Maybe I’m a book snob, but I pretty much expected this to suck. Always happy to be surprised, though. Especially by the prose work, it feels almost wild how much this text respects the intellect of the reader. I was expecting, I don’t know, Forgotten Realms or Dragonlance type writing. This is a cut above the commercial fiction today, let alone then. Great flow, vocabulary, and feels dynamic between character work and the unfolding, interesting plot. A couple twists cement this as a bit of a gem for me. Not enough to really blow me away, as the actual plot concerning the dragons and all but one of the characters didn’t capture my interest, despite being well rendered, but I can see why this has a (cult?) following.