The Everlasting is Alix Harrow’s novel weaving myth, legend, time travel, destiny, and yes, a love story.
Owen Mallory is an academic, a scholar in the country of Dominion. He has survived the last war and is now studying the national myth of his country. He is drawn, however, into doing much more than reading and writing about the myth. He winds up becoming part of that very myth cycle.¹
Una Everlasting IS that myth, the national myth of Dominion. Everyone knows her story, the Perfect Knight, who fought treachery, dragons, enemies within and without and found the Grail to heal a dying Queen.Everyone knows her story. But the ending of her story can change. Details in her story can change. Indeed the very fabric of her story can change. If someone plucks at the tapestry of her story long enough…
Owen’s story, and Una’s story, is the story of Alix Harrow’s The Everlasting.
“History became legend. Legend became Myth.”
That line is from the Peter Jackson film version of The Lord of the Rings, the Fellowship of the Ring, and it is Galadriel who is telling us about the story of the Battle against Sauron and the ring. She’s talking about how facts on the ground can be changed by time and the loss of memory. And The Everlasting is all about that, and how that myth can be molded, changed, fought and defied. Owen meets Vivian, who runs Dominion and is tasked with going back in time to actually meet Una, and *changing* the last myth. Why this is the case only becomes clear after the first iteration. Owen does meet Una, who is a very human and prickly person (see that quote above) and slowly comes to a warming relationship with her. And he manages to change and alter the manner of her death and ending by his actions. As a result, the myth changes, the history changes, and we go through the cycle more times, with Dominion changing each time.² Eventually, aware now of what Vivian is doing, both Owen and Una decide to try and break the cycle entirely.
Harrow makes things more complicated and ornate than that bare bones outline. Just when the engine of the novel seems to be running smoothly, she pulls the rug out. And then the characters themselves try and break the pattern in a different way. The revelation of the truly tangled skein of the history and stories of the novel is like the peeling back of the layers of an onion, and expertly done.
We get a lot of social commentary, thanks to this cycle that Owen and Una are caught in and try to break, about national myths and national ideals and the ultimate uses of such. It’s not a very pleasant revelation and unveiling. Harrow seems to be suggesting that stories such as Una’s can, in the wrong hands, be used as a rallying point for a nation, certainly, but they can also be used for nationalism, xenophobia, and, yes, fascism. In the hands of someone ambitious like Vivian, those darker uses of the myth are inevitable. Mythology can be a tool, a dark tool to shape hearts, minds, and a country.
And then there is the love story, on the other hand. Owen and Una (and especially Una’s horse) do not get along well at all on the first go-through. There is more than a bit of deprogramming for Owen, not only raised on the Una myth but making it his subject of study, to go from Una as a mythic larger than life figure to a person with needs, desires, feelings and humanity. Once Owen does so, and starts to open up to Una as a person, and Una opens up to him, their shared experiences help bond them together, and the romance is a slow but inexorable burn from there, especially as we jump from life to life. It’s a romance that is destined to be a tragedy, and it will absolutely rip your heart out. The personal costs of their liaison, as they ultimately face what Vivian is doing and is prepared to do, are high. In the afterward, Harrow says that “this is a book about love: defiant love, endurant love, love born in a bad world and determined to build a better one.” I think that the novel succeeds in her aspirations, here.
The novel (or novels, in the US) that really ties and acts as a counterpart for Harrow’s work is The Book of Ash by Mary Gentle (aka Ash: A Secret History). This is a massive single book that focuses on a framing device of a modern-day researcher studying and investigating a 15th century female mercenary captain, and the actual story of that mercenary captain. It emerges that the interior history is very different than ours, with Arian Christianity, a rampant Visigothic Carthage, and more. The story slowly reveals that entities in the 15th century are attempting to alter history, and this spills out into the archaeological and historical record that the researcher is trying to uncover and discover. Reality has warped, and warps throughout the narrative; there is a bit of an observer effect going on. Harrow’s book is more mythic in scope; Ash’s is more gritty and shows off Gentle’s degree and interest in 15th century military history. Harrow fits her story into a single lean 320 pages, whereas Ash is an epic at 1120 pages.
I think, though, The Everlasting is a much more personal and character-focused story in the end, and is a novel that fits the current moment in reading a little better than Gentle’s masterpiece. Ash brought me into the world of her titular character and the odd pseudo-alternate history that it portrays. The Everlasting on the other hand dunked me into the story of Owen and of Una and made me care, to their tragedy and triumphs, highs and lows, in a much more visceral and personal fashion. And along the way to that, we get criticism and a commentary on how myths and legends become what they are. Myths and legends come out of a deep place, a place of strong emotion, of love, of desire, of defiance. Myths are not generally sweet and gentle. They are taproot stories and to work with them and to create them is to try and capture lightning in a bottle. That’s what Harrow reaches for, here, and for the most part in my opinion, succeeds.
Harrow, Alix, The Everlasting, 2025 Tor Books
¹ Myths and the nature of myths are important in Harrow’s story. As she points out in the afterwards, the story of a Knight is often that of a lone Hero, with all of the supportive work that supports a knight is done offscreen. The myth is one of rugged individualism that is belied by how much support a knight actually needs, or else just how threadbare their lives really are without that. See also the hedge knights in George R.R. Martin’s Westeros.
² Less of a criticism than a note here: Although Dominion and the world around him changes again and again through the iterations, Owen’s history doesn’t. It always remains the same. He is always a veteran of a war with a tragic event in the war, his father is always a rebel, he is always an academic. It’s probably not realistic from an alternate history point of view, but this is a story interested in legend and myth, not being a “hard” alternate history.
