The Court of the Blind King

The Court of the Blind King, published in 2020, is David Guymer's study of the strangest and most melancholy of Age of Sigmar's aelf factions: the Idoneth Deepkin. Created in secret by the mage-god Teclis, the Idoneth were born flawed, their souls incomplete, condemned to fade unless they replenish themselves by harvesting the souls of others. They retreated into the hidden deeps of the Mortal Realms' oceans, building a secretive civilisation that surfaces only to raid, and Guymer's novel is one of the few works to render that culture from the inside.

The story turns on an Idoneth enclave and its ruler, the blind king of the title, an ancient, weary monarch presiding over a court riven with ambition and old grievances. Guymer uses the political machinery of that court to explore what kind of society emerges when survival itself is theft: a people bound by ritual and shame, mourning what they must do even as they do it. The result is a portrait less of villains than of the desperate, and the moral discomfort is very much the point.

The engine of the plot is a soul-raid. Riding the ethersea, the ghostly ocean the Idoneth carry with them out of the deeps, the enclave's Akhelian cavalry and Namarti thralls surface to reap the souls of surface-dwellers, and Guymer stages these incursions with a dreamlike, terrifying beauty. To their victims the Deepkin are an inexplicable catastrophe, appearing out of a phantom tide and vanishing with the essence of the dying; from within, they are simply a nation trying not to die. Holding both perspectives at once is the book's great achievement.

Guymer writes with a sensitivity to the Mortal Realms' capacity for the uncanny, and the Idoneth give him ideal material: their sea-magic, their soul-ledgers, their eerie fatalism. He resists the temptation to make them simply sympathetic or simply monstrous, instead letting the reader sit with a culture that is both. The Isharann soul-priests, the proud Akhelian warriors, and the voiceless Namarti each embody a different facet of a people organised entirely around loss.

For a faction that can be difficult to grasp from rulebooks alone, The Court of the Blind King is close to essential reading, translating the Idoneth's abstract, tragic concept into character and consequence. It is a quieter, more introspective book than much of the range, closer to gothic tragedy than heroic war story, and it rewards readers who want Age of Sigmar at its most imaginative and strange. Few Black Library novels have made an army of soul-stealing raiders feel this human.