19 Years Later, Cassandra Clare’s ‘Shadowhunters’ Saga Officially Begins Its Final Trilogy

Readers are spoiled for choice when it comes to YA fantasy books, from the classic Harry Potter novels to The Hunger Games, An Ember in the Ashes, and Throne of Glass. However, few have been as long-enduring as Cassandra Clare‘s The Shadowhunters Chronicles. The universe began in 2007 with the release of City of Bones, the first installment in a six-book series titled The Mortal Instruments, following 15-year-old Clary Fairchild as she learns of her half-angel heritage, powers, and place in the world as a Shadowhunter. Since then, it has exploded into a massive world, featuring five book series and a bevy of short story collections and graphic novels, a widely panned movie, and a much better-received Freeform show. All good things must come to an end eventually, though.

Next week, on November 3, the final trilogy of Shadowhunters, titled The Wicked Powers, will begin with the release of The Last King of Faerie. Set four years after the final novel in The Mortal Instruments sequel series, The Dark Artifices, the book follows Drusilla “Dru” Blackthorne, her brother Ty, and his former love interest, Kit Herondale. Dru finds her fourth year at Shadowhunter Academy interrupted when she’s kidnapped after a nightclub confrontation and brought to the titular land of Faerie by Prince Ash Morgenstern, finding danger at every turn, but also an unexpected and treacherous connection to Ash and the darkness around him. At the same time, Ty and Kit must put their bitterness aside to save everything they hold dear after a disappearance sends ripples through the Shadowhunter world.

Before it flies onto shelves, Collider can exclusively share an excerpt from the novel narrated by a beloved star from the teen supernatural fantasy realm — James Marsters. Best known as Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, he brings life to an action-packed sequence which sees Dru clashing with a false Jace Herondale, who has captured Clary. Initially, things seem to be going well when she lands a sharp blow with her sword, but the impostor quickly shows his strength, sending her to the edge of the roof where they’re fighting. With one fatal misstep, he sends her plummeting, seemingly to her death, until something swoops in to save her before she can hit the pavement. It takes her a second to realize, amid the adrenaline, that it’s Ash carrying her to safety on his black wings. The draw she feels toward him is apparent in how Marsters describes the young man, and the rescue sets the stage for their complicated relationship to unfold.

Four worlds and four completely different ideas of what a good life
looks like. This is where you belong, what it would ask of you, and what you would get back in
return.

You belong somewhere old enough that the mountains have names and
somebody can still tell you who gave them. Middle-earth is for people who think the right
thing is worth doing even when it will not be finished in their lifetime.

• This is the only world on the list where doing good is understood as a very long defeat,
  fought anyway, by people who will never see how it ends.
• You are drawn to grandeur, to white cities and deep forges and the sense that almost
  everything you touch is older than your entire family line.
• The Rings of Power is set in the last good age before it all goes wrong, which gives
  every quiet scene in it a slightly unbearable weight.
• You would take the hard road, and you would take it on foot.

You want the sea, a crew, and absolutely nobody telling you where
you are allowed to go. The Grand Line is the world for people whose main ambition in life is
finding out what is over there.

• One Piece has run for decades on one very simple engine, which is a group of people who
  each want something impossible and have decided to go and get it together.
• You collect people. Your ideal crew is a set of misfits who were each written off
  somewhere else before you turned up and offered them a better idea.
• The world is enormous and deliberately ridiculous, and the emotional gut punches land
  harder because of that rather than in spite of it.
• You would set sail knowing the map runs out, which is more or less the entire point of
  it.

You would rather be feared and useful than liked and useless. The
Continent is a world where the monsters are the straightforward part of the job and the
people are where it all gets complicated.

• Witchers get paid to do what nobody else will and resented for existing at all, which is
  a trade most people would refuse and you would probably accept.
• You have no real illusions about which side is the good one, largely because on the
  Continent that question tends to have a disappointing answer.
• The best of these stories are not about the fighting. They are about somebody with a
  rigid code being repeatedly cornered into caring about people.
• You would take the coin, finish the job properly, and be out of town before the story
  got told wrong.

You want the myths to be real and loose in the actual world, and
you want to find out at about thirteen that you were never anywhere near as ordinary as
everybody kept telling you.

• Percy Jackson takes the oldest stories we have and drops them into car parks and diners,
  which makes the gods considerably funnier and a great deal worse.
• You would be the kid every school gave up on, who turns out to have been built for
  something nobody thought to test for.
• The series is genuinely about friendship rather than destiny, and it says so out loud
  every time a prophecy tries to get in the way.
• Camp Half-Blood is the real fantasy here: a place where the thing that made you
  difficult everywhere else is the thing that makes you belong.

‘The Last King of Faerie’ Will Dig Deeper Into the Mythology of ‘Shadowhunters’

Expectations will be high for how The Mortal Powers brings the chronicles to a close. Shadowhunters has made Clare a New York Times bestselling author and one of the most recognizable names in YA fiction and romantasy, with an empire to rival some of the biggest book series. Through its many installments, the author has also managed to construct a deep and interconnected fantasy world with yet more room to explore. In an exclusive interview with ScreenRant, she spoke about how The Last King of Faerie and Wicked Powers as a whole give her a chance to play around in the land of Faerie more after only scratching the surface in previous installments. This will be a chance to dig deeper into the mythology within the Shadowhunters world and understand how the land operates, from how its people live to the hierarchy of power and the many rules that define it.

“I’ve written about faeries before, and got to use a lot of things I enjoy from mythology, like the Wild Hunt. But in The Wicked Powers I do get to explore Faerie as a place where people actually live, rather than somewhere Shadowhunters visit on a dangerous mission. I’d say I love the extremes of Faerie. It’s a place of extraordinary beauty, but also tremendous danger. It’s full of power but that power can be wild and uncontrollable. It’s full of strict rules, but everyone spends their time figuring out how to break them. And there is no punishment for breaking them if you do it cleverly enough. Which is one of the great things about Faerie, it’s a place that respects style and flamboyance more than brute strength or wealth.”

“I’ve written about faeries before, and got to use a lot of things I enjoy from mythology, like the Wild Hunt. But in The Wicked Powers I do get to explore Faerie as a place where people actually live, rather than somewhere Shadowhunters visit on a dangerous mission. I’d say I love the extremes of Faerie. It’s a place of extraordinary beauty, but also tremendous danger. It’s full of power but that power can be wild and uncontrollable. It’s full of strict rules, but everyone spends their time figuring out how to break them. And there is no punishment for breaking them if you do it cleverly enough. Which is one of the great things about Faerie, it’s a place that respects style and flamboyance more than brute strength or wealth.”

The Last King of Faerie releases on November 3. Listen to an early excerpt from the novel narrated by Marsters in the player above. Explore the Shadowhunters novels and more with a free trial of Audible.

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