It’s official. This author gets off on torturing her readers (and characters!), BIG TIME. Like carrot-and-stick, but you get a baby carrot and a baseball bat instead. A tiny break, followed by a world of hurt.



Nash excels at creating loathsome villains. I like to acknowledge characters that made me feel things, good or bad. That said, Dokul was a fucking monster. He was a nasty motherfucker all through book two, but here things got really awful. Every time he appeared on-page, my skin crawled and I wanted to tear his guts out. Never had a character death felt so good as it did here. Too bad it took so long.

As much as I hated him, Nye placed a close second. That sniveling, scheming bitch got off too easily. For everything he'd done, he deserved a far worse fate - I thought up a couple of very satisfying endings for him, but alas, none came true. Oh well, at least he died, even though it was too quick.

My heart went out to Lysander. That poor dragon just couldn’t catch a break - for every little thing that went well for him (and those can easily be counted ON ONE HAND), another went spectacularly wrong. It hurt to see him struggle, and suffer, and fuck, that scene near the end was almost too much for me; I had to take a break - but still, he never gave up. I liked Eroan well enough, but he doesn’t hold a candle to Lysander. He had me drowning in feels.



And don’t even get me started on Akiem, because that goes for him, too. That bastard’s been growing on me ever since book two, and I’m so excited that the author had decided to explore his character some more. I just hope he won’t do a complete one-eighty and become a saint in the next book, bless his little black heart.

Some plot twists were predictable here, some not - it actually didn’t matter to me in this case, because I enjoyed the story so much. Along with other pet peeves of mine that were present in all three books, like unedited typos and some unwieldy sentence structures, I was able to completely ignore that, and just fucking immerse. And that's because, the great world-building notwithstanding, it was mostly character-driven - and character development throughout all the books was spectacular, remaining one of the strongest points of this trilogy. ( )

No words needed, this book is absolutely amazing and I loved everything. ( )