Genre Spotlights

Onyx Storm: Why Rebecca Yarros’s Empyrean Series Has Taken Over Romantasy

If you’ve spent any time on BookTok in the last couple of years, you’ve seen the dragons, the leathers, and the endless debate about whether Xaden or Tairn is the better personality. Onyx Storm, the third book in Rebecca Yarros’s Empyrean series, didn’t just continue that conversation, it reignited it. Bookstores held release parties. Fans queued at midnight. And the book promptly became one of the most discussed novels of the year.

If you’re new to the series, or you’ve been meaning to start it and keep getting distracted, here’s what the fuss is actually about, and why “romantasy” has become one of the biggest niches in fiction right now.

What Romantasy Actually Is

“Romantasy” is exactly what it sounds like, romance and fantasy fused together so neither one is the side dish. Older fantasy series often treated romance as a subplot. Romantasy flips that. The relationships are central, often slow-burn, often messy, and the fantasy world exists partly to create the kind of high-stakes situations that make those relationships hit harder.

Yarros didn’t invent the genre, Sarah J. Maas fans have been here for years, but the Empyrean series is widely credited with bringing romantasy into the mainstream in a way that pulled in readers who’d never picked up a fantasy novel before.

The Empyrean Series So Far

The series follows Violet Sorrengail, a young woman who expected a quiet life among the Scribes, only to be forced into the brutal dragon rider training at Basgiath War College instead. Book one, Fourth Wing, sets up the world: a war college where the drop-out rate is measured in funerals, not failed exams, and where Violet has to survive both the training and the political games around her.

By Onyx Storm, eighteen months have passed and the stakes have escalated considerably. The war that’s been simmering in the background is no longer background. Violet has to look beyond her own college and her own country for allies, and the relationships that have been building since book one are tested in ways that, depending who you ask online, either devastated readers or had them cheering.

Why This Book Specifically Is Everywhere Right Now

A few things make Onyx Storm stand out even within a series that was already huge. It’s the point where Yarros said she’d take her time rather than rushing a sequel out, and readers noticed the difference, the pacing and character work are tighter. It’s also the book where several long-running fan theories either paid off or got blown up entirely, which is exactly the kind of thing that drives discussion across Reddit, TikTok and Goodreads for months after release.

One thing worth knowing going in: this is not a book you can pick up cold. It assumes you know the world, the characters, and the relationships from the first two books. If the premise interests you, start with Fourth Wing. Onyx Storm is available as an instant PDF download here for when you’re ready for it.

Who This Series Is For (and Who It Isn’t)

If you want fantasy that prioritises clean world-building logic and restrained pacing, this probably isn’t your series, the Empyrean books lean into emotional intensity over subtlety. But if you want dragons, high stakes, slow-burn relationships that actually go somewhere, and a reading experience that’s genuinely difficult to put down, this is exactly the kind of series that’s earned its reputation.

It also reads as new adult rather than strictly YA, there’s more mature content than you’d find in a typical young adult fantasy, which is worth knowing if you’re picking it up for a younger reader based on the dragon-school premise alone.