A trying journey threatens to consume a priestess as she struggles to save her people in this immersive high fantasy.
“She hugged her legs close to her chest. It was the only sense of safety she felt… It had only been ten days into the desert. She felt the weight of exhaustion settling in, her water skins nearly empty, and food rations running low. The towering red cliffs encircling her served as a stark reminder that she was still at the beginning of her journey…”
This very real exhaustion introduces Ben Billups’ first book in the Priestess of Kelvert series, Beneath the Golden Sands. Nuyani, once exiled as a “tainted child” because of her ember-colored eyes and unusual magical abilities, is deep in a desert, dehydrated, hunted, and forced to keep moving forward by forces she only partially understands.
Inadvertently becoming a priestess, not by ceremony but by consequence, after resurrecting and bonding with Kelvert, (an angelic being shattered and weakened by a greater demonic force) she begins her journey in the desert. It’s not something she has much of a choice in. If she doesn’t embark on this hazardous journey, the storm ravaging her homeland will only keep worsening and they could all perish.
Beneath the Golden Sands excels in both worldbuilding and setting. Billups immerses readers in the hostile, oppressive heat of the desert, and this already draining journey is worsened by the ever-present nokragga worms (parasitic creatures) who sap people of their magical essence and leave them hollow.
Beyond the desert, she meets people, like a wandering mage, who make her see how the isolation that once sheltered her people now leaves them dangerously ignorant.
“It was another weird thing to learn some of the history of both the people who lived in the desert and the worms’ changes… According to the stories that Zonqua showed, there were lizard people called kymacs and snake women called vorjecoudya (people of Vorjeo), with the top half as human while the bottom remained a long tail starting at the hip…”
The ever-intriguing Kelvert is in a fractured state, a god now existing in literal and metaphysical pieces embedded in crystals scattered across the desert (a huge drop from once being an angel with immense powers). And Nuyani’s connection to him, while reverent, is strained with her drawing strength from him even as she questions how she is meant to restore a god who has been so thoroughly broken. This contrast between divine expectation and human limitation humanizes the theological aspects of the story.
Terms like edria, prutosa, and magic cores are used early and often, and readers may find some of it distracting, especially when explanations happen during tense moments. And they only truly begin to make sense when Nuyani uses too much magic causing immediate fatigue and pain.
While the brisk pace is effective overall, it leaves little space for pauses and emotional consequence; moments of respite are brief with the next threat usually appearing immediately after another. In a way this works, as it matches Nuyani’s restlessness in a desert that remains alive beneath her feet, but taking a few beats to sit with the changes in the story may have made the action and stakes hit harder.
With rigorous worldbuilding and morally burdened heroes, Ben Billups’ Beneath the Golden Sands builds a solid foundation for what looks like it will be a vivid, action-packed series.
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