Keiran: The Eternal Mage

Blurb

Keiran of the Night Vale has staved off death for two thousand years. His mind and his magic remain as sharp as ever, but his body is old, worn out, and failing. What he needs is to reincarnate into a new, young body, and he bends his prodigious talents towards doing exactly that. He awakens to find that he’s been reborn in a wasteland where mana has become a scarce resource. Even the internal mana generated by people is stolen away by those who rule them. And without mana, he’s no longer a mage.

It will take more than that to stop Keiran. With each passing week, he regains more of his old strength, but can he keep his secrets safely hidden? Standing in his way is his new home’s cult-like nightly mana tithing, a governor with deadly secrets, and a monster-ridden desert. It’s a deadly scramble to claim the mana he so desperately needs to survive, but Keiran didn’t become an archmage by accident. He’s willing to use every dirty trick and tactic he knows to get there again.

Thoughts

The premise is a good one. Keiran is a two-thousand-year-old archmage who reincarnates into a region almost completely starved of ambient mana, which means his “back to power” arc takes years rather than the usual three chapters. If you’ve read enough of the genre, you know the OP-reincarnation loop by heart, so anything that stretches out that compressed timeline is at least interesting on paper. I went in expecting something like Level One God, that same flavor of “I was great before and now I have to claw back up”, and the mana-tithing setup is clever: the local ruling class runs a nightly ritual that siphons mana from the whole population, keeping everyone weak and keeping Keiran’s recovery from looking suspicious. The worldbuilding premise is interesting, and the mystery of how such an environment exists, where Keiran is, and why there is one less moon in the sky than normal are good.

The problem I, and a few other reviewers seem to have, is Keiran himself. He’s analytical, dry, and because he’s essentially a 2000-year-old man in a child’s body, his internal voice has this clinical distance that never really lets you in. I didn’t hate reading him, but I never cared about him either. This isn’t an issue normally due to two things: a solid supporting cast to add emotional depth; spending word count doing instead of thinking.

To touch on the second one first, a lot of this book is internal. Keiran mulls over a lot of things. There’s a lot of telling about the magic system and how things could work and what decisions Keiran could make. That means that the amount of time we spend deep inside Keiran’s detached viewpoint is very high.

And when we do get to step out, the supporting cast to bring emotional depth and attachment is just not there. Family members are barely present. Townsfolk are effectively either NPCs or council members with more character depth, but none of it the kind that drives attachment or engagement. So when book 1 ends with Keiran leaving all of them behind, I found myself doing a mental shrug instead of feeling the weight of it. The final quarter of book 1 does find a proper mystery to dig into, which helped, but by then I’d already been coasting on plot mechanics more than investment.

I’m taking a break from book two to pick up some new releases, I might come back post checking out reviews for the later books and seeing if things pick up.