Review: The Sapphire Alter by David Dalglish

Blurb:

In this epic fantasy from a bestselling author, a usurped prince must master the magic of shadows in order to reclaim his kingdom and his people.
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Cyrus wants out. Trained to be an assassin in order to oust the invading Empire from his kingdom, Cyrus is now worried the price of his vengeance is too high. His old master has been keeping too many secrets to be trusted. And the mask he wears to hide his true identity and become the legendary "Vagrant" has started whispering to him in the dark. But the fight isn't over and the Empire has sent its full force to bear upon Cyrus's floundering revolution. He'll have to decide once and for all whether to become the thing he fears or lose the country he loves.

Review:

David Dalglish’s The Sapphire Alter, being book 2 of the Vagrant Gods series, begins where The Bladed Faith left off! While we don’t really get any ‘new’ characters introduced to the crew of powerful revolutionists in this story, what we do get is lots and lots of character growth. There isn’t a single character who I grew bored with. I genuinely looked forward to seeing where each of them went and how Dalglish would deepen their development. 

We still follow our main protagonist Cyrus who has become ‘The Vagrant’ god and I must say I find Dalglish’s world of gods and power-scaling to be not only unique but also quite awesome. Basically, what happens is that ‘faith’ plays a huge role in the world and with hundreds of different faiths scattered throughout the vast world, gods can be created simply by having a large number of people believe in them. Create a symbol worthy of worship, grant them publicity and give them to a crowd of believers, sacrifice a few dozen people in their name (yes this happens) and bam… you have a human-turned god. Cool, right? This vast increase in power-scaling leads to some truly epic moments and battle-scenes where our heroes this time fight against the heir-incarnate (basically the god-incarnate’s son and first in-line for his throne). 

One of my personal favourites this time around was Arn. We didn’t know much about him in The Bladed Faith, but here we delve deeper into his past and find out the trauma that led to him turning away from his role as a Paragon and into the freedom fighting beast we see him as today. In this book, he changes from the stone-faced, emotionless killer he was in book one, into a deep-thinking character with multiple layers of depth. This is the hallmark of a very talented writer, and Dalglish manages to do this with not just one, but all of his characters. Usually I gravitate toward a certain person’s perspective in these wide range of POV books and often find myself skimming to my favourite ones. But here, I genuinely looked forward to each of them because I have that instilled ‘trust’ that Dalglish knows what he’s doing and some sort of revelation is coming my way with each character ARC.

For those of you that enjoy a little ‘romance’ in your books, there is lots here to be enjoyed, though I wouldn’t say these elements to the story overshadow anything else. All connections form naturally and they do so without taking the focus away from the brilliant story and powerful emotional responses of the characters as they take on their greatest threat yet. 

Overall, I very much enjoyed my time in book 2 of the Vagrant Gods series and I can’t wait to delve into the final chapter with book 3!