Fire & Chasm

There are two great, primal forces in the world. The Fire is the warmth of creation, the Chasm the abyss of unmaking. All humans are given a gift by the fire, a singular magical ability that they can employ at will, unless they sacrifice that gift for the power of the many spells that can be drawn from the chasm. The Church worships the Fire, the Wizards' Guild studies the Chasm. The two clash politically all the time, but Az is the Church's weapon in a more secret war. Able to control the intoxicating power of obsidian - where fire and chasm meet - he is an assassin, a wizard killer, and an enigma even to himself.

Fire & Chasm is a fairly short YA fantasy novel with a decent bit of world building. Unfortunately, it has two major problems:

First, Az spends a lot of time bemoaning his lot, although overall he comes through lightly given how many people he has killed during the course of the narrative, including about a dozen wizards who were just trying to stop him breaking into their house in a fugue state. I guess we're supposed to forgive him because of the fugue and the horrors done to him, but in all seriousness these deaths are basically never mentioned except for their impact on the political landscape. After the immediate aftermath, they seem to prey on precisely nobody's conscience, ever. The other main characters are the wizard who made him this way, the wizard's daughter Leora, whose romance with Az has little conflict even when his fugues are revealed to her, and a cartoonishly diabolical High Priest.

The second problem is that the plot wants to be political, but the characters essentially exist within a bubble. The wider ramifications of their actions are reported, but never shown, and more importantly involve characters that we are not allowed to know and thus have little reason to care about. We never see anything of the political sphere besides the High Priest, who is a hands-on kind of guy and is never seen at court or engaged in subtle diplomacy and manoeuvring, just setting things on fire and torturing Az for shiggles.

Fire & Chasm isn't terrible, but an unengaging protagonist and an emphasis away from what feels like the more involving part of the plot mean that it fails to distinguish itself from the crowd.