Fearless

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death.

Fearless is the third and final installment in Lauren Roberts’s young adult romantasy series The Powerless Trilogy. The novel is preceded by Powerless (2023) and Reckless (2024) and continues the story of the main characters, Paedyn Gray and Kai Azer. The trilogy first rose to popularity on “BookTok” on TikTok, where Roberts gained a following for her initially self-published version of Powerless. Simon & Schuster has since purchased the rights to the trilogy and reissued all three titles.

In Powerless, Roberts introduces the fantastical world of Ilya. In this fictional realm, a widespread disease (referred to as the Plague) has imbued some citizens with magical powers but not others. The surviving magical citizens are referred to as the Elites, while the surviving powerless citizens are known as the Ordinaries.

Convinced that the Ordinaries will infect and destroy the Elites, the Elite ruling class and the royal family have segregated Ilya. Paedyn is an Ordinary, but her father, Adam Gray, has raised her to be observant, a skill that she’s honed so well that she can pose as a Psychic (an Elite with mind-reading powers).

Paedyn gets caught up in a battle with other Elites and meets Kai (one of King Edric Azer’s sons). Kai is an Enforcer and has been raised to hunt down and kill Ordinaries (because Edric publicly blames the Ordinaries for the Plague, he orchestrates a campaign to kill them all).

Via a series of unexpected events, Kai and Paedyn compete in the Purging Trials together. These Trials pit Elites against Ordinaries to highlight Elites’ power and destroy innocent Ordinaries. During the Trials, Paedyn and Kai help each other and survive. Afterward, Paedyn encounters Edric; he tries to kill her, but she kills him. Kai’s older half-brother, Kitt Azer, assumes the throne.

In Reckless, Kitt, as the new king, sends Kai (now his right-hand assassin and Enforcer) on a mission to find and kill Paedyn. Kai finds Paedyn, and the two renew their initial bond. While in Dor (a neighboring city that is home to only Ordinaries), the two develop an intimate relationship.

One day, they then run into Paedyn’s friends, who try to rescue her from Kai because they fear that he will hurt her. Shortly thereafter, Paedyn and Kai are apprehended and jailed in Dor by a man who ran the fighting pits where Paedyn once worked. They eventually escape and decide to return to Ilya together as a formal couple. However, almost as soon as they arrive, Kitt announces that he is going to marry Paedyn to unite the Ordinaries and Elites.

Fearless picks up where Reckless leaves off. This final installment in the trilogy resolves the lingering conflicts from the series’ first two novels and introduces new narrative revelations. While Powerless is largely devoted to world building, Reckless and Fearless develop the primary characters’ relationships and flesh out the social commentaries affected by the fantastical Ilya universe.

The Powerless Trilogy is in conversation with other romantasy titles including Penn Cole’s Spark of the Everflame, Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, and Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses.