Gorgeous visual craft deployed in this one, about a young Prince-to-be and his half sister, who narrowly escape the fate of their kingdom, destroyed because the prince has supposed precognition of tearing down an empire of, what appears to be, killer robots. This is obviously supposed to be a pretty long series though, because as they embark on this quest to go to the far north, they encounter various obstacles that take a pretty long time to move beyond.

They mostly act as devices for worldbuilding and to get the two to interact with more than each other. Otherwise they’re pretty much always at one another’s throats, which does get pretty boring. The Prince is a privileged child with no skills for surviving in the wild, and of course, the sister is the complete opposite and has no access to her feelings or much communication skills to speak of. It’s basically inverted masculine-feminine tropes, but their relationship feels well enough fleshed out. I struggled to connect with the plot though, as the larger arc seems incrementally progressed, and this backstory element became predominate instead.