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Verdict: Eighteen thousand words that carry more grief, atmosphere and craft than most books five times the length — with a “high heat” label three readers say the book does not quite meet.
Best for: Readers who want a half-dragon butch knight, an Arthurian world with no men in it, and a romance built on loss rather than on banter — in a single sitting.
Heat level: ★★★★☆ (4/5 — explicit, but author-billed rather than crowd-rated; romance.io has two entries for it and neither carries a steam rating at all)
Rating: ★★★★☆ (3.9/5 — a 4.32 Goodreads average from a small, self-selected sample of 60 ratings)
Tropes: Half-dragon heroine, butch knight, rescue from a cult, grief and hurt/comfort, Arthurian retelling, all-women world, shapeshifting, novella, standalone-readable, HEA.
Martis the Brazen by Rien Gray is the second of the Out of True novellas — dark sapphic fantasy romance in an Arthurian-inflected realm called the Land of Maidens, where Martis, the daughter of a dragon and a witch, returns to the Gorsedd mountains to watch her father die and rescues a sorceress named Amoret from a cult that intends to sacrifice her.
Two things about the numbers before anything else. Sixty Goodreads ratings and eighteen written reviews is too small to call a consensus, and the sample is largely readers who already follow Gray — so treat everything below as indicative rather than settled. And the book was itch.io-exclusive for roughly two and a half years before reaching Amazon in August 2025, which is almost certainly why that number is sixty rather than six hundred.
What Is Martis the Brazen About?
The Out of True novellas are Arthuriana rewritten as a sequence of sapphic knight stories, and the world’s defining feature is that it is populated entirely by women and nonbinary people. The Land of Maidens has a king — Theomacha the Exalted, a woman — a court, an order of knights, and none of the gendered machinery that usually drives a chivalric romance. Gray writes it without comment, which is the right decision and part of why the setting works.
Martis is the sole daughter of the dragon Thouros and a witch, raised in the Gorsedd mountains. When her mother died she went through a grief-rampage that ended with King Theomacha stopping her, taking her into the court and giving her a new name — so the knight she now is exists because someone caught her at the worst moment of her life. Amoret is the woman she finds in the hands of a dragon-worshipping cult with a sacrifice planned, and whose identity turns out to complicate everything. StoryGraph’s crowd rates the book 61% character-driven, the most character-forward title in this batch by a wide margin, against 7% plot.
What Makes This Dark Sapphic Knight Novella Work
- Grief is the engine, not the backdrop: four or more readers name it, and it is the recurring word. Martis comes home to watch her dragon father die, and the romance is built out of that rather than placed beside it.
- Density per page: three readers name it. One puts it best — Gray has worked out exactly how much story goes into seventy pages.
- The prose: three readers single it out, one calling it beautifully written, magical and hot in the same breath.
- Heat that carries emotional weight: the most useful single observation anyone made — solid heat, but not all about the parts. The explicit content is doing character work.
- A world with no men in it, unremarked: the all-women and nonbinary Land of Maidens is built rather than announced, and reviewers notice.
Book Synopsis
Martis has not been home in a long time. Home is the Gorsedd mountains, where a dragon called Thouros raised a half-human daughter and a witch raised a half-dragon one, and where both of those arrangements ended badly. She left as something feral and came back as a knight of the Land of Maidens, which is a distinction the mountains do not particularly recognise.
She is here because Thouros is dying. Dragons do not die quickly and they do not die quietly, and a daughter who has spent years not thinking about her father now has to sit with the process. The court gave her a name and an order and a reason to be somewhere else; none of that is any use up here.
Then there is a cult. They worship dragons in the way that ends with someone on an altar, and the someone they have chosen is a sorceress named Amoret — who is not what the cult thinks she is, and not quite what Martis assumes either. A rescue is straightforward. What follows it, in a mountain hall with a dying dragon and two women who have both been made into instruments by people who loved them, is not.
My Review
This is the most efficient book on our dragon shelf. Eighteen thousand words is a lunch break, and Gray gets a grieving half-dragon knight, a rescued sorceress, an Arthurian court, a dying father and a complete romantic arc into it without any of them feeling sketched. Three readers name the density specifically, and one of them puts it exactly right — Gray has worked out how much story fits in seventy pages, which is a craft skill most novella writers never acquire.
The grief is what elevates it. Martis comes home to sit with a dying dragon who is also her father, and the book is honest about what that does to a person who was already made out of a bad night — she became a knight because a king caught her mid-rampage after her mother died, which means her entire adult identity is a container someone else built for her feelings. The romance grows out of that soil rather than beside it, and four separate readers reach for grief as the word for what the book is about. StoryGraph’s crowd rates it 70% emotional against 7% plot-driven, which is the right shape.
The one criticism with any recurrence is that readers wanted more — three of them, and it is the single most repeated reservation. That is a compliment wearing a complaint’s clothes, but it is also a real limitation: this is a story with enough material for a novel, delivered at a fifth of the length.
The more useful complaint is about the label. Gray bills this, in the book’s own copy, as an eighteen-thousand-word high-heat f/f fantasy romance novella. Readers confirm it is explicit and well-written — magical and hot, in one reader’s phrase — but three independently report it delivering less than “high heat” implies. One StoryGraph reviewer says there is a single intimate scene arriving around the seventy-percent mark and was disappointed by the positioning; that specific claim rests on one voice, so treat it as such. Two more readers, independently, wanted more kink than they got. Nobody calls the book unerotic; several call it less than the label promises, and the direction is consistent across three readers.
What makes that gap worse is a genuinely odd piece of infrastructure. romance.io has two duplicate entries for this book and neither carries a steam rating — not five empty flames, but no flame widget rendered at all. Meanwhile its own series-mate, Valerin the Fair, is rated 3 out of 5 on the same site. So a reader trying to verify a “high heat” claim on the genre’s main steam database will find nothing, on a book whose sibling has a rating. That is a discoverability failure rather than a craft one, but it is the kind a reader can check in five seconds.
Two readers find the prose too ornate, one saying she reread paragraphs to work out what was happening — which is the natural cost of the density everyone else praises. And the low-star tail on Goodreads has no visible review text at all, so their reasoning is simply unknown and I am not going to invent it.
My honest note: A small, dark, beautifully made thing that ends before you want it to. Buy it for the grief and the knight; go in expecting one explicit scene rather than a high-heat novella, and you will not be disappointed by anything.
| Element | In Martis the Brazen |
|---|---|
| Central relationship | Martis & Amoret — a half-dragon knight and a sorceress rescued from a dragon-worshipping cult |
| Core tropes | Half-dragon heroine, butch knight, rescue, grief and hurt/comfort, Arthurian retelling, shapeshifting |
| Setting | The Land of Maidens under King Theomacha — an all-women and nonbinary Arthurian realm — and the Gorsedd mountains |
| Heat level | 4/5 — explicit, but author-billed; romance.io carries no steam rating on either of its two entries |
| Series | Out of True book 2 of 4 — reads standalone; originally itch.io-exclusive in 2023, on Amazon since August 2025 |
| Content notes | Death of a parent as graphic; grief, injury and sexual content as moderate; attempted human sacrifice, a cult, hurt/comfort and shifted sex per the author |
How Dark and Spicy Is Martis the Brazen?
Call it a 4/5, and know exactly where that comes from, because it does not come from the usual place. Gray’s own copy describes an eighteen-thousand-word high-heat f/f fantasy romance novella, and readers confirm the content is explicit and well written. But romance.io — the site this review normally quotes for heat — has two duplicate entries for the book and neither renders a steam widget at all, while Valerin the Fair, the previous book in the same series, is rated 3 out of 5 on that same site. So the heat claim here is entirely author-side, and the crowd has not weighed in.
The readers who have weighed in split the difference. Three of them, independently, report it delivering less than the label implies — one on scene count and placement, two wanting more kink than they got. Set against that, two readers praise the heat specifically for carrying emotional weight rather than existing on its own, which is the more interesting compliment. On darkness: the author files it as dark, StoryGraph’s crowd rates death of a parent as graphic, and there is an attempted human sacrifice in it. If you want verified top-band heat instead, Dragon Queens and Of Dreams and Poison both carry actual romance.io ratings at 5/5.
Who Should Read This Book?
You’ll likely love it if: you want a butch half-dragon knight, you read for grief and atmosphere more than for plot, you like dense prose, and an evening is the commitment you have.
You may want to skip it if: you were buying on the “high heat” billing and want frequency, ornate prose slows you down, you want a full-length novel, or you need a book with enough readers behind it to trust the rating.
In short: an unusually well-made novella that under-delivers on exactly one of its own promises.
What Readers Are Actually Saying (August 2026)
The interesting thing about the discourse here is that it exists for the author and not for the book. A Reddit search for Martis the Brazen returns nothing at all. A search for Rien Gray returns around eleven threads — including the r/wlwbooks top romance recommendations of 2025, a heavily upvoted r/RomanceBooks thread about childfree romances, a trans-rights readathon roundup, and one post about this very series being free on itch.io, which is the only thread that touches these books at all. Reddit knows Gray, mostly through the contemporary Fatal Fidelity novels. It does not know Martis. There is no TikTok footprint, no trade coverage of any kind, and nothing from The Lesbrary, The Lesbian Review, LezReviewBooks or Lambda Literary. The one substantive outside review is at Smut Report, which highlights the identity-and-loss material and the dragon mythology. A second review exists on a now-defunct blogging platform and we could not reach it, so we are not citing it.
Why readers love it (according to the discourse): Grief, first and by a clear margin — four or more readers name it, and it is the recurring word for what the book is doing. Then density: three readers admire how much fits into seventy pages. Then the prose itself, named by three, one of whom simply says nobody does it like Rien Gray. And the sharpest compliment anyone paid it — that the heat is solid but not all about the parts, meaning the explicit content is emotionally load-bearing rather than decorative. StoryGraph’s crowd rates the book 100% adventurous, 70% emotional, 83% loveable and 80% diverse, on 43 reviews.
What readers argue about and complain about: Not much, and the sample is too small for confident conclusions — sixty Goodreads ratings, eighteen written reviews and two Amazon ratings with no written text at all. The single most repeated reservation is that readers wanted more length: three of them, one noting that eighteen thousand words leaves the reader wanting, another that she loved it but wished for more story. Second, and more actionable: three independent readers report the “high heat” billing over-promising, one on the single scene’s placement around the seventy-percent mark and two on wanting more kink. Third, two readers find the prose too flowery, one saying she reread paragraphs to follow what was happening — the exact inverse of the density everyone else praises. Beyond that there is a small tail of low ratings on Goodreads and StoryGraph with no review text attached, so their reasoning is genuinely unknown and we are not guessing at it.
The series question everyone should ask first: it resolves. The romance lands, readers describe a sweet and satisfying release at the end, and Gray states in the book’s own copy that it reads as either a standalone or a sequel. So you can start here. The series ladder is worth having, though, because it tells a story of its own: Valerin the Fair sits at 3.91 across 131 ratings, this book at 4.32 across 60, Seure the Tempered at 4.53 across 45, and the newest, Galeas the Keen, at 4.73 across 11. The rating rises as the sample shrinks, which is what happens when a series is read increasingly by people who already like it — so take the later numbers with that in mind. If you want a next step, Seure the Tempered has the best rating-to-sample ratio after this one. Do not start a romance-first reader on Valerin, which is the chronological predecessor and also the lowest-rated book in the series. Gray has signalled a further instalment following a blind butch knight, with no title or date confirmed.
There is no audiobook in any format, and no Rien Gray title on Libro.fm at all. The book is not in Kindle Unlimited; it is available to buy (check today’s price on Amazon), and the first three books in the series are also sold as a bundle.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I read Martis the Brazen as a standalone?
Yes. Gray says so in the book’s own copy — it reads as either a standalone or a sequel to Valerin the Fair. It resolves, with a satisfying romantic ending and no cliffhanger.
How spicy is Martis the Brazen?
Explicit, but less frequent than the billing implies. Gray describes it as a high-heat novella, and readers confirm the content is graphic and well written — but three independently report it delivering less than that label suggests. romance.io has two entries for the book and neither carries a steam rating at all.
How long is Martis the Brazen?
About 18,000 words — the author’s own figure, and the only stable one, since page counts vary from 71 to 93 across retailers. Expect an evening.
Is it on Kindle Unlimited?
No. It is available to buy, with the first three books in the series also sold as a bundle — check today’s price on Amazon.
Is there an audiobook?
No. There is no audiobook in any format, and no Rien Gray title on Libro.fm at all.
Which book in the series should I read next?
Seure the Tempered, at 4.53 across 45 Goodreads ratings — the best rating-to-sample ratio in the series after this one. Avoid starting with Valerin the Fair, the chronological predecessor, which is the lowest-rated book in the series at 3.91.
If You Loved Martis the Brazen, Read These Next
If it was the knight-and-dragon shape you wanted at similar length, The Bloodless Princes is the closest sibling on our shelf, with a lonely dragon and a knight in roughly the same page count. If the grief and the half-human inheritance are what landed, The Blood-Born Dragon runs a bond the heroine never asked for at a verified 4/5 heat. And if you want dense, serious sapphic fantasy in an evening, In the Vanishers’ Palace is the most demanding novella in the category.
For more in this register, browse our guide to dragon sapphic romantasy or the full Book Reviews collection.
The Bottom Line
Martis the Brazen is the best-made small thing on this list. Gray packs a dying dragon, a grieving daughter, a cult, a rescue and a complete romantic arc into eighteen thousand words without any of it feeling rushed, and the grief at its centre — a woman whose entire adult identity was built around her by someone who caught her at her worst — gives the romance a foundation most novellas cannot afford. The reservations are two: readers want more of it, which is the good kind of complaint, and three of them report that the “high heat” billing promises more than one late scene delivers, which is the actionable kind. Sixty ratings is too small a sample to be certain of anything, but everything visible points the same way. Read it in an evening and expect to want the rest of the series. Check Martis the Brazen on Amazon →
The Eikna Overall Ranking
On the Eikna scale, Martis the Brazen ranks as a superbly compressed dark sapphic knight novella — atmospheric, grief-driven and unusually well written for its length, held back by a heat claim it does not fully meet and a readership too small to confirm anything, and best approached for the mourning rather than for the spice.
The Evidence Scorecard
Overall ★★★★☆ 3.9/5
- ✓ 4.32 Goodreads average, but only 60 ratings
- ✓ 61% character-driven — the most in this batch
- ✓ Itch.io exclusivity capped its readership for years
- ✓ Three readers say the heat billing over-promises
Romance ★★★★☆ 4/5
- ✓ Built out of grief rather than beside it
- ✓ Rescue premise avoids the obvious shape
- ✓ Lands a satisfying resolution in 18,000 words
- ✓ Three readers wanted more of it
Characters ★★★★☆ 4.1/5
- ✓ Martis’s knighthood is a container for grief
- ✓ Amoret’s identity complicates cleanly
- ✓ 83% call the cast loveable
- ✓ Amoret gets less room than Martis
Writing ★★★★☆ 4/5
- ✓ Three readers name the prose specifically
- ✓ Density-per-page is the standout craft
- ✓ All-women world built rather than announced
- ✓ Two readers find it too ornate to follow
Emotional Impact ★★★★☆ 4.3/5
- ✓ Grief is the recurring word across four readers
- ✓ Emotional at 70% on StoryGraph
- ✓ A dying dragon father is genuinely affecting
- ✓ The sample is too small to generalise from
Heat Level ★★★★☆ 4/5
- ✓ Explicit and well written by reader account
- ✓ Author bills it high heat outright
- ✓ Readers say the spice carries emotional weight
- ✓ Two romance.io entries, neither with a steam rating
Ending ★★★★☆ 4/5
- ✓ Resolves with an earned romantic landing
- ✓ Reads standalone by the author’s own note
- ✓ No cliffhanger reported
- ✓ Arrives sooner than readers want
Re-read Value ★★★★☆ 3.7/5
- ✓ An evening makes revisiting trivial
- ✓ Prose rewards a slower second pass
- ✓ Series continues across four books
- ✓ No audiobook, and not in Kindle Unlimited
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