The Everlasting

Published in 2025, Alix E. Harrow’s The Everlasting is a metafictional fantasy novel that deconstructs the legends of heroism and the creation of national myths. The story follows Owen Mallory, a historian and traumatized war veteran in a near-future version of a nation called Dominion. When Owen receives a mysterious, supposedly nonexistent manuscript detailing the life of the legendary knight Sir Una Everlasting, he is drawn into a time-traveling conspiracy orchestrated by a powerful political leader. Trapped in a repeating cycle centuries in the past, Owen is forced to write and rewrite Una’s tragic story, confronting the brutal reality behind the hero he has always worshipped. The novel explores themes of The Power and Peril of Narrative Construction, Personal Liberation Versus Imposed Destiny, and The Personal Cost of Heroic Myths.

Alix E. Harrow is an acclaimed American author known for her lyrical and critically lauded fantasy novels. Her work, including the Hugo Award-nominated The Ten Thousand Doors of January and the British Fantasy Award-winning The Once and Future Witches, often blends history, folklore, and social commentary, focusing on how marginalized people reclaim power through storytelling. The Everlasting continues this tradition, using the conventions of revisionist fantasy to question the relationship between history, myth, and propaganda. By placing its characters within a repeating time loop, the novel invites readers to consider how foundational stories are crafted, manipulated, and weaponized to serve the powerful.

This guide is based on the 2025 Tor Publishing Group edition.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide feature depictions of graphic violence, illness or death, child death, suicidal ideation, death by suicide, pregnancy loss or termination, substance use, cursing, emotional abuse, animal death, and sexual content.

Plot Summary

An anonymous narrator introduces the legend of Sir Una Everlasting, a child found by a woodcutter beneath a yew tree. After the Brigand Prince kills her father, the 12-year-old Una draws the sword Valiance from the tree, kills the prince, and rescues a captive king’s daughter. This woman, who becomes Queen Yvanne, knights Una as her champion. The narrator, claiming to be Una’s companion, promises to tell the true story of her legend’s end. The text is identified as a translation by Owen Mallory, a junior faculty member at Cantford College. In the present, several years after a major war, Owen receives the supposedly nonexistent manuscript of The Death of Una Everlasting and begins to translate it

Owen recounts the three times Una’s legend has “saved” his life. At age nine, ashamed of his pacifist father’s reputation as a coward, he runs away to a grove, the last remnant of the ancient Queen’s Wood. He finds a children’s book about Una, and her heroism inspires him to return home. At 23, feeling alienated as a student exempt from the draft, he sees a recruitment poster of Una and enlists. At 26, serving as a brilliant but traumatized marksman, he attempts to desert. His commanding officer, Colonel Drayton, slits his throat, but Owen survives after having a fever dream of Una calling to him. He is awarded the Everlasting Medal of Valor under false pretenses. After the war, he returns to Cantford to study the Everlasting Cycle under his skeptical professor, Gilda Sawbridge.

One day, the book is stolen from Owen’s flat, and a card bearing the address of the capitol is left behind. There, he encounters his father at a protest against the Minister of War, Vivian Rolfe. Owen is then escorted to a meeting with Vivian, who reveals she found the book in a vault at Cavallon Keep. She asks him to translate it to remind the nation of its heroic past, but when Owen opens it, the pages are blank. Vivian stabs his hand with a letter opener, pinning it to the book and transporting him through time. He awakens in a winter forest centuries in the past, where he is confronted by the real, world-weary Una Everlasting. He faints and wakes in a ruined cottage. Una is suspicious, but Owen convinces her he is from the future by deducing that she has abandoned her quest for the grail. He begs her to complete it, explaining how her legend will inspire future generations.

Owen begins writing the book as he lives it, creating a heroic narrative of Una’s past. Realizing Una is avoiding sleep, he tends the fire one night, allowing her to rest. She has a prophetic dream, prompted by his voice, telling her to find the last dragon at Cloven Hill. Believing this is her final quest, Una agrees to go, and Owen accompanies her on her horse, Hen. During their journey, Owen has a panic attack, and Una comforts him. She has nightmares and grabs his throat in her sleep, not allowing him to comfort her in return.

Una and Owen travel through towns where the people fear her. Owen collects local stories, and by correcting them, Una reveals her true history, though she refuses to speak of her victory at the Black Bastion. In a hostile village, a man attacks Una. She nearly kills him but is stopped by Owen’s shout, only severing the man’s hand. That night, she reveals her guilt over her violent past. They arrive at Cloven Hill, where Una insists on facing the dragon alone. She returns with the grail, emotionally devastated by the death of the beautiful creature.

On the journey to Cavallon Keep, Una confesses she experienced suicidal ideation before Owen appeared, and he confesses he was a deserter. At the gates, Owen knows a Hinterlander ambush awaits. He shouts a warning and uses his service revolver to kill the archers, saving Una. They enter the throne room, where Queen Yvanne appears deathly ill. After Yvanne drinks from the grail and seems miraculously healed, her knight, Ancel the Good, stabs Una from her blind side. Mortally wounded, Una kills Ancel in a duel before collapsing into Owen’s arms. She dies, telling him to wait for her. Owen looks up and realizes Queen Yvanne is Vivian Rolfe. Vivian explains that she is rewriting history to create a stronger Dominion, which requires the tragedy of a sacrificed hero. Feeling he has no choice, Owen completes the book, framing Una as a martyr and Ancel as a traitor. Vivian then sends him back to his own time, where he will forget.

The narrative resets, but this time from Una’s first-person perspective. Owen receives the book, now filled with his own writing, and has flashes of memory before Vivian sends him back. Una is in the woods, experiencing suicidal ideation over the atrocities she committed for Yvanne, especially burning the besieged Black Bastion, which was filled with civilians. Owen appears, and their journey unfolds through her eyes. At Cavallon, Owen warns her of the trap. In the throne room, he takes the fatal blow from Ancel meant for her. Una kills Ancel but is then killed by other guards. As she dies, she remembers the time loop and tells Owen to wait for her.

Owen confronts Vivian, who admits to running the loop multiple times to perfect the story. Her new plan involves a prophecy about the stolen crown and grail to justify restoring the monarchy in her own time. Owen refuses to write the new ending and is tortured with cold until he complies, but he embeds a coded message in the text for his future self.

The loop resets. Owen, with more memories, deciphers his code and remembers everything. He learns that his father is imprisoned and discovers his own origin: He is the son of a Roving Folk woman killed by his father’s unit during a past war. His father rescued him and raised him as his own. Owen confronts Vivian at the ruins of Cavallon Keep. This time, she reveals that she has played the role of Queen Yvanne throughout her entire life, while also controlling Una and Owen to use them as tools as she maintains control of Dominion. Owen is sent back one last time.

Now both remembering their past lives, Owen and Una escape through time. They live as fugitives for nine years, during which they become lovers and have two children, a son and a daughter. They discover Valiance, her sword, is a modern replica planted by Vivian. Prioritizing her family’s safety, Una refuses to fight raiders who threaten a nearby farm, symbolically ending her life as a hero. Eventually, Vivian finds them. Owen burns the book, but Vivian reveals that the yew tree itself is the source of the time travel magic. She threatens their children to force compliance. Una kills Vivian’s men but is shot and killed by Vivian. Vivian then takes their children hostage to force Owen’s compliance. At the yew tree, Vivian reveals that she is Una’s mother, born from a ritual involving a dragon’s heart seed, and takes Owen hostage with a knife. To break the cycle, Owen dies by suicide, pressing his head into Vivian’s knife.

With Owen dead, Una is finally free and kills Vivian. Realizing she can use the same magic to bring Owen back, she buries him and plants the dragon’s heart seed in his chest. She waits for centuries as a new yew tree grows from his grave, becoming a local legend known as the Green Knight. One day, Owen is reborn from the yew, and they are reunited. The woods become a refuge for outcasts from all eras, including a redeemed Ancel and Una’s fathers. Their children, Marro and Thea, are reborn to them. Owen writes their true story, The Life of Una Everlasting, and sends the manuscript to Gilda Sawbridge in the future. A final telegram confirms that Gilda and Owen’s father will visit them through the yew.