Yndrasta: The Celestial Spear

Main Review:

I realised recently that it’s been an alarmingly long time since a full fiction novel appeared on Fully Booked, and so I was looking for something straightforward to get back into the swing of things. In the end, I settled on Yndrasta: The Celestial Spear, another Warhammer adventure focussed on the winged huntress of Sigmar. Now I’ve been a fan of Yndrasta since her model was first announced for the tabletop game back in 2021, so as you might expect I was very excited to find out that she was getting her own book. So much so that I was willing to overlook the fact that most Age of Sigmar books tend to be of a quality that leaves much to be desired.

Excited but trepidatious in equal measure, I got going with Van Ngyuen’s tale. Right away, I discovered that the prologue is narrated by Yndrasta herself, speaking in the present tense, which I thought was a bold choice to go with. We learn that, in the frozen lands of Izalend (any similarity to Iceland being, of course, completely co-incidental and legally distinct for copyright reasons) Yndrasta, our fair-haired heroine is zealously hunting down her target right at the edges of the world. Sadly, her obsessive focus on her quest puts her at odds with the other soldiers she is meant to be working alongside. Naturally, things come to a head, with the soldiers ultimately refusing to support her any further in her pursuits. And if that’s sounding at all familiar, it’s because it is alarmingly identical to the opening act of the first series of The Rings of Power. Truly, it’s so blatant that I can’t see how it could have happened coincidentally.

But once the prologue was over and the main thrust of the story began, I was pleasantly surprised to see that Yndrasta: The Celestial Spear seemed to be actively trying to avoid the criticism I often level at other Black Library offerings. Namely, it feels like Van Nguyen is trying to do his own thing with the world and write a fully fleshed out story, rather than just stringing together a series of copyrightable faction names to prompt the reader to buy more toy soldiers. Whilst Warhammer specific words like Sigmar, and Stormcast Eternals and Kruleboyz are thrown around fairly liberally, the story mostly involves a tribe of nomadic hunters in the frozen realm of Izalend, and there’s clearly been a lot of work put into figuring out how their society operates and the language and terminology they would use. Indeed, the book as a whole does a wonderful job of capturing how bleak it would be to live in an arctic environment in a place called ‘The Realm of Beasts’.

The downside to this approach, however, is that in a book named after Yndrasta, and with her image proudly emblazoned on the cover, she ends up feeling like a secondary protagonist at best. The bulk of the story is told from the perspective of a mortal huntress called Njda, whose home town is ransacked by orruks and is forced to try and find safety for her and the scant few other survivors out in the tundra. Yndrasta’s role is seemingly limited to popping into the story every now and then to be vaguely menacing and or provide a Deus Ex Machina as and when the plot requires before kicking the story back to Njda.

As huntress not hero, Yndrasta’s disdain for mortal beings (and their insistence on basic needs like food and rest) is a wonderful contrast to the more empathetic Stormcast Eternals we have seen in other stories. Her views are in sharp contrast to Neave Blacktalon, for example, who spends most of her book (Blacktalon: First Mark by C.L Werner) doing everything she can to try and protect the mortals under her care like a mother hen with very dangerous lighting axes. Indeed, for much of the first half of the book, Yndrasta barely speaks to Njda and the other survivors, being entirely focussed on her hunt for one of the great beasts of the realm.

As readers, we become entirely dependent on the all too short sections that are told from Yndrasta’s perspective to try and flesh her out. Somewhat paradoxically, the overall quality of the writing makes the lack of focus on Yndrasta all the worse. The brief snippets of backstory we do get (like how as a mortal she led a diverse group of warriors to try and stave off the irrepressible tide of Chaos™ and daemons attacking her homeland) are really interesting and I would have loved to have seen them given more time.

Whilst she was undeniably being short-changed by the story, Van Nguyen’s descriptions of Yndrasta were really interesting. There’s a frequent focus on how Yndrasta’s very presence influences the world around her: her speech causes distant thunder to peal, her breath makes the trees sway in the wind, and her footsteps cause the ground to shake. It’s a really clever way to capture how powerful a being she is and let the divine nature of Stormcast Eternals come to the fore. Similarly, Van Nguyen repeatedly describes Yndrasta’s voice as a contralto, which led to me being struck (one quick Google later) by the idea of Cher as a Stormcast Eternal.

Eventually, the mortals make it to Suodji, a merchant city on the coast, and there’s the expected sections of culture clash between Njda and her rural reindeer herders and the obscenely wealthy merchants who are either unable to see the orruk threat on the horizon or to understand that the danger can’t be stopped by simply throwing coin at it. Instead, it comes down to a loose coalition of actual merchants, mercenaries and other unexpected heroes to make ready the defences, inspired by Yndrasta and united by a refusal to let their city go down without a fight.

The finale is your typical big battle sequence, much like every Marvel project of recent years. As should be expected, the story focuses almost entirely on Njda’s experience, and Yndrasta’s duel with a massive leviathan is definitely the secondary focus of the scene. Eventually, our heroes eke out a narrow victory, and a momentary peace is achieved. We then get a final epilogue scene set decades later, with Njda (now an old woman) and Yndrasta (still as lightning-powered as ever) meeting once again. It was an interesting touch, if slightly confusing given that timings and years in the Mortal Realms of the Age of Sigmar stories never feel particularly well defined.

All in all, Yndrasta: The Celestial Spear is an interesting story, and certainly not as shallow or blatantly commercialized as the other Black Library stories I've read recently. However, the overall pacing of the story, swapping between its two protagonists felt a little off, and it is certainly more of a story in which Yndrasta features rather than one in which she is the main character. This, I suspect will disappoint those, like myself, who came here hoping for high-octane huntress action, and definitely dulls the overall shine of the reading experience.  

Until the next time, Happy Reading!