48 pages • 1 hour read
J. C. CervantesThe Storm Runner
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 34-44Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 34 Summary
The figure darts into the trees, and Zane chases it to a clearing, where a rope leads down into a hole in the ground. He climbs down, finding a pool with flashing lights and a cave entrance. He enters the cave despite his terror.
Chapter 35 Summary
The Sparkstriker is in the cave. She gives Zane a metal cane that makes his limp disappear and will respond to his commands. Next, she instructs him to choose a lightning bolt from the pool so that she can hammer it into his leg and awaken his dormant powers. Zane protests because his leg is already weak, but the Sparkstriker tells him that his leg “is the most powerful part, […] not the weakest” (357-58).
Chapter 36 Summary
The hammering process sends Zane to the place where he first met his father. He is once again in jaguar form, and his power is revealed to be fire, which starts to cook him from the inside. Desperate, he runs for the water, but his father stops him, ordering him to release the power on his own. His father states, “If you take the easy way out now, you’ll never learn to control it” (365). Zane slashes a tree, which catches fire, and a huge wave rises to put it out. Zane rushes back to the cave, where the Sparkstriker informs him that Ah-Puch has arrived in the Old World.
Chapter 37 Summary
The Sparkstriker goes into a fit. When she comes out of it, she adds that all the gods have arrived. This means that Zane must hurry and kill Ah-Puch before they get to him first. One hit from Zane’s new cane should do the trick. When Zane asks the Sparkstriker why she is helping him, she answers, “I always try to choose the winning side” (370). The Sparkstriker summons one of her warriors, who is a shape-shifter and Brooks’s sister. When Brook’s sister flies Zane to Ah-Puch’s location, one of his minions attacks and wounds her while she is in bird form.
Chapter 38 Summary
Brook’s sister crash-lands in a clearing. Brooks arrives and is glad to see that both of them are mostly unharmed. Brooks returned to the ship; she has found the jade tooth and gives it to Zane just as Ah-Puch and an army of demon runners appear. Suddenly, Ixtab arrives with her own army, and as the gods battle, Zane feverishly tries to keep Ah-Puch alive so that he can kill the god himself. Meanwhile, Ixtab summons hounds of hell and grins at Zane, saying, “Traitors always pay the highest price” (381).
Chapter 39 Summary
One of the hounds is Zane’s dog. While Zane is distracted, Ah-Puch imprisons him in a cage of smoke. Ah-Puch sends Brooks and her sister flying away and then releases Zane, grabbing him and draining his energy. In a whirl of color, five figures appear, and Zane is shocked to realize that they are all Mayan gods.
Chapter 40 Summary
Zane is relieved until he remembers that the gods also want him dead. The gods announce their intention to kill Ah-Puch, but before they can do so, Hurakan steps forward, announcing that Zane is his son and officially claiming him. This act awakens Zane to his full powers, and he harnesses fire to bring Ah-Puch to the liminal place that his father created.
Chapter 41 Summary
Zane arrives in his jaguar form, and Ah-Puch takes the shape of a giant snake. Ah-Puch is impressed with Zane’s cleverness, but he knows that once Hurakan dies, this place will disappear, freeing Ah-Puch. The god offers Zane a trade suggesting that Zane join him in exchange for learning to use his powers rather than being killed by the other gods. Zane leads Ah-Puch to the edge of his father’s world, smothering him in fire before plunging both of them into an abyss. The last thing Zane sees is “a fire-eaten monster serpent spiraling into the vortex, hissing, ‘I’ll come for you’” (399).
Chapter 42 Summary
Chapter 43 Summary
Chapter 43 is a postscript continuation of Zane’s story, which is written on different paper so that the gods will not learn of its existence. The story alternates between the magic paper’s version of events, in which Zane is dead and will spend eternity in Xibalba, and the true events, in which he is alive and has conquered all of his enemies. Ixtab summons Zane’s dog, who, despite looking like a hell hound, is still the same loving pet he knows. Ixtab has been working with Zane’s father for weeks, putting all the elements in place to get Zane to the Old World so that Hurakan could awaken his son’s powers, thereby effecting Ah-Puch’s destruction. Now, Ixtab has created a safe place for Zane to live a normal life with his human family. However, he is forbidden from using his divine powers on pain of death. Zane doesn’t want to go back to being normal, but he agrees to this arrangement out of necessity.
Chapter 44 Summary
Chapter 44 is a post-postscript, in which Zane is brought to his new home—a luxury vacation home in Mexico. Ixtab has shrunk his magic cane, transforming it into a letter opener. She has also moved Zane’s volcano to a nearby location, putting an emergency portal to Xibalba inside. Zane asks why he would ever need a portal if the island is safe, and Ixtab says, “Nowhere is ever entirely safe for someone like you” (417).
Zane has a nice dinner with his family and neighbors, all of whom were moved to the island. Later, Brooks visits. Zane tells her everything, including his plan to break his father out of the gods’ prison. She agrees to help him. The novel ends with Zane putting a call out to other children of the gods, certain that he cannot be the only one.
Chapters 34-44 Analysis
The final section of the book wraps up the internal and external conflicts and sets up for the sequel in which Zane and Brooks will seek to free Zane’s father from prison. In addition to detailing the action-packed events of the final battle, the closing chapters represent the culmination of The Journey of Self-Discovery, for Zane is finally depicted as having come into his full powers, realizing his greater potential. Significantly, however, his innate fire-based powers are inherently difficult to control, and this aspect of his magical abilities foreshadows the dangerous and challenging road that he still has to travel. Even within these narrative innovations, Cervantes remains true to mythological origins, for the Sparkstriker (who is a reimagined version of the figure Saqik’oxol) has roots in the Mayan origin story of the Popol Vuh. She is the maker of lightning bolts, and Cervantes remains true to this image. In the novel, the Sparkstriker presents Zane with the same types of trials that classic heroes must undergo before reaching their full potential on the traditional Hero’s Journey. To unlock his powers, Zane undergoes great physical pain, but just as all heroes tend to do, he gains strength both figuratively and literally as his newest cane removes his limp. Zane also learns the truth about his leg in these chapters—specifically that it is the source of much of his power and is an attribute that he inherited from his father. In this way, Zane’s disability comes to represent the idea that perceived weaknesses can sometimes be transformed into great strengths. Ultimately, Zane is only able to access the godly power that runs through him when he embraces every aspect of his true self.
The final confrontation with Ah-Puch brings many plot elements full circle while showing how much Zane has grown since the beginning of the novel. Since learning the truth about his father, Zane has had mixed feelings about his increasingly dangerous predicament. Although Zane realizes that the gods would kill both him and his father if they knew the truth of his origins, Zane also feels as though his father should be willing to take this risk to help his child. Zane doesn’t yet realize that his father’s long silence is part of the greater plan that Ixtab outlines in the book’s final chapters; as a result, until the moment in which his father officially claims him, Zane remains conflicted about using his powers because they are a link to a parent he doesn’t respect or love. When his father claims him, this moment removes the last barrier preventing Zane from defeating Ah-Puch. When Zane accesses his powers and vanquishes the god by throwing him into the great abyss, this feat shows Zane’s quick reflexes, cleverness, and ingenuity.
The final three chapters foreshadow a new conflict for the sequel, but by incorporating two different versions of the ending, Cervantes pays tribute to the patchwork narrative structure that characterizes mythology itself. Just as any culture’s myths include multiple versions that shift and change across time, Cervantes’s readers must contend with conflicting versions of the novel’s conclusion. Because the gods believe that Zane was killed in the confrontation with Ah-Puch, they are no longer clamoring for his death. This grants him some freedom of movement and creates the expectation that at some point in the subsequent stories, he will inevitably run afoul of the gods he is eluding. Similarly, although Ixtab is portrayed as a villain throughout the book, the revelation of her supporting role demonstrates how profoundly the message of any given story can change with the perspective of the storyteller. Thus, the Mayan gods receive one version of the story while the reader gets another, and this juxtaposition serves to make the novel feel more realistic, for Zane’s call to other children of the gods creates an aspect of plausibility that allows readers to indulge the fantasy that Zane’s story might just contain an element of truth. By leaving her readers with the intriguing thought that mythological figures are real on some level, the author stokes interest in subsequent installments and employs an excellent technique for increasing the readership of her novels.
