A Blazing Beginning for an Inventive Fantasy Saga

BlackFyre: Shattered Shards by Daniel Welynn

Daniel Welynn‘s BlackFyre: Shattered Shards is a fantasy novel that is hard to put down. Set in fog-draped San Francisco, the novel opens with two teenage girls named Branwen and Daphne who are walking home from school, trading banter about Shakespeare essays and the creeping October haze. The scene feels ordinary, until it doesn’t. Welynn is masterful at this slow-burn unsettling, at the way dread crystallizes out of the mundane: a reflection in a darkened shopfront, a shape that moves when it shouldn’t, a smile that has been learned rather than felt. By the time the apartment window explodes and creatures strip away their human glamour in a spray of silver glass, readers are fully invested.

At the center of the story is Branwen, a fifteen-year-old girl who is also something ancient. She is the heir to a power she cannot fully control: the BlackFyre. This is a sentient primordial fire that lives inside her like a second consciousness, coaxing, threatening and bargaining with her across every chapter. The voice inside Branwen is not an evil force to be defeated; it is cunning, intimate and sometimes reasonable. It exploits her grief, her guilt, her loneliness. It offers power when she is most desperate. Welynn writes internal confrontations as Branwen clings to herself in the crushing dark of the ocean and the BlackFyre promises relief. This is a story about the struggle to remain yourself under unbearable pressure.

The friendship between Branwen and Daphne is comforting to read. Daphne is warm, funny and perceptive in ways that catch Branwen off guard. Their bond feels real. Welynn understands that the most powerful anchor a person can have is someone who refuses to let go.

Bram, Branwen’s guardian, walks the line between knight and man-who-has-outlasted-too-many-bad-nights. Elaine — Daphne’s mother, a cartographer with a supernatural sensitivity she doesn’t yet understand — provides one of the book’s more moving perspectives, her grief and disorientation as she is pulled into this world rendered with empathy.

Welynn’s prose is a pleasure. His action sequences have fury without becoming chaos; his quieter scenes breathe with emotion. The world-building — Courts Seelie and Goblyn, Handmaidens marked as walking embers, a shattered artifact whose nine shards have scattered across realms — is intricate and reveals itself naturally. BlackFyre: Shattered Shards closes with the promise of more to come, and the wait will not be comfortable.