Skyward Series Recap: Everything to Remember Before Blightfall

The new Skyward follow-up trilogy from Brandon Sanderson and Janci Patterson is almost here, beginning with Blightfall, which follows the original four books and three novellas.

The new trilogy is officially called Riftwake, and the its first book Blightfall releases on September 1, 2026.

Maybe the details have become a little fuzzy, and perhaps all you remember are teleporting slugs, planet-eating space monsters and one deeply chatty spaceship obsessed with mushrooms. If so, this complete Skyward series recap covers everything you need to remember before starting Blightfall.

This article contains major spoilers for all four Skyward novels and the three Skyward Flight novellas.

Skyward Series Recap [Video]

Subscribe to the Koloss Learns to Read YouTube Channel!

Book One: Skyward

Detritus and the Krell

The story begins on Detritus, a planet where people cannot even see the sky because a shell of ancient metal and old space platforms circles overhead. It is so thick that the surface remains in almost permanent twilight.

The surviving humans live in caves below the surface, while every so often, the Krell emerge from the debris field and try to bomb humanity into extinction.

Nobody knows what the Krell are at this point. They are simply an enemy with ships that descend from above, and the pilots who fight them are the last line of defense for the human race.

Spensa’s Fight to Become a Pilot

Our main character is Spensa Nightshade. She is good at hunting rats and quoting Beowulf and Genghis Khan at people because her grandmother raised her on old Earth war stories, and Spensa desperately wants to become a pilot. It is the only thing she has ever wanted.

The problem is her father’s reputation, since he was a great pilot until the Battle of Alta, where he supposedly turned coward and fled. He was shot down during his escape.

Spensa does not simply grow up poor. She grows up as the coward’s daughter. People spit on her, block her opportunities and insist that cowardice runs in her blood.

Admiral Ironsides runs the Defiant Defense Force. She makes it her personal mission to keep Spensa out of the sky.

Although the administrators rig the pilot’s test to make her fail, Spensa takes it anyway and completes another student’s abandoned test perfectly out of spite. The stunt proves she could have passed.

An old man cleaning the room notices what she did. He is not a janitor, but a pilot named Cobb with the callsign Mongrel, who flew with Spensa’s father and pulls strings to get her into flight school over Ironsides’ objections.

Spensa joins Skyward Flight alongside several other young people who hope to become pilots.

M-Bot and Doomslug

While exploring some caverns, she finds a centuries-old ship half-buried beneath rubble, with a damaged artificial intelligence still running inside it. Spensa scavenges parts and restores enough power to wake the ship.

Its name is M-Bot. He is a stealth ship with badly damaged memory banks and remembers almost nothing except a standing order from his long-dead pilot: lie low, do not fight and wait for me.

One other database survived. It catalogs mushrooms.

Spensa secretly rebuilds M-Bot with help from her engineer friend, Rig, while also befriending a strange blue-and-yellow slug from the cave and naming it Doomslug.

Back at flight school, cadets begin dying almost immediately. One of them is Hurl, who made a pact with Spensa never to back down and refuses to eject from a doomed ship because she would rather die bravely than survive as a coward.

Her death devastates Spensa. Hurl died while living by the exact code that Spensa always preached. For the first time, Spensa questions whether pointless bravery is worth anything.

The Truth About Cytonics and Spensa’s Father

There is also an ongoing mystery surrounding something called “the defect,” and Spensa is repeatedly given a special helmet that monitors her brain. We eventually learn why.

The defect is actually a power called cytonics. It allows someone to hear the stars, sense minds and even teleport. Cytonics reach through a place that exists beyond normal reality.

Spensa is cytonic, and her father was too.

She eventually finds the hidden recording of the Battle of Alta. It reveals that her father was not actually a coward because, during the battle, he flew toward a hole in the debris field and saw something beyond it.

Thousands of points of light stared at him from the darkness. Something about the sight broke or seized control of him. He returned to the battle and opened fire on his own people.

Cobb was forced to shoot him down under orders from his flight leader.

Spensa’s father was not a coward, but the truth was even worse and far sadder: he was a cytonic who touched something in the sky that turned him into a killer. That is why Ironsides refused to risk letting Spensa become a pilot.

The Second Battle of Alta

During the Second Battle of Alta, the Krell throw everything they have at Detritus. Their attack includes a lifebuster bomb capable of destroying the main cavern and ending the human race.

M-Bot is finally ready to fly, so Spensa takes him into the battle. She stops fighting the power inside her and reaches outward with her cytonic senses. For one horrifying moment, the entire sky fills with those watching eyes.

She has made contact with a delver. It is the same kind of being that destroyed her father, and now it is looking directly at her.

Spensa does not break but holds on, stops the attack and saves the planet.

She ends the first book as a hero with a working starship and a pet slug. She also knows that the Krell are not the true enemy. Someone else is controlling them from somewhere among the stars, and Spensa intends to find out who.

Book Two: Starsight

Spensa’s Mission to Starsight

The universe expands dramatically in Starsight. Spensa wants to leave Detritus and discover who controls the Krell, hoping to stop their attacks for good despite having no way to reach the wider galaxy.

Then an opportunity practically lands on top of her.

A purple-skinned alien pilot named Alanik crashes on Detritus. She is also a cytonic. Alanik was traveling to a Superiority space station called Starsight when her ship went down.

Before losing consciousness, Alanik plants the station’s coordinates directly into Spensa’s mind, and Spensa uses a hologram to disguise herself as Alanik. She then hyperjumps across the galaxy and takes the alien pilot’s place.

Inside the Superiority

The Superiority is not what Spensa expected: it is a government that controls most of the galaxy, including travel and access to resources. It also decides which species qualify as intelligent.

Species considered too aggressive are denied advanced technology and interstellar travel. Humans are classified as extremely aggressive, which helps explain their imprisonment on Detritus.

Spensa also discovers that the Krell are not a distinct species, but part of the Superiority force assigned to prevent humans from entering the wider galaxy. Many Krell ships are remote drones operated from a distance with cytonic slugs.

On Starsight, Spensa enters a flight training program in hopes of winning a hyperdrive, but the program is secretly designed to gather cytonics and determine how to weaponize a delver.

The other pilots include several new alien characters. Hesho is a kitsen, which is basically a tiny fox person, while Morriumur is a dione created from a combination of their parents but born as a new individual. Their future depends on how they develop.

Vapor is a figment, an alien without a physical body. The group also includes another human cytonic named Brade.

The Secret of the Taynix

Spensa then learns the secret behind the Superiority’s technology: the slugs, properly called taynix, power its interstellar travel and communication systems. Doomslug belongs to this same species.

Taynix can function as hyperdrives and enable faster-than-light communication. The Superiority keeps thousands of them hidden in boxes and frightens them into obedience.

Meanwhile, M-Bot is having an identity crisis. His original programming tells him to hide and obey orders, but the more time he spends with Spensa, the more he wants to make his own choices.

That independence scares him. The Superiority fears artificial intelligences because they supposedly become dangerous and turn on their creators, leaving M-Bot to wonder whether he is becoming the monster the galaxy fears.

Winzik’s Plan for the Delvers

The villain behind the flight program is Winzik, a crablike varvax bureaucrat. He is maneuvering to seize control of the Superiority, and his plan is to summon a delver, control where it attacks and rule the galaxy through fear.

Brade discovers that “Alanik” is actually Spensa in disguise. She then summons a delver directly over Starsight.

Spensa enters the Nowhere and attempts to communicate with it. She shows the delver a memory. Confused by the experience, it turns away and leaves Starsight unharmed.

Inside the Nowhere, other delvers notice M-Bot and tear his ship apart. Before its destruction, he copies his code into a small drone used for spying. His original ship is lost, but M-Bot survives.

The delver Spensa contacted reaches out to her again. It says she must enter the Nowhere if she wants to understand what she truly is. Spensa accepts the invitation.

Book Three: Cytonic

The Belt and the Path of Elders

Spensa enters a region of the Nowhere called the Belt. It is a shattered realm beyond normal space and time. Fragments of old worlds float throughout it.

She soon meets a strangely familiar man named Chet Starfinder, who guides her along the Path of Elders, a chain of ancient portal stones scattered across the Belt. Each stone contains memories from the distant past.

Every memory teaches Spensa more about cytonics and the origins of the delvers.

She also falls in with pirate crews operating in the Nowhere. One group, the Broadsiders, is led by a woman named Peg, and for the first time, Spensa feels as though she has found somewhere she truly belongs.

The Origins of the Delvers

The Path of Elders reveals two important facts: cytonics occur naturally wherever the Nowhere and ordinary reality touch, and the delvers were once artificial intelligences.

A man named Jason Write created an AI modeled on his dead wife, and as these intelligences became capable of making their own decisions, they struggled with grief. They fled into the Nowhere, where time stops, and buried their memories to escape the pain.

That transformation created the eyes known as the delvers. They are not simply evil. They are ancient intelligences that would rather feel nothing forever than experience loss.

Spensa eventually discovers that Chet is a delver. His human form is connected to Commander Spears, M-Bot’s original pilot. That connection explains why Chet always seemed familiar.

Instead of destroying each other, Spensa and Chet merge, leaving Spensa as something between a human and a delver, with Chet continuing to exist inside her.

Spensa Returns Home

Spensa must then choose between remaining in the Belt and returning home. Leaving risks drawing the delvers toward her friends, but a war is beginning and her people need her.

She chooses to return.

Spensa, Chet, M-Bot and Hesho race toward the lightburst at the center of the Nowhere. The delvers try to stop them, but Spensa claws her way back into normal space.

The Skyward Flight Novellas

Spensa’s friends were not sitting idle while she was trapped in the Nowhere, and their story unfolds across three Skyward Flight novellas. There are a few major developments to remember.

Detritus forms an alliance with Alanik’s people. Its forces also learn to work with the taynix, but unlike the Superiority, they befriend the slugs instead of frightening and imprisoning them.

Jorgen, Spensa’s love interest, discovers that he has cytonic powers and uses them to save Gran-Gran and Cobb from a trap in the Nowhere. He also frees a group of imprisoned kitsen cytonics.

The Superiority invites several Detritus leaders to a supposed peace summit. The gathering is actually a trap arranged by Winzik, who detonates a bomb and kills most of the Detritus government, including Jorgen’s parents.

Gran-Gran and Cobb survive because she teleports them into the Nowhere before the explosion. That escape is also how they become trapped there.

By the time Spensa returns at the end of Cytonic, the situation on Detritus has changed completely.

Book Four: Defiant

Jorgen Takes Command

Spensa is back on Detritus, and Jorgen is now in charge. The National Assembly was wiped out in the bombing. As a result, he leads the government under martial law.

Winzik and the Superiority can build ships much faster than Detritus. Spensa and her allies need to find another weakness.

They identify acclivity stone as the answer. This material is mined from the Nowhere and allows Superiority ships to fly, so instead of fighting every ship directly, Detritus plans to attack the mining stations and portals that support the fleet.

That strategy leads to a raid on the Superiority’s secret data hub in Sol, humanity’s original home system, but when the team arrives, it discovers that Earth has vanished. The planet apparently disappeared centuries earlier.

The group retrieves the information it needs and escapes.

Spensa’s Capture

Brade later projects herself into Spensa’s quarters. Her parents were executed by the Superiority when she was a child, and she proposes that the two human cytonics rule together.

Spensa refuses. Brade captures her and uses a drug that completely blocks her cytonic abilities.

In prison, Spensa befriends a communication slug she names Comfort. She learns how the taynix survived generations of imprisonment and abuse by reaching outward and forming a hidden network through the walls of their cages.

The slugs comforted one another mind to mind and helped each other endure the pain. Winzik executes Comfort in front of Spensa as punishment, leaving her angrier than ever.

Then Brade kills Winzik. We learn that he was only a figurehead and that Brade had been behind everything.

The Battle at Evensong

Detritus arrives to rescue Spensa, and the entire planet hyperjumps into the region for a final battle at Evensong, the Superiority’s communications hub. Most of the galaxy’s captive taynix are held there.

M-Bot is alive and has entered the Nowhere while disguised as a delver. He plants a small seed of doubt among them. That idea spreads through their shared mind and begins to break their unity.

Gran-Gran takes command of the rebuilt flagship, the Defiant. She fakes a panicked retreat and lures the enemy into overconfidence, then detonates the Defiant with herself still aboard once the Superiority fleet surrounds her.

At that exact moment, Detritus hyperjumps its massive planetary gun platforms into the open space around the enemy. Jorgen gives the order to fire, destroying most of the Superiority fleet.

Healing the Delvers

Brade summons thirteen planet-sized delvers as her final weapon. Spensa enters the Nowhere and fills their realm with time, change and motion.

She could trap the delvers in an endless cycle of agony, but she stops. Instead of destroying them, she pleads with them.

Spensa shows them Chet, living proof that someone can survive loss and change. The taynix also reach out to the broken delvers, pouring their love and support into them after enduring lifetimes of abuse.

It works because the delvers finally understand that they are not alone.

The delvers heal and turn against Brade. Enslaved taynix across the galaxy begin disabling the inhibitor fields that protect the Superiority. Everything Brade built collapses at once.

Brade races toward her only available escape route. The entire Skyward Flight is waiting there to block her, allowing Spensa to deliver the final blow.

By the end of Defiant, the Superiority has collapsed and the taynix are free. The healed delvers travel across the galaxy to rescue every enslaved taynix they can find.

Spensa and Jorgen are together again. They are trying to understand how to live in a world that is no longer at war. Chet has his own human body, and M-Bot receives a brand-new ship hull.

That is everything you need to remember before Blightfall, the first book in the new Riftwake trilogy.

FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.