very tightly paced and intertwined books, the third installment of this trilogy is suddenly set 20 years after the events of book two. Our main protagonist, Aelfric, lost a piece of himself at the end of book two and has spent twenty years as a ghost of himself trying to live out his life. Now, as an old man, he has received one last call to adventure and must once and for all pick up the sword, find his lost piece, and finish what was started.
Where to start? Let’s first talk about the most confusing and poorly implemented time jump I have ever read. First off, the entire thing is deeply confusing. Some characters seemed to have aged incredibly in those twenty years and become entirely different people off-screen. Other characters (most of them, if I am being honest) have seen so little change that I genuinely had to keep flipping back in the book to verify that I hadn’t imagined that there was a 20-year jump forward. The conflict of the story hasn’t changed even slightly in the twenty-year jump, adding to the chronological confusion, and the intricate socio-political situation outlined at the end of book two has somehow remained poised on a cliff face, about to implode, for TWO DECADES without any clear indication as to how things were able to stay in this heightened state without the world ending.
Aelfric has aged extremely poorly in this time jump and has lost almost everything that made him special and enjoyable in the first two installments. He spends the first half of the book as an enfeebled old man doing the “I got old” schtick, and the back half of the book falling down a ladder whose rungs are made out of deus ex machinas, hitting every single one on the way down. The speedrun character assassination of this man is honestly a work of art that should be studied. Previously, he was a tenacious and dumb everyman, whose pure heart won out over his guileless mind to keep him afloat in a sea of political intrigue that constantly went over his head and threatened to pull him under. Now he’s just a guy. An old guy, who would have been better off leaving the adventure to the younger generation of characters surrounding him, who were all actually great and were the silver lining to this disaster. Olva (the secondary protagonist), is fine, but I can’t bring myself to say that she carried the problems with Aelfric.
There were a ton of extremely mysterious loose ends coming out of book two that I was super excited to have explored in The Sword Triumphant. Almost none of them had a satisfying resolution. The biggest crime of the book is that, at its core, its plot is basically a repeat of book two, just noticeably worse. The final confrontation uses a deus ex so bad that it almost made me quit the book. The characters keep bringing up the same problems to solve and questions to answer, with little to no progress on the resolutions, over and over and over. Until finally, in the last 20%, all of them get wrapped up (if you exclude the side plots that are just dropped entirely) immediately, with little fanfare.
Other than the endearing new generation of heroes, the one thing this book does well is its ultimate ending. The final thematic execution of the story is very clever and fun, but here we find ourselves with a problem. This book feels like it was built upon exactly one thing: that Hanrahan had a very clever idea for an ending, and that he just had to get his characters from the end of book two to this final resolution. The rest of book three reads like filler as Hanrahan tries to maneuver his characters into a final reveal. It feels like a duology that someone told him he could get a trilogy out of if he just stretched the material really thin. This was a bad experience for me as a reader, even though I will acknowledge that a lot of what differentiates Hanrahan is still here. The Sword Triumphant reads like a hollow shell bookended by glimpses of substance. There is no reason that this book needed to be as long as it was if it was going to contain so little. And if people wanted it to be this long, I have five other examples of Hanrahan’s work that show he can do a lot better than this. I am extremely disappointed in this read, to the point where I think I will have to withdraw my recommendation for the series.
Rating: The Sword Triumphant – 3.5/10
-Andrew
An ARC of this book was provided to me by the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The thoughts on this book are my own.
