Fourth Wing

Overview

At Basgiath War College, cadets cross a narrow stone parapet high above a gorge on their first day, and those who fall are simply gone. Those who survive must, at the Threshing, persuade a dragon to bond with them — or be burned where they stand. Violet Sorrengail, twenty years old, small, prone to injury because of a chronic condition, and trained all her life to be a scribe, is ordered into the riders' quadrant by her mother, the commanding general. Fourth Wing (2023), the first book of Rebecca Yarros's Empyrean series, took the oldest fantasy creature, the Dragon, and one of the newest genres, Romantasy, and made them the biggest thing in publishing.

Origins

Yarros, born in 1981 and already a prolific author of contemporary romance, conceived the book as her first fantasy novel. It was published by Red Tower Books, a new fantasy imprint of Entangled Publishing, the independent romance house founded by Liz Pelletier, on May 2, 2023. The book arrived into a market primed by Sarah J. Maas's A Court of Thorns and Roses and by BookTok, the TikTok reading community that had turned romantic fantasy into a word-of-mouth juggernaut. Entangled aimed its marketing squarely at that audience.

The story

Violet's world is the kingdom of Navarre, protected by magical wards and by the riders of Basgiath, whose bonded dragons channel power that manifests in each rider as a unique "signet." In her class is Xaden Riorson, son of an executed rebel leader and a man with every reason to want the general's daughter dead. Violet survives by intellect as much as strength; she bonds, against all precedent, with two dragons — the massive black Tairn and the small golden Andarna — and discovers that Navarre's history is a lie concealing a far older threat. The romance is central, explicit and slow-burning; the war-school structure, with its challenges, rankings and body counts, gives it the momentum of an academy thriller.

Readers will recognize ancestors. The telepathic bond between rider and dragon echoes a tradition running back through Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern, while the rankings, trials and individual signet powers echo both young-adult dystopias and the progression logic of games.

Reception & impact

Fourth Wing sold more than two million copies in its first six months, reached No. 1 on the New York Times list, and had spent 65 weeks on that list by August 2024. The sequel, Iron Flame, followed after only six months, in November 2023. Onyx Storm, released on January 21, 2025, sold 2.7 million copies in its first week, more than any adult novel in the previous twenty years according to BookScan. Fourth Wing won International Book of the Year at the 2024 TikTok Book Awards.

The success also drew criticism. Reviewers noted modern slang and a fast, sometimes loose approach to worldbuilding, and debates over whether romantasy "counts" as fantasy became a recurring feature of the genre's online culture. None of it slowed sales; the books' devoted readership turned out for bookstore midnight release parties that recalled the Harry Potter era.

The phenomenon has run mostly toward screen and merchandise rather than games so far. In October 2023 Amazon MGM Studios and Michael B. Jordan's Outlier Society acquired the rights for a television series, with Yarros and Pelletier as executive producers.

Legacy

Yarros has said the Empyrean will run to five books. As of September 2026, three novels are published, and the untitled books four and five have no announced release dates. A companion volume, Threshing Day, has been announced by Red Tower for September 29, 2026. Whatever comes next, Fourth Wing has already marked a turning point: the moment the dragon, the defining monster of fantasy from Beowulf to Dungeons & Dragons, became the object of a love story read by millions.