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Raptoraem :
Six years ago, in the ruins of a massacre, a little witch tried to kill Erik Mordiger.
She failed… but was claimed as his heir.
Now Mordiger — feared as the Black Maw — rules a city torn free from Solarium after a bloody revolution. From the Pit, he enforces order with his Raptors, keeping the Strutlords in line and brokering peace through a fragile treaty with the empire he despises.
But hidden in that treaty is a secret clause: the return of Shryke, an exile who lost everything to Mordiger’s rise — and who swears to see him fall.
At the center stands Stryx.
Once a child with nothing, now a sorceress with a storm under her skin, she is Mordiger’s living legacy — and a prize both sides will kill to possess.
As vengeance and revolution collide, the players of Raptoraem must learn:
FREEDOM COSTS BLOOD. SO DOES MAGIC.
And love makes monsters of us all.
Perfect for fans of Bardugo’s Six of Crows and R.F. Kuang’s The Poppy War—as well as readers who crave forbidden magic, villain origin stories, and cities where both revolution and love leave scars.
She failed… but was claimed as his heir.
Now Mordiger — feared as the Black Maw — rules a city torn free from Solarium after a bloody revolution. From the Pit, he enforces order with his Raptors, keeping the Strutlords in line and brokering peace through a fragile treaty with the empire he despises.
But hidden in that treaty is a secret clause: the return of Shryke, an exile who lost everything to Mordiger’s rise — and who swears to see him fall.
At the center stands Stryx.
Once a child with nothing, now a sorceress with a storm under her skin, she is Mordiger’s living legacy — and a prize both sides will kill to possess.
As vengeance and revolution collide, the players of Raptoraem must learn:
FREEDOM COSTS BLOOD. SO DOES MAGIC.
And love makes monsters of us all.
Perfect for fans of Bardugo’s Six of Crows and R.F. Kuang’s The Poppy War—as well as readers who crave forbidden magic, villain origin stories, and cities where both revolution and love leave scars.
608 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 22, 2026
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September 22, 2025
A Spoiler Review of Raptøræm (Book I)
I received an advance review copy of this book to read and give an honest review.
⚠️ Full spoilers below!
Premise & Setting
Raptøræm opens in the storm-lashed remains of a colonized port city called Refugium, a place literally built in broken straits and tiers, beneath a gleaming empire (Solarium) that extracts its resources, labor, and eventually its people, while calling the extraction civilization. The book wastes no time establishing the moral architecture of its world. We have a massacre in the opening pages, a child left for dead, and an empire that watches from a comfortable distance and does nothing. From there, the story tracks a revolution: Refugium's transformation into the independent, blood-soaked nation of Raptoraem and the people who both cause and survive that transformation.
This is a genre the book calls "mythpunk": myth-structure and folklore (an invented pantheon, in-world legends, prophetic imagery) with punk-adjacent grime like smuggler economies, drug trades and revolutionary violence. The world is enormous in scope. We have named foreign powers with their own trade postures, and a magic system tangled up with a black-market narcotic that also happens to fuel the empire's own religion. This is not a book that hands you a map and waves goodbye. It hands you glossaries, references and dossiers because you'll need them, and it trusts you to do the work of piecing the rest together yourself.
The Events
The plot, in short. A girl survives the massacre of her found family at the hands of a warlord known as the Black Maw, is taken in (or taken captive, depending how you want to read it) by the very man responsible, and is slowly shaped — through trauma, magic, and a genuinely complicated bond — into a living weapon. Years pass. The revolution succeeds. The new nation of Raptoraem has to survive its own reconstruction, fend off a hostile empire's diplomatic maneuvering, consolidate power through violent internal politics, and reckon with a magic system that may be older and scarier than anyone in power understands.
Meanwhile, the girl's presumed-dead sister turns out to be alive as a "guest" of the very empire that orchestrated the original massacre, quietly being groomed as a political asset, engaged to a noble family, and nursing a very different kind of long-game revenge. The two sisters haven't reunited on the page by the end of Book I, and the tension of what happens when they do (Stryx's magic seems to react violently to Shryke's proximity) is left as the loaded gun pointed at the rest of the series.
If you're coming to this book expecting a resolved arc, know going in: you won't get one. Book I ends on a cliffhanger but it doesn't feel like a structural failure as much as an announced choice. This is stated, explicitly, to be the first of nine planned books, and it reads like someone building the foundation rather than delivering a single closed room.
Worldbuilding
This is where the book does its heaviest lifting, and it's worth calling out on its own rather than folding into "setting." The Black Ledger documents are doing real narrative work, often undercutting themselves through margin annotations from an anonymous dissident ("the Ferryman") who translates bureaucratic euphemism into what's actually happening. It's a great trick so you get to catch the empire lying to itself in real time rather than being told it's lying.
The economics are unusually rigorous for the genre. Umbra (the drug/fuel/magic substance driving the black market) turns out to be the exact same resource powering Solarium's holy Lumen light, meaning the empire's entire industrial infrastructure is propped up by the same underclass it persecutes for using it. That kind of closed-loop, resource-curse economics (think Dune) gives the politics real grit instead of hand-wavy "evil empire" motivation.
The pantheon gets similar treatment. There is an original, uglier set of gods (the Blessed Five) sanitized by Solarium into state-approved versions, and it's a cynical bit of writing about how empires launder colonized cultures. There's also a linguistically distinct set of diaspora communities (each with specific food, dialect, and custom rather than generic "poor people" set-dressing), and a magic system (Veilcraft) that's introduced with real restraint so you get just enough to understand the stakes long before you get a full explanation of the mechanics.
It amounts to one of the more internally consistent fantasy worlds I've read in the ARC space recently, closer in density to Malazan or early ASOIAF than to a typical single-volume dark fantasy debut.
The Characters
The emotional center of the book is the relationship between Erik Mordiger — the revolutionary and warlord— and Stryx, the girl in question, who is not just traumatized but literally, clinically dead and brought back through forbidden magic. Their bond is the book's boldest and most uncomfortable choice: genuinely tender in places, genuinely abusive in others, and the narrative never fully resolves which one you're supposed to believe. She tries to kill him. Lots of times. He hits her hard enough to leave lasting damage, at least once. He also understands her on a level few people do, and combs the knots out of her hair with more patience than anyone else in her life has ever shown her. The book asks you to hold all of that at once, and it largely succeeds at making you feel the pull of the bond even while distrusting it (though how much you buy the tenderness as earned will depend a lot on you as a reader.)
Around them: Vira, Mordiger's second-in-command, former lover and current situationship, whose loyalty is real and costly all at once, and whose snark is some of the book's best relief valve; Aurea Pallas, a Solarium diplomat who is an equal-caliber match for Mordiger rather than an obstacle to be outsmarted, and whose scenes with him crackle with more tension than most of the book's actual romantic content; and Shryke, the missing sister, whose voice fully emerges near the very end, in correspondence rather than direct scenes, and leaves you eager to know more about her.
The Prose
This is where the book distinguishes itself most clearly. The prose is fragment-heavy and rhythmic, deployed at moments of high tension, with entire paragraphs built out of single-word beats. It's a deliberate, consistent authorial voice, and it gives the book a propulsive, almost cinematic quality even in its stillest scenes.
Dialogue is where the book shines: every named character has a distinct verbal register, from Mordiger's antiquated formality to Vira's clipped bluntness. Entire chapters are carried purely on the strength of two people talking, and I never felt bored reading any exchange.
Why the "Slowness" Is a Feature
I want to spend real space on this because I think it's the single most misunderstood thing a reader might say about this book on a first pass: it is slow, by conventional thriller standards, and that slowness is the point.
This is old-fashioned table-setting. Entire chapters (sometimes entire multi-chapter acts) are given over to a single crisis, a single relationship's formation, a single domestic ritual. A political negotiation runs for what feels like a war arc's worth of pages. A father-daughter hair-combing scene, in which nothing plot-relevant happens, gets as much craft attention as any battle in the book.
If you read for momentum, this will test your patience. But if you read slowly and pay attention, this book rewards you in every chapter. Early throwaway details return dozens or hundreds of pages later completely recontextualized, sometimes devastatingly so. There are double meanings buried in almost every piece of "document" text that only reveal themselves once you know what actually happened versus what the empire claims happened. Names carry etymological weight. Objects carry emotional freight that pays off later. This is a book built for underlining and going back through with new eyes once you know how a thread resolves. The density is an investment the book is confident you'll want to cash in eventually, and it mostly is right to be confident.
Visual Appeal
I'll say this plainly: this book is crazily visual. The character designs practically describe themselves (the murder-drag aesthetic, a spider-eating-sun motif, a claw-handed warlord in tailored clothing, propaganda posters that beg to be rendered as actual illustrated artifacts rather than plain text.) The fragment-heavy prose style reads almost like panel direction with lots of short, punchy beats that would translate directly into single-image compositions.
Between the density of costuming detail, the document-interlude structure, and the tonal whiplash between domestic fluff and sudden trauma, this feels like it was written with an eye toward adaptation, whether or not that was the explicit intent. I could easily see this as a webtoon or an animated series, and I suspect a lot of readers coming from that space (anime, manga, animation) will recognize the storytelling instincts at work here.
A Necessary Caveat
This is unambiguously adult fantasy, and takes its content warnings seriously so you should too. There is graphic violence and torture rendered in unflinching detail. There is an explicit sex scene with no romantic cushioning. There are references to sexual violence and its aftermath handled with real weight rather than exploitation, but handled directly nonetheless (including at least one passage that is genuinely one of the bleakest things I've read in the genre recently.) There is on-page violence against a minor character by an adult guardian figure, depicted without softening. If any of that is a hard limit for you, know it's there before you start; the book doesn't hide from its own darkness, and it shouldn't be picked up expecting anything gentler than what it advertises.
If you can stomach that, what you'll find is a genuinely fascinating, character-driven epic that trusts its readers to pay attention and wait for the payoff. It's the first act of what's clearly meant to be a very long story, and on the strength of this opening volume, I'm in for the rest of it.
I received an advance review copy of this book to read and give an honest review.
⚠️ Full spoilers below!
Premise & Setting
Raptøræm opens in the storm-lashed remains of a colonized port city called Refugium, a place literally built in broken straits and tiers, beneath a gleaming empire (Solarium) that extracts its resources, labor, and eventually its people, while calling the extraction civilization. The book wastes no time establishing the moral architecture of its world. We have a massacre in the opening pages, a child left for dead, and an empire that watches from a comfortable distance and does nothing. From there, the story tracks a revolution: Refugium's transformation into the independent, blood-soaked nation of Raptoraem and the people who both cause and survive that transformation.
This is a genre the book calls "mythpunk": myth-structure and folklore (an invented pantheon, in-world legends, prophetic imagery) with punk-adjacent grime like smuggler economies, drug trades and revolutionary violence. The world is enormous in scope. We have named foreign powers with their own trade postures, and a magic system tangled up with a black-market narcotic that also happens to fuel the empire's own religion. This is not a book that hands you a map and waves goodbye. It hands you glossaries, references and dossiers because you'll need them, and it trusts you to do the work of piecing the rest together yourself.
The Events
The plot, in short. A girl survives the massacre of her found family at the hands of a warlord known as the Black Maw, is taken in (or taken captive, depending how you want to read it) by the very man responsible, and is slowly shaped — through trauma, magic, and a genuinely complicated bond — into a living weapon. Years pass. The revolution succeeds. The new nation of Raptoraem has to survive its own reconstruction, fend off a hostile empire's diplomatic maneuvering, consolidate power through violent internal politics, and reckon with a magic system that may be older and scarier than anyone in power understands.
Meanwhile, the girl's presumed-dead sister turns out to be alive as a "guest" of the very empire that orchestrated the original massacre, quietly being groomed as a political asset, engaged to a noble family, and nursing a very different kind of long-game revenge. The two sisters haven't reunited on the page by the end of Book I, and the tension of what happens when they do (Stryx's magic seems to react violently to Shryke's proximity) is left as the loaded gun pointed at the rest of the series.
If you're coming to this book expecting a resolved arc, know going in: you won't get one. Book I ends on a cliffhanger but it doesn't feel like a structural failure as much as an announced choice. This is stated, explicitly, to be the first of nine planned books, and it reads like someone building the foundation rather than delivering a single closed room.
Worldbuilding
This is where the book does its heaviest lifting, and it's worth calling out on its own rather than folding into "setting." The Black Ledger documents are doing real narrative work, often undercutting themselves through margin annotations from an anonymous dissident ("the Ferryman") who translates bureaucratic euphemism into what's actually happening. It's a great trick so you get to catch the empire lying to itself in real time rather than being told it's lying.
The economics are unusually rigorous for the genre. Umbra (the drug/fuel/magic substance driving the black market) turns out to be the exact same resource powering Solarium's holy Lumen light, meaning the empire's entire industrial infrastructure is propped up by the same underclass it persecutes for using it. That kind of closed-loop, resource-curse economics (think Dune) gives the politics real grit instead of hand-wavy "evil empire" motivation.
The pantheon gets similar treatment. There is an original, uglier set of gods (the Blessed Five) sanitized by Solarium into state-approved versions, and it's a cynical bit of writing about how empires launder colonized cultures. There's also a linguistically distinct set of diaspora communities (each with specific food, dialect, and custom rather than generic "poor people" set-dressing), and a magic system (Veilcraft) that's introduced with real restraint so you get just enough to understand the stakes long before you get a full explanation of the mechanics.
It amounts to one of the more internally consistent fantasy worlds I've read in the ARC space recently, closer in density to Malazan or early ASOIAF than to a typical single-volume dark fantasy debut.
The Characters
The emotional center of the book is the relationship between Erik Mordiger — the revolutionary and warlord— and Stryx, the girl in question, who is not just traumatized but literally, clinically dead and brought back through forbidden magic. Their bond is the book's boldest and most uncomfortable choice: genuinely tender in places, genuinely abusive in others, and the narrative never fully resolves which one you're supposed to believe. She tries to kill him. Lots of times. He hits her hard enough to leave lasting damage, at least once. He also understands her on a level few people do, and combs the knots out of her hair with more patience than anyone else in her life has ever shown her. The book asks you to hold all of that at once, and it largely succeeds at making you feel the pull of the bond even while distrusting it (though how much you buy the tenderness as earned will depend a lot on you as a reader.)
Around them: Vira, Mordiger's second-in-command, former lover and current situationship, whose loyalty is real and costly all at once, and whose snark is some of the book's best relief valve; Aurea Pallas, a Solarium diplomat who is an equal-caliber match for Mordiger rather than an obstacle to be outsmarted, and whose scenes with him crackle with more tension than most of the book's actual romantic content; and Shryke, the missing sister, whose voice fully emerges near the very end, in correspondence rather than direct scenes, and leaves you eager to know more about her.
The Prose
This is where the book distinguishes itself most clearly. The prose is fragment-heavy and rhythmic, deployed at moments of high tension, with entire paragraphs built out of single-word beats. It's a deliberate, consistent authorial voice, and it gives the book a propulsive, almost cinematic quality even in its stillest scenes.
Dialogue is where the book shines: every named character has a distinct verbal register, from Mordiger's antiquated formality to Vira's clipped bluntness. Entire chapters are carried purely on the strength of two people talking, and I never felt bored reading any exchange.
Why the "Slowness" Is a Feature
I want to spend real space on this because I think it's the single most misunderstood thing a reader might say about this book on a first pass: it is slow, by conventional thriller standards, and that slowness is the point.
This is old-fashioned table-setting. Entire chapters (sometimes entire multi-chapter acts) are given over to a single crisis, a single relationship's formation, a single domestic ritual. A political negotiation runs for what feels like a war arc's worth of pages. A father-daughter hair-combing scene, in which nothing plot-relevant happens, gets as much craft attention as any battle in the book.
If you read for momentum, this will test your patience. But if you read slowly and pay attention, this book rewards you in every chapter. Early throwaway details return dozens or hundreds of pages later completely recontextualized, sometimes devastatingly so. There are double meanings buried in almost every piece of "document" text that only reveal themselves once you know what actually happened versus what the empire claims happened. Names carry etymological weight. Objects carry emotional freight that pays off later. This is a book built for underlining and going back through with new eyes once you know how a thread resolves. The density is an investment the book is confident you'll want to cash in eventually, and it mostly is right to be confident.
Visual Appeal
I'll say this plainly: this book is crazily visual. The character designs practically describe themselves (the murder-drag aesthetic, a spider-eating-sun motif, a claw-handed warlord in tailored clothing, propaganda posters that beg to be rendered as actual illustrated artifacts rather than plain text.) The fragment-heavy prose style reads almost like panel direction with lots of short, punchy beats that would translate directly into single-image compositions.
Between the density of costuming detail, the document-interlude structure, and the tonal whiplash between domestic fluff and sudden trauma, this feels like it was written with an eye toward adaptation, whether or not that was the explicit intent. I could easily see this as a webtoon or an animated series, and I suspect a lot of readers coming from that space (anime, manga, animation) will recognize the storytelling instincts at work here.
A Necessary Caveat
This is unambiguously adult fantasy, and takes its content warnings seriously so you should too. There is graphic violence and torture rendered in unflinching detail. There is an explicit sex scene with no romantic cushioning. There are references to sexual violence and its aftermath handled with real weight rather than exploitation, but handled directly nonetheless (including at least one passage that is genuinely one of the bleakest things I've read in the genre recently.) There is on-page violence against a minor character by an adult guardian figure, depicted without softening. If any of that is a hard limit for you, know it's there before you start; the book doesn't hide from its own darkness, and it shouldn't be picked up expecting anything gentler than what it advertises.
If you can stomach that, what you'll find is a genuinely fascinating, character-driven epic that trusts its readers to pay attention and wait for the payoff. It's the first act of what's clearly meant to be a very long story, and on the strength of this opening volume, I'm in for the rest of it.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 22, 2025
Just saw that Raptoraem is finally up for preorder?? A whole nine-book dark fantasy saga set in a drowned city?? Mythpunk magic + rebellion + OST albums?? Inject this straight into my veins. September 2026 can’t come fast enough
Review of advance copy received from Author
My one caveat while reading this, and I believe it to be substantial given how the story hinges on Mordiger and Stryx’s relationship, is that I think there was a huge missed opportunity to show rather than tell the reader of the deep bond between Stryx and Mordiger that developed during the substantial off-screen time skip. The story begins with Stryx adopted by Mordiger and then leaps to a brief scene of the revolution, and then jumps again to the aftermath where the rest unfolds. A portion of the book, whether through brief peeks into Stryx as she grew up in Mordiger’s care; a set of anecdotes; maybe even a series of official documents recovered by Solarium officials, would have been a huge boon. Even a spartanly written chapter or two would be enough, something more than snatches of reminiscence. As it stands there isn’t quite that insatiable hook to care. I am intrigued by Mordiger and Stryx’s characters separately, I am intrigued by their relationship, but for the latter the curiosity is driven not by knowing it and cherishing it, even if it’s fledgling and full of holes to be filled later, but because I’m am desperate on my part as a reader for it to coalesce into something that is satisfactory and entertaining to read. At the pace that the story is being told, and the amount of worldbuilding and set pieces that need to be laid for it all to make sense, such a drastic choice might bump the events in Book One further down the line and balloon the series into perhaps ten, eleven, twelve books. I do not know. I am excited to revel in this world in the future, but that one lynchpin, Stryx and Mordiger… I need something more to latch onto, more of a foundation. I know the author has an MCU catalogue’s worth of stories and scenes of these two through the years, I would just like to see them presented in their respective moments in time, not as they’re remembered.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Review of advance copy received from Indie Reviewers
Steampunk Peaky Blinders in the best possible way
If Peaky Blinders had a baby with a dark steampunk fantasy and then raised it in a haunted fairy tale, it would be RAPTØRÆM. You’ve got criminal empires, power plays, morally bankrupt elites, and a brooding kingpin at the center who controls everything with sexy menace. But instead of 1920s Birmingham, it’s a filthy, glowing, industrial fantasy city full of smoke, magic, and political decay.
The vibe is immaculate: stylish, violent, and terrifying. Every conversation feels like it could turn deadly, and every alliance feels temporary. If you love stories about gangs, empires, and people clawing for control in a broken world, this is going to scratch that itch hard.
Reading experience and warnings
This is not an easy read. Raptoraem is very lore-heavy and dense so don’t go in expecting a fast-paced thriller. It’s a character-driven slice of life in a broken world, and it's very richly detailed and intentionally immersive. Beware the content warnings in the preface. They mean them.
This is my first Goodreads account and my first time doing ARC readership, but it’s already worth it if the series continues!
If Peaky Blinders had a baby with a dark steampunk fantasy and then raised it in a haunted fairy tale, it would be RAPTØRÆM. You’ve got criminal empires, power plays, morally bankrupt elites, and a brooding kingpin at the center who controls everything with sexy menace. But instead of 1920s Birmingham, it’s a filthy, glowing, industrial fantasy city full of smoke, magic, and political decay.
The vibe is immaculate: stylish, violent, and terrifying. Every conversation feels like it could turn deadly, and every alliance feels temporary. If you love stories about gangs, empires, and people clawing for control in a broken world, this is going to scratch that itch hard.
Reading experience and warnings
This is not an easy read. Raptoraem is very lore-heavy and dense so don’t go in expecting a fast-paced thriller. It’s a character-driven slice of life in a broken world, and it's very richly detailed and intentionally immersive. Beware the content warnings in the preface. They mean them.
This is my first Goodreads account and my first time doing ARC readership, but it’s already worth it if the series continues!
October 12, 2025
Mordiger Has Me By The Throat (And I’m Thankful)
I need everyone to understand that MORDIGER is one of the most insane characters I have encountered in fiction and unfortunately I am now his problem.
like. this man walks into a room and the narrative starts sweating (no literally, there is a scene like that.)
he is a revolutionary. he is a tyrant. he is a father. he is a killer. he is a political strategist. he is a deeply emotionally compromised freak.
AND I LOVE HIM.
Mordiger has this absolutely rancid combination of smarts + self-awareness + emotional repression that makes me want to chew through drywall. because he KNOWS what he is. he isn't wandering around going “oh nooo why does everyone think i'm evol 🥺” he knows exactly how much blood is on his hands. he has simply decided that the correct response to this information is to continue being Mordiger.
and then you put Stryx in the equation???? HELLO??????
this man takes the child who literally tried to kill him and goes “ok cool you live with me now” and somehow turns that into the most psychologically deranged father-daughter relationship imaginable.
the thing about Mordiger is that he doesn't need to be secretly soft to be compelling. he can love someone genuinely and STILL be horrifying. he can protect someone and STILL control them. he can do something tender and then five minutes later remind you that this man has probably committed seventeen atrocities before breakfast.
THAT'S CHARACTERIZATION BABEY!!!
every time he has a moment of genuine affection I am like “oh my god 🥺” and then immediately “WAIT. OH NO WHAT IS HE GOING TO DO WITH THIS EMOTION.”
also the sheer AUDACITY of this man. the confidence. the composure. the absolutely pathological belief that he can hold a collapsing city, a revolution, a family, several enemies, and his own catastrophic psyche together through sheer force of will.
sir.
SIR YOU ARE NOT WELL.
please continue.
10/10 would let this man ruin my life.
I mean this as a compliment. well done, sibley k.
I need everyone to understand that MORDIGER is one of the most insane characters I have encountered in fiction and unfortunately I am now his problem.
like. this man walks into a room and the narrative starts sweating (no literally, there is a scene like that.)
he is a revolutionary. he is a tyrant. he is a father. he is a killer. he is a political strategist. he is a deeply emotionally compromised freak.
AND I LOVE HIM.
Mordiger has this absolutely rancid combination of smarts + self-awareness + emotional repression that makes me want to chew through drywall. because he KNOWS what he is. he isn't wandering around going “oh nooo why does everyone think i'm evol 🥺” he knows exactly how much blood is on his hands. he has simply decided that the correct response to this information is to continue being Mordiger.
and then you put Stryx in the equation???? HELLO??????
this man takes the child who literally tried to kill him and goes “ok cool you live with me now” and somehow turns that into the most psychologically deranged father-daughter relationship imaginable.
the thing about Mordiger is that he doesn't need to be secretly soft to be compelling. he can love someone genuinely and STILL be horrifying. he can protect someone and STILL control them. he can do something tender and then five minutes later remind you that this man has probably committed seventeen atrocities before breakfast.
THAT'S CHARACTERIZATION BABEY!!!
every time he has a moment of genuine affection I am like “oh my god 🥺” and then immediately “WAIT. OH NO WHAT IS HE GOING TO DO WITH THIS EMOTION.”
also the sheer AUDACITY of this man. the confidence. the composure. the absolutely pathological belief that he can hold a collapsing city, a revolution, a family, several enemies, and his own catastrophic psyche together through sheer force of will.
sir.
SIR YOU ARE NOT WELL.
please continue.
10/10 would let this man ruin my life.
I mean this as a compliment. well done, sibley k.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Review of advance copy received from Author
If you like your fairy tales gone feral and dressed in revolution's rags, then Raptoraem might be up your alley. I have a soft spot for stories where the city itself feels like a character, and the city of Raptoraem is promising to become my new brain rot.
The cover looked interesting so I requested the ARC and added it to my "to read" list. When I finally began, I was caught from the first paragraph. The prose has weight. You can smell the damp stone, see the dark streets, feel the chill of a city haunted by its own sovereignty. While I'll usually read a novel on the bus or in bed or wherever I can squeeze in pages, that wasn't the case with Raptoraem. I needed to read it somewhere that matched the mood. I took it to a quiet corner of my campus library, then inside a museum where the statues seemed to watch, then (my favorite spot) my bed next to the open window at night.
This is a book like the gritty fairy tales I remember from childhood. The ones that aren't all that nice when you think about them, but as a kid you're either frightened or just oblivious to how cruel the creatures can be. As an adult (and this is very much an adult book) you see all the cruelties these characters are capable of. They don't live by our morals and it makes for a damn good story.
Mordiger is cruel and demanding, but despite all of this I couldn't stop turning pages. Every moment in this book from his POV you are being twisted and turned and spun around. If you don't pay attention, it's very easy to get lost.
And then there's Stryx. Stryx is a gem. Electric in a way that makes the air feel charged when she's on the page. For almost half the book she doesn't speak at all, which had me leaning forward, waiting, wondering what kind of voice would finally break that silence. And when she does it's like both a breath of fresh air and a lightning strike. Her words are abrasive and sharp, nothing like Mordiger's calculated, controlled tone and after many chapters in Mordiger's company it's a relief.
The story is written in the style of dark epics, with phrases that echo and repeat in ways that feel intentional, like a spell being cast. I never assumed something would happen because the other options were unbelievable; everything feels possible in this world. I finished this ARC and immediately wanted more. I wanted to stay in that drowned city a little longer, to walk those streets and see what else the shadows are hiding and know what happens when the past finishes what it started.
This is the kind of book that leaves you standing at the edge of a strange world, knowing you've only seen the first layer. I already know I'm going to buy the printed special edition the moment it drops. I want it for myself, to cherish and hold and read again. But more than that, I want to go back and see what waits in the ruins when the sun still refuses to rise.
rating: characters ★★★★★, prose ★★★★★, “i should not be rooting for him but here we are” ★★★★★, emotional damage ★★★★★
The cover looked interesting so I requested the ARC and added it to my "to read" list. When I finally began, I was caught from the first paragraph. The prose has weight. You can smell the damp stone, see the dark streets, feel the chill of a city haunted by its own sovereignty. While I'll usually read a novel on the bus or in bed or wherever I can squeeze in pages, that wasn't the case with Raptoraem. I needed to read it somewhere that matched the mood. I took it to a quiet corner of my campus library, then inside a museum where the statues seemed to watch, then (my favorite spot) my bed next to the open window at night.
This is a book like the gritty fairy tales I remember from childhood. The ones that aren't all that nice when you think about them, but as a kid you're either frightened or just oblivious to how cruel the creatures can be. As an adult (and this is very much an adult book) you see all the cruelties these characters are capable of. They don't live by our morals and it makes for a damn good story.
Mordiger is cruel and demanding, but despite all of this I couldn't stop turning pages. Every moment in this book from his POV you are being twisted and turned and spun around. If you don't pay attention, it's very easy to get lost.
And then there's Stryx. Stryx is a gem. Electric in a way that makes the air feel charged when she's on the page. For almost half the book she doesn't speak at all, which had me leaning forward, waiting, wondering what kind of voice would finally break that silence. And when she does it's like both a breath of fresh air and a lightning strike. Her words are abrasive and sharp, nothing like Mordiger's calculated, controlled tone and after many chapters in Mordiger's company it's a relief.
The story is written in the style of dark epics, with phrases that echo and repeat in ways that feel intentional, like a spell being cast. I never assumed something would happen because the other options were unbelievable; everything feels possible in this world. I finished this ARC and immediately wanted more. I wanted to stay in that drowned city a little longer, to walk those streets and see what else the shadows are hiding and know what happens when the past finishes what it started.
This is the kind of book that leaves you standing at the edge of a strange world, knowing you've only seen the first layer. I already know I'm going to buy the printed special edition the moment it drops. I want it for myself, to cherish and hold and read again. But more than that, I want to go back and see what waits in the ruins when the sun still refuses to rise.
rating: characters ★★★★★, prose ★★★★★, “i should not be rooting for him but here we are” ★★★★★, emotional damage ★★★★★
September 22, 2026
I asked myself what word I would pick if I had only one to describe the whole book, and I thought about
“deadline”.
It’s a fitting word for the sea that cyclically closes the passage between Raptoaraem and Solarium, our two main cities: Better be done with your parley and economical demands before meeting again becomes more troublesome, better stand on the side you belong to before crossing back and forth is not an option anymore, better be ready before the path you walked on becomes a dead line…
And it’s a fitting word for the limit Mordiger, both the antagonist and protagonist of this tale, drew after counting each and every trespass of every sorts, both as a hero and a villain.
It’s also a fitting word for all the questions that steadily build within a basic one, “what makes something or someone dead or alive?” (Are Mordiger and Stryx still even living people? Is there an old self that dies when we change or take up a new name? Is survival life, is all encompassing structure death?)
And then, it’s a fitting word because of how present the theme of Time is. And because of how Stryx kills it as a line.
I actually do not have to pick only one word, so I can say that Raptoraem is a really absorbing tale of dark fantasy that makes us love the villains. The murderers, the traitors, the liars. Because they fully explain and make us feel why they do what they do, or because of what they are where they are, or both. And we might not forgive much, but we understand it all. Everyone has their way to fight off their tragedy.
I love how Mordiger is unapologetically a villain, both from the narration point of view and his own. He has decided that he would take matters into his own hand, and so be it if he has to lose and replace it by a cruel and monstrous metal one in the process. He believes in violence, and makes us do too; but still not without growing soft for him and his players: the Crew, Vira, Stryx, … Oh, especially Stryx!
Stryx is both the one that makes the less sense (she loves the monster she wants to kill as her father) and the one with the less paradoxes (in the end, all she is after might be a simple sense of safety, and I do find that relatable). She is a so very endearing child, and yet, we can feel in her something of a goddess in the making. I personally think she is the most fascinating one of the book and I already can’t wait to know where the future is taking her (...well, the future is already taking her places…).
The city of Raptoraem is also a character of its own, and a very interesting one with its influences and contradictions. It has its own past, present and future, its own traumas and victories, what it needs as a hungry land and a newborn child, and what it can provide as a mother and full of gods soil. It lives, and might not behave exactly the same depending on who it is hanging out with. The map is also one that calls for imagination to run (the Pit, the straits dividing the land, the peculiar weather around which lives get by), and so are its myths and beliefs.
And along all its descriptions, there just seems to be something that is growing. Maybe dangerously so. As I carried on, I found myself wondering more and more at each shadow “was that normal or unnatural?” – with “unnatural” potentially meaning “magick” or just “human but monstrously so” or both. It tragically brings at the forefront the question of: Is there something more evil that could threaten the monster we somehow root for…?
One foreboding question! And I’m glad to know there will be 8 more books to answer it and a whole multimedia universe to carry those characters!
For the little reservations I have :
As a non-native English speaker, I was not actually familiar with the word “ledger” before. I… I am now. I felt like the word and its cousins were a little too hammered on, and I do understand the goal of setting this whole atmosphere of a retribution that comes from objective numbers, of a philosophy of calculating the costs and rewards (and that is something I loved while reading and a strong and memorable aspect of the book) but I think this might have been conveyed just a little more subtly. There is also recurrently a share of sentences that are formulated like maxims that straight on settle and answer the situation, and it comes off a little too dryly, in my humble opinion of course, and again this can also be attributed to Mordiger’s blunt personality, this is also his way of cutting anyone’s nonsense, but still I found it a little too heavy. I kinda hoped that someone would come and go “stop with that, you can’t sum everything up in one sentence man, however charismatic you are” or even “hey I don’t get what you mean, you’re gonna have to expand on that”.
Definitely still a good read. A little hard at times, with very specific words and other languages adding to it, but that is something I personally enjoyed.
I recommend Raptoraem for its out of bounds experience, its unique world map, its complex characters that do not balk at their own paradoxes, its stinky darkness nesting despair and hope as sisters, its revolution, its lore, and Stryx. Just Stryx would be enough.
“deadline”.
It’s a fitting word for the sea that cyclically closes the passage between Raptoaraem and Solarium, our two main cities: Better be done with your parley and economical demands before meeting again becomes more troublesome, better stand on the side you belong to before crossing back and forth is not an option anymore, better be ready before the path you walked on becomes a dead line…
And it’s a fitting word for the limit Mordiger, both the antagonist and protagonist of this tale, drew after counting each and every trespass of every sorts, both as a hero and a villain.
It’s also a fitting word for all the questions that steadily build within a basic one, “what makes something or someone dead or alive?” (Are Mordiger and Stryx still even living people? Is there an old self that dies when we change or take up a new name? Is survival life, is all encompassing structure death?)
And then, it’s a fitting word because of how present the theme of Time is. And because of how Stryx kills it as a line.
I actually do not have to pick only one word, so I can say that Raptoraem is a really absorbing tale of dark fantasy that makes us love the villains. The murderers, the traitors, the liars. Because they fully explain and make us feel why they do what they do, or because of what they are where they are, or both. And we might not forgive much, but we understand it all. Everyone has their way to fight off their tragedy.
I love how Mordiger is unapologetically a villain, both from the narration point of view and his own. He has decided that he would take matters into his own hand, and so be it if he has to lose and replace it by a cruel and monstrous metal one in the process. He believes in violence, and makes us do too; but still not without growing soft for him and his players: the Crew, Vira, Stryx, … Oh, especially Stryx!
Stryx is both the one that makes the less sense (she loves the monster she wants to kill as her father) and the one with the less paradoxes (in the end, all she is after might be a simple sense of safety, and I do find that relatable). She is a so very endearing child, and yet, we can feel in her something of a goddess in the making. I personally think she is the most fascinating one of the book and I already can’t wait to know where the future is taking her (...well, the future is already taking her places…).
The city of Raptoraem is also a character of its own, and a very interesting one with its influences and contradictions. It has its own past, present and future, its own traumas and victories, what it needs as a hungry land and a newborn child, and what it can provide as a mother and full of gods soil. It lives, and might not behave exactly the same depending on who it is hanging out with. The map is also one that calls for imagination to run (the Pit, the straits dividing the land, the peculiar weather around which lives get by), and so are its myths and beliefs.
And along all its descriptions, there just seems to be something that is growing. Maybe dangerously so. As I carried on, I found myself wondering more and more at each shadow “was that normal or unnatural?” – with “unnatural” potentially meaning “magick” or just “human but monstrously so” or both. It tragically brings at the forefront the question of: Is there something more evil that could threaten the monster we somehow root for…?
One foreboding question! And I’m glad to know there will be 8 more books to answer it and a whole multimedia universe to carry those characters!
For the little reservations I have :
As a non-native English speaker, I was not actually familiar with the word “ledger” before. I… I am now. I felt like the word and its cousins were a little too hammered on, and I do understand the goal of setting this whole atmosphere of a retribution that comes from objective numbers, of a philosophy of calculating the costs and rewards (and that is something I loved while reading and a strong and memorable aspect of the book) but I think this might have been conveyed just a little more subtly. There is also recurrently a share of sentences that are formulated like maxims that straight on settle and answer the situation, and it comes off a little too dryly, in my humble opinion of course, and again this can also be attributed to Mordiger’s blunt personality, this is also his way of cutting anyone’s nonsense, but still I found it a little too heavy. I kinda hoped that someone would come and go “stop with that, you can’t sum everything up in one sentence man, however charismatic you are” or even “hey I don’t get what you mean, you’re gonna have to expand on that”.
Definitely still a good read. A little hard at times, with very specific words and other languages adding to it, but that is something I personally enjoyed.
I recommend Raptoraem for its out of bounds experience, its unique world map, its complex characters that do not balk at their own paradoxes, its stinky darkness nesting despair and hope as sisters, its revolution, its lore, and Stryx. Just Stryx would be enough.
Read
September 21, 2026Any fan of more gritty, dark and adult stories is probably going to feel right at home. Be warned however: every warning is absolutely warranted, The Drowned Star doesn't have a name like that for no reason. Raptoraem is a dark tale that still finds moments of light even in a very hopeless place defined by a bloody and brutal history. This is a story filled with heavy subjects. Most of the time it feels like a grimdark story and at others it reads like a fairy tale gone mad.
The biggest highlights of the book are without a doubt its monstrous protagonist Erik Mordiger and his adoptive daughter Stryx. The first, Mordiger, a monster defined by a surprising degree of self-awareness and a capacity for feeling that at times would seem alien even to himself. The second, a girl broken by a story littered with trauma and crushed by the weight of a gift that feels more like a curse. The bond that binds these two is the focal point of the story but you shouldn't expect roses and happy family gatherings. It's an absolute mess of a dynamic, built on trauma and harm but surrounded by an uncertainty of feeling that might just be familial care.
The lore of this world is given to you through dialogues and delivered through pages of manuscripts and reports. The worldbuilding of Raptoraem is conveyed in a way that keeps you interested and, more importantly, allows you to immerse yourself in it. Discovering the long tale of Raptoraem makes the reader feel like a student of history delving through old texts to piece together history for their own study. It should be noted however that given its heavy focus on internal character reflections and exposition, the more casual reader might find some difficulty on following the pacing at times.
If you stick around though, this first book provides a good introduction to this nine acts saga. With it's cast of characters, combined with a history made of violent revolution and magic, Raptoraem will definitely leave you waiting for more.
The biggest highlights of the book are without a doubt its monstrous protagonist Erik Mordiger and his adoptive daughter Stryx. The first, Mordiger, a monster defined by a surprising degree of self-awareness and a capacity for feeling that at times would seem alien even to himself. The second, a girl broken by a story littered with trauma and crushed by the weight of a gift that feels more like a curse. The bond that binds these two is the focal point of the story but you shouldn't expect roses and happy family gatherings. It's an absolute mess of a dynamic, built on trauma and harm but surrounded by an uncertainty of feeling that might just be familial care.
The lore of this world is given to you through dialogues and delivered through pages of manuscripts and reports. The worldbuilding of Raptoraem is conveyed in a way that keeps you interested and, more importantly, allows you to immerse yourself in it. Discovering the long tale of Raptoraem makes the reader feel like a student of history delving through old texts to piece together history for their own study. It should be noted however that given its heavy focus on internal character reflections and exposition, the more casual reader might find some difficulty on following the pacing at times.
If you stick around though, this first book provides a good introduction to this nine acts saga. With it's cast of characters, combined with a history made of violent revolution and magic, Raptoraem will definitely leave you waiting for more.
Review of advance copy received from Author
I absolutely loved the characters and the premise of Raptoraem. There’s something about this world that feels ugly, beautiful, strange, familiar, and just out of reach in the best possible way. I found myself getting increasingly invested in the characters and wanting to understand more about the world they inhabit.
That said, there were moments where I felt like I was being given a LOT of information at once, while in other places it felt like someone had opened a door just enough for me to see what was behind it… and then slammed it directly in my face 😂 There were definitely moments where I wanted more answers, and just a little longer with certain pieces of the mystery. But I’m not taking a star off for it, because I genuinely think this may be a deliberate narrative choice. Raptoraem feels like it knows there are things it wants you to wonder about rather than immediately understand, and I suspect some of those frustratingly locked doors are going to matter later.
Book One has given me a glimpse of the Drowned Star, and I’m already excited for the future books to start turning the keys. I just need them to open some of those damn doors. 🔑🌊
That said, there were moments where I felt like I was being given a LOT of information at once, while in other places it felt like someone had opened a door just enough for me to see what was behind it… and then slammed it directly in my face 😂 There were definitely moments where I wanted more answers, and just a little longer with certain pieces of the mystery. But I’m not taking a star off for it, because I genuinely think this may be a deliberate narrative choice. Raptoraem feels like it knows there are things it wants you to wonder about rather than immediately understand, and I suspect some of those frustratingly locked doors are going to matter later.
Book One has given me a glimpse of the Drowned Star, and I’m already excited for the future books to start turning the keys. I just need them to open some of those damn doors. 🔑🌊
September 22, 2026
Ambitious. Stylish. Unique.
Silbey is a writer that has brought us a world that you can more then see and hear, but touch and smell as well.
The voice of the world demands the reader's attention. Prose and poetry flow together to weave the world and it's grim history together as we explore the city through the senses and experiences of the people who have become what they must to do more than survive there; but thrive and rule there.
This book is the opening movements of what is sure to be a delightful meal of literature. But, be warned, reader, it is only the beginning. Enough to wet ones appetite and introduce you to the players, but not a complete tale standing on its own.
Visceral in its violence and wrenching in its sorrow; this series opener is not to be missed by any who enjoys a mythpunk read in a new light.
Note: this review is based off the ARC provided before release
Silbey is a writer that has brought us a world that you can more then see and hear, but touch and smell as well.
The voice of the world demands the reader's attention. Prose and poetry flow together to weave the world and it's grim history together as we explore the city through the senses and experiences of the people who have become what they must to do more than survive there; but thrive and rule there.
This book is the opening movements of what is sure to be a delightful meal of literature. But, be warned, reader, it is only the beginning. Enough to wet ones appetite and introduce you to the players, but not a complete tale standing on its own.
Visceral in its violence and wrenching in its sorrow; this series opener is not to be missed by any who enjoys a mythpunk read in a new light.
Note: this review is based off the ARC provided before release
September 19, 2026
Review of advance copy kindly received from the author.
Here we have a highly skilled writer who is, I believe, about to spoil the reader with a massive saga I’m excited to see unfold. Raptoraem is an aesthetic, wild and fun big-dick ride, the element of cool ambitiously heavy in the polluted air on every page, so maybe it’s a lucky thing that this first instalment did not nick my boots in the way I expected it to.
My issue with this book is that it feels under- and overwritten at the same time. World-building and character specific points seem to be driven home almost unnecessarily often (Mordiger’s character who is pretty well fleshed-out early on), while other points lack substance (the fallout before the revolution), which is mirrored in the writing itself: every line hits the bullseye with mechanical precision, letting it linger somewhere between terrific and a resulting lack of rhythm—something that’s underlined by the timeline of the story as well. Although this approach feels ironically natural to the theme of the story, namely looking forward and not back, as a reader it often left me disoriented, especially since, collectively, a huge part of the story is told through Mordiger’s reminiscing of the past. In the same way, I wondered whether the at times heavy telling vs. showing might be too by design.
For my part, I consider this book a somewhat dense introduction to a story that will tell the aftermath of a previous fallout in later instalments—a first daring gaze down the bottomless Pit, so to speak. I surely want to see what the darkness holds; everyone else: proceed at your own discretion.
Here we have a highly skilled writer who is, I believe, about to spoil the reader with a massive saga I’m excited to see unfold. Raptoraem is an aesthetic, wild and fun big-dick ride, the element of cool ambitiously heavy in the polluted air on every page, so maybe it’s a lucky thing that this first instalment did not nick my boots in the way I expected it to.
My issue with this book is that it feels under- and overwritten at the same time. World-building and character specific points seem to be driven home almost unnecessarily often (Mordiger’s character who is pretty well fleshed-out early on), while other points lack substance (the fallout before the revolution), which is mirrored in the writing itself: every line hits the bullseye with mechanical precision, letting it linger somewhere between terrific and a resulting lack of rhythm—something that’s underlined by the timeline of the story as well. Although this approach feels ironically natural to the theme of the story, namely looking forward and not back, as a reader it often left me disoriented, especially since, collectively, a huge part of the story is told through Mordiger’s reminiscing of the past. In the same way, I wondered whether the at times heavy telling vs. showing might be too by design.
For my part, I consider this book a somewhat dense introduction to a story that will tell the aftermath of a previous fallout in later instalments—a first daring gaze down the bottomless Pit, so to speak. I surely want to see what the darkness holds; everyone else: proceed at your own discretion.
September 29, 2026
I am in the middle of this book and having a great time! There is so much to take in! It is written so well and descriptive! You totally fall into this world and the dark vibes it puts off. Im taking time with it to absorb it all and sit within it and soak up these characters. but wanted to put a review up asap! Will revise when finished! 🖤
October 3, 2026
Okay, confession time: I finished RAPTØRÆM a while ago, and I've been sitting on this review because every time I open a draft I end up rereading chapters instead of writing.
The easiest way to pitch it: imagine Arcane's undercity raised a death squad, threw them into a Maze Runner-style pit, and then pointed them at a Game of Thrones succession crisis. Except they don't just survive the throne war but throw a coup. That's RAPTØRÆM. It's also not really any of those things, because it's very much its own beast (a large, gothic, slightly feral beast).
The tagline is "Freedom costs blood. So does magic." and the book means it. Every word.
The world is Veilmeer, and the city is formerly Refugium, specifically the five Straits (Coal, Stone, Gold, Silks, and Veils), each run by a Strutlord. If you loved how Six of Crows made Ketterdam feel like a live, extremely stabby city, the Straits do that times five. Underneath it all is the Pit, which has seven tiers, and each tier is NAMED AFTER A TOOTH. I don't know why that detail wrecked me as much as it did, but it did. "The Pit yawned. Depth without end." Yeah. That's the vibe. It's the Maze Runner part of the equation: a place built to grind people down, where the rules are brutal and nobody explains them to you. Except here, the people who built it are very much alive and very much running things.
Can we talk about the languages for a second? Because this is where RAPTØRÆM became a whole different kind of fun for me. Everyone in Raptøræm speaks Riftcant, but the wider world of Veilmeer pulls from real tongues and cultures and folds them right into the fantasy. Drachenherz has German running through its bones, right down to its assassins, the Nachtjäger. The separatist Trollslända carry a Swedish name. Lukomorje sounds like it stepped straight out of a Slavic fairy tale, and Old Latin drifts through the edges of everything. None of it feels like a lazy copy of a real place but like history. As a Hindi speaker, I kept catching words, and every time it happened I got this little jolt of *wait, I KNOW that*. It's a puzzle you get to play with if you're a language nerd, and it never gets in the way if you're not.
And then there's Mordiger. Oh, Mordiger. Parts of this book are narrated by him, looking back on everything, and the longer you read, the more you get this creeping feeling that he's not just telling the story but testifying. To who? I don't know! The book doesn't say! But once that impression lands, you go back and reread everything with new eyes, and you realize you should not trust him. I mean that as the highest compliment. If Kaz Brekker is the gloved teenage mastermind who flinches at a touch, Mordiger is what happens when that kind of brilliance stops flinching and walks into every room like he owns it and everyone in it. He is an ADULT, and the book knows it. The man is charged in every scene he's in, and I needed to fan myself more than once. Add in a crew that takes a whole government and the very real possibility that he's explaining himself to someone with the power to judge him, lying beautifully the whole time? Is he the hero? The villain? The defendant? (Maybe all three? I have THEORIES.)
Also, shoutout to Vira, who gets the single best line in the book: "If it breathes, it lies." I screamed. I'm still screaming.
Stryx and Mordiger, though. That relationship is the heart of the whole thing for me. Found family, but the morally messy kind, where the person who took you in is also the most dangerous person you know, and you're not sure anyone deserves to be saved, least of all the person doing the saving. If Jinx and Silco broke your heart, or you're still not over Vincent and Oraya, or Madoc and Jude, BRACE YOURSELF.
The Game of Thrones part comes in with the politics, and there's a lot of it, in the best way. You've got the Vertex Consortium and the Iron Code, a pantheon called the Blessed Five with a Spiderweaver goddess at the top, and a catastrophe called the Black Wake that happened when the story starts and is still bleeding into everything until the last chapter. "Power is never the mouth. It is the hand around the throat." That's basically the whole political thesis of the book, and it delivers on it. There's a negotiation scene at Lowtide Quay between Pallas and Mordiger that's the spine of the back half, and I LIVE for scenes like that. Two people at a table, saying polite things, while you can practically hear the knives under the table. If you love plotting scenes as much as I do, this one is for you.
Is it a lot? Yes. Book I definitely asks you to keep up, and there are moments where I wanted a glossary taped to my forehead. But the payoff is worth it, and knowing this is the first of NINE books, with Mordiger's whole retelling feeling like it's leading somewhere? I'm in. I'm so in. I have ideas about where the rest of the story goes but nothing feels settled yet. It is the kind of series that might make someone pay later and I want to see it happen.
RAPTØRÆM is dark, political, character-driven, kind of mean to you, and I loved every page. Now excuse me while I go reread the Lowtide Quay chapters. Again.
The easiest way to pitch it: imagine Arcane's undercity raised a death squad, threw them into a Maze Runner-style pit, and then pointed them at a Game of Thrones succession crisis. Except they don't just survive the throne war but throw a coup. That's RAPTØRÆM. It's also not really any of those things, because it's very much its own beast (a large, gothic, slightly feral beast).
The tagline is "Freedom costs blood. So does magic." and the book means it. Every word.
The world is Veilmeer, and the city is formerly Refugium, specifically the five Straits (Coal, Stone, Gold, Silks, and Veils), each run by a Strutlord. If you loved how Six of Crows made Ketterdam feel like a live, extremely stabby city, the Straits do that times five. Underneath it all is the Pit, which has seven tiers, and each tier is NAMED AFTER A TOOTH. I don't know why that detail wrecked me as much as it did, but it did. "The Pit yawned. Depth without end." Yeah. That's the vibe. It's the Maze Runner part of the equation: a place built to grind people down, where the rules are brutal and nobody explains them to you. Except here, the people who built it are very much alive and very much running things.
Can we talk about the languages for a second? Because this is where RAPTØRÆM became a whole different kind of fun for me. Everyone in Raptøræm speaks Riftcant, but the wider world of Veilmeer pulls from real tongues and cultures and folds them right into the fantasy. Drachenherz has German running through its bones, right down to its assassins, the Nachtjäger. The separatist Trollslända carry a Swedish name. Lukomorje sounds like it stepped straight out of a Slavic fairy tale, and Old Latin drifts through the edges of everything. None of it feels like a lazy copy of a real place but like history. As a Hindi speaker, I kept catching words, and every time it happened I got this little jolt of *wait, I KNOW that*. It's a puzzle you get to play with if you're a language nerd, and it never gets in the way if you're not.
And then there's Mordiger. Oh, Mordiger. Parts of this book are narrated by him, looking back on everything, and the longer you read, the more you get this creeping feeling that he's not just telling the story but testifying. To who? I don't know! The book doesn't say! But once that impression lands, you go back and reread everything with new eyes, and you realize you should not trust him. I mean that as the highest compliment. If Kaz Brekker is the gloved teenage mastermind who flinches at a touch, Mordiger is what happens when that kind of brilliance stops flinching and walks into every room like he owns it and everyone in it. He is an ADULT, and the book knows it. The man is charged in every scene he's in, and I needed to fan myself more than once. Add in a crew that takes a whole government and the very real possibility that he's explaining himself to someone with the power to judge him, lying beautifully the whole time? Is he the hero? The villain? The defendant? (Maybe all three? I have THEORIES.)
Also, shoutout to Vira, who gets the single best line in the book: "If it breathes, it lies." I screamed. I'm still screaming.
Stryx and Mordiger, though. That relationship is the heart of the whole thing for me. Found family, but the morally messy kind, where the person who took you in is also the most dangerous person you know, and you're not sure anyone deserves to be saved, least of all the person doing the saving. If Jinx and Silco broke your heart, or you're still not over Vincent and Oraya, or Madoc and Jude, BRACE YOURSELF.
The Game of Thrones part comes in with the politics, and there's a lot of it, in the best way. You've got the Vertex Consortium and the Iron Code, a pantheon called the Blessed Five with a Spiderweaver goddess at the top, and a catastrophe called the Black Wake that happened when the story starts and is still bleeding into everything until the last chapter. "Power is never the mouth. It is the hand around the throat." That's basically the whole political thesis of the book, and it delivers on it. There's a negotiation scene at Lowtide Quay between Pallas and Mordiger that's the spine of the back half, and I LIVE for scenes like that. Two people at a table, saying polite things, while you can practically hear the knives under the table. If you love plotting scenes as much as I do, this one is for you.
Is it a lot? Yes. Book I definitely asks you to keep up, and there are moments where I wanted a glossary taped to my forehead. But the payoff is worth it, and knowing this is the first of NINE books, with Mordiger's whole retelling feeling like it's leading somewhere? I'm in. I'm so in. I have ideas about where the rest of the story goes but nothing feels settled yet. It is the kind of series that might make someone pay later and I want to see it happen.
RAPTØRÆM is dark, political, character-driven, kind of mean to you, and I loved every page. Now excuse me while I go reread the Lowtide Quay chapters. Again.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Review of advance copy
Ambitious, brutal, and clearly building toward something huge
Raptoraem opens with a massacre and doesn't let up much from there. This is unapologetically adult dark fantasy, and it earns every content warning in the front matter. What impressed me most was the worldbuilding: instead of dumping lore on you, the book interleaves the story with "Black ledger" chapters — propaganda bulletins, smuggled pamphlets, intercepted letters — that let you piece together the history of this drowned, colonized city yourself. It's some of the most disciplined, immersive worldbuilding I've read in the genre in a while, and the political maneuvering between the revolutionary antihero and a rival empire's diplomat is genuinely sharp, almost thriller-level dialogue.
The antihero, Erik Mordiger, is the book's biggest asset. He's articulate, self-aware and DEEPLY monstrous without ever tipping into cartoon villainy. His relationship with Stryx, the traumatized oracle child he's raised, is the emotional engine of the book, and it's messy in a way I think is intentional: the narrative wants you to feel real tenderness in a dynamic that's also, unmistakably, built on real harm. Whether that works for you will depend a lot on your tolerance for morally uncomfortable found-family stories.
My only real hesitation is pacing. This is a long book that spends a lot of time in extended dialogue and flashback, and by the end the main plot hook (introduced early) hasn't actually resolved. It reads like a very well-crafted first act of a much longer saga rather than a complete story in itself, which makes sense given this is Book I of nine, but is worth knowing going in.
If you love dense, morally bleak political fantasy with a genuinely magnetic villain-protagonist and don't need fast plotting or tidy stakes, this is very much worth your time. Recommended, with the caveat that you're signing up for a long haul.
Note: I received an advance reader copy (ARC) of this book in exchange for my honest opinion.
Raptoraem opens with a massacre and doesn't let up much from there. This is unapologetically adult dark fantasy, and it earns every content warning in the front matter. What impressed me most was the worldbuilding: instead of dumping lore on you, the book interleaves the story with "Black ledger" chapters — propaganda bulletins, smuggled pamphlets, intercepted letters — that let you piece together the history of this drowned, colonized city yourself. It's some of the most disciplined, immersive worldbuilding I've read in the genre in a while, and the political maneuvering between the revolutionary antihero and a rival empire's diplomat is genuinely sharp, almost thriller-level dialogue.
The antihero, Erik Mordiger, is the book's biggest asset. He's articulate, self-aware and DEEPLY monstrous without ever tipping into cartoon villainy. His relationship with Stryx, the traumatized oracle child he's raised, is the emotional engine of the book, and it's messy in a way I think is intentional: the narrative wants you to feel real tenderness in a dynamic that's also, unmistakably, built on real harm. Whether that works for you will depend a lot on your tolerance for morally uncomfortable found-family stories.
My only real hesitation is pacing. This is a long book that spends a lot of time in extended dialogue and flashback, and by the end the main plot hook (introduced early) hasn't actually resolved. It reads like a very well-crafted first act of a much longer saga rather than a complete story in itself, which makes sense given this is Book I of nine, but is worth knowing going in.
If you love dense, morally bleak political fantasy with a genuinely magnetic villain-protagonist and don't need fast plotting or tidy stakes, this is very much worth your time. Recommended, with the caveat that you're signing up for a long haul.
Note: I received an advance reader copy (ARC) of this book in exchange for my honest opinion.
October 9, 2025
This is my first (pre?)review on goodreads just like it was my first post on Tumblr, my first fanart posted for someone’s writing, my first ebook preorder and so on. All because of this author. And I say this as a millenial lurker.
Truly this author’s thoughtfulness and generosity with their interactions keep the web a fun and interesting place to be still.
But mostly I’m here for the writing. I’m actually glad there’s ample time for me to prepare… to get my heart broken (and near spooky season too ? *sigh*). I expect the worst of humanity but never gratuitous, hope too hard-earned, character studies unveiled like a carefully orchestrated full-course dinner and worldbuilding delivered in a most immersive (even multimedia) experience.
Sorry for the word salad. Non native english speaker here who’d gladly let others expertly weave words in my stead. But I felt the need to do my part in supporting this monstrous endeavor (9 books ?!). I have no doubt regarding the author’s ability to deliver I only pray they’ll be met with the best conditions and their work receives its deserved praises.
Truly this author’s thoughtfulness and generosity with their interactions keep the web a fun and interesting place to be still.
But mostly I’m here for the writing. I’m actually glad there’s ample time for me to prepare… to get my heart broken (and near spooky season too ? *sigh*). I expect the worst of humanity but never gratuitous, hope too hard-earned, character studies unveiled like a carefully orchestrated full-course dinner and worldbuilding delivered in a most immersive (even multimedia) experience.
Sorry for the word salad. Non native english speaker here who’d gladly let others expertly weave words in my stead. But I felt the need to do my part in supporting this monstrous endeavor (9 books ?!). I have no doubt regarding the author’s ability to deliver I only pray they’ll be met with the best conditions and their work receives its deserved praises.
Review of advance copy
Here’s the non-spoiler version: Raptoraem looks set to be an enormous 9-book saga, and I tore through Book 1 much faster than I’d have thought possible, despite its slow pace, morally complicated characters, and complete lack of desire to create any endearing protagonists. Sibley K. is an author who not-so-gently holds your hand and guides you into some not-so-nice places, a good portion of them taking place in the protagonists' minds, and you can’t stop staring at them. And then there’s a "what-if myth, but what if it had a switchblade and was violently opposed to the system" angle. Which it delivers on with conviction. We've got propaganda leaflets, stolen files, newspaper clippings, arguments about tariffs made by monsters, and children in danger. And it's all very dark but sometimes very funny in some pretty unexpected ways. The cliffhanger ending left me excited where others would be annoyed. I’m already hooked for Book 2.
October 1, 2025
I don’t usually leave reviews on a preorder, but this one has me hooked. I've followed the author’s writing on tumblr, so I know the characters are going to be sharp and the politics will cut deep, and honestly the premise here feels HUGE. What I love most is how it feels like it’s going to dig into relationships in ways that don’t look clean or safe. Mordiger and Stryx already fascinate me just from the description: the idea of a girl who once tried to kill him becoming his heir? That’s the kind of dynamic I can sink my teeth into.
Eagerly waiting to see how it plays out.
Eagerly waiting to see how it plays out.
September 24, 2025
I’m already obsessed with the premise and the aesthetic. Waiting for 2026!
Review of advance copy
Best fictional book I ever read ...very close to today's reality..
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
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