Fourth Wing

Fourth Wing is the first novel of the Empyrean series and the first adult fantasy book by the American author Rebecca Yarros. Entangled Publishing's Red Tower Books imprint issued it in the United States on 2 May 2023. The story belongs to the kingdom of Navarre, whose defence rests on the dragon riders trained at Basgiath War College and on a bond between rider and dragon that the dragon, rather than the cadet, gets to decide.

Basgiath sorts its intake into quadrants, and Violet Sorrengail was raised for the Scribes, the branch that keeps the kingdom's records. Her joints have always been fragile enough for the archives to be the sensible destination, but her mother, General Lilith Sorrengail, commands the college and overrules the plan, ordering her youngest daughter into the Riders Quadrant. First-year riders train until some of them die, and their training includes an attempt to bond with a dragon; a dragon that rejects a candidate may burn the candidate instead.

The college also holds the children of a rebellion Navarre put down. Those cadets are branded with relics and forced into the Riders Quadrant, and some of them blame Violet's family for what happened to their parents. Xaden Riorson, a wingleader whose father was executed on the general's order, is the most senior of them. Violet's childhood friend Dain Aetos, now her squad leader, is one of the few people at the college who wants her kept alive, while another cadet tells her plainly that he intends to kill her.

Beyond the walls, the war that the college exists to fight has been running for generations. Navarre is protected by wards, its neighbour Poromiel fields gryphon fliers rather than dragons, and the threat the wards are there to hold back is kept off the syllabus. Yarros planned the Empyrean as a sequence of five novels; Iron Flame followed in November 2023 and Onyx Storm in January 2025.