If you have read any fantasy published in the last five decades, you know the Chosen One motify. A child who is destined, by fate, destiny, the Gods, the Force, to rise up against a tyranny, throw down evil, get the girl, and usher in a new time of peace, prosperity and goodness for all. You know the shape of this narrative well enough by now. Even if you have not read fantasy, cultural osmosis means you’ve been exposed to it.
This is, however, not a typical Chosen One story. What if that story was falsified, made out of whole cloth? What if its elements were all manufactured, including the Chosen One himself? Andrew Knighton’s Forged for Destiny is an epic fantasy that looks and deconstructs the Chosen One narrative through the eyes of its unwitting protagonist.
That theme is right in the title. The full title of the book is Forged for Destiny: A Heroic Fantasy with a Chosen-One Twist. The novel is definitely not hiding what it wants to do, and does it with a pun in the title in the process. Further, the novel makes it clear in its prologue that the prime movers behind Raul’s “Destiny,” Valens and Prisca, are trying to bootstrap it from the start. Finding a random baby as the city of Pavuno is falling. Taking the time to have that baby branded, marked, in accordance with the legend and prophecy and destiny they are weaving for him. Going out to the hinterlands and having him grow up in rural isolation. A theater troupe who comes to the village on their circuit to nurture ideas of the old kingdom, and old good king Balbainus standing up for what’s right.
Raul is being groomed by both Valens and Prisca to be the point of a spear to oppose the Dunholmi invaders who have conquered the country for the last two decades. What Valens and Prisca don’t count on is that Raul is not a perfect puppet, and even with all of their plans, he does have a mind of his own. And so, armed with a sense of his destiny but willing to go off-script for his own inculcated virtues and values, Raul’s story does not play out quite according to plan. He’s a genuinely good person who tries to do the right thing, time and again. I think Knighton’s goal was to make us feel for Raul and identify with him since he IS being so manipulated into his role.
This book is very concerned with the power of story and its ability to persuade, and perhaps, to create a reality out of nothing. It’s fascinating to see Valens and Prisca try and again to set up the path for Raul from the very beginning, and to see Raul fulfill, sometimes too well, their lessons and expectations.¹ To that end, the worldbuilding of this world and the socio-political setup is what I want to focus on. This is a world where the invading Dunholmi are wary of both literacy and the small magics that people use. As a result, most actual books are banned and not allowed. Professions of copyists and the like are not allowed either, although a few people are allowed to be scribes (and they are watched like hawks). Books and the like are valuable treasures that are among some of the things that Raul and his insurgents, once they get going, look for.
Also, take the theater troupe. They are allowed to perform, but have a permanent sword of Damocles over their heads. Displeasing the Dumholmi in a play is a great way for a theater troupe to lose their liberty, or their heads. The novel explores the problems of censorship and restriction of the flow of ideas too. And yet, later in the book, we get the reasons why the Dunholmi are doing what they are doing. It’s not caprice or needless cruelty. The novel undercuts that, too.
All this comes to the power of story, and the manufacture and nurturing of story and its ability to change people’s lives and motivate them. Tell the right story, and a people can rise up to oppose tyranny, or come to accept the new state of affairs. Raised on, and learning the heroic stories of, the fallen monarchy shapes Raul and his character. He believes in the old stories, in the chivalric virtues; he is immersed in them. But he is not a tabula rasa. Raul is at his heart a genuinely good person. Time and again, he acts in a heroic or merciful manner where the “Script” would have him act differently.²
But the novel further complicates it all in several ways. Prisca supposedly can see the future. Or so she says. She uses this to push and motivate Raul at various points to keep him on the path she has chosen, or try to. If this were the world of Leverage, we could definitely see her as the mastermind of the operation. Valens might be inculcating virtue and fighting skills to Raul, but this is, really, Prisca’s long hoped-for plan to restore the monarchy and drive out the Dunholmi invaders. How much of her oracular gift are lies? We do get stuff from her point of view, and magic is real, but the preponderance of the evidence as we go along is, indeed, that she is trying to mostly bootstrap a non-existent prophecy and destiny onto Raul and onto the people of the land.
The novel does intriguingly at points break Raul’s point of view to look at his story from elsewhere and the tropes it is critiquing. Take Yasmi, for instance. She is the young star of the troupe, and clearly meant to be the Dulcinea for our knight Raul to have as his pole star to keep him on the path. In a bog-standard Chosen One narrative, especially a couple of decades past, that would be the entirety of her role, with about as much characterization and autonomy as a number 2 pencil.³ Yasmi, however, wants to be a star with a capital S, and given opportunity once they get to the big city, has ambition enough to be willing to leap for the golden ring. This, of course, is yet another crook and twist in Prisca’s plans. She also wields the most overt magic in the book, with a set of masks that allow her to take the shape of various animals (the wolf being her favorite).
Like many of these books, while following Raul and seeing him stumble, try to right, and for a while follow Prisca’s plan without deviation, what these sorts of books, including this one that is critiquing the tropes of antagonist and villain, is where a lot of the juice lies. Sure, you can have faceless guards, barely sketched lieutenants, and a villain with barely any characterization, and make a serviceable book. But if you have a complicated villain with some depth and characterization to them, it makes Chosen One narratives richer and deeper. And if you can get stuff from that point of view, even better.
Enter Count Brennett Alder, who is administering Pavuno. We do get some scenes from his point of view scattered throughout the book. He doesn’t think much of the city in its now parlous state. He has a scheming Chamberlain as his second in command. But he is erudite, ambitious, intelligent, and willing to use a variety of tools and techniques to try and quell the rebellion Prisca is brewing around Raul. One can sympathize with him, his goals and his point of view. Is he a foreign tyrant and governor of a conquered province? Absolutely. Is he having a big monument to that conquest being built in the city? Again, absolutely. Does he keep up the restrictions on magic and books? Again, absolutely. But (unlike Tur, who is his dark shadow) he is not capricious about his evil and his goals. And in his confrontation with Raul at the climax of the book, the cards are on the table and we truly get him. And that’s why he’s such a good foil for Raul and the rebellion.
The book is well written and entertaining and a good read even as it fulfills and inverts the Chosen One tropes. It’s not innovative in style; its innovation and creative forces are mainly focused on looking at those tropes critically, even as its protagonist is forced/guided/coaxed onto that path. The novel ends with an incomplete total story, and with Raul launched into a new phase. But if you wanted just to ride off into the sunset with the Chosen One trope examined and done, you could stop here.
It’s not really my place to detail where I hope the story goes in the second and final(?)⁴ volume, Forged for Prophecy, but I hope Knighton stays to his strengths. I could see how so very easily the second book could fall into a more standard form and template; my hope is that he does not take that easier path. I think he has plenty to say about these sorts of narratives, while at the same time providing a very readable story in the process.
NB: In January 2024, on this blog, Roseanna reviewed Knighton’s novella Ashes of the Ancestors.
Highlights:
- Right from the title, tells you it is going to invert and play with tropes
- A strongly told story on its own merits
- Solid use of theme and character
Reference: Knighton, Andrew. Forged for Destiny: A Heroic Fantasy with a Chosen-One Twist [Orbit, 2025].
POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.
¹ The book does its best to avoid the “Chosen One must be a dude” by having Valens and Prisca look for a girl, but unable to find a suitable one, get the male baby that turns out to be Valens. There are plenty of female warriors as antagonists to avoid cliched ideas that only men get to wield swords. So we could have had a “Raulia” instead of a “Raul.” I think that might in some ways have made for a slightly more interesting book and would have further critiqued the Chosen One trope from the start.
² Consider Luke Skywalker in Empire Strikes Back, who leaves Yoda to go and try and free and save his friends, because it’s the right thing to do. Yoda and Obi-Wan certainly would have had him stay on Dagobah, train and oppose the Emperor later (even if it meant the end for his friends). But of course Luke IS the chosen one, son of Darth Vader. Here, Raul is a nobody who gets sculpted into that role. Some comparison to pre- Rise of Skywalker Rey (before we find (to my sorrow) about her “true heritage”) might be warranted. Or Finn, for that matter.
³ Sadly, that is still too common today, but such books are more frequently found in self-published fantasy and SF catalogues than from mainstream publishers large and small.
⁴ I have noticed a rise in duologies as opposed to trilogies these days. Some of these duologies have felt like trilogies squeezed down; others have been a single book padded out to two-book length. This one does feel genuinely like two halves of a story.
