Hymn Brings a Fantasy Epic to a Powerful Crescendo

After nearly a decade, Ken Scholes’ Hymn brings to a close the five-part epic The Psalms of Isaak.
The story began in Lamentation, as the people of the Named Lands watched their bastion of knowledge, the city of Windwir, decimated at the hands of the penitent mechoservitor Isaak. In Canticle, the song of history began to play louder, revealing secrets and a bloody past coming for our protagonists from across the sea.
In Antiphon, gods, technology, and dreams of older days arose and answered the growing threat of the Y’zirite Empire, who carved their way through the Named Lands with knives and blood. And in Requiem, ancient devices and ancient pain made way for the vengeance of fathers, families, and more, as the enemy empire began to crumble—but at terrible cost.

Despite this tumult of pain, there is love in this world too, and joy, and revelation, and even peace. As the music builds, and as the curtain begins to fall, Scholes plays for us one last time a song of wars ending, of weapons laid down, of dreams fulfilled, and love answering in turn, as the lamentation that began The Psalms of Isaak becomes an uplifting hymn.
As the book opens, the characters are reeling in the wake of the revelations at the end of Requiem; not only has an ancient pathogen been introduced to the water supplies of the Named Lands that will kill any Y’Zirite blood mage on ingestion, but Jakob (the child of Rudolfo and Jin Li Tam) and the Crimson Empress of the Y’Zirite faith, toddlers both, have seemingly been murdered by the vengeful hand of Vlad Li Tam, Jin’s father.

Rudolfo, Jin Li Tam, Winters, Nebios, Petronus, Isaak, Marta, and others are exhausted from the tragedies of four previous books, and yet these latest murders are the proverbial straw that breaks the camel’s back, and gets the climactic book off to a dark start. Each of the primary characters struggles with tragedy: the loss of a son, a symbol, a daughter, a home, a dream. But not all is as it seems, and even at this late a stage, new players enter to offer aid and hope. Our heroes race to rescue not only their people, but the very planet itself.
This series has always been about loss, though that has never been clearer. The characters have suffered tragedy upon tragedy and battle after battle. The cost of survival has been high. S Starting this book at a low point,choles uses the opportunity to examine a mind after war; grief, the raw pain of loss, and the hard choice to continue the fight—these provide the book’s best moments.

But it isn’t all deep introspection; Scholes also earns that epic page count with the moments of wild science fantasy that have defined the series: silver biomechanical dragons pace the sea between the earth and the moon; characters imbue themselves with the power of the Younger Gods; magicked scouts keep pace with mechoservitors mid-battle; a half-dead wizard lives on in a mechanical prison. There’s no skimping on the grandiose moments as the gloves come off and our heroes fight for the fate of their world.
Hymn is a worthy ending to The Psalms of Isaak—painful and beautiful, fulfilling and timely, epic and intimate. By its final pages, I was in tears at the prospect of saying goodbye to these characters. But Scholes gives them a fitting sendoff, and they’ve earned their rest. There is an honesty to the pain at the heart of this series, and now, at the end, I can truly say it truly is a beautiful song.
Hymn is available now.