After the excellent novel Spear of Shadows, Josh Reynolds’ Age of Sigmar series Eight Lamentations continues with the audio drama War-Claw. When one of the infamous Eight Lamentations is located in Aqshy, the Realm of Fire, Grungni sends Owain Volker and Zana Mathos to retrieve it in his name. Before they can lay claim to the weapon, however, Owain and Zana are forced to find refuge with the tattered survivors of a devastated outpost. Tension and mistrust grows as it becomes clear that there are agents of other powers also seeking the same prize, and their survival hangs by a thread.
The novel serves as something of a travelogue of the Mortal Realms, flitting from region to region exploring some of the wildly imaginative locations that have been dreamt up recently. While this is a much shorter story which takes place in just a single location, it still provides the opportunity to see (well…hear) another unusual part of the Mortal Realms – which comes with snow, even in Aqshy! It’s actually a classic setting for this sort of ‘isolated outpost under siege from terrifying monsters’ story, contributing to a strong sense of tension and unease as the enemies – in this case beastmen and other, worse creatures – circle and the characters, apparently safe behind their walls, slowly learn about each other and understand exactly who they’re sharing space with.
Owain and Zana make for entertaining protagonists, brought to live beautifully by Tom Alexander and Emma Gregory and a script from Reynolds full of sharp little moments of sly banter between the two of them. You’ll get the most out of the characters if you’ve read Spear of Shadows, but even without that there’s plenty to pick up on in terms of their fondness for each other and the slight will-they-won’t-they dynamic. The rest of the cast are as good as you’d expect, although with the exception of John Banks’ self-serving duardin Njal Brunisson there’s not a lot of room for development beyond the basics of their characters – the loyal bodyguard, trusting nephew, capricious aelf, and so on.
Building on the strong foundation of Spear of Shadows, as well as the various supplementary short stories, this pretty much aims for entertainment with the horror-inflected ‘protect the house’ trope, and nails it with a load of fun, plenty of satisfying tension and some great dialogue. It’s the sort of audio story that you can chuck on, kick back and just enjoy as a bunch of great actors have a great time delivering a really entertaining script. There’s a lot of scope for further audios featuring these characters, and if Black Library and Reynolds can get a good pipeline going then this could be the start of something hugely enjoyable – although more short stories and further novels wouldn’t go amiss either!
Check out reviews of the wider Eight Lamentations series so far.
Also check out the main Age of Sigmar reviews page on Track of Words.
Click here to order Eight Lamentations: War-Claw on Audible.