Literature / Chronicles of Blood and Stone

A series of High Fantasy novels by Robert Newcomb, notable for a) a literal gender war, with women as the baddies, and b) an amazingly vehement Hatedom, partly because of the gender war and partly because of rampant cliches.

The order of the books is:

• The Fifth Sorceress (2002)
• The Gates of Dawn (2003)
• The Scrolls of the Ancients (2004)

The sequel trilogy is known as Destinies of Blood and Stone. There were plans for a third trilogy, Victories of Blood and Stone, but publisher Del Rey cancelled Newcomb's contract after the second trilogy was released.

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This series of books provides examples of:

• Action Girl: By the third book, Shailiha is one of these, having apparently been practicing her swordsmanship off-page. Also in the third book is Tyranny.
• Aerith and Bob: We have Tristan, Nicholas, Morganna, and Shailiha all coming from the same family. In the same world, we also have Failee, Succiu, Wigg, Shannon the Small, etc.
• Airport Fantasy: Is it ever. The books range between 400 to 700 pages, filled with sex and graphic violence, and the plots largely consist of standard action-packed epic fantasy quests.
• All Animals Are Dogs: Pilgrim the horse. It even plays fetch.
• Anticlimax: Conflicts have a tendency to be resolved suddenly and without much build-up. For example, Failee doesn't even get a special death scene, she is killed off along with most other sorceresses while unable to fight back. Even more obviously, in The Gates of Dawn Nicholas accidentally kills himself while trying to activate the titular gates for reasons that have been barely foreshadowed and which don't require any of the protagonists to so much as lift a finger to cause it.
• Arc Villain: The series has a very high turnover rate in its villain cast, with most of them not surviving the book where they were introduced. Though the Heretics are the overall big bads of the entire series, each book therefore has its own specific antagonists:
  • The Fifth Sorceress has the Coven sorceresses, with Failee as The Leader and Succiu as the Number Two getting the most attention.
  • The Gates of Dawn has Nicholas II.
  • The Scrolls of the Ancients has Krassus for most of the book, with Wulfgar taking over for the climax after he dies.
• Artistic License – Biology: Apparently, Succiu can go through a full-term pregnancy in about a day without suffering any ill-effects. Considering some of the other stuff she's done, accelerating her pregnancy through black magic is par for the course.
• As You Know: Happens a bit, especially whenever Wigg is around. The wizards in general are prone to massive infodumps, which often contain things that their audience either already knows or could figure out on their own. The villains, especially the sorceresses, are also liable to infodump to each other any time they're not distracted by gratuitous depravity.
• Author Appeal: Newcomb seems to be really into nudism, although only villains are nudists. Succiu has a particular tendency to walk around naked.
• A Wizard Did It: A common handwave in the series. If something unusual isn't the direct result of a wizard or sorceress's actions, it's often the result of the prophcies/someone's endowed blood/the craft itself jerking things around on its own initiative.
• The Baroness: Succiu. She's definitely of the Sexpot variety, depicted as an attractive but cold, sadistic and arrogant dominitrix who loves combining sex and torture.
• Because Destiny Says So: Taken to pretty ridiculous levels with the wizards, who basically allow the sorceresses to invade the kingdom, steal a magical artifact, capture/kill the royal family and let Tristan save everyone because it was prophesied it would happen. Instead of, y'know, taking steps to try and avoid this happening in the first place.
• Black-and-Gray Morality: Tristan sleeps with many women and is spoiled, while Wigg is a sexist who banned women from practicing magic without having to. The only reason they are not the bad guys in the first book is that the Sorceresses and the Minions are all serial rapists and murderers that can make almost anyone else look heroic compared to them.
• Cartwright Curse: Tristan. Evelyn, a woman he sleeps with early on, is killed in the coronation massacre, Lilith turns out to be Natasha in disguise and Narissa is killed towards the end of the story. All in the first book, we might add. In later books, he falls in love with another woman, Celeste, who sticks around for several books before she dies too, giving Tristan a grand total of four' dead lovers across across as many novels.
• Chosen One: Tristan. He and his sister are literally called the "Chosen Ones" because of the abnormally high quality of their magical blood.
• Dangerous Forbidden Technique: The Vagaries. In particular, the combining of the Vigors and the Vagaries for anyone who isn't the Chosen One.
• Depraved Bisexual: All the sorceresses automatically become this when they start using dark magic, except for their leader Failee who claims to have grown out of it and isn't much interested in sex at all.
• Disc-One Final Boss: The sorceresses, who are all killed off at the end of the first book, with five more (counting the Sequel Series) to go which introduce different villains.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Succiu rapes Geldon in her introduction because he laughed at her.
• Distracted by the Sexy: Tristan attention is constantly wandering to any attractive woman in the vicinity, especially in the first book. Wigg, in contrast, is never bothered.
• Door Stopper: The first book has close to 700 pages. The sequels tone it down it a bit, having somewhere between 400 and 500 pages.
• Double Standard Rape: Female on Male: Averted. The sorceresses are reviled for the "rape and torture of both sexes", and Tristan is nearly raped by Natasha, whom he kills, and later is horrifically raped by Succiu.
• Drunk on the Dark Side: Why not to use the Vagaries. It starts with becoming a Depraved Bisexual, and goes from there.
• The End of the World as We Know It: When the sorceresses invade the kingdom. While the coven's ultimate plan is to Take Over the World, because their leader doesn't actually know what she's doing, the actual result of the spell she's trying to cast would destroy the world instead.
• Evil Feels Good: "Hugely sexual longings" commence when using the Vagaries. This is mostly ignored in later books.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Newcomb has a tendency to give things very blunt names that describe exactly what they are - Tristan and Shailiha are "the Chosen One," the Magical Society Wigg belongs to is "the Directorate of Wizards," the sorceresses' mooks are "the Minions", the sorceresses themselves are called "The Coven of Sorceresses" and so on. Some of these later get more "fantasy-ish" names; others are left as they are.
• Extreme Omnisexual: A common result of sorcery, but Succiu deserves special mention, as her appetites include men, women, slave boys, dwarves, genetically mutated minions, other sorceresses, and both the main character and his twin sister.
• Face–Heel Turn: Shailiha joins the sorceresses, thanks to brainwashing. She gets better.
• Fantastic Arousal: The minions have a sensitive area on their wings. Succiu often licks this area while sexing up minions.
• For the Evulz: The motive of the sorceresses. Apparently, their overuse of the Vagaries drives them to engage in acts of rape, torture and other depravity just because.
• Functional Magic: The Vigors and the Vagaries are the good and evil aspects of "the craft" respectively, and are only usable by people that are born with endowed blood.
• Genre Shift: Happens reasonably early in the first book. It starts out as fairly lighthearted or typical High Fantasy, complete with pony rides through the woods and following giant butterflies into a magic cave...then goes headlong into grimdark territory with lots of graphic violence and sexual assault.
• Good Is Dumb: Yes, very dumb. Tristan has a tendency to charge into any situation without thinking it through whatsoever, while Wigg and the wizards are so beholden to their Obstructive Code of Conduct that they make easily avoidable mistakes for no discernable gain; sparing the Pentangle sorceresses is just the tip of the iceberg.
• Half-Human Hybrid: The Minions are magically-created hybrids of humans with Parthalon's local fauna, most obviously resulting in their wings.
• Hell-Bent for Leather: The sorceresses, Succiu in particular, seem fond of leather (when they actually bother to wear clothes).
• Honor Before Reason: The wizards tend to follow this to the point of insanity. It gets all but one of them killed very early on.
• Hypocrite: Tristan is said to dislike Lady Natasha (before he finds out she’s evil) because she allegedly sleeps around. As he doesn't even bring up her husband, it makes it seem as though his problem with her is solely that she’s promiscuous, not that she’s married and promiscuous. However, Tristan himself is notorious for being a womanizer, though apparently it’s okay if he does it because he’s “the hero” (and a man).
• Informed Ability: The reader is repeatedly and emphatically told that Failee, the leader of the sorceresses, is an unparalleled magical genius; even her enemies treat this as true. What we're actually shown is that she's an overconfident Smug Snake who thinks she's smarter than everyone else but doesn't really know what she's doing most of the time.
• Kick the Dog: Newcomb wants to make sure we know that all women the sorceresses are evil; if a scene featuring the sorceresses doesn't involve them expositing at each other at length, it will probably involve plenty of gratuitous torture and/or rape instead.
• LEGO Genetics: Minions are humans who are given bat-like wings by magic.
• Long-Lost Relative:
  • Wulfgar, who is Tristan and Shaihila's half-brother.
  • Also Celeste, who is Wigg's daughter.
• Love at First Sight: Tristan towards three different girls. First Lilith, who is a sorceress in disguise and tries to kill him, then Narrissa, who dies. And in the second book it happens again with Celeste.
• Luke, I Am Your Father: Inverted. It's more of a 'Luke I Am Your Son' moment, between Tristan and Nicholas II in the second book.
• Magic A Is Magic A: Downplayed. Despite being excruciatingly explained, the magic system is nonetheless vague and sometimes contradictory.
• Mistaken Age: Meta-example. It's not unheard of for first-time readers of The Fifth Sorceress to initially believe Tristan is in his late teens due to his general behavior and attitude; he's a bit of a rebel and a womaniser who's Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places and is regularly Distracted by the Sexy, is rather naive about the history and lore of his kingdom (including his status as The Chosen One) and is very reluctant about having to become king. This comes off as Age-Appropriate Angst and typical teen rebellion/life uncertainty stuff...until the reader finds out in the first act that Tristan is actually nearly thirty years old.
• Mook–Face Turn: Once Tristan kills Kluge, all the other Minions stop being sadistic rapists and become Tristan's loyal guards instead.
• Ms. Fanservice: Succiu walks around naked as much as possible. Overlaps with Fan Disservice because of the fact that she's usually involved in some act of horrific evil at the time.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Succiu, who really acts like the worst incarnations of the succubi in media.
• New Powers as the Plot Demands: Tristan is untrained, but as The Chosen One can periodically pull new powers out of the aether as he needs them, most obviously at the climax of the first book when his powers still work when everyone else's are shut off because reasons.
• Obstructive Code of Conduct: The source of the wizards' very foolish decision sparing the last sorceresses-they all swore an oath "to take no life except in urgent defense of self or others, or without fair warning." Of course, one might think capital punishment could be justified under either or both clauses... In spite of this too, stranding them with no supplies is fine, rather than tantamount to killing itself.
• Older Than They Look: Tristan's general description and characterization leads a lot of readers to assume he's in his late teens...he's actually almost thirty.
• Old Master: Wigg, as head of the Directorate of Wizards, is a centuries old Archmage and Tristan's mentor, in theory. In practice he's rather ineffectual.
• Plot Hole: Many, often due to bad editing.
• Rape as Drama: This happens constantly. Particularly following the coronation massacre, the story feels the need to point out that the queen and several other women were all raped before they were murdered, even though it has zero effect on the plot and them being violently killed was already bad enough.
• Really 700 Years Old: Most of the wizards and sorceresses are around 300-400 years old, but don't look their age, since the "Time Enchantments" that grant immortality freeze a person at the age they were when the enchantments were put on them.
• Satellite Love Interest: Narissa’s sole purpose to the plot is being Tristan’s Love Interest, then dying horribly to show how EVIL the villains are and to cause some more angst for Tristan.
• Sequel Hook: Tristan's father appears to him in a dream for the sole purpose of giving a Sequel Hook. Gee, dad, thanks for confirming that my life will continue to suck even if I survive this book.
• Single Tear: "Single tears" are very common. At one point, a character cries two tears, and the author manages to write it out as two single tears.
• Skewed Priorities: When Tristan gets with Lilith and she turns to be Natasha in disguise, he is more bothered by the fact that it will be hard ot find a perfect woman like Lilith pretended to be than by being raped by someone who also planned to kill him afterwards.
• Smug Snake: Failee. She considers herself enlightened beyond compare, but her plans involve making her troops kill each other during training, sending one monster at the time and needlessly complicated brainwashing that can be lethal. Even In-Universe, Succiu, who usually only thinks about rape, questions her plans.
• Stupid Good / Too Dumb to Live: 327 years ago, after defeating the sorceresses in war, the wizards decided to exile them instead of executing them, despite the leader's warning that they would return. It gets better. Despite it being prophesied that the sorceresses would return and steal the magic stone during Tristan's coronation, due to the wizards being temporarily depowered, the wizards still insist on having a public coronation in the castle. Guess what happens.
• The Un-Favourite: A downplayed example, as it has little effect on the story, but Morganna privately admits to herself that Tristan has always been her favorite over Shailiha…for some reason.
• Unstable Powered Woman: Exaggerated. Every sorceress is an Ax-Crazy, sadistic, sexually-aggressive Card-Carrying Villain, with no exceptions (the same does not apply to wizards). After Princess Shailiha loses her memory and is brought over to the sorceresses' side, she supports them unquestioningly and even makes creepy advances upon her own twin brother, though luckily she gets brought back to the side of good before she does anything too drastic.
• Villainous Incest: Shailiha makes some less-than-sisterly comments about her captive twin brother, though fortunately she doesn't get a chance to do more than that. Because of brainwashing, she didn't know he was her brother at the time.
• You Killed My Father: Well, actually, Tristan kills his own dad - at the orders of a villain - and then attacks them, screaming "You made me kill my father!"

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