Sabriel (Old Kingdom series Book 1)

"I credit the Abhorsen trilogy with restoring my love of the genre after I drifted away from it for a while, as it was one of the first times I’d seen a female protagonist carving out her own story. It follows Sabriel, daughter of the Abhorsen – the one who controls the border between life and death – as she comes into her inheritance. Its magic system, the Charter, is based on runes. The Abhorsen uses a series of bells of different sizes to control the dead and wield other powers – a concept I still find so fresh and intriguing, even thirty years after it was published. It’s a classic I’d recommend to anyone looking for a great trilogy. Perhaps it’s some reflection of the three-act structure. Our brains are used to absorbing stories in sets of three. My books are usually broken into three internal parts. Trilogies do carry a risk of the middle book feeling like filler, but they can be very satisfying when everything is measured out perfectly. The Roots of Chaos series is set in a world that hinges on the delicate balance between the magic of starlight (sterren) and the magic of fire (siden), which produce different species of dragons. Siden gives rise to fire-breathing wyrms bent on destruction, while sterren creates water dragons, intelligent and peaceful enough to work alongside humans. The two previous books are very long – over 800 pages each – and I wanted to provide a more accessible entry point in the form of a shorter instalment, which would also enrich the lore and characters for existing Roots of Chaos readers. To do that, I decided to expand on a single event, the Fall of Yscalin. We see the aftermath of this event in The Priory of the Orange Tree , when the Kingdom of Yscalin has already fallen to Draconic evil, but Among the Burning Flowers explains how it happened. It follows the isolated Marosa Vetalda, the heir to Yscalin, as she faces the threat of the ruthless wyrm Fýredel, who tried to destroy the world five centuries ago."