“Violet Sorrengail, a fragile scribe, is forced into the brutal dragon-riding war college. The first book of the Empyrean series.”
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Fourth Wing is Rebecca Yarros's 2023 romantasy novel, the first volume of the Empyrean series and the book that defined the 2023-2024 BookTok-driven romantasy moment. Violet Sorrengail, the twenty-year-old daughter of the kingdom's most decorated military commander, has been raised to be a scribe (a sedentary archival role suited to her chronic-pain condition and her physical fragility). On the eve of her induction into the Scribe Quadrant, her mother forces her into the Riders Quadrant of Basgiath War College instead, the elite dragon-riding military training program. Most cadets do not survive the first year of training; the dragons select their own riders and most of the unselected die in the Threshing.
Yarros's strength is the patient construction of the war-college setting in the front half and the careful escalation of the romance plot with Xaden Riorson (a fellow third-year cadet whose father was executed for treason by Violet's mother). The hard-rule worldbuilding is more carefully designed than the romantasy genre usually attempts: the signets that bond riders to specific dragons, the wardstones that protect the kingdom from cross-border raids, the gryphon-riding insurgent army the cadets are being trained to fight. The chronic-pain protagonist treatment is one of the few major fantasy novels to engage seriously with disability accommodation as a plot element. The romance plot is in the slow-burn enemies-to-lovers register the audience came for.
Recommended for contemporary romantasy readers, for fans of Sarah J. Maas's A Court of Thorns and Roses series and Jennifer L. Armentrout's From Blood and Ash, and for readers looking for books like Fourth Wing in the dragon-rider-war-college subgenre. Read Iron Flame (2023) and Onyx Storm (2025) next. The Rebecca Soler / Teddy Hamilton audiobook is the definitive audio production. Four solid stars.
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