EDEN’S RISE

In Bruening’s fantasy novel, three young humans in a dwarven empire discover that survival and servitude are not the same thing.

Eden is a 17-year-old “Rescue”—a human ward of the dwarven empire—on the cusp of earning his mapper’s certificate from his mentor, Master Halin, when a dragon attack on his mountain township of Iridur upends everything. With the gates sealed behind them and nowhere else to go, Eden and his two closest friends, the quick-witted Anya and the reckless elven inventor Faras, descend into the tunnels beneath the kingdom with a single instruction from the only adult who ever cared about them: Get to the capital and disappear into it. Their bid to reach the empire’s capital becomes an education in everything the empire would rather they not know: They discover a ghost town swallowed by the tunnels; a scheming dark fairy pulling strings she won’t explain, who promises destinies of great deeds; and monsters from childhood stories that turn out to be very, very real. (“Deep in shadows creeps a poison stinger. With shrouded webs of darkest black, four eyes burn as the echoes linger.”) As Eden, Anya, and Faras are pushed deeper into a lightless realm beneath the capital (where an underground resistance is building a hidden city), they realize survival wasn’t the hard part. Now, Eden must navigate a war he doesn’t fully understand, pull back a friend who’s being consumed by it, and reckon with a bloodline that makes him a target. And Anya—whose strange connection to the ether is waking something none of them are ready for—may be hiding the most dangerous secret of all.

Threaded through the primary narrative are flashbacks following Aleena, a ruthless dragon rider whose moral corruption deepens in counterpoint to Eden’s growing conscience; the dual narrative structure of the book is one of Bruening’s strongest choices. Aleena’s chapters convey the war’s scale and darkness in crisp, kinetic prose, while Eden’s arc earns its emotional weight through slowly accumulated trust and loss. The worldbuilding is the author’s most impressive achievement. Bruening constructs a geological society with internal consistency—dwarven culture, class hierarchy, currency, mapping guilds, and the terrifying “Rage” mechanics of dragon-bonding are all rendered with precision and obvious affection. The result is an underground world that feels genuinely inhabited rather than decorated. The trio’s weeks-long journey through abandoned mining tunnels, crystalline caverns, and ghost towns is atmospheric and tense, and the author has a keen eye for the way physical darkness amplifies psychological dread. Less successful is the novel’s pacing in the first half, with its expository scaffolding; Tia’s grand pronouncements about destiny and bloodlines have the feel of an overstuffed fantasy checklist. Eden’s lineage revelation leans on convention rather than earning surprise, and Anya, while compelling in action sequences—her chase across ledges and ladders above Empire City’s deepest alleys is the novel’s thrilling highlight—is too frequently reactive in dialogue scenes. Still, Bruening demonstrates firm command of craft, and the emotional throughline—three marginalized young people claiming their own futures inside a system built on their exploitation—never loses its urgency. The final choice at the four-tunnel crossroads, with its quietly devastating stakes, suggests a series opener that knows exactly what questions to leave open.

Solid and ambitious fantasy for readers who like their worldbuilding earned.