2023
Fourth Wing
FW
The record-shattering third Empyrean novel sends Violet Sorrengail beyond everything she knows — and it's the series' most ambitious book yet.
After nearly eighteen months at Basgiath War College, Violet Sorrengail knows there's no such thing as safe. The wards protecting Navarre are failing, the venin are no longer a rumor, and the man she loves is fighting a battle inside himself that no signet power can win.
To save Xaden — and everyone else she refuses to lose — Violet ventures beyond the wards and beyond the maps, hunting allies among isles and kingdoms that have never bent to Navarre. What she finds out there changes what she believes about dragons, about the war, and about her own family's place in it.
It's the biggest canvas the series has painted on: new lands, new creatures, court politics, sea crossings, and a war that stops being theoretical. And through it all, Yarros keeps the thing that made Fourth Wing a phenomenon — characters you'd follow off a cliff, and one dragon with truly no patience left.
Yes — if you've read the first two Empyrean books, Onyx Storm is essential; it broke a 20-year sales record for adult fiction in its first week for a reason.
The pacing is uneven in the middle third — quest structure means island-hopping, and some readers find the new-names-per-chapter density heavy. But the character work, the dragon banter, and a genuinely staggering last act make it the series' strongest book since Fourth Wing. The cliffhanger is significant, so know going in that book four is coming.
Not yet — but it's coming. A television adaptation of the Empyrean series is in development at Amazon MGM Studios, which won a heated bidding war for the rights to Fourth Wing. No cast or release date has been announced, which means there's still time to read the books first — always the right order of operations.
Yes, absolutely. Onyx Storm is book three of an ongoing series and picks up directly after Iron Flame's cliffhanger. Nothing in it will land — plot or emotionally — without the first two books. Read Fourth Wing (2023), then Iron Flame (2023), then Onyx Storm.
No. The Empyrean is planned as a five-book series, so Onyx Storm is the middle book. It ends on a major cliffhanger, with two more books to come.
It's a long book — over 500 pages — and its quest structure makes the middle more exploratory than Fourth Wing's academy setting. Most readers find the final act more than makes up for it; the last hundred pages are widely considered the series' best since book one.
Its January 2025 release sold roughly 2.7 million copies in its first week — the biggest debut for an adult novel in about 20 years. It turned the Empyrean series from a BookTok phenomenon into a genuine publishing record-setter.
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