Aretia
A spoiler-free guide to Fourth Wing, Iron Flame & Onyx Storm (The Empyrean).
Only showing what’s been revealed up to your current progress. Future events, identities, and relationships are hidden.
Overview
Aretia is Tyrrendor’s former capital, known in Navarre as the city burned to the ground after the rebellion. Navarre’s own strategic map marks its location with a scorch mark instead of a living city.
Aretia survives as a rebuilt settlement of cinder and ruins around its fortress, with a quiet town below and enough concealment to avoid official attention. Xaden brings Violet there for treatment after Resson, revealing that the city is neither abandoned nor only a memory.
Aretia functions openly as the revolution's base despite Navarre's public record that it was burned after the separatist movement. Violet sees the rebuilt city operating from Riorson House and understands that it has quietly existed for years under General Melgren's nose.
After the Basgiath departure, Aretia operates as a relocated school and military base, with cadets housed, fed, and taught in crowded rooms while the valley shelters more than two hundred restless dragons.
The rebuilt city expands into a wartime school, sanctuary, forge site, and dragon hatching ground. Families arrive in small groups under sanctuary offers, while riders and fliers die trying to protect the valley's strategic secret.
Important Events
The Battle of Aretia and Navarre’s Reunification Day fall on July first. The royal proclamation and Treaty of Aretia connect the city to the defeat of the rebellion, the deaths celebrated by Navarre, and the formal punishment and conscription of the executed officers’ 107 children.
After the Basgiath split, the defecting riot flies to Aretia. The arrival of one hundred one riders, around two hundred dragons, professors, and scribes turns the hidden base into an openly burdened center of resistance.
Violet’s first attempt to raise Aretia’s wards fails. The failed ritual leaves the city without functioning wards, without a completed forge, with few experienced riders, and still dependent on acquiring a luminary.
When a wyvern horde flies from Pavis toward Aretia’s cliffs, riders and fliers rush from Riorson House toward the flight field while Violet’s group raises the wardstone before the enemy reaches the city. The wards save Aretia from immediate attack, though their flawed nature quickly becomes visible.
A night wyvern assault in bad weather brings enemy forces closer to Aretia than they have reached before. The city mobilizes through mage-lighted streets, crowded courtyards, infantry posts, dragons, and gryphons, and the wards rise in time to keep the enemy from carrying proof that Aretia’s hatching ground can be reached.
After Theophanie’s demand at Draithus, Aretia’s Assembly chamber becomes the immediate war-planning room. Its wards shelter the leaders and cadets while the rescue and Draithus operation depart from the protected city.
After Draithus, Violet reappears in the courtyard of Riorson House after twelve missing hours while celebration continues inside. The reports about dead riders, murdered dragons, missing riders, and missing eggs return the aftermath to Aretia’s command sphere.
Location and Access
Aretia is not truly hidden, but it does not advertise its existence. Its small rebuilt settlement, relic-based protection from Melgren's sight, and limited scribe attention help keep it unnoticed.
Aretia lies outside Navarre’s protective wards because the shield from the Vale falls short of the official mountainous borders and leaves the southwestern coastline of Tyrrendor exposed. That location makes the city vulnerable to venin and wyvern once those threats are understood.
The flight from Aretia to Basgiath takes nearly eighteen straight hours for Tairn, making the city distant enough that travel between the rebel base and the college is costly even for a powerful dragon.
Aretia remains a life-or-death secret after Violet tells her friends most of the truth. She keeps back how and where she woke after Resson because revealing it would risk every life in the city.
Aretia's materials and instruction begin feeding Basgiath's wartime curriculum when cadets are assigned two-week rotations there for rune intensives.
The route from Basgiath to Aretia includes an overnight camp inside the Tyrrish border before the squad enters the lone protection of Aretia's wards and lands in the high valley above the city.
Layout and Features
The rebuilt city includes Riorson House above a smaller town with identical green roofs, charred tree lines, scorched stone, and the recognizable Temple of Amari. The landscape still carries the physical marks of the burning.
Aretia has a dormant wardstone. Brennan believes it is useless because the knowledge for making new wards has been lost, but its presence gives Violet a concrete target for ward research.
The delivered luminary is installed in an offshoot of the valley above the city, where the new forge is located. A hatchling’s emergence changes the valley back into a hatching ground, making the site strategically sensitive enough that nearby wyvern patrols are alarming.
Dunne’s temple outside Aretia becomes a significant landmark in the city’s defense. Violet later recognizes that the marble weapon used against Theophanie appears to have come from the fractured temple she defended there.
Function and Rules
Aretia needs a working forge to smelt alloy into more weapons. Dragonfire can heat the crucible, but the city needs a luminary to intensify that fire enough for alloy smelting.
After the deal with Tecarus, the luminary is delivered to an offshoot of the valley above Aretia where the new forge is located.
After the break from Basgiath, Aretia houses cadets, professors, scribes, dragons, and fliers in an improvised school and military base. Integration between riders and fliers is tense, so instructors force mixed classes and prepare each rider squad to absorb a flier drift.
Aretia’s first raised wards protect the city but prove flawed, since Syrena can still wield under them and Lilith warns they will fail unless Violet finds what Warrick falsified or omitted. By the aftermath of Basgiath’s restored wards, Aretia’s wards are already weaker and declining.
Arinmint is illegal to take outside Aretia. Violet uses that restriction during her antidote bluff in Hedotis, treating the law as known enough to support her claim about poisoned tea.
Leothan fires Aretia’s wardstone as an irid of the seventh breed, making the city safe under raised wards. The new protection allows celebration in the city, but it also leaves Brennan responsible for housing and feeding thousands of refugees while the forge and wounded demand attention.
Residents and Affiliations
Aretia is tied to the Riorson family rebellion. Xaden remembers the night his father left Aretia to declare secession as the beginning of his long sleeplessness.
Xaden is technically Duke of Aretia by birth, while the Treaty of Aretia formally curtailed Riorson political authority in Tyrrendor after the rebellion.
The city takes in the breakaway cadets, hundreds of dragons, scribes, professors, and families arriving under sanctuary offers. That population growth strains a city with limited defenses, incomplete infrastructure, and a secret that active riders and fliers die trying to protect.
Aretia’s authority is politically unresolved after Basgiath’s battle: Brennan represents it openly, Lewellen does so secretly, and Xaden is expected to speak for it even though he says the Assembly runs the city. A formal accord with Navarre provides full pardons for those who flew for Aretia once the scribes finish drafting it.
Aretia also serves as a refuge for Maren’s surviving brothers. Rhiannon’s family takes them in there, moving the boys away from Basgiath.
When the raised wards stabilize the city, Aretia supports outdoor rune classes, dragon landings, Riorson House command work, and ongoing wartime administration. With most officers and Assembly members stationed at outposts, Brennan runs the place when Xaden is away.