Onyx Storm (The Empyrean #3) by Rebecca Yarros

Genre: Romantic Fantasy | Published: 2025

HEAVY SPOILERS AHEAD!

Introduction

I’m writing this review hours after finishing Onyx Storm . I started reading it on the day it was released – January 21st, 2025.  In fact the review for this book was supposed to be my very first post as I wanted to capitalise on the hype to draw in traffic. However, I listened to the audiobook and got about 30% through by February, where I stayed for months. You can imagine how I was feeling about the book to even shift my blog plans.

I made a very conscious effort to finally finish it this month because I had decided to write this review, and honestly, I was tired of dragging this story out over more and more months. I switched to the graphic audio version, thinking that if I was going to suffer through it, I might as well use a format I enjoy. Towards the end, I was listening for the sake of it, I didn’t want to DNF, but I wasn’t absorbing anything. I did have to watch a synopsis video afterwards  just to make sure I remembered exactly everything that happened. 

I want to caveat this review by saying that I did enjoy Fourth Wing. It was the first romantic fantasy I had read in a long time. It’s the only good book in the entire series, even with its flaws. It had a fully fleshed-out story, a convincing romantic arc, lore that I was genuinely obsessed with, and a clear character journey.

It was a solid opener, albeit a little cliché, but it showed the great potential that this universe had. Iron Flame felt a bit dragged and was a lot of filler, but I can say it still drove the story forward, fleshed out some side characters and maintained a compelling story. The cliff hanger was done well, and it kept the intrigue of the books.

So here comes Onyx Storm. I have so much to say about why this book fell flat for me. From the undeveloped romance, the lack of real character growth, the plot holes, the disjointed storylines, and the way the magic system and lore feel half-baked and hard to follow. Rebecca Yarros struggles to balance the romantic arc with the fantasy world-building, and the reality is she just doesn’t seem capable of delivering the story she’s trying to tell.

I know this review will come across as harsh, but it’s because these books had so much potential. The truth is, she told the story she could in Fourth Wing – and the two books since then feel like she’s been making it up as she goes. Also, this is a long one, so buckle in.

The Premise of Onyx Storm

In Book 3 of the Empyrean series, after nearly eighteen months at Basgiath War College, Violet Sorrengail knows there’s no more time for lessons – only action. With the Aretian wards failing, she must venture beyond Navarre’s borders to find new allies willing to stand against the growing Venin army. Violet will do whatever it takes to protect what she loves: her dragons, her family, her home – and Xaden. Even if it means carrying a secret so devastating it could destroy everything she’s fighting for.

But a storm is coming, and not everyone will survive its wrath. Especially when Xaden, the man who sacrificed so much to save her, has now become the very thing she was raised to fear and hate.

My Frustrations

The Venin Storyline

I don’t know what storm Rebecca Yarros is referring to because even though she kept telling us the stakes are high, it doesn’t feel like it is. Xaden’s transformation never truly threatens his relationship with Violet. It never really threatens anything.

The issue I had with Xaden becoming Venin is that I knew Rebecca Yarros wouldn’t fully commit to the storyline she’d set up. He was never going to truly turn evil, switch sides, or grapple with any real inner conflict that would test his love for Violet against his growing urges. Instead, he spent the entire book supposedly fighting to stay in control, but it never actually felt like a fight. In fact, he handles it remarkably well and barely struggles.

In the end, he deliberately channels again to save everyone, pushing him fully into his transformation, but this was an active choice not a descent into insanity. So while Violet and the family scramble to save him and hunt for a cure, he’s fine the whole time. And as a reader, I never once felt the threat we were told to fear.

The Romance 

I’ve never been fully convinced by Violet and Xaden’s relationship, and Onyx Storm only solidified that for me. It was a relief to see a little less juvenile drama (like in Iron Flame) and a tiny bit (not much) more maturity this time around. They do have more faith and confidence in each other, but the problem is that they spend so much time telling us they love each other without really showing it in any meaningful way – and her wanting to save him doesn’t count.

Rebecca Yarros would have benefited from keeping Violet and Xaden apart in the first book. And let the relationship be an authentic slowburn…it’s very rare the love interests get together in book one. She’s run out of new dynamics to explore between them, so now it feels like she’s just reheating the same stale ‘will they won’t they’ tension from Fourth Wing. There’s no good reason for an established couple to be dragged through another half-baked slow burn in book three. By now, they’ve been together for about a year – yet somehow their relationship doesn’t reflect the supposedly high stakes and deep bonds they share.

They’ve gone from “I love you, but I don’t trust you” to “I love you, but I can’t control myself around you,” and honestly, there’s just too much lust and not enough substance. It feels like their entire relationship has been boiled down to how badly they want to have sex but can’t , and every interaction circles back to that. I’m sorry, you’re telling me when you’re alone together, if you can’t “get down and dirty,”  you have nothing else to talk about? 

Almost every interaction is boiled down into the below quote:

 “All I want is to lose myself in you, and I can’t. You are the only person in the world with the power to strip me of every ounce of my control, and the only person I can’t fathom losing that control with.” …. “And yet here I am, unable to keep three fucking feet away from you.”

REBECCA YARROS

Xaden as a character has never been more pathetic than he is in this book. His dedication to Violet is admirable, and it’s clear he doesn’t want to hurt her – but this entire book feels like one long string of whining and then doing exactly what he says he doesn’t want to do. Xaden leaves a lot to be desired here. He’s always been so compelling as a leader, someone willing to do the hard, often unfavourable thing – and that’s what I’ve always liked most about him. Thankfully, that trait isn’t entirely lost, but this time around he comes across as so melodramatic that he doesn’t feel as strong or formidable, even though he’s meant to be.

And while his love for Violet has always been shown as fierce and intense, it didn’t feel that authentic to me this time. Of course, most of the story is told through Violet’s perspective, and it’s very much The Violet Show, but all she really tells us about Xaden is how hot he is and how badly she wants him, so I felt far less connected to him than I did in books one and two.

I’m not even going to discuss the smut scenes because they simply aren’t worth the mention.

Writing & Pacing

Plot

Nothing that happens in Onyx Storm is truly shocking, surprising, or exciting. That’s not to say interesting things don’t happen – they do – but they never feel impactful. The story is written so linearly that it reads like a checklist: this happens, then this happens, then that happens, and somehow we end up right back where we started.

The ending is especially frustrating because it relies on the same type of cliffhanger as book two. I just can’t buy into the stakes anymore. What happened to the revolution? I understand the Venin are now the bigger threat, but why build up the revolution in Fourth Wing only to brush past it so quickly? It happened, it ended, and we moved on – just like that.

This series keeps dropping major plot points before they’re fully explored, and at this point, it’s hard to stay invested. It’s almost as if every big moment that happens could have been the central plot of an entire book – but instead, it just pops up randomly in, say, chapter 52, and then we simply move on. This drastically lowers the stakes because if the characters themselves aren’t shaken or changed by these reveals, why should I be?

Rebecca Yarros has a pattern of undoing her plotlines in favour of jumping to something else. Nothing ever feels fully fleshed out.There’s political upheaval at Basgiath, the Irids, Violet’s childhood trauma, the search for a Venin cure, her father’s mysterious books and travels, Xaden’s mother – who was so important while they were there and then never mentioned again, then Andarna’s dramatic exit to “find her people” made out to be this huge deal, only for her to reappear less than 50 pages later like she never left!… Nothing was executed well.

Honestly, the entire middle of the book could be skipped without changing much to what ends up being important and what doesn’t. If you read the first few chapters for context, then jump ahead to Andarna finding her family and the final stretch, you’d barely miss anything vital to the plot. It all feels like filler: random events strung together rather than meaningful developments. And while I hope the history we learn about Violet’s parents or other breadcrumbs dropped becomes relevant in a satisfying way, I don’t have high hopes based on how this story keeps abandoning its ideas.

Writing Quality 

When I talk about writing quality here, I’m really referring to Yarros’s ability to craft a cohesive story – not her grammar or sentence-level writing. Since I listened to the series primarily on audiobook, I can’t speak to the prose itself in detail. But what I can say – and I mentioned this earlier – is that I don’t think Rebecca Yarros has the ability to finish the story she’s started. Even though plenty happens in this book, there’s no real plot left for her to develop in any meaningful way. She’s already told the story she’s capable of telling.

I know she’s traditionally a contemporary romance author, I haven’t read her other books, so I can’t speak to her writing there, but that might explain why she struggles to expand beyond the basics. She doesn’t seem to know what to do with a story that doesn’t wrap up after book one, or with a fantasy world that actually needs deeper explanation and development.

This weakness is most obvious in the flood of new side characters. Many of them feel underdeveloped and only exist to push the ‘plot’ along. Ordinarily, a few extra faces wouldn’t be a problem, but there are so many that it becomes hard to keep track of who’s who. Meanwhile, the side characters we already know and love – Rhi, Ridoc, Bodhi, and the rest – don’t get nearly enough new development because they’re fighting for space with characters we don’t really care about. It was nice to see small subplots like Sawyer’s recovery from his amputation or Rhi stepping up as a more confident squad leader, but those moments just weren’t enough.

Character Development 

Violet is a character I’ve always struggled with. I appreciate so much about her – her wit, intelligence, and resilience. In the first book, we got such a clear sense of how her mind worked and her unwavering determination to become a good rider. And even though she can be incredibly annoying at times, she has redeeming qualities that make her worth rooting for. Unfortunately, none of those strengths felt properly handled in this book.

Her unwavering loyalty to Xaden quickly became repetitive and predictable, overshadowing the depth and growth I expected from her. Violet has always been portrayed as someone who would put the people she loves above herself, which is admirable, but here it crosses into impulsive and foolish territory. It often felt like she was putting Xaden above everyone and everything else, including the larger threats facing Navarre.

Instead of seeing her evolve, her identity seemed to shrink down to her relationship with Xaden, as if that were her only source of substance. Yes, saving him was important, but it dominated her focus so much that the much bigger threat of the Venin felt secondary, even though he was fine for most of the book. In the end, I didn’t feel like Violet grew at all in this book, and that lack of real development made her arc feel stagnant and frustrating.

What I Love 

I’ve always loved the world Rebecca Yarros has created. It’s my favourite part of these books and the main reason I keep coming back. The rich setting and lore are the series’s greatest redeeming qualities. The dragons are and will always be the best part of the book. I enjoyed the journey to discover Andarna’s kin. I think it was a very cute subplot and I rather enjoyed the concept of a peaceful dragon race (even though it sounds very ridiculous). The part where Andarana basically gives a toddler retelling of the events of the last two books was incredibly adorable. 

Surprisingly I also enjoyed the journeys to other provinces, it was interesting to see how people differ from each other, the ones ruled by science versus the ones ruled by Gods and magic. The journey in isolation was entertaining and could very well have been a book themselves. 

Also, parts of the book are genuinely comical – and I don’t mean that as an insult. There are plenty of funny characters, and their moments of humor add much-needed levity to the story. These lighter scenes are important because they ground the characters and remind the reader that this is, at its heart, a found family with a deep love for each other. That essence of the series has never been lost, and I do still really appreciate that.

Although….

Unfortunately, all that wasn’t enough. I can’t help wishing Rebecca Yarros pushed the story further. It would have been so much more compelling if Xaden had truly lost control,  if there had been a real risk of him betraying Violet and Aretia. Instead, there was no convincing moral dilemma, and the stakes never felt as high as they should have.

Final Thoughts

I remember finishing Fourth Wing,  and even Iron Flame, and feeling completely absorbed in the Empyrean universe. I was so hooked that I’d watch theory videos, dive into fan communities, and get swept up in all the speculation about Onyx Storm and where the story could go next. It made everything feel so much more thrilling, and I was genuinely excited for what was coming. But now, after reading it, I just feel disappointed.

I’ve even tried watching TikToks about people’s theories for the ending – who they think the new Venin really is, why Xaden has disappeared – but despite all the hype, I just don’t feel anything anymore. And with the next book not coming out for another two years, it’s hard to care.

I won’t be back in two years. I’m lying, I will be – because as annoyed as I am, I’m still invested. I told someone the other day, before I’d even finished reading, that one thing Rebecca Yarros does well is write an absolute clusterfuck of a book and then end it on a cliffhanger. She knows exactly how to keep people coming back for more. What excellent foresight on my part!

In two years, I’ll probably have forgotten how frustrated I was and pick up the next book just to see how it all goes, but we’ll have to wait and see. Hopefully, I’ll still have this blog then, so I’ll report back.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoyed this review, and I’m sorry it turned out to be this long😂. I’ll be back next week with my monthly roundup, so stay tuned!