Brighter Than Scale, Swifter Than Flame by Neon Yang is written like a folktale, not about slaying dragons but finding yourself again after you’ve lost who you were to protect yourself. It’s a tale of identity, isolation, and culture. The fact that its main character, Kunlin Yeva, is a famous dragon slayer is less crucial to the story, as the narrator makes clear from the first chapter. The storyteller, who tells this story from their foremothers who heard it from their foremothers, makes it clear they’re telling the true story of Yeva, and not the legend of the dragon slayer who just so happens to be the same person. The way Yang uses the opening chapter to detail Yeva’s accomplishments as a dragon slayer, only to immediately imply to the reader that who they were, where they came from, who they were raised by, and who they loved is the better story than any legend of heroics or deeds and I am inclined to agree. Some Spoilers Ahead.

In the beginning, Yeva is stripped of everything she knows to become a guildknight of Mithrandon. She is taken from her family, her home, and everything she knows, all because she has a power within her bloodline, her father alleges, is from his bloodline, which I am inclined to believe is a falsehood. In Mithrandon, she is treated differently for her gender and her foreignness by the other trainees. She is discouraged from writing letters home to her family, fed the line that any employee joining a toxic corporation can relate to, of the knights being her family now. Her only family there, her uncle on her father’s side, does not look upon her with kindness because of the mother she was born to. Yeva quickly realizes she is not a person anymore but a tool for the empire to slay dragons. It’s no wonder she retreats into her armor, her helmet, and her training, becoming the tool they want her to be. Being a tool becomes who she is, her helmet and armor both her prison and her protection from what she has lost, herself. Even after all her accomplishments, her isolation, her hiding her identity beneath her armor, burying the culture of her mother deep within, and adopting the one of the Sun Empire as best she can, she is still sent away to Quanbao, the homeland of her mother she does not know because as her cousin points out, despite all she has done, she is still different from everyone else. Yeva claims the hurt this caused was invisible beneath her armor, do not believe her for a second. Throughout her time in Mithrandon, I wanted desperately for someone to give Yeva a hug and a shoulder to cry on, but Yang only gives her a helm and magic swords, a pale substitute.

Despite her immediate family being absent from the story, they loom over it, especially Yeva’s mother. Her father’s world, Mithrandon and the Sun Empire, is a world of heroic deeds associated with traditional fantasy, but also cold and classist, also like traditional fantasy. Yeva’s need to seal away her identity and gender beneath her armor in a land associated with the triumph of good versus evil conveys a lot about the genre and its traditional treatment of women. Even her only friend and cousin, Emory Deerland, is thought of as strange for rather reading a book than raising a sword despite the guildknights flourishing under his care. It’s in the details that Yang shows the suppression of her mother’s influence and, by extension, her femininity. Her father is named in his first scene, and yet it isn’t until Yeva opens up in Quanbao that her mother’s name is said for the reader. It is interesting to compare this to Lady Sookhee’s relationship with her parents. Her father sacrificed himself to save her life, and it is her mother who resented her for it, a contrast to Yeva’s father, who chose to sacrifice his daughter’s childhood and, without knowing it, his marriage for the sake of duty.

It’s no coincidence that the land her mother is from and Yeva is forced to go to is literally warmer and more welcoming to her when she lets her guard down. Without a threat of a dragon appearing, despite her investigation, Yeva has a lot of time on her hands to embrace her mother’s culture, remembering the language she used to speak, talking to people, and trying the food. The latter, she has to shed the protection that is her helmet in order to do so. When she does this in front of a friend of her mother, her response of “It is you. I see her in you” carries so much weight and cuts so deep. That scene is more important to the story than any dragon appearance. The way Yang coincides the shedding of her armor with Yeva learning about her mother, embracing who she is under the armor, before embracing a lover, is so well done.

It’s a novella, so the pacing has to be quick for the tale Yang is trying to tell. It’s not about Yeva’s training, her ascension to guildknight, the passing of her uncle, or the slaying of the infamous dragons mentioned in chapter one. It’s about Yeva’s choices more than what she has actually been sent to Quanbao to do. To everyone, readers included, the secret of Lady Sookhee’s blood-sickness may be obvious to everyone but Yeva. However, Yeva figuring out the secret isn’t what is vital to this book. It’s the choices Yeva makes throughout her time in Quanbao and how those choices lead to her final two choices, the one in the climax when she finds out Sookhee’s secret, and the choice to finally visit home again in the ending. We don’t see Yeva’s reunion with her mother and sister, but we don’t have to. She has allowed herself, in Quanbao, to mentally come home, and now she can actually do so.

While the world building done is tremendous for the short amount of pages it is done in, from the Guildknight of Mithrandon to the food and culture of Quanbao, it is there to serve Yeva’s story. Not every book needs to he a series, and not every story needs to be a universe. Yang doesn’t have to tell us how Yeva’s reunion with her mother went for us to picture how it went, because her mother’s presence is felt throughout the book. If the ending of Yeva and Sookhee’s story is all there is, I’m happy to imagine two dragons flying in the night’s sky, twisting about through the clouds, with no concern for the Sun Empire.

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Joshua was provided an advance copy of the book by Tor Books.

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