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The Dark Army
For three thousand years, Olympus has known peace—but peace has a cost.
Every fifty years, four warriors known as The Eldric are summoned from across worlds to challenge an ancient evil, preventing his return for another cycle. This time, however, something is different.
Darien Glade never expected to be one of The Eldric. Raised in the Academy, trained in swordsmanship and battle tactics, he was preparing for an ordinary life—until he was pulled into a world he never knew existed. Now, trapped in Olympus, surrounded by creatures of myth and legends made real, he must navigate a war that has raged for millennia.
As factions clash, marauders prowl the lands, and Cyprin’s growing forces prepare for war, Darien and his allies must uncover the truth behind the cycle before it’s too late. But as betrayals mount and ancient secrets come to light, Darien begins to wonder: Is he truly meant to save Olympus, or is he just another pawn in a battle beyond his control?
Every fifty years, four warriors known as The Eldric are summoned from across worlds to challenge an ancient evil, preventing his return for another cycle. This time, however, something is different.
Darien Glade never expected to be one of The Eldric. Raised in the Academy, trained in swordsmanship and battle tactics, he was preparing for an ordinary life—until he was pulled into a world he never knew existed. Now, trapped in Olympus, surrounded by creatures of myth and legends made real, he must navigate a war that has raged for millennia.
As factions clash, marauders prowl the lands, and Cyprin’s growing forces prepare for war, Darien and his allies must uncover the truth behind the cycle before it’s too late. But as betrayals mount and ancient secrets come to light, Darien begins to wonder: Is he truly meant to save Olympus, or is he just another pawn in a battle beyond his control?
Kindle Edition
First published September 10, 2019
About the author
R.D. Wolfe
6 books3 followersR.D. Wolfe is the author of the Saving Olympus series, blending high-stakes adventure, mythology, and fast-paced fantasy into compelling, character-driven stories. Influenced heavily by Christopher Paolini, the Harry Potter universe, and classic sci-fi like Star Wars and Star Trek, Wolfe’s writing is rooted in a love for epic storytelling, strategy, and immersive world-building. Naturally, The Lord of the Rings has played a major role in shaping his storytelling—an experience made even more special by the time he spent at The Eagle and Child, where J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis once discussed their legendary works.
Wolfe published his first book in 2019 and moved to Southeast Idaho in 2020, where he continues to craft stories filled with adventure, honor, and destiny. When not writing, he enjoys gardening, hiking, and hunting, drawing inspiration from the beauty and challenges of the natural world.
Follow R.D. Wolfe on Facebook for updates on the Saving Olympus trilogy and future releases.
Wolfe published his first book in 2019 and moved to Southeast Idaho in 2020, where he continues to craft stories filled with adventure, honor, and destiny. When not writing, he enjoys gardening, hiking, and hunting, drawing inspiration from the beauty and challenges of the natural world.
Follow R.D. Wolfe on Facebook for updates on the Saving Olympus trilogy and future releases.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
June 13, 2021
If you write a book from beginning to end, that is something to celebrate! You should be lauded! It does not matter if the book is terrible or absolutely astounding. That is an amazing accomplishment, and you deserve praise for that. A surprisingly small number of people actually finish writing an entire novel. Well done! HOWEVER... the work does not end there. You cannot take your first draft - no matter how good- to the publisher and call it done. No, you need to rewrite and edit that sucker within an inch of its life! If this book was edited by an actual paid editor, the author needs to get his money back. No matter how many times you edit, there will always be small mistakes that make it through - even in the most professional of books - but the level in this book? Ridiculous. There were even random punctuation marks literally scattered throughout, showing up between sentences or at the start of paragraphs. There was one spot where an entire paragraph completely repeated itself! It was as if the author decided to rewrite a paragraph and then forgot to remove the original. Not to mention several incidents of utterly bizarre sentence structure. Editing would have definitely made this book a lot more tolerable to read, but would it have fixed it? NOPE.
The characters are bland at best and completely inconsistent, there is little to no motivation for said characters, weak world-building, atrocious realism, terrible timing, and worst of all, nearly the entire thing is written in passive voice where everything - everything! - is explained via exposition rather than shown. There is no emotion, no passion, no anger, no nothing to this book. The closest thing we got to emotion was two characters crying a tiny bit while one had a rather awkward freak-out moment. At least I think that is what that scene was supposed to be... The main character, Darien, has a severe case of Mary Sue syndrome (Gary Stu, seeing as he is a male), and I don't even necessarily hate Mary Sues! He is absolutely perfect, and what few "flaws" he has are quickly and unrealistically overcome. As a single, smaller example, the guy has never been around a horse before, and by the third day, without any lessons or help of any kind, he is riding his horse like an expert, including knowing how to saddle it and care for it. At least have someone show him even once how it's done! Again, this is a small thing and merely an example of many, many other incidents.
The plot... oh, the plot... Our main character, Darien, has been pulled from his cushy, sheltered life at what sounds like a medieval military Academy set in modern time Earth into a magical land without magic (kind of, it's confusingly complicated). When he arrives in a city of centaurs, he discovers that he is a Chosen One, one of four Chosen Ones who are destined to face a great, dark enemy who has been haunting the land for some 3,000 years. Apparently, every 50 years or so, four chosen ones (creatively called The Four) show up from other worlds and stop the Evil Being from escaping his prison. First, Darien has to go find the other three, and then they have to go find the hidden weapons, which may or may not be magical. This plot is so predictable and clichéd that I was literally predicting the next lines before I read them.
To be honest, sometimes a clichéd and predictable story is perfectly fine. If I am going through a hard time, I do not always want to be challenged, so a simple story is just the ticket! However, it must also have something to captivate the reader. Strong, engaging characters. An interesting world. The occasional bizarre twist. Something! This book felt soulless, empty, and emotionless. There were a few funny lines and a couple of good ideas, but they were not well utilized. So much more could have been done with these glimmers of goodness! If the author had done a lot more work to tighten things up and take out a lot of the negatives, this would have been a perfectly serviceable book. Perhaps not amazing, but good. And I wish he had. I really wanted to enjoy this book, and I hope he continues writing, grows from his first book, and gets a better editor.
The characters are bland at best and completely inconsistent, there is little to no motivation for said characters, weak world-building, atrocious realism, terrible timing, and worst of all, nearly the entire thing is written in passive voice where everything - everything! - is explained via exposition rather than shown. There is no emotion, no passion, no anger, no nothing to this book. The closest thing we got to emotion was two characters crying a tiny bit while one had a rather awkward freak-out moment. At least I think that is what that scene was supposed to be... The main character, Darien, has a severe case of Mary Sue syndrome (Gary Stu, seeing as he is a male), and I don't even necessarily hate Mary Sues! He is absolutely perfect, and what few "flaws" he has are quickly and unrealistically overcome. As a single, smaller example, the guy has never been around a horse before, and by the third day, without any lessons or help of any kind, he is riding his horse like an expert, including knowing how to saddle it and care for it. At least have someone show him even once how it's done! Again, this is a small thing and merely an example of many, many other incidents.
The plot... oh, the plot... Our main character, Darien, has been pulled from his cushy, sheltered life at what sounds like a medieval military Academy set in modern time Earth into a magical land without magic (kind of, it's confusingly complicated). When he arrives in a city of centaurs, he discovers that he is a Chosen One, one of four Chosen Ones who are destined to face a great, dark enemy who has been haunting the land for some 3,000 years. Apparently, every 50 years or so, four chosen ones (creatively called The Four) show up from other worlds and stop the Evil Being from escaping his prison. First, Darien has to go find the other three, and then they have to go find the hidden weapons, which may or may not be magical. This plot is so predictable and clichéd that I was literally predicting the next lines before I read them.
To be honest, sometimes a clichéd and predictable story is perfectly fine. If I am going through a hard time, I do not always want to be challenged, so a simple story is just the ticket! However, it must also have something to captivate the reader. Strong, engaging characters. An interesting world. The occasional bizarre twist. Something! This book felt soulless, empty, and emotionless. There were a few funny lines and a couple of good ideas, but they were not well utilized. So much more could have been done with these glimmers of goodness! If the author had done a lot more work to tighten things up and take out a lot of the negatives, this would have been a perfectly serviceable book. Perhaps not amazing, but good. And I wish he had. I really wanted to enjoy this book, and I hope he continues writing, grows from his first book, and gets a better editor.
June 29, 2021
Darien - a teenager at a strange school that teaches medieval style combat along with the usual subjects kids learn - is suddenly teleported into a new world right before his school's most important combat match. He is supposed to be one of four to save the world of Olympus from the threat of Cyprin.
There are seeds of good ideas here. The idea behind how wraiths work in Olympus is really neat and unique. Some of the side characters feel like they could be interesting if we spent more time with them. Unfortunately, the seeds never blossom.
While reading Saving Olympus, I continuously compared it to two other works: Harry Potter and The Eye of Argon. Comparisons to Harry Potter typically took the form of, "This could work if [something] was done. Look at how Rowling did [whatever] in Harry Potter! For all those books' flaws, she got [this] right!" Comparisons to The Eye of Argon typically took the form of, "I never thought I'd read a book that did [fill-in-the-blank] as bad as Eye of Argon!" If this book was edited, that editor should be fired and the author refunded every cent they paid. In regards to mechanics, there are a bunch of punctuation errors and typos. There are random punctuation marks between sentences, as though the sentence they belonged to vanished but they were left behind. Sentences are convoluted, many requiring at least two readings to try and make sense of the structure. The writing suffers badly from repetition. Sometimes names occur five or six times in only a few lines. At least one time two whole paragraphs were repeated almost verbatim back to back (possibly a rewrite where the original wasn't removed). The only two responses that characters have throughout the story is to stare or to pause, which makes every interaction feel like sludging through molasses. It doesn't help that the entire thing is written in a passive voice; for example, "So-and-so had done..." instead of "So-and-so did..."
This is, sadly, only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the problems present, some of which I don't think even the best editor could fix. The plot never feels like it gets started, and the biggest reason is the main character, Darien. Darien is emotionless, soulless, and inconsistent. He flip-flops between being simple and honest to sly and conniving, between being incompetent to being godlike, between being focused on his mission to being apathetic about everything, and all at the drop of a hat. He doesn't feel like a character at all, just a name to move around the world. I've felt more attachment to silent protagonists from '80s JRPGs like Final Fantasy, and those protagonists were supposed to be a blank slate! Here's an example of Darien's inconsistency: About a third of the way through the book Darien is captured by marauders. He refuses to join them as they are murderers and thieves. To avoid being put to death he agrees to clean their camp. After one day of cleaning stables Darien is ready to join up with the group he denounced not even 24 hours earlier. The raid doesn't go as planned, and the group is attacked. Darien decides immediately to fight the attackers and defend the marauders, even though the marauders are, by his own admission, monsters. In the attack, Darien cowers and hides from the fight, not sure of what to do. Then suddenly he begins wading through the battlefield driving off the enemy almost singlehandedly. And on and on and on it goes. The fight scenes are impossible to follow and filled with illogical moments, such as when a heavily armored enemy charges Darien and somehow manages to impale himself on a spear Darien was loosely holding out.
Like Darien, Olympus itself feels empty and lifeless. Some of the creatures seem like they could be fun or cool or, well, SOMETHING, but the plot moves past them too quickly to form any attachment to them. At one point Darien is told (I believe by a centaur) that there are five races in Olympus, which he responds to by staring in shock. There are dozens if not hundreds of different races and creatures in Greek mythology alone, much less all the creative creatures in other fantasy worlds! Five is both way too specific and incredibly underwhelming.
Lastly, the plot is a generic "chosen one needs to find people to find things to save the world" type of story that has been done thousands of times. This doesn't mean it has to be bad, but in order to make it interesting something has to be special. There is nothing here to make the story different or investing.
With a ton of editing, more detail given to the world, a different path through the plot, and a complete rewrite of the character of Darien, Saving Olympus could be fun - not groundbreaking, but at least enjoyable. As it stands, this is a fantasy novel I'd recommend avoiding at all costs.
There are seeds of good ideas here. The idea behind how wraiths work in Olympus is really neat and unique. Some of the side characters feel like they could be interesting if we spent more time with them. Unfortunately, the seeds never blossom.
While reading Saving Olympus, I continuously compared it to two other works: Harry Potter and The Eye of Argon. Comparisons to Harry Potter typically took the form of, "This could work if [something] was done. Look at how Rowling did [whatever] in Harry Potter! For all those books' flaws, she got [this] right!" Comparisons to The Eye of Argon typically took the form of, "I never thought I'd read a book that did [fill-in-the-blank] as bad as Eye of Argon!" If this book was edited, that editor should be fired and the author refunded every cent they paid. In regards to mechanics, there are a bunch of punctuation errors and typos. There are random punctuation marks between sentences, as though the sentence they belonged to vanished but they were left behind. Sentences are convoluted, many requiring at least two readings to try and make sense of the structure. The writing suffers badly from repetition. Sometimes names occur five or six times in only a few lines. At least one time two whole paragraphs were repeated almost verbatim back to back (possibly a rewrite where the original wasn't removed). The only two responses that characters have throughout the story is to stare or to pause, which makes every interaction feel like sludging through molasses. It doesn't help that the entire thing is written in a passive voice; for example, "So-and-so had done..." instead of "So-and-so did..."
This is, sadly, only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the problems present, some of which I don't think even the best editor could fix. The plot never feels like it gets started, and the biggest reason is the main character, Darien. Darien is emotionless, soulless, and inconsistent. He flip-flops between being simple and honest to sly and conniving, between being incompetent to being godlike, between being focused on his mission to being apathetic about everything, and all at the drop of a hat. He doesn't feel like a character at all, just a name to move around the world. I've felt more attachment to silent protagonists from '80s JRPGs like Final Fantasy, and those protagonists were supposed to be a blank slate! Here's an example of Darien's inconsistency: About a third of the way through the book Darien is captured by marauders. He refuses to join them as they are murderers and thieves. To avoid being put to death he agrees to clean their camp. After one day of cleaning stables Darien is ready to join up with the group he denounced not even 24 hours earlier. The raid doesn't go as planned, and the group is attacked. Darien decides immediately to fight the attackers and defend the marauders, even though the marauders are, by his own admission, monsters. In the attack, Darien cowers and hides from the fight, not sure of what to do. Then suddenly he begins wading through the battlefield driving off the enemy almost singlehandedly. And on and on and on it goes. The fight scenes are impossible to follow and filled with illogical moments, such as when a heavily armored enemy charges Darien and somehow manages to impale himself on a spear Darien was loosely holding out.
Like Darien, Olympus itself feels empty and lifeless. Some of the creatures seem like they could be fun or cool or, well, SOMETHING, but the plot moves past them too quickly to form any attachment to them. At one point Darien is told (I believe by a centaur) that there are five races in Olympus, which he responds to by staring in shock. There are dozens if not hundreds of different races and creatures in Greek mythology alone, much less all the creative creatures in other fantasy worlds! Five is both way too specific and incredibly underwhelming.
Lastly, the plot is a generic "chosen one needs to find people to find things to save the world" type of story that has been done thousands of times. This doesn't mean it has to be bad, but in order to make it interesting something has to be special. There is nothing here to make the story different or investing.
With a ton of editing, more detail given to the world, a different path through the plot, and a complete rewrite of the character of Darien, Saving Olympus could be fun - not groundbreaking, but at least enjoyable. As it stands, this is a fantasy novel I'd recommend avoiding at all costs.
March 7, 2025
Immersive and Captivating MUST read!!!
The attention to detail in the surroundings of this book make you truly feel like you’re there experiencing the smell of the grass, the crunch of the gravel, and the chill of the cold air surrounding you! To the very few who said this story lacked, couldn’t be more wrong.
By Chapter 2 I was hooked! This book is a must read for anyone seeking a captivating, gripping tale with depth in detail and beautifully crafted characters! The writing was done beautifully and I genuinely felt like I knew the main characters personally by the end! I’m on the edge of my seat waiting to find out who the remaining members of the four are, where the journey will take them now, and what other twists and turns Olympus has waiting for them!
For this to be a first book story! The LEAST I can say is truly BRAVO! I’ll be anxiously awaiting the rest of the story and all of the unmistakably beautiful imagery and excitement that was definitely captured in this book to move through the next! To whoever rated Saving Olympus: The Dark Army anything LESS than 5 stars..? You’re out of your mind. This story is so incredibly underrated and I cannot wait for it to get even more recognition! Tell your friends, granny, momma, brothers, sisters, cousins, etc. this is THE book!
The attention to detail in the surroundings of this book make you truly feel like you’re there experiencing the smell of the grass, the crunch of the gravel, and the chill of the cold air surrounding you! To the very few who said this story lacked, couldn’t be more wrong.
By Chapter 2 I was hooked! This book is a must read for anyone seeking a captivating, gripping tale with depth in detail and beautifully crafted characters! The writing was done beautifully and I genuinely felt like I knew the main characters personally by the end! I’m on the edge of my seat waiting to find out who the remaining members of the four are, where the journey will take them now, and what other twists and turns Olympus has waiting for them!
For this to be a first book story! The LEAST I can say is truly BRAVO! I’ll be anxiously awaiting the rest of the story and all of the unmistakably beautiful imagery and excitement that was definitely captured in this book to move through the next! To whoever rated Saving Olympus: The Dark Army anything LESS than 5 stars..? You’re out of your mind. This story is so incredibly underrated and I cannot wait for it to get even more recognition! Tell your friends, granny, momma, brothers, sisters, cousins, etc. this is THE book!
April 22, 2020
Reminds me of a combination of Rick Riordan and JK Rowling. Good story.
October 13, 2019
This was an awesome read!
I loved the characters, the world of Olympus, Mr Wolf's way and style of writing. The story was easy to follow, and exciting to read. I felt like I was really there standing next to Darein.
I loved the characters, the world of Olympus, Mr Wolf's way and style of writing. The story was easy to follow, and exciting to read. I felt like I was really there standing next to Darein.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews