World Building/Guide
Crescent City
There’s a lot happening in the Crescent City series, so we designed this guide to help you keep track of what’s important.
Our guide covers key concepts and lore from House of Earth and Blood, and touches on the series’ overarching themes and conflicts. This guide includes minor spoilers for book one, but it doesn’t spoil major reveals or character arcs!
If we continue our deep dive into books two and three, we will add dropdown menus for information discovered in those books, clearly marked so you never accidentally get spoiled :)
HOW TO USE THIS GUIDE:
THE MAIN TOPICS:
At its core, Crescent City is about friendship, resilience, and power.
Friendship: Maas grapples with the multifaceted nature of friendship throughout the series—not only through the protagonist, but through several supporting characters. Bryce’s relationship with Danika is central to her character development and the conflict in House of Earth and Blood. However, we also see how the various states of Bryce’s other friendships—from her stable relationship with Lehabah, to her fraught relationships with Fury and Juniper, to her disintegrating friendship with Ithan—play a role in her personal journey.
Resilience: Crescent City examines how the ability to contend with one’s grief contributes to building one’s resilience, primarily through Bryce and Hunt’s development. After Bryce lives through a traumatic event, she experiences a profound grief that nearly takes her life. Eventually, she works her way out of a serious depression and uses the memory of her loved ones to continue her to keep going. Similarly, Hunt’s role in the Fallen Rebellion and his subsequent enslavement shapes how he sees the world. While he emerges from his past with an immense sense of guilt and a need for stability, he works through these emotions and uses the memory of his fallen warriors to help him fight for a better world.
Geography:
Here’s what you need to know for the first book:
Crescent City takes place on Midgard, a planet occupied by virtually every fantastical being (referred to as Vanir in the book) you could ever imagine. Many of these beings exist on other planets in SJM’s universe, and they entered Midgard thousands of years ago through a portal called the Northern Rift. At the beginning of House of Earth and Blood, the Northern Rift is closed.
While Midgard is sectioned into several territories, only a few are relevant in the series, and even fewer are relevant for book one.
Most important is a territory called Valbara, which is where Lunathion (aka Crescent City) is located and where the action takes place in House of Earth and Blood.
Across the Haldren ocean lies a continent called Pangera, where the Asteri live and rule from the Eternal City and Ophion, a human rebel group, operates from.
Hel is another realm in the Maasverse that becomes more relevant in later books. It is ruled by seven Princes of Hel, and events in book one suggest that this realm may not be as “evil” as Bryce has been led to believe.