For a video game tie-in, this is genuinely good. Better than most romantasy on shelves right now, which is a low bar, but still.
This book is methodical. The couple doesn’t meet until 40% in. It opens with rock surveying. Literally boring tunnels. The D’ni are like dwarves — long-lived, underground, politically obsessed with geology. And somehow it works, because the patience builds real suspense. No cheap twists. When characters make hasty decisions or skip contingency planning, you feel something challenging or bad coming.
The romance is structurally interesting. Ti’ana is a human who stumbles onto a secret underground civilization because she loves rocks as much as they do. She’s a fish out of water who more than earns her place. The worldbuilding earns its runtime. The result is a romance that is literally and epistemologically earth-shattering.
Aitrus’s “he was not right to make me choose” — When Aitrus’s prejudiced friend Veovis excludes his human crush from a fancy event, this is how Aitrus describes overcoming his loyalty to his friend. I love that: It’s a matter of principle, perhaps over loyalty.
Veovis’s corruption arc is solid for most of the book. The friendship with Aitrus is politically motivated on Veovis’s end (prejudice drives his interest in the exploratory mission) but probably became genuine. A’gaeris is the corrupting force that makes the friends-to-rivals pipeline believable — they basically offloaded all the mustache-twirling onto him so Veovis could stay nuanced longer.
The tragedy structure Like Romeo and Juliet, much of the tragedy operates on missing information. R&J’s communications failures are incidental. In Ti’ana, this is orchestrated by A’gaeris. Characters acting on missing or forged information do stupid grief-driven things. It works well.
“Between guessing and knowing is a long dark tunnel.” Great line.
The age gap. Ti’ana starts the book as a teenager. He’s ~50. Young for D’ni, sure. Could’ve just made her ~25 instead of barely legal. This is a nitpick, not a pitchfork.
The final third falls apart. Veovis goes full rage-and-resentment, which doesn’t quite fit. His motivation might be jealousy — losing Aitrus as a confidant, possibly something more — but the leap to genocidal spite is shaky.
Here’s the issue: apathy is way more believable as the engine of prejudice than pure rage. Hitler didn’t think he was destroying Germany — he thought he was saving it, delusional to the end. He’d destroy it through maniacal attrition, not by blowing it up on purpose. Veovis doing intentional scorched-earth feels off for a methodical character.
The villain who works for pure destruction is Nolan’s Joker — but that’s because chaos is his stated worldview, and the mystery of his motivation IS the character. Veovis is too plotty for that framing.
The fix that would’ve made this a great book: make the destruction of D’ni an accident. They push it to the edge, and it tips over and shocks everyone. That’s more tragic, more thematically coherent (society dying of its own hubris), and more honest to how prejudice actually destroys things. A’gaeris needed more multidimensional development.
This is a prequel, so the ending is predetermined — D’ni falls, everyone dies or becomes an asshole offscreen. That constraint kneecaps the third act. When you already know where it ends, the villain has to do a lot of heavy lifting to make the collapse feel earned rather than inevitable, and Veovis just isn’t quite up to it by the end.
Still: patient, well-built, genuinely suspenseful for most of its length. The rocky sections aren’t boring — they’re doing real work. The reviewers complaining about that missed the point.
