Between Earth & Sky has always been about doing something fresh.

Rebecca Roanhorse set out to create an epic fantasy set in a world based on the pre-contact Americas. It has its Maya, Cahokia, Ancestral Puebloan and Woodlands analog cultures; it has a seafaring matriarchy that is a bit Polynesian, a bit Caribbean, a bit “this would be cool.” But the world of The Meridian is its own thing. At times the technology is greater than what existed in our world, it has giant crows, eagles, insects and winged serpents tamed as mounts and its gods are very real, and not particularly benevolent.

But if the world the author sets her fantasy is drawing from cultures underused in fantasy, the story-structure is unique as well. This is not a story of a rising dark lord and the plucky heroes that rise against him. Its villains are all-too-human, motivate by sometimes petty desires, sometimes misplaced love, and if there is a “Dark Lord”, well he is one of the most sympathetic characters in the entire tale.

None of this is inversion for inversion’s sake; it is about telling a compelling, fresh story that feels authentic to the sources that inspired its author, and now it has all come to an end with Mirrored Heavens.

Sticking a landing is always tricky and Roanhorse to some extent set herself a challenging task at the end of Book 2. The mid-book of a trilogy is always a bridge story of revelations and few resolutions, but in Fevered Star we only truly see into the villain’s mind — or even realize his full roll — in the last third of the book. Our two main pairs of heroes: Serapio and Xiala, Narampa and Ixtan, spend the novel separated while the fifth main hero, Okoa, is mostly haplessly dragged from bad decision to bad decision. Things end with the predictable “it’s even worse now”, but other than an epic, beautifully rendered clash between Serapio and Narampa, as respective avatars of the Crow and Sun, in some ways the stage feels unset for resolution in one volume.

That would all be true if Roanhorse was trying to write The Lords of the Rings, pre-Contact Americas style. But she isn’t, and her story isn’t triggered by plot, but by characters. If there is a reveal in Fevered Star it is that all of our main characters, even the villainous Balam, have been motivated by personal relationships, disappointments or love. For all the interplay of ancient gods and prophecies, the story is indeed about Serapio and Xiala, Narampa and Ixtan, Okoa and yes, even evil Balam. It’s about family and isolation, a desire to belong and be loved, or what happens when that instead turns into possessive control. Consequently, to borrow a line from the otherwise wretched The Last Jedi: This isn’t going to go how you think it will.

Reading the above, one might think this is a very literary, slow book. It is not. From the first page there is assassination attempts, blood magic, scary monsters and marching armies. As with the first two volumes, Roanhorse’s prose is tight, sometimes even clipped, and her pages fly by. The summary of our situation: Serapio, now the Carrion King and ruler of Tova, is trying to cement his rule as the Crow clan’s living messiah, and knows that besides the other clans wishing to murder him, the rulership of his own clan has no love for being supplanted by living avatar.

All the other cities of the confederacy are marshalling against him, and he doesn’t even know that the villain behind it all is the man who sent him on his quest — and has been involved in his very creation from the start. He is presented with a prophecy, supposedly from the maw of the trickster god Coyote himself that says that if he slays his “unloved bride” and his father, he can win the three different wars brewing against him, but only by losing everything. What the hell does that mean, and how much further into dark, even cruel, paths will Serapio descend to fulfill it. Indeed — is he even the “good guy” and what is he trying to win?

Okoa, as brother to the Carrion Crow matron, has come to respect and idolize Serapio, but like everyone — fears him. His sister reveals the other clan matrons have learned of a weapon that can slay the Carrion King and demands Okoa’s help.

Narampa feels the power of the Sun growing in her and has fled to the north, to the Graveyard of the Gods — where it is said the gods made war and were “slain”/banished from the mortal world — seeking a shaman who can teach her how to use the mysterious godflesh mushrooms that will allow her to enter the various spirit worlds and fight to liberate her city from the Crow. Only she, too, does not realize Serapio is not the problem…

Ixtan is in the city of Hokaia, adrift and unsure what their path now is, until they learn that Narampa lives and that the southern lord Balam is at the heart of everything. A dangerous thing for a “Priest of Knives” to learn.

Xiala has returned home to the isles of the reclusive Teek. Her mother dead, she should be queen — a role she has run from. But Lord Balam’s agents have come to enslave the Teek, and somehow she has to save her people and find a way back to Serapio to warn him.

Seem like spoilers? That’s where we pick up and in a way that’s all you need to know. The rest of Mirrored Heavens is about how each of these players follows that path, and a revelation of how Lord Balam came to be bent on quest of the cities of the Meridian. The resolution will have blood magic, shadow worlds, a clash between gods, love and definite loss…and it won’t be what you think.

Now, confession: I came close to rating this to four stars because, with so much to resolve and tie up, it is only within the last 70 pages of a 600-page novel that it all starts to come into motion. The final clash is certainly dramatic, maybe almost too much — it feels very much like the final confrontation scene would expect in a Marvel movie, or at least an 80s adventure film. For all of the build-up, Serapio and Narampa are not fated to meet again and, indeed, many characters here fail to understand their role in the story, or make choices that lead to worse, not better, and never do recover from it.

A key to victory comes from an idea introduced about five pages before it is used, which felt contrived. Finally, the more we learn of Lord Balam’s backstory, the less competent he seems, and more like the real-world’s over-privileged billionaires who are interfering in the modern world simply because they can, they have the resources to bully their way in, and because they don’t like being told no. It all felt a bit rushed, and not always fair to the characters we’d been running with for 1600 pages.

Then I read the two final chapters, that serve as epilogues.

As I said at the start of this review, Rebecca Roanhorse isn’t trying to write a “Native American Lord of the Rings“, she is telling her own tale, and when you get to the end it all clicks. Besides tying every loose end, the other choices: a somewhat tragic, almost pointless, death of a main character; the fact that an assassin not only gets away with it, but parleys their actions into more power; the fact that some of the great heroism of a character is never known or understood — yes, that’s how the world works in politics and in war.

The gods are real, yet their ultimate appearance remains vague, unclear, and seemingly uncaring of mortal cost because they are gods — not mortals writ large. There is nothing of the Classical or Judeo-Christian belief to these deities; they are primal and simply are — once they act, mortals are left to reason for themselves what it all means. Scenes that occur off-stage do so because they really tell us nothing about the interplay of the core characters, and that’s what this story has always been about: a small group of players caught in the center of a revenge decades in the making.

Could the end have been a bit longer? Perhaps. Do I still think Lord Balam never really quite works as the chief villain? Somewhat. Is the “secret weapon” introduced just before it is needed… needed. No. But in the end, that doesn’t matter: Mirrored Heavens is ultimately about people and in telling that story, Roanhorse creates a magic and adventure-filled conclusion to one of the freshest epic fantasies I’ve read in years. I am already missing Serapio, Xiala, Ixtan and the rest, and although the story of The Meridian seems complete, Roanhorse mentions a distant western Empire of the Boundless Seas and other lands I’d eagerly visit.

(You can read my review of volume one here: Neverwhens, Where History and Fantasy Collide: Brilliance Gleams Beneath a Black Sun.)