The Reader Ledger

Why the Villain Steals the Show (and Your Heart)

Let’s be honest: you’re not here for the treaty clauses. You’re here because Mordiger is the kind of villain who could read you the city tax code and you’d still swoon. He’s feared, brilliant, and running a revolution like it’s a high-stakes chess match where every piece is in love with him or wants to stab him—sometimes both.

The saga leans hard into the “evil is sexy” trope without apologizing for it, and it WORKS. Mordiger isn’t just powerful; he’s complicated in that delicious, “I could fix him (or he could ruin me)” way that keeps readers turning pages instead of sleeping like normal people.

Rating: 5 out of 5 morally questionable decisions. Would let Mordiger ruin my life again.

It’s a fitting word for the sea that cyclically closes the passage between Raptoaraem and Solarium, our two main cities : Better be done with your parley and economical demands before meeting again becomes more troublesome, better stand on the side you belong to before crossing back and forth is not an option anymore, better be ready before the path you walked on becomes a dead line…
And it’s a fitting word for the limit Mordiger, both the antagonist and protagonist of this tale, drew after counting each and every trespass of every sorts, both as a hero and a villain.
It’s also a fitting word for all the questions that steadily build within a basic one, “what makes something or someone dead or alive?” Are Mordiger and Stryx still even living people? Is there an old self that dies when we change or take up a new name? Is survival life, is all encompassing structure death?
And then, it’s a fitting word because of how present the theme of Time is. And because of how Stryx kills it as a line.

I actually do not have to pick only one word, so I can say that Raptoraem is a really absorbing tale of dark fantasy that makes us love the villains. The murderers, the traitors, the liars. Because they fully explain and make us feel why they do what they do, or because of what they are where they are, or both. And we might not forgive much, but we understand it all. Everyone has their way to fight off their tragedy.

I love how Mordiger is unapologetically a villain, both from the narration point of view and his own. He has decided that he would take matters into his own hand, and so be it if he has to lose and replace it by a cruel and monstrous metal one in the process. He believes in violence, and makes us do too; but still not without growing soft for him and his players: the Crew, Vira, Stryx, … Oh, especially Stryx!

Stryx is both the one that makes the less sense (she loves the monster she wants to kill as her father) and the one with the less paradoxes (in the end, all she is after might be a simple sense of safety, and I do find that relatable). She is a so very endearing child, and yet, we can feel in her something of a goddess in the making. I personally think she is the most fascinating one of the book and I already can’t wait to know where the future is taking her (...well, the future is already taking her places…).

The city of Raptoraem is also a character of its own, and a very interesting one with its influences and contradictions. It has its own past, present and future, its own traumas and victories, what it needs as a hungry land and a newborn child, and what it can provide as a mother and full of gods soil. It lives, and might not behave exactly the same depending on who it is hanging out with. The map is also one that calls for imagination to run (the Pit, the straits dividing the land, the peculiar weather around which lives get by), and so are its myths and beliefs.
And along all its descriptions, there just seems to be something that is growing. Maybe dangerously so. As I carried on, I found myself wondering more and more at each shadow “was that normal or unnatural?” – with “unnatural” potentially meaning “magick” or just “human but monstrously so” or both. It tragically brings at the forefront the question of: Is there something more evil that could threaten the monster we somehow root for…?
One foreboding question! And I’m glad to know there will be 8 more books to answer it and a whole multimedia universe to carry those characters!

For the little reservations I have :
As a non-native English speaker, I was not actually familiar with the word “ledger” before. I… I am now. I felt like the word and its cousins were a little too hammered on, and I do understand the goal of setting this whole atmosphere of a retribution that comes from objective numbers, of a philosophy of calculating the costs and rewards (and that is something I loved while reading and a strong and memorable aspect of the book) but I think this might have been conveyed just a little more subtly. There is also recurrently a share of sentences that are formulated like maxims that straight on settle and answer the situation, and it comes off a little too dryly, in my humble opinion of course, and again this can also be attributed to Mordiger’s blunt personality, this is also his way of cutting anyone’s nonsense, but still I found it a little too heavy. I kinda hoped that someone would come and go “stop with that, you can’t sum everything up in one sentence man, however charismatic you are” or even “hey I don’t get what you mean, you’re gonna have to expand on that”.
Definitely still a good read. A little hard at times, with very specific words and other languages adding to it, but that is something I personally enjoyed.

I recommend Raptoraem for its out of bounds experience, its unique world map, its complex characters that do not balk at their own paradoxes, its stinky darkness nesting despair and hope as sisters, its revolution, its lore, and Stryx. Just Stryx would be enough <3

She has the emotional regulation of a cornered animal that has decided the best solution to every problem is “bite first, ask questions while still biting.”

She tried to kill Mordiger as a kid, got adopted instead, and somehow that did not teach her chill, it just gave her more access to the people she can menace.

The drowned city, the mythpunk magic, the revolution stuff? All incredible. But I am primarily here to scream about Stryx, and let her teach me what “feral” actually means, because after this book my definition has been permanently upgraded.