Brighter than Scale, Swifter than Flame by Neon Yang Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: dragons, fantasy, fantasy romance, queer romance
Pages: 176
Published by Tordotcom on May 6, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
With an armored, oath-bound hero reminiscent of The Mandaloriana nd the Asian-inspired epic fantasy of She Who Became the Sun, Neon Yang’s Brighter than Scale, Swifter than Flame is a stunning queer novella about a dragon hunter finding home with a dragon queen.
Few know the true identity of the masked guildknight of Mithrandon.
She barely remembers herself.
The masked guildknight―Yeva―was thirteen when she killed her first dragon. With her gift revealed, she was shipped away to the imperial capital to train in the rare art of dragon-slaying. Now a legendary dragon hunter, she has never truly felt at home―nor removed her armor in public―since that fateful day all those years ago.
Yeva must now go to Quanbao, a fiercely independent and reclusive kingdom. It is rumored that there, dragons are not feared as is right and proper, but instead loved and worshipped. It is rumored that there, they harbor a dragon behind their borders.
While Yeva searches for the dreaded beast, she is welcomed into the palace by Quanbao’s monarch, Lady Sookhee. Though wary of each other, Yeva is shocked to find herself slowly opening up to the beautiful, mysterious queen.
As they grow closer, Yeva longs to let Lady Sookhee see the person behind the armor, but she knows she must fulfill her purpose and slay the dragon. Ultimately, she must decide who―or what―she is willing to betray: her own heart, or the sacred duty that she has called home for so long.
My Review:
At the outset, this is a bit of a ‘chosen one’ sort of narrative, but it’s ‘chosen’ in the negative sense. At least in the sense that Kunlin Yeva has no choice, that the power she has manifested requires that she be shipped off to a distant country to learn to train that power to serve the Sun Empire – will she or nil she. (If this sounds a bit like manifesting magical power in Dragon Age and being hauled off by templars to a tower, I think that’s a fairly accurate picture. Except for the bit where the other denizens of said tower are hopefully more sympathetic in Thedas.)
Yeva is a child. She adapts to her new and unwelcome circumstances because it’s the only way to survive. She hides her origins behind her duty and her helmet and pretends not to look back. Not until she’s sent back, just as willy-nilly as she was sent to the capital in the first place. Which is where her story truly begins.
Because she’s sent ALMOST home, to her place of origin’s neighboring country Quanbao, ruled by the young girl-king Lady Sookhee. Yeva is once again a stranger in a strange land. A land where, in order to not just survive but thrive, she’s teased, coaxed, persuaded and outright seduced into stripping away the armor that has protected and imprisoned her for years. A place where she can take back her identity – or at least graft the maturity and experience she has acquired onto the person she might have been if her mother had trained her magic instead of her father shipping her back to his homeland to be trained in war.
A war that she has come to Quanbao to prevent – if she can. But to do that she’ll have to decide not just where she belongs but who she is. And whether all that power she has and all that training she’s learned will continue to be used for killing dragons – or turned to protecting them. And the kingdom that one of them rules – along with Yeva’s heart.
Escape Rating B: It’s best not to go into this story expecting to SEE a lot of dragons. Not that dragons aren’t important to the story, just that they are more remembered and talked about than they are seen. In that particular, it reminds me more than a bit of The Fireborne Blade, as that’s another story about a female knight hunting a dragon in a place where one doesn’t really expect to find one
Which leads to my second comment, in that I often find myself having arguments with book blurbs, and this is one of those times. The idea that this is She Who Became the Sun meets The Mandalorian isn’t totally off, but to paraphrase an entirely different character from that universe, this may not be the helmeted warrior you’re looking for – even if Kunlin Yeva hides her face just as Din Djarin does. The effect may be the same from the outside, but is considerably different from inside the helmet.
The Mandalorian, Din Djarin, shrouds his body in armor because it’s a basic tenet of the creed he swore himself to long before the events of HIS story. He does it to SHOW exactly who he is – and his face is the least part of that. Kunlin Yeva shrouds her body in the armor of the empire and covers her face with her helmet to HIDE who she is. And that’s a crucial difference because Yeva feels the need, even with her fellow guildknights, to hide that she is different and does not belong. The Mandalorian belongs nowhere and everywhere and doesn’t care who knows it because it’s a paradoxical but integral part of his identity. Yeva is hiding hers from everyone around her – even herself.
The reference to She Who Became the Sun is also close but not quite. On the surface, yes, as the two stories are both queer and Asian-inspired, but the resemblance feels little more than helmet-deep under that surface. Personally I believe that a better readalike would be Nghi Vo’s Singing Hills Cycle as this reads like a tale that Cleric Chih would love to observe and especially to tell.
Brighter than Scale, Swifter than Flame is a story about transformation that has its roots both in the caverns under the palace of Quanbao and in mythical and fairytale transformation stories like “The Crane Wife” and the fantasy novella based on it, Kelly Barnhill’s The Crane Husband. Its roots lie in every fairytale where pursuit of a monster leads to the terrible discovery that the monster is merely a facet of the hunter hero’s beloved, and that the only thing that can follow such an ill-advised, oft-warned about pursuit is murder and tragedy.
Which, in this story, is where the narrative turns subversive, as, just as the girl-king of Quanbao transforms into a dragon, the guildknight Yeva transforms from a killer of dragons to a protector of them – and of the place and people she has adopted as her own.
The story, for much of its length, feels familiar AND as if it’s heading inexorably towards tragedy – because that’s the way this trope usually goes. Adding Yeva’s transformation into the mix takes that inevitable tragedy and shifts into something that is, indeed, brighter than scale, even if that transformation was considerably less swift than flame – although the romance between Yeva and Lady Sookhee burns every bit as bright.
