The Immortals

About The Immortals

The Immortals moves Tortall's focus to a new heroine, Daine, a refugee girl with an unusually powerful and uncontrolled version of wild magic -- the ability to speak with and eventually transform into animals -- who's taken in as the royal menagerie's assistant handler and, before long, apprenticed to the kingdom's most powerful mage, Numair Salmalin. The series' hook is baked into its title: immortal creatures out of legend -- griffins, dragons, spidrens, and worse -- have begun crossing back into the mortal world after centuries sealed away, and Daine's magic makes her one of the few people equipped to deal with them, even as she's still learning to control abilities that terrify her as much as they help her. Set a generation after Song of the Lioness, with Alanna now a settled adult figure at court, the quartet trades that series' knighthood-and-disguise plot for something closer to a magical-education arc crossed with escalating fantasy-creature threats, as Daine's power grows book by book alongside genuine uncertainty about what she actually is. Pierce builds real emotional weight into Daine's relationship with animals -- shaped by childhood trauma revealed gradually across the series -- and into her slow-burn mentor-student dynamic with Numair, which becomes one of the more quietly significant relationships in the wider Tortall universe. Wild Magic through The Realms of the Gods tracks Daine from a frightened, isolated teenager to someone who has to decide what to do with power large enough to reshape the world she lives in.

How to read this series

Read The Immortals in publication order -- Wild Magic, Wolf-Speaker, Emperor Mage, The Realms of the Gods -- one continuous story following Daine's growing magical ability and the escalating immortal-creature threat across all four books. It's set in the same kingdom as Song of the Lioness, roughly a generation later, with Alanna appearing as a recurring supporting character, but you don't strictly need to have read Song of the Lioness first to follow Daine's story. New Tortall readers can start here instead of with Alanna's quartet if a magic-focused protagonist appeals more than a knighthood plot, though some references to Alanna's history land with more weight if you've read her series first.