Serpentwar Saga

About the Serpentwar Saga series

A generation after the Riftwar Saga, a new threat rises: the Emerald Queen, a serpent-worshipping conqueror from across the sea, invades Midkemia's Kingdom of the Isles with an army of raiders and dark magic. The Serpentwar Saga follows two new young heroes, mercenary soldiers Erik von Darkmoor and Roo Avery, as they're swept from a death sentence into the desperate defense of the Kingdom, while Pug -- now an aging, immensely powerful magician -- works a much larger, cosmic-scale plot to stop the true force manipulating the invasion from behind the scenes. It's a bigger, darker war story than the original trilogy, splitting time between grim battlefield survival (Erik), sharp-elbowed wartime profiteering (Roo, whose mercantile subplot is one of the saga's most memorable threads), and Pug's mystical, dimension-spanning efforts to identify and defeat an enemy far older than the Emerald Queen herself.

Published across the mid-to-late 1990s as four novels, the Serpentwar Saga is often cited by longtime readers as a high point of the Riftwar Cycle for its scale and the way it balances intimate character arcs against genuinely epic stakes. It follows on from the original Riftwar Saga and Krondor's Sons and assumes familiarity with Pug, the Kingdom, and Midkemia's political landscape established there.

How to read this series

Read in publication order: Shadow of a Dark Queen, Rise of a Merchant Prince, Rage of a Demon King, Shards of a Broken Crown. The four books form one continuous war narrative -- each ends on developments the next picks up directly -- so this is not a series to sample out of order. Come to it after the Riftwar Saga and, ideally, Krondor's Sons; Pug's history and the Kingdom's political structure are assumed knowledge rather than re-explained.