The Malloreon

About The Malloreon

The Malloreon picks up several years after the Belgariad's ending, when Garion -- now the Rivan King -- learns that the infant son stolen from him and his wife Ce'Nedra has been taken east across the sea to Mallorea, the vast Angarak empire the earlier books only glimpsed from a distance. The prophecy isn't finished after all: a second, opposing prophecy has been quietly gathering its own champion, and Garion's party reassembles -- Belgarath, Polgara, Silk, Durnik, and the rest -- for a much longer journey across cultures the Belgariad never had time to visit, from the slave markets of Mallorea to the ruins of a vanished seventh nation. New figures complicate the old certainties: Zakath, the seemingly ruthless Mallorean emperor who turns out to be more interesting than his reputation, and Cyradis, a blindfolded seeress-judge who represents a choice more genuinely difficult than good-versus-evil. Where the Belgariad built its quest around a straightforward retrieval, the Malloreon widens the lens into something closer to a tour of Eddings' whole invented world, using the returning cast's established chemistry as a stable center while the politics and geography around them grow more complicated. It ends by resolving the two-prophecy structure the entire saga has been building since Pawn of Prophecy, making it best understood as the second and concluding half of one long story rather than a fully separate series.

How to read this series

The Malloreon must be read after the Belgariad in full -- it opens assuming you already know Garion is the Rivan King, that Ce'Nedra is his wife, and how the first series' central prophecy resolved, none of which is re-explained in any depth. Read the five books in publication order: Guardians of the West, King of the Murgos, Demon Lord of Karanda, Sorceress of Darshiva, The Seeress of Kell. It's a single continuous story like its predecessor, not a set of standalone entries. Readers who finish the Malloreon and want more of the world should go to the prequels, Belgarath the Sorcerer and Polgara the Sorceress, which are written for an audience who already knows the full story and would otherwise be spoiled by reading them first.