Dark Age
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The bestselling author of Morning Star returns to the Red Rising universe with the thrilling sequel to Iron Gold.
“Brown’s plots are like a depth charge of nitromethane dropped in a bucket of gasoline. His pacing is 100% him standing over it all with a lit match and a smile, waiting for us to dare him to drop it.”—NPR (Best Books of the Year)
He broke the chains. Then he broke the world….
A decade ago Darrow led a revolution, and laid the foundations for a new world. Now he’s an outlaw.
Cast out of the very Republic he founded, with half his fleet destroyed, he wages a rogue war on Mercury. Outnumbered and outgunned, is he still the hero who broke the chains? Or will he become the very evil he fought to destroy?
In his darkening shadow, a new hero rises.
Lysander au Lune, the displaced heir to the old empire, has returned to bridge the divide between the Golds of the Rim and Core. If united, their combined might may prove fatal to the fledgling Republic.
On Luna, the embattled Sovereign of the Republic, Virginia au Augustus, fights to preserve her precious demokracy and her exiled husband. But one may cost her the other, and her son is not yet returned.
Abducted by enemy agents, Pax au Augustus must trust in a Gray thief, Ephraim, for his salvation.
Far across the void, Lyria, a Red refugee accused of treason, makes a desperate bid for freedom with the help of two unlikely new allies.
Fear dims the hopes of the Rising, and as power is seized, lost, and reclaimed, the worlds spin on and on toward a new Dark Age.
Don’t miss any of Pierce Brown’s Red Rising Saga:
RED RISING • GOLDEN SON • MORNING STAR • IRON GOLD • DARK AGE • LIGHT BRINGER
- Pages
- 1223
- First published
- 2015
- Language
- English
- Edition
- Ebook
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Shelved by 4 Litcadians
Reviews
Finished September 20, 2026
3.1/5 ⭐ Dark Age was... a lot. My biggest problem is that the continuation after the original trilogy still feels somewhat forced. The book is too long, too fragmented, and often relies on killing interesting characters for shock value. The beginning dragged for me. Tongueless dies almost immediately, Seraphina gets killed before doing much, and we spend far too long focused on the Mercury war before characters like Lyria, Volga, Ephraim, Pax, and Virginia properly return. And honestly? Those characters interested me much more than Darrow and Lysander. Virginia is basically the spine of the Republic. Lyria, Volga, and Victra are a fantastic combination. Ephraim became one of my favorite characters. Even Pax was more interesting to me than another hundred pages of warfare. Darrow, meanwhile, increasingly feels like a space messiah. People follow him almost blindly and are willing to die simply because he tells them to. Lysander became incredibly annoying. I actually liked him more in Iron Gold, but here he turns into a calculating snake. Darrow once spared him, and all he gets for showing humanity is another major enemy. The book also keeps doing something that really frustrates me: old villains survive or return, while newly introduced "good" characters get slaughtered. Alexander survives... only to die again. Ephraim dies. Dancer dies. Seraphina dies. Tongueless dies. Meanwhile Lysander? Of course he's still alive. WHY?! There were some great moments, though. Volga being Ragnar's daughter?! That was awesome. Lyria basically entering Spider-Man mode with the parasite was also interesting. And Lyria + Volga + Victra might be one of my favorite character combinations in the series. Then there was Victra's baby. I expected something bad to happen. I did NOT expect a newborn baby to be nailed to a f*cking tree. WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS AUTHOR?! That might be one of the most unnecessarily brutal things I've read in the series. The Obsidian storyline was also completely insane. Shamans, drugs, bizarre rituals, sexism, psychopaths... everything just kept escalating. By the final quarter, the story had split into so many separate conflicts that everything was going wrong everywhere at once. It was interesting to see how they would eventually reconnect, but it also made the book feel unnecessarily chaotic. And then, near the end, the allies finally start communicating. WOW. Imagine if they'd done that earlier. Maybe half these people wouldn't be dead. Still, when the slingBlade appeared... IT'S REAPING TIME. Overall, Dark Age had great character moments, brutal twists, some genuinely funny scenes, and an enormous scope. But for me, it's too long, too dependent on shock deaths, and increasingly feels like the series is being extended beyond its natural ending. The original trilogy felt complete. This doesn't.