Last August, TorDotCom released 'In the Shadow of the Fall', a novella to comprise the first half of a duology called 'Guardians of the Gods'. I wondered immediately, given that it was just a hundred and fifty pages long, why they chose to split the book in half. Well, that's for two reasons. For one, the second half, released only five months later, is longer by sixty pages, so probably counting as a short novel rather than a novella, but the total page count certainly isn't huge by the standards of the fantasy genre. However, for two, the tone shifts considerably, enough for the approach to now make sense.

To quickly recap, we're in Nigeria dealing with the orisha, or Yoruba gods, who are initially absent. Ashâke, a young acolyte in the Temple of Ifa can't become a priest because these gods don't talk to her. What she finds, as the first book progresses, is that maybe nobody else can either because they're gone and have been gone for four hundred years. Eventually she learns that the Teacher, who leads an army of godkillers, killed Olodumare, the Supreme Father, and is attempting to work his way through the rest. And now that four remaining gods can manifest physically, after having turned Ashâke into their idan, a sort of container, he wants her dead too.

Ashâke is the principal character in both books and she's who we follow almost exclusively, so it's a pretty safe bet that we're supposed to see her as one of the good guys. By extension, because she worships the orisha, we see them in a similar light, though, of course, it's never quite that simple with any gods. Is a god of war or disease or destruction a good guy? Probably not. At a most basic level, though, Ashâke is clearly trying to save and preserve, while the godkillers are trying to kill and destroy, so we have our good guys and our bad guys. We don't even have to ponder on a core suggestion, that if the orisha all die, the world dies with them.

Here, in the second half of the story, that blurs considerably. It doesn't reverse, because this isn't Tobi Ogundiran flipping things around on us, but, with four orisha effectively living inside her, the simple worldview Ashâke had naturally complicates. That the Teacher is able to communicate and show her who he was and why he took the path he did escalates that, the interlude after chapter seven being an impeccable wake-up call for anyone. It's not particularly surprising but it's such a brutal section in such a casual way that it carries a serious impact. More importantly, it's the key to the book.

Now, we the readers, along with Ashâke, start to look beyond a simple good guy/bad guy mindset to ask pretty deep questions. What are gods? What do gods mean? What can gods be? I don't want to suggest that there wasn't depth in 'In the Shadow of the Fall' because there was, but the major focus was on coming of age. Here, it's more about coming of power. Everything's bigger and wider and altogether on a grander scale. The focus isn't on a single person any more but an entire world and how it sees itself.

And that manifests in scenes like chapter seven, not only a powerful scene but the first in a string of them. Some might say the second, as Ashâke is soon betrayed and captured, only to escape and be pointed at the one city left that hasn't fallen to the Godkillers, Abeokuta, and there's power in that section for sure. However, it's also more traditional plot progression. It doesn't stand apart in the way that the interlude after chapter seven does, set as it is in Orun, the Realm of the Divine; or the moment that Djábri accidentally learns the power of silverglass; or the scene in which the Teacher returns and nonchalantly reshuffles his cabinet, in a manner of speaking. These moments are all special and couldn't happen in a mundane world of entirely human interaction.

Eventually, of course, we find ourselves at the Fount of Creation, as the title suggests, which was and is as impactful to the story and the world as you might expect. These scenes, plural, also count as special in that sense, interactions between a god and a mortal in a place that could be seen as entirely apart from the human dimension. I have no idea where it is or how to describe it and that isn't the important thing. What matters is that Eshu Elegba, the same Yoruba lord of mischief we met at the very beginning of 'In the Shadow of the Fall', can get there and so things happen that change everything.

I've bumped into Yoruba orisha in other books, like 'David Mogo, Godhunter' and another Nigerian author living in the U.S., Suyi Davies Okungbowa. However, this isn't my culture and I'm not deeply versed in it, so I can't say how true this duology is to traditional mythology. Certainly the gods are taken from that and we spend time with five of them here, not only Eshu, who's also the orisha of roads and crossroads, but the four inside Ashâke. Those others are Arewa, whose realm is beauty and debauchery; Ogun, lord of war and metalwork; Oya, the goddess of wind and rain; and finally Yemoja, the mother of the gods. I'm sure each has particular attributes that have meaning to the Yoruba people beyond their specialties but I wouldn't be able to recognise them.

What matters is that they're clearly delineated characters with their own quirks and substance, a not unimportant detail in a very human story. They're like us but they're not like us at all, which is a tricky balance for an author to walk. Ogundiran does it well. Given the length of these books, it's perhaps not that surprising to find few human characters with substance. Ashâke is easily the best defined as the core of both books, but her old fellow acolyte Simbi is given key moments here and Djábri proves worthy too, an Ogboni guard who opposes the godkillers and is connected to earlier characters. Nobody has the quirkiness of witchdoctor Bo Fatai from the first book, but that's fair.

All in all, I liked this. It's not the quick and easy romp that was 'In the Shadow of the Fall', but that makes sense. It doesn't need to be. It builds on that introduction considerably and ably takes the story home. I haven't adored everything I've read from Nigerian authors but I've found all of it to be fascinating and I've had a blast with much of it. Clearly I need to keep reading more. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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