Stacey McEwan’s BookTok breakout A Forbidden Alchemy earned its audience by pairing gritty, industrial fantasy with a slow-burn romance that refused to play nice. Its sequel, A Forsaken Prophecy, doubles down on both instincts, sending its fractured couple deeper into a war-torn world while making them work considerably harder to trust each other again.
In Belavere Trench, the uneasy balance of power has collapsed entirely: the ruling Artisans and the rebellious Craftsmen are now openly at war, and Patrick, the last living Alchemist, along with Nina, the world’s only known earth Charmer, are prisoners of the very regime his rebellion is fighting. Patrick hasn’t forgiven Nina for her earlier betrayals, but survival forces the issue. A narrow escape reunites him with his long-imprisoned father and, awkwardly, pulls in Theo, Nina’s first love, as an unlikely ally. From there, the group chases a half-mythical prophecy pointing to an endless supply of idium, a resource that could tip the war decisively, dragging them through a string of dying mining towns that have seen better days.
McEwan’s world-building remains the book’s greatest asset. Belavere Trench feels lived-in and exhausted, its class conflict between magic-wielding elites and the laborers who power their world rendered with real texture rather than genre shorthand. The villains here are appropriately chilling, less interested in melodrama than in the quiet cruelty of institutional power, and the emotional tension between Patrick and Nina, betrayal layered over old longing, gives the political plot a personal stake that keeps pages turning even when the larger war recedes into the background.
That said, the book’s structure shows some strain. The town-to-town search for prophecy clues settles into a repeatable rhythm, arrive, grieve, argue, decode, move on, that saps momentum through the middle stretch before the final act reasserts urgency. Readers who loved the first book for its slow-burn tension will find plenty to like here, though the pacing dips have been a common note in early reactions, alongside general praise for the book’s darker, grittier tone and its unflinching cliffhanger of an ending.
A Forsaken Prophecy is a worthy, if occasionally uneven, second act, one that trades some of its predecessor’s momentum for deeper emotional stakes and a meaner, more desperate version of its world. Series fans will want to push through the saggy middle for a finale that earns its gut-punch, and newcomers should absolutely start with A Forbidden Alchemy first.
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