Traditional quest fantasy encompasses a wide array of themes and story elements, despites the genre’s reputation for derivative plots and cliché tropes. Curse Bearer by Rebecca P. Minor – the beginning of The Risen Age Archive series – resonates many of the familiar fantasy conventions with the Christian experience. The tapestry woven from the strands of fantasy convention clearly portrays the human existential crisis, framing it with Christian ideology without trying to solve what readers can only work out for themselves.

Generally a lighter read with darker undertones, filled with action and genre campiness, Curse Bearer has the potential to provide both an entertaining adventure and a deep reflection on the nature of the will.

The story is a strong-willed young woman’s journey of faith and self-discovery. That statement needs some qualification, because the novel is not very introspective or psychological. Neither is the character. Danae is direct and determined to a fault. The fault is not only with Danae’s personal character but with her characterization in the narrative; she is also supposed to be very studious and intelligent, but her headstrong characterization can make her annoying at times. Danae manages to be both the swashbuckling rogue of sword-and-sorcery fantasy and the commoner protagonist of epic fantasy. This hybrid aspect of the plot prevents the protagonist from ever feeling one-dimensional. Throughout the novel, perhaps especially during her weakest moments, Danae is presented as an admirably strong individual.

As the sword-and-sorcery heroine, Danae wields blades and magic as she adventures for her own ends. As in the Conan stories, the antagonistic force is an evil cult religion that sacrifices people and assimilates cultures. There may be a small dystopian survival component, which serves as Danae’s initial motivation. As the heroine of the broader epic fantasy story, Danae desperately seeks salvation for others while struggling under responsibilities that fate has given to her.

Danae’s character arc takes her on a chaotic, segmented journey, told through the somewhat haphazard plot. Geographically, the story follows Danae and her companions on a long trek across land and sea, city and country. The story usually progresses at a fast pace, and the few breaks in the momentum serve to highlight Danae’s own urgency without significantly slowing the plot for the reader. The relationship between Danae’s personal motivation for her adventure and the quest to save the free world is tenuous. Some events are unrealistic for the sake of convenience; specifically, certain villains are less suspicious than they should be.

The epic-quest element of the plot is based on the acquisition of an object of power, which had been named in the novel’s working title prior to its publication. The change in title was appropriate, because the Sword of the Patron is not the most important part of the story. Throughout most of the story, the Sword does not even seem particularly interesting, perhaps because it is primarily one of the means to a personal objective for Danae. Near the end there are some tantalizing implications about the nature of the Sword, and those implications reflect the dominate themes in the story.

The tangled plot takes the reader on a tour through Minor’s world. There is probably no element of the worldbuilding that has not been seen in many other fantasy novels; so the world rises or falls on the way that the fantastic elements are presented. Fortunately, the world is tight, with amazing continuity. Near the beginning, a foreigner in Danae’s home country is identified by his hometown. Much later, Danae passes through the same town on her journey. Nothing extremely critical to the world or the character happens there, and the fact that it is the same town that had been previously mentioned is only off-handedly alluded to. The inclusion of maps helps in visualizing the journey and lends an even greater sense of geographical coherence.

The details of the setting are less coherent. Some of the places that Danae journeys through feel more real than others. There is at least one jarring anachronism – a modern restaurant, complete with a printed menu and waiters. Although this is other-world fantasy and the author has the right to put modern restaurants in what feels like an early Renaissance environment if she wants to, the fact remains that such a scene clashes with the expectations established by earlier passages.

The initial setting of Danae’s home country is particularly interesting because it manages to evoke the homeliness and familiarity of a simple, pre-Industrial Western civilization, while also being dangerous and despondent. Radromir is no idyllic Shire, not only because of having fallen into hard times, but also morally. The dark outlook on the protagonist’s homeland is reminiscient of Jim Butcher’s portrayal of Calderon Valley in Furies of Calderon; however, the people of Radromir and Dayleston feel more sympathetic and relatable than the inhabitants of Calderon Valley.

In comparison to the coherent geography, the worldbuilding regarding the land’s inhabitants feels sloppy. This is partly due to there being many races, some of which overlap in story function. Why does there need to be generic goblins when the dragon-kin are better described and seem to be better integrated with the story-world’s mythos? The elves are critically important, but the mention of dwarves seems to serve no purpose, except that every fantasy world that has elves is expected to also have dwarves. There are at least two big monsters in the story, and they suffer from being over-described, making them less scary and more awkward. Fortunately, the monster descriptions are not nearly as cheesy as those in the Shannara series, probably because Minor’s prose is better and more disciplined than Brooks’s.

Curse Bearer does languages better than many contemporary fantasy novels do. There is some linguistic development toward one language that is important to the story-world. Different cultures have different languages, and Danae cannot understand foreigners when they talk in their native tongues. Although it seems like everyone conveniently knows Danae’s language, there is no indication that her language a universally understood common tongue. The only problem is that even impolite and antagonistic characters speak Danae’s language in her presence a little too often.

Both the prose and the narrative technique are strong. The writing feels down-to-earth and intimate while still preserving a poetic flair. Sometimes the dialog or the action seems become awkward. Occasionally, a phrase in the narrative feels anachronistic or otherwise out of place, such as a use of the modern Evangelical term “prayer warrior,” which could give a skin-deep impression of preachiness that does not hold up to an objective evaluation. These moments of awkwardness do not ruin the impact of the serious themes or even lessen the believability of the story very much, partly because the narrative only takes itself as seriously as it needs to. That is to say, it is a basically serious story, but it is always winking at the genre cliché that it uses and does not try to be too ambitious with either prose or theme. The good-natured comic bantering makes for some of the best characterization in the novel. The comedy is integrated with the serious elements; the predominate comic relief character is also a heroic and tragic figure.

The heart of the worldbuilding is the magic system. Magic in Curse Bearer is neither the subtle divinity of Tolkien nor the complicated, almost physics-like systems of Sanderson. The magic is one with the spiritual reality, as in The Chronicles of Narnia, but it is manifested through an organized system of incantations. God gives the gift of miracles to those that use the incantations by faith, while the Devil-figure gives exactly the same supernatural abilities to his servants, evoked by exactly the same words. This strengthens Danae’s inner spiritual journey, raising the question that probably every Christian has asked of his or her desires and abilities – Is this really of God? And we believe that anything that is not of God is against Him.

The magic system raises unanswered questions. There is one point where a very normal prayer is answered miraculously – what is the difference between magic and answered prayer? The characters rarely use the word “magic,” and when they do, they use it almost the same way that we do, as a generic, superstitious term for a supernatural reality. Despite being done through supernatural agency, there is an implication that only people with an inborn ability can use magic at all. However, there is no indication of how the magic user controls the magic other than by initially calling upon the supernatural power with incantations. One critical scene is hurt by the fact that a character is said to be specifically controlling a magical flight ability, moving in different directions and at different speeds, but nothing is said as to how the character is able to control the power. It would have been more consistent if all of the effects of that incantation had been spontaneous and uncontrollable.

Magic is one of the most important vehicles for Curse Bearer’s themes. The supernatural power is mysterious and transcendent, but ordinary mortals – at least those born with the ability – can wrest control of the power for their own purposes, according to their own will. Doing so leaves them enslaved to the dark force that they had ignorantly served. The integration of the spiritual reality with the magic system keeps spiritual conflict at the forefront of the plot, equally important with hack-and-slash adventuring and political intrigue. The Christianity of the story, the world, and the theme is undisguised and unmistakable.

There is an analogue of the Bible, a book called The Tree. There would have been plenty of opportunity to insert modern-day Evangelical punchlines and platitudes, but Curse Bearer is gutless of any charge of preaching. Not only does the narrative turn down countless opportunities to have one character “witness” to another, but the spiritual mentor figure (the wizard archetype) refuses on one occasion to answer Danae’s question of whether or not The Tree ought to be interpreted literally. That scene would probably anger any Evangelicals who might only read fantasy as allegory. Yet, it seems clear that no ambiguity for the sake of political correctness was intended; because the story is always completely open and honest about spiritual truth, and being politically correct would have made the book intolerably awkward. The Tree is not really our Bible, much like Aslan is not really Jesus. In fact, The Tree contains magical incantations. The scripture-spellbook hybrid is an intriguing supposal of what the Bible might be like in a world where spiritual reality is partially declared and observed through incantations.

God is known as Creo in the story. I was waiting for Danae to be told that she doesn’t have to work to earn favor with Creo, that all she needs is faith, that if she only believes she will channel miracles. That never happens, at least not clearly and unambiguously. It would be easy to read a simple salvation analogue into the spiritual reality of the story, but that would present theological problems. For one thing, forcing an allegory of sin onto the debt accrued from using magic wrongly would lead to the conclusion that sin is a debt owed to the Devil, rather than offense against God.

The predominate evil of Minor’s world is the dark and monolithic entity known as the Impenetrable Darkness. The Impenetrable Darkness is referred to as a person, but his name makes him seem more of an abstraction. Like the Dark One in The Wheel of Time, this presentation of ultimate evil carries some Zoroastrian overtones, but those bi-theistic connotations carry poignant truth in the fantastic environment. In Christian experience, the ultimate evil is the abstraction of sin, the principle of rebellion against God that we do not Satan to tempt us to. Humanly, we wonder whether the controlling principle of the cosmos really is the Law of rightness and love, or whether Chaos might not really be the ultimate reality and the destiny that everything is heading toward. (Of course, if Chaos were supreme, we couldn’t care about evil.) Therefore, an abstract and monolithic evil has a legitimate place in high fantasy, and Curse Bearer uses it to portray the problem of evil in the human and Christian experience.

There is another potential Devil-figure, more personal than the Impenetrable Darkness. Queldurick is almost certainly the ultimate villain of The Risen Age Archive series. In Curse Bearer, Queldurick is mainly part of the backstory, but his existence is important to the theme. The separation between Queldurick and the Impenetrable Darkness means that the main characters are not trying to vanquish all evil. Instead, they merely do their best to defeat the darkness of their own age, struggling to believe that Providence will bring about the ultimate good in the end. One of the greatest epiphany moments is the realization that all power comes from Creo, and that even the evil power fueling selfishly-used incantations is only the theft and perversion of Creo’s gift. The Impenetrable Darkness must ultimately be either an illusion or a middle-man, and Queldurick is only his lackey.

Curse Bearer is all about will – Creo’s will and human will. The supremacy of the divine will as well as the reality of human freedom is upheld. Both the good and bad aspects of Danae’s steel will are illustrated through her inner journey, a journey that feels familiar to anyone who has experienced the disparity of one’s personal intention and God’s omniscient plan. At last, Christian readers of fantasy have a novel of objectively equal quality to one from the fantasy section of a secular bookstore that speaks intimately to their spiritual experience without the baggage of artificiality. It helps that the story is a thoroughly enjoyable adventure, drawing from fantasy’s favorite sources of inspiration.