Green Rider

Green Rider is both a series of Speculative Fiction novels by Kristen Britain and the name of the first novel in the series. They follow the adventures of Karigan G'ladheon, one of the titular Green Riders. The Green Riders are a messenger service in the Kingdom of Sacoridia who are magically called to service by the winged horse brooches, which amplify and enable their special magical talents.

In Green Rider, Karigan discovers a young man dying from a pair of ominous black arrows. He is a Green Rider, and begs her to carry his "life or death" message to the king. With his dying breath, he bids her to beware the shadow man. Karigan's promise changes her life forever. Pursued by unknown assassins, following a path only her horse seems to know, and accompanied by the silent specter of the original messenger, she herself must rise above being a simple schoolgirl and become one of the Green Riders of legend. Caught up in a world of deadly danger and complex magic, compelled by forces she cannot understand, Karigan is hounded by dark beings bent on seeing that the message, and its reluctant carrier, never reach their destination.

In First Rider's Call, Karigan has gone back home to work in her father's trading business, but finds that resisting the call of the messenger service is far harder than she thought it would be. Returning to Sacor City, she finds the messenger service much diminished. Many riders die on their dangerous missions, but no new riders are answering to take their places. Rider magic is becoming unpredictable or failing entirely. Wild magic is scouring the land, and an ancient evil is stirring in the Blackveil Forest.

In The High King's Tomb, the country of Sacoridia struggles to reclaim magical documents and knowledge lost since the long war to prepare for the confrontation with Mornhavon the Black. Meanwhile, the Second Empire, descendants of the original Empire led by Mornhavon, are ready to make their move to assert sovereignty over the nations once again.

In Blackveil, a joint expedition between the Eletians and Sacoridians, including Karigan, enters Blackveil Forest in order to determine the fate of Argenthyne, the lost capital of the Eletians. Grandmother also enters Blackveil after receiving a vision that she must "wake the Sleepers." At the Wall, Alton and Estral Andovian race to uncover the mysteries of its making and how it may be repaired, if it can be at all.

Tropes used in Green Rider include:

Action Girl: Karigan and nearly every other female Green Rider, not to mention the female Weapons.
Animated Armor: In First Rider's Call, all of the armor in the castle is brought to life by wild magic. They attack the inhabitants for about an hour, then fall apart.
Attempted Rape: Karigan is nearly raped by a mercenary, but a double fist to the groin and a good headbutt to the nose end those pretensions. Mel, an orphan raised by Captain Mapstone, is also nearly raped when Sacor city is invaded, but Karigan intervenes in time.
Avatar: Karigan is Westrion's (the death god) Avatar. This neatly explains all her powers. Fading out is simply entering the spirit realm, and if she goes too far she is no longer bound by time just like any spirit. It also explains why she can see ghosts and why they come to her for aid.
Automaton Horses: Averted. The messenger horses are well looked after in the books and one fledgling Rider is severely chastised for treating his horse this way.
Badass Army: The Black Shields.
Blood Magic: Mornhavon's specialty, and how he creates and strengthens his ultimate weapon, the Black Star. Also used by Sacoridians to create the D'Yer Wall, and not all the people who sacrificed their lives to fortify the wall did so willingly.
Chekhov's Armory: Seven Chimneys is a borderline example. It doesn't have the excessive quantity of guns usually expected in such, but those it does have take a while to fire, and have quite powerful effects on the story.
Chekhov's Gun: The ship-in-a-bottle that shows up in the Seven Chimneys library early in the first book appears to be just a bit of excessive detail used to illustrate how odd Seven Chimneys is. Then, in High King's Tomb, someone breaks the bottle...
- One of the books in that same library—in the section on the arcane arts—is all blank pages. In High King's Tomb you find out precisely why.
- On the very first page of book 1 an owl observes Shawdell as he begins the process of breaching the D'Yer Wall, as well as when he actually collapses a small portion of it.
The Chessmaster: Lord-Governer Mirwell fancies himself as one, using an Intrigue (the rough analogue of chess in Sacoridia) board to mark his own and his enemies moves. However, it's the Grey One who was pulling the strings all along.
Complete Monster: Mornhaven the Black is treated this way in-Universe. You'd be hard pressed to find anyone sane who doesn't think he was a monster. Even his most loyal friend abandoned him after he killed the boy who was like a son to him to power his magic.
Cool Horse: The messenger service horses are not only smarter and more durable than regular horses, they are the chosen of Salvastar, the steed of Westrion the death god. They're also all named after bird species (Condor, Robin, etc.)
- Mostly bird species: there's also Firefly and Moth
Creepy Monotone: The wraiths.
Diary: Excerpts from the Diary of Hadriax el Fex are used to provide backstory for First Rider's Call.
Due to the Dead: Karigan learns of a ceremony the original Riders used to honor their dead while time traveling in the second book, and revives the tradition at the end of the book.
Engineered Public Confession: Estora tricks her cousin Spane into confessing his blackmail of her in front of Zachary, whom he thinks is unconscious, and Beryl, whom he thinks is nothing but a servant.
Epic Fail: Karrigan's date at the start of Book 3. Gets really dressed up for a date with a representative of a foreign merchant house. And winds up in a sword fight. In a dress and corset. In the middle of a museum.
Even Evil Has Standards: When Mornhavon kills the boy that Hadriax el Fex considered like a younger brother, he goes over to the natives in order to stop him.
Evil Empire: The Arcosian Empire.
Evil Overlord: Mornhavon the Black.
Gentleman Thief: Raven Mask, who is also a Chick Magnet.
Ghost Memory: Karigan is briefly possessed by a F'ryan Coblebay (a swordmaster initiate) and fights another swordsmaster to save her own life. Later, the moves and skill he used is available to her, making her a better fighter than before.
God Save Us From the Queen / Sexist Matriarchy: The Play Within A Book Mad Queen Oddacious provides examples of both. Karigan muses that it was probably written to demonstrate how unwise it is to give a woman power.
- But she also notes that the play enjoyed a resurgence of popularity during the reign of Queen Isen, who was well-loved.
Hair of Gold: Lady Estora.
I Am Who?: Karigan finds out that she is Westrion's avatar in the third book. After she performs her duty, he kindly erases her memory so she doesn't have to deal with it.
I Call It Vera: Karigan briefly toys with naming her sabre Fang, since people who discover the body of the scorpion-like monster she killed remark that some great beast set its fangs into its belly.
I See Dead People: One of Karigan's powers.
I'm Dying, Please Take My MacGuffin: F'ryan's two messages and the magical Rider broach.
- Karigan's mother also asked her in-laws to give her MacGuffin to Karigan, but since she referred to it by it's Eletian name, and the relatives in question didn't know what a muna'riel was, they weren't able to honor that request for more than a decade.
Immortality Immorality: One of Mornhavon's goals was to become immortal after he learns that the Eletians are. He vivisects many of them to reach this goal.
Intangible Time Travel: Karigan can do this when wild magic is warping Rider abilities.
Kicking Ass in All Her Finery: Karigan has to learn to do this after the Raven Mask escapes her in his first appearance.
Living Lie Detector: Captain Mapstone's special gift. This makes her invaluable to the king.
Love Triangle: Karigan loves both King Zachary and Lord Alton, and they both return her feelings. Neither can marry a commoner, however, and since she knows this she does not act on her feelings. This is further confused in the third book when Lady Estora starts to develop feelings for her betrothed, Zachary, and Raven Mask is attracted to Karigan.
- Either simplified or further complicated in the fourth book when Alton enters into a relationship with Karigan's friend Estral.
Melee a Trois: Intrigue (a chess analogue) can be played with just two players, but it's best when played as a triad.
Memento MacGuffin: Karigan's second moonstone, a gift from her departed mother.
The Mole: Major Spencer for the good guys, Castellan Crowe for the bad guys.
Moral Event Horizon: In-Universe, Mornhaven's slaughter of the Lions is treated this way by Hadriax.
Mutilation Interrogation: Inverted in The High King's Tomb. Spencer does this to an evil henchman who had already lost one hand. To top it off, this same henchman had driven the interrogator's brother to suicide by blaming him for an incident that made their sadistic master cut off both his hands.
Names to Run Away From Really Fast: Mornhavon the Black.
Non-Idle Rich: Karrigan's father is the chief of a merchant clan and among other things he has been known to work at the loading docks beside his underlings.
Not Using the Z Word: See Our Elves Are Better.
Our Elves Are Better / The Fair Folk: The Elt or Eletians, elves in all but name. They're incredibly arrogant and very conscious of how much innate magic they have compared to humans. On occasion, though, the human characters will call them on it -- and on how unhelpful they can be when the fate of the world is at stake. The trope is also subverted when the villain of the first book is an Eletian gone bad.
Playing with Fire: Mara's special Rider talent.
Please Get Off Me: Zachary says this to Karigan when she uses herself to protect him from an animated armor axeman.
Public Execution: King Zachary has a public execution for the traitorous Lord Mirwell. In later books, it's revealed that while all executions are public, attending them is socially discouraged for the most part.
Punctuation Shaker: F'ryan, G'ladheon, D'Yer... Justified since we get to see there was a period in Sacoridia's history when making these contractions was popular. The original forms of the names were Galadheon and Deyer.
Pursued Protagonist: The first novel quickly introduces F'ryan Coblebay, who is pursued by unknown antagonists and mortally wounded. He passes on his messages and his horse to Karigan.
Red Shirt: The three Sacoridians sent into Blackveil along with Karigan, Yates, and Lynx.
Redemption Equals Death: Jendara
Sacrificial Lion: Rider Yates. Especially a punch to the reader after he miraculously survives most of the book.
Sealed Evil in a Can: The Kanmorhan Vane, aka the Blackveil Forest, is a place severely contaminated by Morhavon the Black's magic and sealed all around by the magical D'Yer Wall. Even after hundreds of years it still warps all the plants and animals sealed inside. That's because Mornhavon is still sealed inside, too, albeit as something incorporeal. The High King's Tomb also has a place under the palace catacombs where evil spirits are sealed away from walking the world of the living and causing untold destruction. Naturally, the seal gets broken.
Something They Would Never Say: Why Lady Estora brings F'ryan's love letter back to Karigan and how the Karigan realizes it contains a coded message.
Stable Time Loop: Karigan going back in time leads to the successful rescue of her ancestor, Hadriax el Fex, while he was defecting. He then goes on to take the Arcosian word "betrayer" (Galadheon) as his surname, and moves to the islands where he would father her clan.
- Not to mention that Karigan's actions resulted in her ancestor seeing a vision which inspired him to defect in the first place.
Suicide by Cop: Jendara. When one considers the alternative (being tortured for a month, and then staked out - still alive - for the vultures), this decision (and the considerably faster and relatively painless death that went with it) is understandable.
Take Up My Sword: Or rather broach, although he does give her his sword, too.
Timey-Wimey Ball: In First Rider's Call, we have a Stable Time Loop, where Karigan exists even though her ancestor would have died without her time traveling intervention. In Blackveil, the present doesn't change until after Karigan changes the past, with only her recalling the alternate timeline.
Triang Relations: Type 4. Karigan and Zachary are in love with each other, and Estora is in love with Zachary.
True Companions: The Green Riders are like family, with Captain Mapstone as the mother figure.
- Alternatively they are like a military unit with traditions going back generations, and once in a while past Green Riders intervening for living ones.
Tsundere: Karigan.
Upper Class Twit: Karrigan beats up a noble's son for being a bully. After he whines about it she is suspended from school. Whereupon she is so frightened that she runs away-not realizing that her father has plenty of juice too, and that all the students and even the martial-arts teacher thought he had it coming.
Variant Chess: Intrigue, as mentioned earlier. It's used as a teaching tool for noble youths, much like chess is believed to have been.
Victory-Guided Amnesia: Karigan saves the day by suddenly becoming the avatar of the god of death and dealing a supernatural smackdown to a bunch of Mooks. Then said god of death wipes her memory to allow her to go back to a normal life.
Xtreme Kool Letterz: Hadriax el Fex.