Waywarden (Briardark Book Two) Commentary
SPOILERS AHEAD!
An entrancing sequel to S.A Harian’s Briardark, Waywarden is a survival horror story set in a wilderness that does not adhere to the rules of physics. In Briardark, a group of researchers venture out into the Deadswitch Wilderness to study a melting glacier. But once in the wilderness, things start to unravel— even time itself. Our characters become separated, each embarking on their own journeys to find one another, to find others lost in the wild; to find the way out, or deeper in. Hunting them is The Shadow, a dark, violent presence that haunts the Briardark— a dense, green, rainforest landscaped superimposed on the Deadswitch Wilderness in the Sierras, where breaches in space-time allow characters to slip in and out of their dimension.
Waywarden picks up with our lost characters. Siena traverses a forest so dark she must use a headlamp even during the day, where she battles incessant rain and cold and malnutrition. There, she meets a masked figure who is determined to help her escape the Briardark. Emmett reconnects with Siena, but suffers from a mysterious infection. Cameron, still on the search for her friend, Avery, who went missing there seven years ago, encounters communities surviving in the Briardark, including a cult where she becomes their next sacrifice to The Mother— a protector against The Shadow. Holden, our man on the outside, remains with the Search and Rescue team looking for the missing researchers. He investigates the wilderness’s mysterious cult, The Church of the Bounty, hunting for any details that could bring him closer to finding Siena.
More so than the first book, Waywarden focuses on the horror of infection when you can’t access medical care. The Briardark is a temperate environment, where fungal-bacterial infections torment all the lost inhabitants of the wilderness. It’s an inescapable fate. Cameron encounters a few people at The Tooth, where the cult lives, who have infected wounds that are slowly killing them, even after cleaning and dressing the wounds properly. The infections don’t follow normal rules. The only way to survive is to avoid getting hurt, which is difficult in an environment that is actively trying to kill you. Siena also witnesses the devastation wrought by the infection in Emmett. In the first book, the wilderness itself was the horror. In Waywarden, the wilderness is the setting for an even more disturbing horror: dying to an unstoppable infection that eats away at your body. Can our characters do what they are there to do before inevitable infection?
This is not the end of the story. Briardark will continue in Book Three, Broodmother. I could not yet find a release date for Book Three, so it may be a year or two wait. (Darn!) I’m hungry for the next one already. Stay tuned!