If the previous trilogy saw the Empire of the Wolf in a medieval age, this trilogy sees the Empire in an industrial revolution with gunpowder, muskets and cannons.
We follow the POVs of three characters, although it is a bit unbalanced towards two of them. Renata is a human ambassador to the mermen, and her story begins when two monks confess that they tried to talk to the dead, but no one answered, so they assume it's due to a prophecy called the Great Silence, which will also affect mortals. Death magic is forbidden, so she starts to investigate what's going on.
Peter Kleist is a nobleman who never wanted to join the military, but he is sent to fight for the Sovan Empire in the Near East, a desolate area where strange things happen. Von Oldenburg is the bad guy of the story and has less chapters with his POV than the first two (fortunately, I might add).

I loved Renata and Peter. I thought they were well characterised, and I was glad to see that the author gives voice to men's emotions through Peter. Peter is not your typical brave hero, he's reluctant and just wants to go home. I can't say the same about the Count of Oldenburg, who is simply meant to be unlikable.

The world is described with a very lush and descriptive prose and I could feel myself immersed in the creepy atmosphere that the author has cleverly created. Even though necromancy et similia is not my cup of tea, I think the magic system was original in the fantasy genre, it was interesting and I am curious to know what role it will play in the sequel. What I liked most was the presence of different races, such as wolfmen and mermen, with magical and somewhat mysterious origins and customs.
What I think could have been handled a bit differently was the huge amount of place and world building names, which were often a patchwork of German words. I couldn't keep up because there was no map in the ARC, so I struggled to follow where the characters were and at some point I just couldn't. I hope to see a map and glossary in the final edition because different people use different words to say the same thing, which is cool and I loved it, but it was confusing.

The whole story started off a little slow to introduce the characters and the setting and then picked up towards the middle of the book. As I mentioned before, the author did a great job of creating a terrifying atmosphere throughout the story and I felt a constant sense of fear looming over me. The action scenes had the perfect rhythm and tension, but I often found them a bit confusing and struggled to understand what was going on. Luckily, everything was explained in the following chapter, but I would have liked to have had the chance to think about these scenes and form theories in my head.

All in all, even if some of the ingredients were not my cup of tea, Richard Swan managed to blow me away with a great world building, characters to root for and a creepy and dark story that kept me on the edge of my seat.
I would go a bit far and predict that this could easily be the best dark fantasy of the 2025s (fingers crossed!).

All the reviews of this book I’ve seen so far are very positive and maybe that skewed my reading and my expectations were raised to high because I just didn’t feel the love for this book, I have almost read (DNF to be honest) other books by this author and I finally have to give up and say his writing is not for me, I’m sure many many readers will love it, not me however