With Cataloger taking human form and The Beast on their side Nick and Lesya are beginning to feel that they may actually have a chance to beat the God-King. Especially when Sorrow begins to reveal the truth behind the God-King's assent to supposed godhood and Cat, as Cataloger now goes by, reveals the truth behind his overwhelming power.
Omg this was everything I was hoping it would be and then some!! There is so much I want to just straight fan girl out about here, but it would give away everything so I'm going to try really, really hard not to.
There's a couple of just huge reveals in this one about the nature of the artifact, the blight, and Vaan the pathetic (truly pathetic) God-King. The source of the Blight especially, while made complete sense was a definite "I hate Vaan more than I did before." Which is really the overwhelming emotion throughout most of this book. I am going to give a tiny spoiler here and let out that Vaan had been one of Sorrow's students at one point. A bright young man, who fervently disagreed with the teachings of the Sinifel Empire. I'm going to be honest there is at no point where Vaan doesn't come across as just a petulant child at best and a power-hungry zealot at worst. Granted we learn Vaan's story from Sorrow who has a billion freaking reasons to hate Vaan with every fiber of his being, but I can't see anyone, including his most fervent followers sharing his story in such a manner that would ever elicit any other emotion that sheer rage at Vaan. I think for me it's his self-righteousness and his disgusting hypocrisy when it comes to the violence, he is willing to inflict on his people for no other reason than he has to be right. And that's all it is, he is so sure that he is right that he refuses to listen to anyone else and it is downright infuriating, especially after we learn the source of the blight. Oh my gods did I almost toss my Kindle across the damn room when I found out the source of the blight combined with Sorrow's story in regard to Vaan. I hate Vaan possibly more than Sorrow.
Sorrow's story is a huge portion of this book and possibly the most important part, at least for me. Not only is he humanized in this one, quite literally, but he is so essential to brining Vaan to his knees because of his rage. Sorrow's story isn't even really a complicated one, but his hatred of Vaan is so very complicated. It is most definitely revenge but there is so much more to it than that. The waste of it all, just the complete and utter waste of human life for no reason other than Vaan's ego I think is what really drove him. I wholeheartedly believe that Sorrow's dedication to seeing Vaan ended would have been the same regardless of whether his wife and son had lived, I just think their deaths pushed him to be far more brutal than he would have been. Vaan is just the exact opposite of everything Sorrow stood for and I don't see Sorrow not standing against him.
I am most disappointed in Gareth though. Look, I knew I was going to hate Vaan okay, like there's just no way I wouldn't but Gareth at least seemed to have something of a damn brain in his head, and he just throws it straight out the stupid window thanks to his so-called faith. And sure yeah there's kind of a redemption scene but it's just far too little far too late. But, I also think Gareth had to be written the way he was. He and so much of Yensere is such a prime example of where blind faith leads you. Never questioning and never challenging authority whether it is religious or not never ends well.
Now, what is probably going to keep me up for nights is the morality of this whole godsdamned thing. This is brought up in book two as we find out that the people of Yensere are the uploaded consciousness of people that had lived on a real-life planet, and it is definitely something Nick and Lesya both struggle with throughout the story from the beginning. Knowing this means that they can view the people of Yensere as NPCs, however, when we discover what the Blight actually is and what the theory is on why the Apocalypse happens every thousand years like clockwork, we end up with a Log Horizon level moral conundrum here. Technically, no matter how you slice it these people aren't living. At least in our current understanding of life so why does it even matter if they are oppressed or some demons takes out more than half of their population once a year. And weirdly enough, the answer is it matters. Which quite frankly in the face of that ex Disney kid making that stupid app to create AI versions of your dead relatives feels weird to say and it's 100% Cat's dedication to saving the people of Yensere that solidifies that for me. The AI who basically ran the whole damn thing sees them as people worth fighting for, worth dying for and so this leads to a whole ton of real life more implications ala stupid Disney Kid.
The fight scenes in this were just above and beyond the call of duty. Every single solitary one, but omigoodness that last battle I was this close to having a panic attack! Like seriously edge of my seat, wtf do you mean he's only lost 20% health in the last two pages that's impossible!! It couldn't go fast enough for me and yet felt like time had slowed down for the characters. What was really a handful of pages for me felt like it for them it was days. The last fight scene may have been perfect.
Finally, two things one even though Dalglish implies in his author's note at the end that Gaulith is probably going to be a problem in book four I loved the necromantic magic system, I loved Gaulith, and I am a firm believer that he can somehow live happily in the new world. And just wtf with that ending!? Oh, sure yeah, we solved Yensere fine but now we have sssooo many more questions, I think more than we started off with!! Book four needs to be here next week!
As always thanks to NetGalley and Orbit Books for the eArc!
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