The moral of the story is this: Beware the man who faces you unarmed. If in his eyes you are not the target, then you can be sure you are the weapon.
The Atlas Series is a book trilogy by Olivie Blake. The first book in the series, The Atlas Six was released on January 31, 2020, followed by The Atlas Paradox on October 25, 2022.
The Atlas Six follows six extraordinary medeians: long-time rivals and masters of physical magic Libby Rhodes and Nico de Varona, a telepath Parisa Kamali, a naturalist Reina Mori, an empath Callum Nova and uniquely gifted Tristan Caine, whose power allows him to see through illusions.
All six are offered to join the mysterious Alexandrian Society, whose members have access to lost knowledge from the great ancient civilizations. But there's a catch: in accordance with the Society's rules, only five of them will make the cut and qualify for initiation.
This series provides examples of:
- Awful Truth: "Elimination" doesn't mean you have to go home. It means you die. Specifically, it means all your other fellow candidates chose to murder you.
- Batman Gambit: The selection of the Six turns out to not just be about who are the strongest medeians. Callum and Parisa were chosen because Atlas believes Callum is too dangerous to be allowed to live and Parisa is the only one capable of killing him (as she nearly does). And the others—plus Ezra, who was deliberately excluded—were all selected to help Atlas take something he wants very much from the society.
- Chekhov's Gun: Two come together in the final act. First, Dalton is an immensely powerful animator who never seems to do any actual animating, and Parisa finds a younger, angrier version of him locked inside his head. Two, Gideon, Nico's other best friend, can steal things from dreams, and his abusive mother Eilif spends the whole book trying to get ahold of him so he can steal something for her. The "something" is a near-perfect copy of Libby as a corpse.
- Double Entendre: After finding that Tristan and Parisa have also returned from the Christmas break early and getting tipsy on absinthe with them, Libby remarks that she could never pull off Parisa's dress (as in, wear it herself). Parisa tells her she most certainly can (as in, pull it off Parisa, right this moment). She has to say it again with a little more emphasis before Libby realizes it's a proposition.
- Dysfunction Junction: Being emotionally healthy and lacking some tragedy in your backstory is apparently a disqualification for the Society. Between all of them, the Six can come up with maybe one good parental relationship, one solid sense of self-worth, three real friendships (and two of those are Nico), and zero healthy approaches to handling their powers (although some are at least better than others).
- Ensemble Cast: The book switches between the viewpoints of several characters.
- Exact Words: It's almost impossible to lie in direct telepathic communication. When Parisa asks Atlas if he truly believes in the Society's mission, he says that he would never shed blood for something he doesn't believe in. Parisa notices immediately that he didn't actually mention the Society itself by name anywhere in his answer, but things are happening too fast for her to dig the real answer out of him.
- If I Wanted You Dead...: Nonfatal version. When Tristan accuses Callum of mind-controlling him, Callum protests that he's only influenced him in very minor ways that as far as he's concerned are harmless (eg, making sure they pick out the liquor Callum likes best), and that if he was seriously using his magic on Tristan, Tristan would know. Which he proceeds to demonstrate by briefly intensifying Tristan's self-worth and shame issues to a nigh-unbearable pitch before backing off.
- Jerkass Has a Point: Callum is undeniably callous, selfish, and possibly a sociopath, but he's also right when he tells Tristan that agonizing over doing something bad doesn't give him the moral high ground if he's still considering doing it. (Of course, being Callum, he means this in the sense that he thinks Tristan is hurting himself pointlessly, not that he thinks Tristan should actually not do it.)
- Kill the Ones You Love: A blood sacrifice made in anger always goes wrong. A sacrifice of someone the caster cares about, however, is more stable and more powerful, because it takes something important from the caster as well as the victim. This is why the Society's initiation is constructed the way it is, to make sure the Human Sacrifice that powers the library is always done by the sacrifice's friends and lovers. It's also the reason Tristan gets tapped to kill Callum, because Tristan is the only one who actually loves him.
- Love Dodecahedron: Honestly, it's easier to list the characters who haven't slept together by the end of the book. Libby starts out dating Ezra and ends up sleeping with both Tristan and Parisa after a nasty sort-of-breakup fight. Parisa also has repeated assignations with Dalton (who she seems actually attached to, or at least as much as she's ever attached to anybody) and a brief flirtation with Nico. Tristan, after about a hundred pages of complicated feelings about Callum, ends up in bed with him despite an ongoing passion for Libby.
- Merlin and Nimue: Parisa's pursuit of Dalton has shades of this, though he's not exactly a teacher but more of a general mentor/senior administrator—an older male magician pursued by a younger, ambitious female magician who uses him for personal gain. She gets the betrayal part out of the way early on by reading his mind while they're having sex (which was her express purpose in getting him into bed, or rather, onto his desk) and learning about the murder requirement, which hurts his feelings but doesn't actually end the affair. In a subversion of the more unhappy aspects of this trope, she ends up promising to save him from whatever's been done to his mind.
- Sexy Shirt Switch: Subverted. Although near the end of the book Parisa spends several scenes wearing one of Dalton's shirts and nothing else, having clearly just come from his bed, there's nothing really sexy about it. Because the reason she only had time to throw on Dalton's shirt is that a corpse has suddenly appeared.
- Spanner in the Works: The plan to fake Libby's death would have worked perfectly...except for Tristan. Hardly anyone is aware of his True Sight—he barely even knew it himself before he accepted the invitation to the Society—so the mastermind has no way of knowing that the one person this careful, ingenious, and very expensive plan could not possibly work on is one of the very small group of people it is meant to work on.
- Sufficiently Analyzed Magic: In this universe magic, much like science, is studied as an academic discipline.
- Was It All a Lie?: Subverted; Libby almost asks Ezra this question, but stops herself because she knows the answer will do her no good and things are bad enough without adding an extra level of emotional trauma.
- Wham Line:
- A certain interlude includes a conversation between two parties: one is Ezra, the other, named at the end of the first paragraph, is Atlas Blakely.
- Tristan writes a note to himself before going to have a nightcap with Callum. They have a perfectly nice conversation and drink whiskey together. Then Tristan goes back and reads the note, on which he wrote down what drink he wanted: wine. Meaning he knows for sure that Callum influenced him.
- Wounded Gazelle Gambit: During Parisa and Callum's mental duel, Callum unpicks all of Parisa's past trauma so cruelly it drives her to an emotional breakdown and talks her into jumping off a building (on an astral plane, so she doesn't get hurt, but her suicidal feelings are genuine, and, more importantly, he's not aware she moved them out of the real world)...and that's exactly what she wanted him to do. She let him destroy her in front of an audience so all the others would see him the way she does: as a dangerous sociopath who can't be trusted. While she sweetly concedes defeat, Callum is seething because he knows she won the victory that actually matters.
