The Shandian Chronicles Books in Order

The Shandian Chronicles opens with Reins of Power, and it feels more political and investigative than some of John Forrester's more travel-heavy fantasy. The lead, Akkar, is not a prince or a chosen fighter. He is a scholar at the Historians Guild, an orphan with ambition, useful skills, and a life that changes the moment his mentor disappears. That makes the book feel grounded from the start. The danger is real, but it begins inside institutions rather than on a battlefield.

Akkar's daily world is already full of pressure. He works with books and relics, leads a workshop that produces wands for the Wizards Guild, and practices magic carefully, away from the wrong eyes. When his mentor vanishes under suspicious circumstances, he is pulled into the guild's secret work hunting powerful objects in the ruins beneath the palace. At the same time, he has to defend himself from growing suspicion tied to his mentor's supposed crimes. So the series starts with missing-person mystery, buried history, and a young man trying not to be crushed by forces much higher than his rank.

Akkar is not marching toward glory so much as being cornered into it.

That is part of the appeal. He wants to rise, maybe all the way to guild master, but every step up the ladder comes with new evidence that the empire around him is rotten in ways he did not understand. The deeper he looks, the more he finds corruption in the imperial line and signs of a betrayal that reaches back three hundred years. His old flame Jesnia, a famous actress and illusionist, becomes one of the few people he can turn to, especially after she is branded a traitor herself. Between Jesnia, his noble-born girlfriend, the church, the guilds, the nobility, and foreign enemies, Akkar is pulled in every direction at once.

The setting helps a lot. This is the kind of fantasy where the palace above ground matters, but so do the tunnels and ruins below it. Relics of power are not just treasure. They are evidence. Magic is useful, but it is also dangerous because it shifts who can control the story of the empire. Even dragons and an ancient immortal figure into the background in a way that makes the world feel older and more layered than Akkar first assumes.

So, if you like fantasies built on secrets, professional rivalries, and the slow discovery that the official version of history is a lie, The Shandian Chronicles has a strong opening move. At the moment the published story begins with one book, but that book already gives a clear sense of what this series wants to be, a tale of buried wrongs, rising stakes, and one smart, very pressured young man trying to decide whether power is worth taking if the system itself is broken.