Book 3 Summary

 The Scorched Earth begins with a prologue set at an unknown time in the future with Sam and Mimir, who shows her a memory from someone who witnessed the beginning of the end of the Old Days.

A man named Gerald takes care of his son Kyle. They watch a news broadcast about the twentieth anniversary of Mars's disappearance following an expedition led by a group called GeneHome. Mars was replaced by a radioactive dust cloud known as the Æther which made space travel around Mars’s former position impossible. The news shifts to the presence of a drone overtop a local city just before it drops a nuclear bomb. 

Back to the present day of the story, Ben is in the Ney Vault, where his friends Darius and Mandi were killed by the Enochian Tatanka. Ben experiments on the remains of the Enochian he slew with the Voidsweeper which itself was destroyed in the fight. He learns more about the Na Oiad—the Enochian leaders—and a little bit about another Enochian named Dol-F’raa. Ben and Mimir communicate remotely due to Mimir’s artificial consciousness being tied to the Grand Vault in Svaldway by the North Pole. Tatanka’s memories are too complex to transmit all the way to Svaldway, and Ben can’t sift through them without Mimir’s help. Ben can’t easily travel there with the war needing the airships, so instead he’ll fly to a satellite station that can transmit the data directly to the Grand Vault. 

Gus, a ward to the Orks of Ney and the hidden heir to the fallen Marzoran royal family, is healed in the Vault following the battle with Tatanka. Ben shares with Gus his plan to fly to a satellite and transmit Tatanka’s data to Mimir from there. He asks Gus to work as an ambassador between the Orks and the Penteric Alliance on his behalf. 

Gus accepts and also helps forge an alliance with the wastelanders led by Larz. Before leaving, Ben helps heal one of the wastelanders, Liv, who also fought against Tatanka with him and like Gus had been paralyzed in the fight. Ben reveals to Gus that he’s been working on a cure for the feral Orks—people of Ney who’d been infected by an experiment of Tatanka’s and are banished to live outside Ney civilization.

Rose and her allied forces converge on Dark Helm, the capital of the province of Plutonua. Her army captured the bulk of the city before her arrival, but final plans are made to capture Legate Gatron and solidify their hold on the city. They succeed with ease, and Rose interrogates the fallen legate, learning of his secret alliance with the Grand Elder of Vänalleato. Trinity holds a grudge against Gatron and wants Rose to implement more painful means of questioning. Ben calls Rose via their pair of robotic ravens and informs her of his dealings with the wastelanders, Orks, and Gus, setting up a connection between the groups in hopes of forming an alliance before he leaves. 

Sam and Nico carry on their secret affair. Nico thinks about his long-lost sister who like Sam pretended to be a man to join the Ænærian military but has since faked her death. He longs to see her someday and hopes Sam can meet her too. King Randolph holds a war council where it’s decided that they’ll bide their time through winter and let Rose spread herself thin. Meanwhile he and his forces will assault Svaldway. 

Rose holds court with her council and informers. The Penteric Alliance is hard at work, improving infrastructure between settlements and creating their own currency. They also make plans to recruit more follows. Her council is interrupted by news that Vänalleato has been attacked.  

Arynn broods after her victory over Vänalleato and execution of the Grand Elder who conspired with Legate Gatron to sell Vänalleatians as slaves to Ænæria in exchange for protection over the town. She struggles to rule the town and control her Rhion and Prefect Memnon. She interrogates the people to see what they know about the missing Vänalleatians. She visits her imprisoned father who refuses to speak with her. She realizes Rose must now know about the capture of Vänalleato. She contacts Lord Constantine Flavius who is acting as High Protector of Ignistad while Randolph plots his next moves. Constantine invites Arynn to a summit of legates in the kingdom’s capital. She confronts her father one last time before she departs and learns that he knew the Grand Elder had been selling people into slavery and had left her behind in Vänalleato on purpose to save her when he’d been captured back in The King’s Gambit.

Ben arrives at the Light Tower, a specialized Enochian space station, and speaks with its artificial intelligence Akele. She shares the fact that the Grand Vault underwent an undisclosed malfunction seventeen years ago. Ben learns of the existence of rogue Enochians who betrayed the Na Oiad but there are only three still at large. Ere-Bose is the name of the first rogue Enochian, and the other two are Ben’s mother and the mysterious Dol-F’raa. Whoever Dol-F’raa is, he has a grudge against Ben following a battle with his mother about twelve years ago. Akele refuses to disclose anything about Nephilim, human-Enochian hybrids, and Ben realizes Enochians must fear beings like himself. 

Unfortunately, Ben’s plans go awry as he tries to upload Tatanka’s consciousness as it activates one of the Enochian bodies stored the satellite and attacks Ben. At the same time, the consciousness acts like a virus to the Grand Vault which Mimir stops in time at the loss of much of the data they’d hoped to gain. Ben and Tatanka’s fight ends when Mimir deactivates the shades on the windows and lets through unfiltered UV rays, defeating the radiation sensitive Enochian. Ben heals in one of the satellite’s vats.

Rose speaks with Gus via raven about future alliances, and then checks in with the rest of the leaders of the Penteric Alliance. She made her to way to the dungeons to visit Trinity who’d been there to interrogate Gatron. What she found instead were the corpses of guards, the imprisoned legate, and Trinity. Zechariah, her childhood friend and twin brother to Kristos, attempts to kill Rose. Zechariah had also helped Randolph plot the wastelander assault on Freztad in The King’s Gambit. Zechariah tells Rose he intends to capture and marry her off the Randolph to unite Ænæria and give the king greater legitimacy. Before Zechariah can escape with Rose, Shadow, the mysterious member of the Miners Guild, arrives and saves Rose from Zechariah. 

Ænærian invasion forces arrive on Svaldway. Sam is tasked with guiding Arthur Dion, the son of her prefect, the Bacchuso’s nobleman Edwin Dion, into his first battle. Randolph and Marcus of the Miners Guild meet on the battlefield to discuss terms of surrender. They are refused and the battle begins shortly thereafter. Sam and Arthur engage in the battle and watch as Nico pilots the heliocraft obtained from the Kolpos Vault in The Heir of Ænæria to break through the town’s walls. Arthur gets carried away and is wounded. Sam searches for her uncle and finds him in the home of the Guild’s leaders, Marcus and Jesse. She discovers a painting of the young Miners Guild founders and is shocked to see Ben’s parents depicted. She finds her uncle torturing the leaders and their young son. He brutally executes Marcus and leaves the child dying in his mother’s arms. Randolph tells Sam the two adults were instrumental in the massacre of her family twelve years ago. Sam mercifully ends the mother and son’s suffering.

Arynn leaves Sera behind in Vänalleato as she departs for First Hearth, Vestinia, before traveling to Ignistad for the summit. She and her men are accosted by bitter villagers who support Rose. What started as a riot turns into a massacre and ends with Arynn bargaining with the wastelanders who’d been previously hired to enrage the villagers. 

Ben awakes on the Light Tower and learns that the whole mission was a failure because Mimir had to wipe the incoming data due to Tatanka’s corruption. Tatanka also sent a copy of his consciousness to the Enochian home world, Tsiyyon. Mimir tells Ben of the Ænærian invasion, and Ben decides to fly back to Earth to defend the Grand Vault. Ben discovers that Tatanka is wounded but alive. Tatanka then makes a final effort to kill Ben by breaking through the satellite’s windows. Ben races off the Light Tower in time before the shift in pressure from the compromised atmosphere nearly destroys the entire station.

Sam is haunted by her uncle’s actions and begins feeling physically ill. She sees Ben’s shuttle arrive in the Grand Vault and uses an old collection of Ben’s blood to get into the Vault. Randolph allows Sam and Nico into the Vault with him but no one else. Nico has a storage device retrieved from the Kolpos Vault which Randolph plans to use to gain access and bypass more of the Grand Vault’s security protocols. They split up after Sam and Nico share a fleeting moment alone. Sam explores the Vault’s lower levels alone and sees a ghost of a man: King Xander in the flesh. 

Zechariah is put on trial for his crimes according to Plutonuan tradition, and Rose and her forces hope to make an example of him and prove that she doesn’t mean to erase past traditions of the Northern Realm like her father had when he formed Ænæria. The trials, it seems, is a farce, as Plutonua tries to wash their hands of the situation and instead let Freztad try him for his crimes of treason. However, in the name of the old ways of Plutonua, Kristos challenges his brother to a dual to the death.

Ben lands inside the Grand Vault and meets Mimir in a physical body, the reanimated corpse of Julius, otherwise known as King Xander. Ben seeks out Randolph who he finds leaving the Vault’s living quarters. Ben snaps Randolph’s neck and is then confronted by Nico. They get into a brief fight before Randolph rises from the dead and kills Nico, revealing that he is the Enochian Dol-F’raa. He lost his powers long ago but after healing in the Vault he regained them. He is out for revenge, wanting to wreak havoc, enrage the Na Oiad and ultimately bring Ben’s mother out of hiding, for she was the one who killed his wife, stepdaughter, and the rest of he and Sam’s family and village. He also reveals that the Na Oiad released the plague that devastated the Penteric Alliance’s population a decade ago. Ben survives the encounter, but only because Randolph wants him alive to draw out his mother. 

Ben finds Sam with Mimir. The two battle while Ben is in the trance-like state of his Nephilim mode. Sam wins only by luck as she electrocutes him with her lightning staff. Mimir convinces Sam to help stabilize Ben. She agrees because she thinks he’s King Xander, and if Xander thinks Ben is important, then it’s not her place to question. Mimir and Ben re-enter the shuttle and lift off to an unknown location.

Sam then regrets her decision as she finds Nico’s corpse, and Randolph tells her Ben is the killer while also sharing that Ben’s mother killed her family. They leave the Grand Vault and Svaldway but only after Randolph deposits the mysterious weapon she and Nico had claimed from the Kolpos Vault in The Heir of Ænæria. All prisoners of war and enemy civilians are left on the island, and once the Ænærians are a safe distance away, a flash of light and cloud of atomic fire consumes the island, leaving little behind.

Arynn and her men are again waylaid on their way to First Hearth, this time by blizzard and illness. When they arrive, they are quarantined for a time before being allowed entry. Lady Estel Cranes tells Arynn that a new plague has erupted which kills everyone it infects. Arynn is surprised to see that Constantine is not waiting for her in Ignistad but is in fact in her chambers. Memnon her prefect is also here, and it’s too late before Arynn realizes what’s happening. Constantine shoots her through the leg with a crossbow and tells Arynn that Memnon will be taking over as legate as she has played her part. Estel has Arynn spared, thinking they can still use her to lure out Ben and gain more of the king’s favor. Arynn prepares once more for imprisonment as they set to ship her off to Kolpos.

Sam is stricken by grief and neglects to her duties as legate. Her uncle allows her to use her name and gender again, saying she has redeemed the sins of her father, Longinus. He tells more about the Enochians and they both fear what Ben and Mimir may be up to. Left alone, Sam gets sick once again and realizes she may be pregnant with Nico’s child.

Ben awakens in the Kolpos Vault with Mimir. They used Julius’s body as a host for Mimir to make him more mobile and in hopes of restoring some of his lost memories, thinking that an organic brain may not have the same locks upon it as the Grand Vault’s computers. Ben learns of Svaldway’s fate and is surprised Sam helped save him after his deadly seizure following her electric strike. 

Gus finally makes it to Freztad with the Orks and wastelanders only to find the village under a state of emergency from an emerging plague. He meets with Lydia and Alejandra, and reveals that Alejandra’s daughter, Mandi, died fighting Tatanka. Lydia shares with Gus that she suspects there is a Vault beneath Freztad and that is the key to their salvation from the plague. 

The story ends with an epilogue from the point of view of Siegfried, Arynn’s father. He is set for execution in Vänalleato by Memnon’s remaining Rhion and his new prefect. Just as he is about to be crucified, the young boy Felix, adopted son of Wulkan the blacksmith, tears through the Ænærians and saves Siegfried. He realizes Felix may be more than he seems and capable of liberating the town all on his own.