The Mage Wars (Gryphon Trilogy)

About The Mage Wars (Gryphon Trilogy)

Co-written with Lackey's husband Larry Dixon, the Mage Wars trilogy jumps back roughly a thousand years before the rest of the Valdemar timeline, to the cataclysmic magical war that destroyed the ancient Mage of Silence Empire and reshaped the entire continent's geography and magic. Its protagonists are gryphons — intelligent, magically-created winged beings — rather than humans: Skandranon, a vain, heroic gryphon warrior, leads the story through the war's brutal endgame in The Black Gryphon, then follows the survivors' desperate effort to found a new home for gryphons and their allies in The White Gryphon and The Silver Gryphon, the latter shifting focus to the next generation raised in that new settlement.

Because it's set so far before Valdemar itself exists, the trilogy functions as deep-history worldbuilding for the rest of the series — explaining the cataclysm, the mage-storms, and the ancient magic that later Valdemar-era books (particularly Mage Winds and Mage Storms) build directly on — while also standing on its own as a self-contained trilogy with a nonhuman cast that's distinct in tone from anything else in the Valdemar universe.

How to read this series

Read in publication order: The Black Gryphon (1994), The White Gryphon (1995), The Silver Gryphon (1996). Because it's set roughly a thousand years before Valdemar exists, this trilogy can technically be read first with no prior Valdemar knowledge required, but most readers get more out of it after already having read at least the Mage Winds and Mage Storms trilogies, since it explains ancient history and magic those books reference. It's a fully self-contained trilogy either way, following Skandranon and the gryphon community across all three books.