 This is part two of my video series on the fifth sorceress and its sequels if you have not watched part one then part watch one now or just Watch it again to refresh your memory, you know, I could use more views or or don't I guess It'll just be confused while watching but you know you should this is the introduction song It's not very good, but it's not too long So I said last time and even before that that the fifth sorceress is The worst epic fantasy I've ever read bar none and When I say that I'm referring to the entire trilogy not just the first book like I have all three of them here and Now the series is actually called the Chronicles of Blood and Stone But that's a mouthful and fewer people know about it like if I said oh I'm reviewing the Chronicles of Blood and Stone Most people wouldn't know what I'm talking about unless they looked it up But if I say the fifth sorceress that book is pretty infamous So if I just that that's why it's called that now book one was awful terrible horrible dreadful and many other negative adjectives and I said that the next books were worse and you may be wondering how Exactly. Well, that's what this whole video is about. But the short answer is that they are boring Like, you know, they're still stretched out and flat just like the first book was But there's fewer crazy events that I can laugh at and I will say overall they're worse But a few things are a little bit better like for starters. There is so much less sexual assault, which Thank you. Oh my god. Thank you. It's still there, but there's much less of it the prose the actual writing of the book is a little bit improved like There are still weird lines in there But there's fewer of them and outside of those weird lines It just feels less like an amateur wrote it, you know Like I can understand more about the descriptions of the environments and the actions that the characters are undertaking So that's nice and the books are shorter. So there's less wasted time or rather The second book is definitely shorter. The third one you can see is like a Friggin tome again But it's still a little bit shorter than the first one I believe so I can't pretend that Robert Newcomb didn't improve a little bit over time So, you know, I'll give him credit for that and I don't know. That's enough of an introduction Let's get started on book two the gates of dawn He reached up slowly to feel the thick warm fluid at the side of his head the fluid He both loved and hated so intensely as he ran his fingers Luxuriously through the yellow liquid his thoughts went to the thousandth time to what he had become a bloodstalker that is an Interesting choice of words. I mean, I guess it got my attention Now I'm aware that in my last video I read fewer passages from the actual text than I usually do However, like I complained about this series spends like ten times longer than it needs to explaining every detail So if I were to actually read out loud Some of the really stupid bits rather than just summarizing them to you I'd be reading like three or four pages to get to the point and I'm just not gonna do that You know, it'd be more boring and more obnoxious for both of us So just I have to summarize a lot. I'm sorry, but I just I have to do it It may give the impression that the writing in these books is a little bit better than it really is But no it is bad. It's really bad even after improving after the first book. It's still really bad So this guy that we're introduced to right at the start of this first book is named Ragnar And he is a bloodstalker. Now if you were not as enraptured by the lore of this fascinating world as I was in the first book the Bloodstalkers were wizards that had poison yellow blood and the evil sorceresses did something to them so that they would just hunt down other wizards and If you even touch their blood you will die Or rather Ragnar is actually not a bloodstalker He's halfway transformed into a bloodstalker because 300 years ago He got poisoned and started to change and then wig made an incision in his temple to try and drain the poison And it never healed and now he just has an endlessly Bleeding wound, you know, he just has yellow blood constantly coming out of his head and All of this is revealed right away basically from the first page There's no chance to wonder who this mysterious character is There's no building of mystery or tension or anything. It's just yep This is Ragnar and wig did this to him So he's like halfway to becoming a bloodstalker, you know He's still lucid he can still think and talk and everything which normal bloodstalkers can't do but he Is suffering we actually get a more detailed flashback later on where it goes on for a couple of pages and actually describes everything that we did to him to try and help him and failed but There's no new details there really. It's just the same thing But it takes longer to say so it's a waste of time, you know Like if they had not said any of that here then that flashback would have been better Or if they just removed the flashback and left it here It also would have been better just because it was wasting less time But whatever anyways Ragnar and his servant who is named scrounge and they're in this Hideyhole somewhere in utrasia, they have been going around killing wizards that are in utrasia Those that survived the events of the first book now remember in the first book the directorate of wizards were all killed when the Minions and the sorceresses came in and killed all of them except for wig who managed to escape but there were a bunch more minor wizards that before The army came they just told them to go out into the countryside because they knew something dangerous might happen and Just continue trying to hold things together if in our absence and those are the ones that Ragnar and scrounge are killing And we also learn that Ragnar like again, this is all being told to us rapid fire right away that Ragnar is working for some magical child who doesn't get a name yet and we know that this child can teleport and Float along above the ground and he doesn't talk like a child He talks like a 300 year old philosopher and he can also read from the tome now Remember in the first book the tome was like this book that they found hundreds of years ago Which contains all magical knowledge like all magic all knowledge of the vigors Which is good magic and all knowledge of the vagaries, which is evil magic and most people can't read it because Magical gobbly gook reasons, but this boy can so That's kind of interesting. I guess and we also learned this boy wants Tristan and wig dead Like again all this is told to us right away There's no chance to be intrigued or to even really wonder what's going on Like the only bit of lore that they mention here that we don't immediately know about and they tell everything about it Is that the people who wrote the tome are referred to as those who came before and They don't really say anything about them. In fact, we barely learn anything throughout this series about them but That that is at least something that they don't just throw everything about it in our faces Right away. This prologue adds nothing It only takes things away like if these characters had showed up later and We didn't know who they were and we just saw them when they first like interact with the heroes like Tristan and wigging them Then they may have been a little bit more interesting or a little cooler maybe But as it is now there's no chance for them to even do that because we just we already know who they are and what they Want like that. There's nothing there like the whole point Of prologues is that they're supposed to give intrigue for plot points or characters or world-building details That cannot be organically put in until much later Like a good example of this is the prologue to the first game of thrones book like it follows some men of the night watch they're north beyond the wall and They run into the white walkers or the others as they're called in the books but they change the name for the show and That those characters all die and they never come back and they're not important anymore But it's still important that they do that because there's no good place to bring up the white walkers until much much later in the book like when One of the hero characters actually first interacts with them indirectly is when John finds that white that's attacking commander Mormons at the wall and he kills it and that's when they realize Oh some shit's going down what now and that's what a prologue is supposed to do It's supposed to introduce the audience to that before the characters necessarily know it or at least introduce the audience to it before it Can organically come up in the story because if that was when we first found out about them It would have felt weird the real story begins thusly Tristan of the house of Galand smiled slightly to himself as he looked down at his twin sister Shailaha He was watching her sleep just as he had for many days now What the fuck that's Weird Like I believe that he cares about his sister Especially given that the rest of their family was killed not long ago, but this intimate moment just feels odd Like it feels weirdly romantic Especially since when his sister was evil and brainwashed in the first book She was coming on to him for a while. So this is just Weird and a little uncomfortable. So Tristan and the others are hiding out in the redoubt Which is the giant maze of secret tunnels under the utrosia palace Which is where like the directorate of wizards had their hideout and everything Shailaha his sister remember in the first book was heavily pregnant at the end and she's given birth now and she's undergoing Magic therapy to undo the brainwashing that the sorceress is put on her and you may think that either of those comes back up at some point But neither of them do you know the fact that Shailaha now has a newborn baby They name her Morgana that Doesn't really affect anything, you know Morgana doesn't get kidnapped isn't part of the villains plan or their plan or anything She just exists in the background and the fact that she was magically brainwashed is very quickly Done away with and it never bothers her or anyone else again cool So she wakes up and she asks Tristan to visit the graves of their parents and her husband on her behalf because she can't leave the redoubt and Okay, that makes sense. So Tristan agrees and as he's leaving. I'm not making this up. He blows a kiss to her like I Feel like Robert Newcomb has no siblings like you can say that these are like, you know loving people Yeah, you can say that they're very open with their feelings and they come from a culture We're expressing this sort of thing is very common but there's nothing like that here and Even if there was it might still have felt weird like I I cannot imagine anyone doing that with their siblings except Ironically, you know, like if they said see you later fuckface like I would believe that as an actual interaction between siblings But maybe that's just me. I don't know So wig has brought an injured wizard into the redoubt who he found outside somewhere The man on the couch was a little older than the Prince perhaps 35 new seasons of life He seemed to be in a very bad way His dark blue robe was ripped and dirty and only partially had the fact that the poor fellow was apparently half Starved his blonde hair was in knots his face bruised and bloodied his cheeks were hollowed from malnutrition Despite his condition. He was still a good-looking man No one looks good when they're almost dead man Like just allow the heroes to look ugly sometimes for fuck's sake Like if you don't allow them to look ugly and look beat up then their suffering doesn't seem too bad And it should seem bad so Anyways, this new wizard his name is Joshua and he rants about how he saw some horrible giant birds hatching from eggs And they have glowing eyes and they can wield swords Somehow and we later learned that they're called hatchlings and that they're the creations of Nicholas and Ragnar, but I Don't know how they're wielding swords. Like it's never described in the books Like it there's no description of them having hands and honestly, I don't care if it's there and I missed it I really don't care you can you can shut the fuck up people in the comments But like are they holding the swords with their wings? Are there's like kind of clapping it together like that? This doesn't make sense and there's ways you could have made it weird or scary or cool Like maybe they could have these gross Deformed human arms that just come out of their chest and they use their wings to fly around But they use those to fight that like that would be kind of gross or cool again Or maybe they could strap the blades to their feet or something You know you could at least do something to have it make a little bit more sense, but you did none of that so Whatever anyways Tristan goes to leave again and We hear that he has been hiding out in the redoubt for weeks since the end of the last book Which is weird because I thought he was going back to Eutrasia so that he could take over as king and try and put Things back together after it was all shattered by the minion invasion, you know Rebuild his destroyed country get his people working again get them all back together stop the famines and shit like Instead he's just sitting around waiting for things to get better, you know What you want a real leader to do? We also hear that the cities are filling up with refugees because there's bandits out there There's no food a bunch of people are dead. There's disease spreading like there's just it's chaos basically the country's falling apart And that is the exact opposite of how it's supposed to work like during normal times Cities are economic centers, you know, they have centers of learning. They have manufacturing. They have customers They're a good central hub for people to congregate like having it all close together just makes economic sense That's why cities became a thing in the first place. However, they require a support network to function and to exist Like EG they can't grow all their food for that many people in that space So it has to be grown elsewhere and brought in which means that when there's a famine people tend to flee the cities Cities fill with refugees during times of war because Defenses are concentrated there, you know, like they have big walls around them and there are garrisons nearby and Leaders tend to try and protect them because like I said, they're centers of economic output and like no one wants to attack them If unless they have to because they're a hard target, but like I said, this is not a war There's no enemy that's coming for them. This is a societal collapse and the government is completely gone So there would be nothing to protect them or keep them safe in the city anyhow This is also in direct contrast with the last book where it was specifically mentioned that when Tristan and wig Fled the city everyone else was fleeing into the countryside with them because that was the only place they could find safety So Gelden the dwarf from the last book goes into a tavern in Tamerland Which is the capital of utrasia and he sees scrounge kill somebody and He thinks about it and assures the audience that he's super badass Now this is a bad intro for the character of scrounge, but it is at least better than the prologue You know where it just tells us like hey He's working for the bad guy and he's super cool like at least this we're seeing him do something So scrounge talks to the people in the tavern for a bit and he offers them a 100,000 gold quisa reward to anyone who kills Tristan and the citizens just eagerly accept this Then they're like, oh shit. Yeah They start tripping over themselves to try and go find Tristan so they can kill him and get the reward now I don't know exactly how much money a hundred thousand quisa is like it's clearly a lot and they mention It's more than anyone will make in a lifetime But is it money where you buy a little house in the countryside and then retire and never have to worry about anything again? Or is it buy an entire country and have your own private army and set up your ancestors for generations like I Don't know that sort of thing seems important is all I'm saying So we go back to Tristan with this line. It was good to feel pilgrim beneath him again Tristan thought Okay pilgrim is his horse like he's riding along a trail But please for the love of God just read your sentences to a 13 year old boy before you publish So they can catch things like that So he goes to his parents grave and he sees someone else there in a wizards robe and he sees it's a woman Which he thinks is a little weird because there aren't any women wizards And she's about to commit suicide by jumping from a cliff and Tristan runs over and grabs her and stops her So he did one thing a decent person would do that That makes up for everything else So he gets a look at her and he describes her as verbatim The most beautiful woman he'd ever seen That is the fourth woman he's met over the course of like six weeks who he has described with those exact words like Jesus dude come on whatever it at least she's the last one Okay, and he doesn't get her name, but he also prevents her from killing herself and then she runs off And he's like well, that's weird So then we cut to Fagan who remember was the old wizard who helped them get to Parthalan in the last book And he was you know crippled by the sorceresses and he had to be in a wheelchair and stuff And he's hiding out in the redoubt same as the rest of them And he is experimenting with the magical butterflies that Tristan found at the beginning of the first book Like you remember the flyers of the fields who led him to the cave of the paragon. Yeah, so apparently The magic water that they drink from the cave has not just made them glow It's also made them intelligent And Fagan has been able to teach them the alphabet and now he's trying to teach the math The the wizard the wizard in this book is teaching butterflies to do math When will my pain end? Immediately annoying and the worst part about this it never comes back up Like the the butterflies that are intelligent and can spell and do math just it never comes back up It's never relevant to the story in any way I don't know why they would feel the need to Put this in the story at all But uh, so anyways he talks to wake for a bit and they realize that the paragon Which is the magical stone necklace that like is the source of their powers But also kind of isn't because they had powers before they found the paragon whatever not important It actually is important, but the series isn't going to answer it. So I may as well go past it Anyways, the paragon is losing its power. It appears that something is draining it And then we go back to Ragnar again a different character to do a different subplot So he meets with the magical child again and they both go. Mwaha. I am evil Let's forward our evil plan and then nothing actually progresses or changes in any way We do learn that Ragnar is addicted to the yellow poison that turned him into a blood stalker And I'm not sure how that works because in the first book They said that touching the blood of a blood stalker would kill you It wouldn't turn you into one But then Ragnar is getting turned into one Because he touched the poison And then later Tristan touches it and he starts dying So None of this adds up none of this makes sense. Okay The only actually important bit that we learn here is that the child's name is Nicholas Which remember that was the name he gave to his Dead child that was the product of him and suck you off And that got revived at the end of the epilogue of book one The thing is if you're going to just reveal who he is right now If you're just gonna say his name and not have it be any sort of really big moments Then just do that when he was introduced in the prologue, you know Don't try and build any mystery about it like I mean it'd be bad either way But that at least wastes less time That aside, I'll admit that this did interest me. You know, I wanted to know What entities had brought him back and trained him and why he was already so old when he was Well, not exactly born, but born just a couple of weeks ago And I also wanted to see what Tristan's reaction to seeing him alive would be. I thought that'd be Kind of neat, but you know that because it's this series It's bad and it's unsatisfying Tristan arrives back at the redoubt and he says it's the season of the harvest Which I think is referring to autumn. I think they're saying it's autumn Like all the seasons in this book have weird names for some reason Like spring is the season of new life and winter is the season of crystals like At that point just say winter spring summer fall, you know trying to sound Fantastical and make this seem like a different world, but you're doing it at the wrong time and in the wrong way Like all you're doing is taking normal things and giving them a different name for no discernible reason It's like if you had some animals running around and they were very clearly rabbits but all the people in this world just called them smears and There was nothing else changed besides that if you want to do something weird with seasons Do something weird with seasons, you know like in game of thrones Uh winter lasts several years even over a decade sometimes and summer will also last several years even a decade sometimes like It's weird, but it also informs a lot of their society and their culture Or hell my own writing project that I did a while ago like there was A week of rainy season and then they would have like two weeks of winter And then three months of stormy season and then go to spring for like a month and it like things like that And it would completely change depending on where in the world you were not like based on hemispheres or something You could have winter right next to a heat wave or you could have dry season right next to a stormy season or something And it you know, it's really weird and clearly magical in nature Which the idea of that is to draw in the audience not trying to toot my own horn or anything but it's to draw in the audience and to be unique and interesting and That's not what's done here So anyways Tristan and the others talk about how that bounty is out on him and people are after him And Shailaha thinks about how he's such a chad and he's clearly the chosen one I still don't know what the chosen one is supposed to do in this story But okay, and they talk about how the paragons power is being drained and all of their magic is getting weaker And while they are talking They say that That before the sorceress war there was no monarchy and no sort of government whatsoever Like not even the wizards run around who might try to become warlords Okay, like they specifically mentioned that the monarchy was created To prevent any faction of wizards from gaining too much power over the others But the thing is that's exactly what happened. The directorate of wizards ran the whole country It's like remember it's implied that the monarchy was more of a puppet for them because they're these Dozen immortal powerful wizards who control everything and all the other wizards don't get to be immortal They won't tell them how to cast that spell so they rule over all of them Like that is one faction of wizards that rules everything. That's exactly what it did At how What? So nothing happens for dozens and dozens of pages uh Gelden and the wizard joshua go to parthalon to meet up with the minions remember the bat dudes who Just decided to start following tristan at the end of the last book And we see the minions are hunting a big wizard-like creature called a swamp shrew And apparently these swamp shrews just appeared recently and started attacking people And this plot point goes nowhere Are you sensing a pattern yet? It is theorized by the characters that the swamp shrews were meant as some sort of uh Insurance policy that the sorceress is set up like they set it up So okay, if we ever die the swamp shrews are gonna come back so don't kill us But the thing is they never told anybody about that So that doesn't really make sense like if that was meant to be a threat Then you would have to tell people about the threat Otherwise they don't know about the threat and the threat doesn't It doesn't succeed in its intended purpose So let's just move this along. I have to read you this line Ragnar watched hatefully as the wizards rode down into the midst of the carnage How do you how do you watch something hatefully? Can you dance hatefully? Can you hum hatefully? That doesn't make any sense So wig says that he'll train tristan because you know, he has all this magical potential, but he doesn't know how to actually use his powers And despite him saying this tristan does not actually learn to use any magic throughout the whole series Like he does no spells or anything Cool So fagan is in the library in the redoubt for a little while and it's mentioned that it is a perfect square It is 200 meters on each side and seven stories tall Meaning this library is 40,000 square meters and about 30 meters tall And this is all underground. It was all kept a secret somehow Like I don't know how they constructed it But they did because you know even tristan who had lived in the palace his whole life Did not know that the redoubt was there underneath his feet the whole time And also why do you need that much space for a library? I don't understand any of this Please just make it end So we find ragnar and he has a woman held captive that he uses as a sex slave And her name is not given to us because it's not important and how she feels about this is also not important All we need to know is that the villain here is evil So we have to see him doing evil stuff Now he did cast the time enchantments on her so she's over 300 years old And that does become relevant a little bit later. So that's why I'm mentioning it Uh, so then shaila, like you see we're just going back and forth between all these characters learning a little bit about them But nothing is actually happening in the story So shaila is learning to use her magic and unlike tristan where wig just says Hey, I'll teach you and then doesn't actually do anything. She actually does learn a little bit She practices by commanding the butterflies to spell out words Yeah, okay, please let me leave this So tristan and wig get captured by the villains and you may be wondering like how exactly did they get captured? It trust me. It's not important. Okay, the heroes Are just incompetent when the plot demands it sometimes and uh when they're captured they come face to face with ragnar And to show off how Evil ragnar is uh, he displays his sex slave to them and that's when they see that she is the girl that tristan saved From committing suicide earlier and they also find out pretty quick that that's wigs daughter Like he didn't know about her existence. Uh, he had her with faily who in the first book was the leader of the sorceresses that wig was married to hundreds of years ago before the war and Yeah, that's uh, that's what we learn here. Uh, her name is celeste by the way But her name isn't actually unimportant Or her name isn't actually important You could honestly replace her with a lamp and it would change nothing Like she she is something that is moved around throughout the story and used as motivation for other characters Occasionally, but she doesn't actually do anything So ragnar poisons tristan with some of the bloodstalker blood and it says he'll die Pretty soon not not given an exact time frame, but he'll die pretty soon and he also gives them the tome I don't know why but he gives it to them However, he does magically shrink it down so that no one can read it Like basically it's you know a massive book, but then they shrink it down So it's really small, but all the letters stay the same size They just start overlapping with one another so you can't make out what it says which is Kind of clever, I guess And he also casts a spell to make wig blind and then he lets them go because this is part of their evil plan I guess wig finally opened his eyes and tristan stared in horror the wizards eyes were totally white and lifeless wig tristan screamed can you hear me? Yes, wig responded thickly, but I am quite blind A totally normal human reaction to suddenly discovering that you've become blind When they leave celeste follows them and ragnar just allows this because So wig wonders why faily did not use celeste as the fifth sorceress in her plan You know her evil plan to destroy the world in the first book and that's a good question One which is never answered because you know the reason they didn't use natasha Was because natasha was the product of a father who Had super powerful endowed blood, you know super well endowed super magical and a mother who was just a normal person So she apparently wouldn't have been powerful enough which already didn't make sense because we saw her doing powerful spells and stuff, but okay, whatever But yeah, if that wasn't good enough you could have used celeste because both of her parents were super powered wizards, but I did they just never answer why that happened Like oh, okay, if you never addressed it that would be bad, you know, it would be a plot hole But the fact that you bring it up and then never answer it is just drawing attention to that plot hole Stop it So cut away to a house that is hidden somewhere in the wilderness Apparently there are a few young girls there who have been learning magic Because wig and the wizards thought it would be a better idea to actually start teaching them magic again They just do it secretly even though women with power is bad Again, I'm not like reading into anything that was written here It was just like the first book just came right out and said that sort of stuff Uh, so then the evil hatchling birds attack and they drag a bunch of them off and then we get more and more chapters of exposition and There's no easy way to put this but in one of the exposition chapters We learned that wig discovered dna like they call them blood signatures, but that's what it is. It's dna Basically, you can put someone's blood on paper Cast some magic gobbly gook and it will display a pattern and the pattern will show if they're magic And it also has three separate parts You get one part from your mother one part from your father and one unique part of your own and it is used to show parentage And I'll be honest. I guess that having the blood signatures in here isn't bad It's just a little odd like it doesn't fit with this sort of epic fantasy setting But all right, whatever Nicholas sends them an evil letter telling them that he's kidnapped the magical children And then he destroys a city that we've never seen and it's filled with people who we don't know because he's evil And uh, Nicholas also talks to the spirit things that brought him back to life at the end of the first book Which is one of the only things in this entire book that I found kind of interesting Because we never learn much about these things They're just some Weird powerful beings that don't exist in the physical world Later on wig calls them the guild of heretics And they fought those who came before like the magical people who wrote the tome And they want to use Nicholas to bring themselves back into the physical world And I'll be honest the guild of heretics are kind of cool. They're like the necrophagians Remember the giant heads in the ocean that ate anyone trying to cross Uh where we learn very little about them, but they're powerful and creepy and give this Setting a bit more depth and make it feel almost like cosmic horror in a way It's just it's just kind of cool. But that's all I can say about it And uh, so now Nicholas is building a big gate in order to summon them Hence the the gates of dawn the title of the book He captures Tristan briefly and he introduces himself to him and Tristan's like, oh, it's my son Please don't be evil and Nicholas is all no And that's that's really all I have to say about that like that This had potential Okay, it had potential to be the most interesting complex relationship in this whole series like Tristan Clearly cares about him and wants to help him because he views him as family And he doesn't want to hurt him even when he's doing all this evil stuff And Nicholas seems to only be evil because he was raised by these evil god things But their interactions never go beyond pleading With Nicholas not to be evil like Tristan saying please don't be evil and Nicholas saying I am evil. Fuck you Like they don't even go into detail about how Nicholas is the product of rape and how that might cause Tristan some serious problems with You know being attached to his son and maybe resenting him or something like there was a lot of room to do something here And it's just frustrating that there's nothing with it. You know, it's more frustrating when something Could be good, but it's not than when something is just outright bad But my father's above took me in trained me and returned me here to the world of the living Given that do you really believe I would ever choose you over their power and majesty? All you really did was to vomit your seed into the depths of a woman She in turn chose to see me dead After that you ceased to care I hate that phrasing more than almost anything I have ever read Like like if h.p. Lovecraft decided to write erotica He would write a line like that, you know vomiting your seed forth into a woman. What the fuck dude? That's just gross Shailaha learns to control the evil hatchlings with magic, which is kind of neat. I guess You know, she can only control like one at a time, but she she's doing something at least Uh, so joshua remember the injured wizard from the beginning was a spy all along and i'm so shocked because We got to know him so well Yeah So the gates that nicholas and ragnar are building to bring the guild of heretics into the world are going to be activated at dawn so they're running out of time and Nicholas and ragnar are talking and ragnar is like yes our plan will soon be completed and you will reward me But nicholas just kills him because he doesn't need him anymore and because he's evil As the stalker's desperate breathing ignited the cold air into puffs of vapor a trail of urine emptied from his body Running down the inside of one of his legs to join with the odorous brain fluid already on the ground The two vile substances of similar color snakes their way down the embank embankment melting the snow before them If i had to read that line the rest of you have to hear that line So celeste is in love with tristan now for some reason. I don't know why. Oh, right. He's a he's the protagonist He's the chosen one. He's he's a chad And tristan loves her too because he's horny Now remember celeste is allowed to be horny for tristan because he's the main character It's okay if women are horny for him, but a woman being horny for anyone else is evil Remember I again. I'm not reading into this. I'm not looking at subtext or anything This is just what the first book fucking said So a hatchling flies around and writes some words in the sky which lures tristan to fight scrounge and nicholas And then there's a huge battle where thousands of minions and thousands of hatchlings are flying through the sky And the battle goes on for weeks and each side refuses to budge until tristan being the chad that he is just Instantly wrecks them all with his massive boner and the day is almost saved Obviously i'm joking there, but like there's there's just nothing to say about the battle other than it's annoying that the minions were nerfed You know before they were this unstoppable force that it was almost impossible to overcome and now they're just mooks which Can barely fight against the other guys mooks like It just seems like they made the hero too powerful at the end of book one So they had to make his army weak to maintain any sort of narrative tension and the battle is just You know they fight for a bit and then the good guys win. That's all you can say about it So tristan not quite done yet He goes to the gate where nicholas is and where he's about to summon the guild of heretics And nicholas has already erected these massive stone gateways like just hundreds of feet high And he has soaked them with the blood of the magical children and all the wizards that they found You know to give them their magic power And nicholas Jesus nicholas Tries to summon the heretics like he starts casting the spell and then he dies Like just partway through he starts bleeding from his eyes and then he collapses He just wasn't powerful enough to do the spell. I guess like Tristan does nothing here. He does absolutely nothing like He manages to get the antidote for the poison and he takes it so he lives and doesn't die But the heroes could literally have done nothing and the world would still have been saved Like That's an impressive level of fucking up. I gotta say So tristan runs off and then he runs into scrounge remember him he he exists And he kills him in a fight because they just you know had such a had such a compelling rivalry the way they Didn't interact at all Like at least tristan had reasons to hate kludge so that worked as a rivalry in the first book There's nothing here and then we find another epilogue with some mysterious beings alluding to evil plans and mentioning the scrolls Which is leading into the next book the scrolls of the ancients and that's it. That's the end of book two So obviously it's not an improvement over book one in any way It's less crazy to be sure but it's still pretty odd and not in any sort of endearing way You know, it's just there's some strange moments in there like tristan blowing kisses to his sister It's just like what that's just weird, you know And one thing I will admit I was intrigued by is that at the end of the first book There was no status quo. You know utrasia was completely shattered the sorceresses who I thought were going to be the villains of the series Were gone tristan controlled the entire army of minions, you know, like there there's no obvious path forward For this world and new comb clearly wasn't afraid to shake things up So I was interested in seeing where it would go from here. However The issue is that at the end of book one It looks like they created a new status quo and new comb didn't want to change that up at all Like at the end of book one tristan is a king who is in hiding who doesn't help his country at all utrasia is broken And then at the end of book two he still is You know, nothing has really changed. They just saved it from some other bad guy who popped up out of nowhere Even the villains who were introduced at the end of the first book are gone now or At least they're not dead, but they are still locked away and they don't feature in the third book at all I just straight up grabbed the wrong one. They don't feature in the third book at all so they may as well be gone and Like I thought at the end of the first book that maybe the guild of heretics were actually orchestrating everything from behind the scenes and that The sorceresses were not going to be the real villains. It was going to be the guild But no, they just they just don't show up And I know this felt shorter than the first book and it's not because I'm leaving things out Like I described everything major that happened It's just Everything takes so long to happen that a summary feels short You know if it happened at a regular speed, these books would be like 150 pages long There's just nothing going on. It is mercifully shorter than book one But you know, it isn't the scrolls of the ancients. So let's move on to that now Looking at this you may notice two things. Number one, like I said, it's longer than the second book by a Fair margin like even just looking at you can see it's longer And that means it got rid of one of the only improvements to the series because it drags on even more than the first book Because even fewer things happen and it's not quite as long I don't think but just nothing fucking happens and it gets really obnoxious And number two, you may have seen that there are fewer tabs here comparatively Now that may sound contradictory that like, oh, this is a worse book But there's fewer things to talk about here But the reason that I'm putting fewer tabs is because there's worse things worth mentioning It's not that there's worse bad stuff. There's just worse Fewer that are worth mentioning like there are dumb things here. There's plot holes. There's characters being twats There's odd world building But it's kind of just the same things we've seen before like characters monologue for pages and pages and pages about stuff We don't care about Tristan gets in trouble for being stupid magic just does whatever the plot demands of it Like there's no point in repeating all that you already know that and I already know that the prologue to this book Like all good prologues introduces a new character who probably should have been introduced earlier But the author clearly hadn't thought them up yet and basically Tristan's mother before marrying the king had an affair with some other nobleman and she had a child named wolf gar And she had to give him up Otherwise she you know, her life would have been over. She's couldn't have had a child at a wedlock and she gives him to that secret house that teaches girls magic and Basically we learn here that Tristan has a half brother who is almost as powerful as him And in this section when they're when she's showing the people his blood signature to prove he's endowed They mentioned that there are three categories of blood. There's fully endowed Which is like fully magic partially endowed and unendowed, which is just unmagic or not magic And this flies in the face of everything we've learned already like Before it was clearly a spectrum where people like Tristan Could be far stronger than other fully endowed wizards like wig But now there's someone who is only partially endowed wolf gar who is almost as strong as Tristan That Like you're making up these categories. It doesn't make sense Like i'm not expecting things to suddenly make sense, but just stop digging yourself deeper, please Chapter one follows a slave who is simply called number 29 on a galley ship And he has just you know chained other slaves and forced to row below the decks And apparently this is a thing in this world, you know slavery has never been brought up or mentioned at all but like it apparently it's a thing so Okay, and number 29 is pretty clearly wolf gar and that's confirmed very quickly Like if you wanted to leave some mystery about this guy and who he is just cut out the prologue You know, we'd find out who he was a little bit later and then we go. Oh, okay Tristan has a half brother. Maybe Something interesting will come of that And I don't know this prologue just feels like it's there Because it's supposed to be there like and newcomb just didn't know what he was supposed to put there But a fantasy novel has to start with a prologue. So he just scrambled and's like, ah, fuck it. Wolfgar's backstory So the foreman of the slaves on the ship says this if this happens again The prongs will go directly into your worthless eyes the bleeder hissed. Do you understand? He pointed his dried tried and at the strange brand on 29 shoulder You are not of endowed blood talus. Therefore you are quite expendable. You live only to serve this ship So before he was partially endowed now. He's unendowed. He's not a well-endowed male All right So they introduce the boss of the ship and he gets an entire page devoted to describing his appearance, which is just annoying You know, it's overkill. It feels like a bad fanfiction You know, if you ever read my immortal like it has a bunch of really really long Descriptions of characters like what they're wearing what they look like how their makeup is and you don't need to give that much detail like just Give us a few details and let us fill in the rest and anyways This guy is the main villain of the book Sort of his face was stark white. His lips were deep scarlet a bright red painted mask surrounded by dark piercing eyes Angular and foreboding its edges swept back sharply from the eyebrows and lower lids into the stark white field surrounding it The haughty prominent nose was severely aquiline The jaw surprisingly strong an inverted red triangle was painted below beneath each lip His hair was dyed a bright red and was pulled back tightly from the widow peaked hairline to the rear of his skull I'm gonna be honest That excerpt made it impossible to take him seriously like he he just looks like a fucking clown It takes multiple chapters to learn what his name is his name is janus by the way if any of you care And that's it. Nothing else happens in this chapter And this is followed by a chapter about an old woman who is making a magic potion and she gets attacked by strange men And then it's over and we learned nothing And then after that we go back to tristan and wig income and company and they're still hiding in the redoubt because I don't know. They just wait for the world to fix itself. I guess because we're heroes Uh, and they're playing cards because there's nothing important for them to do and then a wizard magically appears And his name is crassus So crassus leads all of the remaining wizards in utrasia and they call themselves the brotherhood And they have rebelled against the authority of the directorate and the monarchy or what's fucking left of both of those and You may be wondering why it's because crassus is evil and he is evil because he is evil just like all of the villains in this story you know Geez you couldn't even give him like a basic backstory Where to make him hate the directorate like where he was scorned for a promotion Or he blamed the directorate for getting his wife killed or you know something Like give us something like even ragnar had reason to hate wig because he gave him that never healing wound which was unpleasant for him and Obviously he was crazy and overreacting But you know he's a villain and he had an actual motivation to be doing things like crassus doesn't even have that Ideally he might have some intelligent criticism of the directorate or the utrasian monarchy Uh to make him interesting and make us think yeah, okay He kind of has a point maybe the heroes the system that they're fighting for is flawed Like the lightbringer series, which I read last year Was kind of good about that the villain At least the main villain in the first couple of books was Actually very against slavery and against their religious organization, which ran the world which was you know He made some good points is what i'm getting at and just anything like that would be better than nothing and crassus We get nothing So crassus tells them about wolfgar and says that he has him and that he's using him for his evil plan And then he disappears so fagin gives us yet another chapter long exposition all about blood signatures and Apparently wolfgar's blood signature just leans to the left Which means he's evil And then tristan and all the other heroes have blood signatures that lean to the right, which means they're good And it is just it's that simple, you know The further it leans the more evil or good you are you are just your life is determined by that This is terrible. It takes away from all of the character's decisions. You know, they they aren't doing anything because they want to They're just doing what they were supposed to do based on their nature You know, they're just good Or they're evil. Everyone is just good or evil. There's no actual reason or motivation for it They just are I guess robert newcomb is a Calvinist or something I I don't know this This is like the most boring way you could possibly handle this is the thing like there's no depth to the characters There's no motivation for their actions. They're just evil or good because that's what the story demands of them Like these aren't characters their cardboard cutouts like at best They're automatons that just do what they're supposed to Wolfgar's ship arrives at an island and we learned that wolfgar apparently knows that he has nobility Like we don't know who told him this or how he knows this but he knows it And we also never learned how he wound up as a slave on a galley ship. He just Was a noble bastard who was at that house learning magic and then somehow he wound up here I guess that's not important Uh, so they test his blood they see who he is and they all rejoice And then they show all the slaves that the island is surrounded by magical snakes So don't try and swim away or you will die and they march him into a tower And that's the end of that chapter and back to tristan and I just love all this back and forth I really do you know, it makes everything feel so much slower than it already was because You know, at least in the first book while things took forever to happen There was a sense of forward progression and forward momentum throughout the whole thing. That's not here. That's great So this is yet another exposition chapter. Uh, there We learned that there are 25 aspects to magic like basically 25 different schools of magic And this was never brought up at any point like yet They had two whole books to tell us if you could have mentioned it at some point And uh, apparently there are some schools of magic that are more powerful coming from partially endowed people than from fully endowed people Uh, specifically alchemy like alchemy is apparently stronger just coming from people who only had one magic parent, which I mean that's kind of fine. I I guess like You could maybe uh do something with that and make the magic system a little deeper and more interesting But like this leads nowhere, you know, I I don't know what you were expecting from these books at this point, but like There's nothing Uh, it's not important. It goes nowhere. Let's move on. Tristan, Fagan and Shailaha all go to another town because that's what the story demands of them Uh, there's a fight while they're there. Tristan falls unconscious because that's just that's just how shitty writers try to create tension You know, I they a character falls unconscious and then winds up somewhere else like I I think it was strange aeons who said that that's part of shitty book bingo Like characters just constantly falling unconscious. It's obnoxious and you see it all the time So wolf gar gets a nice bedroom in the tower So wolf gar gets a nice bedroom in the tower and then ronald mcdonald throws a woman in there in her underwear and then says Enjoy and then leaves the the implication being that he's going to Let wolf gar rape this slave to try and keep him happy and try and get him on his side Now wolf gar to his credit does not he talks to her for a bit Uh, he says he's not going to do anything against her will and that he doesn't really want to be there either And that they shouldn't uh be enemies, you know And at first this actually seems like a good character beat like it makes uh wolf gar seem like a decent guy And it made me want to see him come out of this without getting hurt Two problems though number one his blood leans towards evil That's what they told us like he should be at least a little bit evil You know, even if he's just kind of a jerk to people around him and doesn't do anything truly despicable That would make more sense. This is not something that a jerk does This is something that a decent person does Now if uh wolf gar's blood signature leans towards evil and he isn't Then clearly the people in this world are wrong about everyone having their true nature of good or evil being determined by their blood like Maybe that could work as a plot point if it was deliberate Like the characters realize that they were wrong about something and alter their worldview But it clearly isn't deliberate Because later ronald turns wolf gar evil or more evil, I guess by magically making his blood signature Pull even further to the left So clearly their blood signature does determine good or evil and the characters are correct about that Problem number two and the girl her name is not important. Okay Like the only thing important about her is how she makes the men around her feel She does nothing. She affects nothing She just I'm not even going to tell you what her name is because I don't care enough to look it up myself So anyways, uh, she is so impressed by wolf gar not raping her that she immediately decides to have consensual sex With him Oh, robert newcomb will you ever write a book that doesn't have some weird commentary on sexual consent? No You should You consider it at least I guess wolf gar is just as much of a chat as his brother Uh, so anyways the heroes are looking for these things that they call the scrolls of the ancients, uh, which that's the title of the book And there are two of them There's the scroll of the vigors good magic and the scroll of the vagaries evil magic And crassus already has the scroll of the vagaries by the way And also crassus and ronald mcdonald are working together. I just feel you should know that So to find the villains the heroes go to a witch named abbey Which is kind of a weird name for a witch in a fantasy world You know when I hear abbey, I think of like an accountant, but Whatever And basically she has this magic fire which she can look into and find things and so they ask her to look Into the magic fire to locate the scrolls And abbey needs ingredients to make her fire function So in other words the heroes have to find a macguffin so that they can find a different macguffin Awesome awesome celeste and shylahud decide to go and find the ingredients because they may as well do something in this fucking series And so they head to the shadow wood which remember that was where fagan was hiding out for several hundred years after the war And his alchemy ingredients are all still stored there, but they get there and the villains have already burned it down Where are they going to get all the magical flowers now? well The good news actually is that the herbs were not burned But they were knocked over off the shelf and they were all kind of mixed together And they're thinking oh my god. How can we separate them? But it turns out that fagan had an enchanted spoon which could actually separate ingredients that were Mixed together by accidents and he made it for just such an occasion so they used it and everything is fixed And I mean I'll admit that it makes sense for fagan to have something like that But the fact that the heroes just Find a problem and they go oh no How are we gonna solve this and then they already have the solution to it and they don't have to actually do anything is not great And this whole thing to make it even worse this whole thing takes several chapters Because it keeps cutting in the middle of events to follow other characters So that whole bit that I just described is spread out across like I don't know 50 pages ish Robert Newcomb's inability to structure a story in a way that makes it interesting or exciting is honestly kind of impressive Like you think he'd get something right at least once but no And because we needed another subplot We are introduced to a young child named marcus now marcus is an urchin living on the streets And he constantly has to avoid adults who are trying to sexually assault him all the time At the sound the man's eyes popped open and he recoiled but it was too late Marcus had grabbed the exposed privates and pulled hard with a single relentless slash. He cut straight down Marcus cringed feeling the sensation through the blade as it first struck home ripped its way in and then finally broke free The amputated entities in his left hand suddenly felt warm soft and sticky and he dropped them to the ground That is the strangest way of cutting off someone's dick and balls. I've ever heard or I've ever read So we find out pretty quickly that marcus has somehow found the scroll of the viggers and is hiding it We don't know where he found it or how but he has it now and he wants to sell it so that he can escape his life Yada yada you get the idea. Uh, so anyways after tristan was knocked out earlier He was taken by crassus onto a galley to be a rower just like Wolfgar was before and uh, it seems like he's being taken to the tower on the island with wolfgar for Some reason but uh, they don't actually specify And then after a while a battle breaks out on the deck and they don't know what's happening But it seems like someone's attacking the ship and tristan kills the foreman and takes his weapon and goes above to help And it looks like oh pirates are attacking and raiding the ship So he fights a bunch of the evil dudes and eventually they kill them all like the slaves just Have an uprising along with the pirates and then they sail off together and Yeah, there are apparently pirates in utrasia and it's not a new phenomenon which Makes some sense. I guess like, you know, there's a lot of commerce going around other people try to steal it. Okay, that's fine but Why does utrasia not have a navy like it in the first book? It's specifically mentioned that they don't have one. So if there are pirates, why don't they have one? Maybe it's because it's expensive and it's just not a big enough problem that they want to devote resources to it But the real reason is just that the navy would have warned them about the minion attack in book one So robert newcomb just needed to say hey, they don't have one Tristan is absolutely shocked to see that the pirate captain is a woman because remember women having power is bad And her face is also pretty but conveys a sense of power Okay, and her name is teresa, but people just call her tyranny Okay, uh, and the ship is called the people's revenge Okay Tristan talks to tyranny for pages and pages And pages and eventually he does convince her that he is the prince or the king rather of utrasia And that she should help him to save the world And she agrees as long as he gives her 100,000 kisa because that's the bounty that would be on his head Like yeah, remember when that was a thing like apparently people still know about it And also he has to make her a privateer, which would mean that she would Not be harassed by law enforcement and they wouldn't come after her But she would also only be allowed to attack certain targets So she needs to take him to the pirate hideaway You know because all these sorts of books need a pirate hideaway Where all the pirates hang out and there's a mean leader of the pirates who everyone follows Even though they're outlaws because no imagination was used when writing this book They spend a very very long time sailing to this hideout. It's called the isle of sanctuary if you care It takes them Around 60 pages to get to this island like all they're doing is sailing Oh my god, we are less than halfway through we are less than halfway through this fucking thing Appreciate the suffering I go through for your entertainment We briefly see celeste for a chapter, uh, and all she does is worry about slash think about Tristan She's known him for like two weeks at this stage Like Okay, I will admit it does kind of make sense that she would get attached to the first man to show her kindness When she's been subject to such horrible abuse for hundreds of years And in the first book remember he found that angel lady named narissa And people in the comments mentioned a similar thing like okay She's experienced such insane abuse that it would make sense for her to become attached to him so quick And while yes, that would make sense. These books do not give that explanation This book says that Tristan is very sexy And it specifically mentions that his endowed blood is attractive to women and just naturally draws them towards him So rather than making a character who's dealing with trauma and exploring if she's doing it in a healthy way And maybe realizing okay. She's actually not in love with this guy We just Get assured over and over again that the main character is a chad There's also a brief flashback with ragnar saying that he has magically fixed himself So he can have children and how he's going to get celeste pregnant soon And I mean he doesn't wind up doing it because he dies right after but they That's that's a thing that I had to read Kind of amazed robert newcomb could finish writing this thing when all his keys kept getting stuck So wig and fagin because the plot demands it of them go to a giant statue of a woman Which is on the coast and it's actually not a statue. It's a natural formation, but it's still In the shape of a woman and it has a lot of detail and everything and they believe that it's a natural formation And not created by magic or something because these people are stupid They enter the mouth and they are transported to another realm and they start talking with the spirits that are there And they are hoping to find the location of all the living wizards Mostly the surviving children apprentices and they're also hoping to find out where the scrolls are and The woman who is there and guiding them like the spirit whoever not important Takes wig somewhere where he will lose a piece of his soul in order to attain that knowledge and I Whatever it means to lose a piece of your soul That's going to be a hefty price. Ooh, like you know If you want consequences to sound like they'll be severe you have to be more specific with it than that like eg If he goes there he'll gain the knowledge he needs But she's going to gouge out one of his eyes or he'll die soon after or He'll lose his magic forever. You know those would be severe consequences So, you know, that's just something I should mention. Oh, also by the way, uh, he healed his blindness at the end of book two I forgot to mention it because It literally doesn't affect anything. It's just oh, he's blind and then it mentions Tristan has to guide him along while they're walking For a bit and then just nothing else happens and he heals himself So the guide asks wig his greatest regret and it's that he did not kill the sorceresses when he had the chance And instead he sent them across the ocean which does make sense I guess and then the guide shows him visions of a bunch of demons killing and mutilating and raping people And while he's watching these visions, he's like, ah and then He falls unconscious and the guide takes him back To fagin and he just he has the knowledge he needs now So on the pirate island Tristan and tyranny need one guy to make them some sales because their ship was damaged in the fighting And he's the only guy on the island that can do it. His name is Ichabod and he wants to charge a lot and Tristan is watching him play cards and a travert in a tavern and he catches him cheating And he threatens to reveal it to everyone else which would most likely result in them killing Ichabod And Ichabod just said, oh, yeah, they don't know you I'll just say you planted cards in my boot And Tristan says actually there's wax on these cards Which matches the wax on your mustache because like these he's a csi all of a sudden And Ichabod is like, oh, I cannot think of any sort of refutation to this Protagonist you are so cool and smart and awesome. I will just have to do what you say now Like it this this sequence is put in here to make Tristan look cool and smart But it just makes Ichabod look stupid So tyranny's ex-husband who is also the leader of this pirate sanctuary Is there and he like beats her up and drags her through the tavern and shows her off to Tristan Like despite her being a capable battle hardened pirate captain She needs to be a damsel in distress now so Tristan can show up and look cool And anyways Tristan again trying to make him look all smart He says he'll give the evil ex-husband a hundred thousand quissa if he lets him go And he gets the guy to agree to it and instead he kidnaps him and he flees off on Tyranny's ship with her and her crew And I will say the one bit of credit I can give here is that at least he didn't win by just fighting super good You know, he had to plan a little bit. I was expecting him to just immediately kill the dude And then all the pirates were gonna fall into line and be his army from then on Because that's what happened with the fucking minions Meanwhile, uh, Ronald McDonald and Crassus put a spell on Wolfgar's blood that just makes him extra evil Even though he already was extra evil His blood signature now goes further to the left than anyone in history meaning he's the most evilest evil ever And he's a dick to everyone now and the evil plan is I guess coming to fruition And also the child Marcus is about to sell the scroll of the vigors to a shopkeeper Like I really cannot stress to you just how much Of this is just Chapters cutting back and forth between different story lines and everyone is just too short and nothing happens Like the first book the chapters were so long and now they're too short Please just fix it, man So you remember how Tristan escaped the pirate island with his cunning plan? Well, the evil ex-husband's men are giving chase and Nearly killed them all and there's like a battle on the ships and they're like, oh no How are we gonna win and then some minions just happen to be flying by And they swoop in and there's a battle and Tristan wins and kills the evil ex-husband because he's awesome And that's it and you know him and tyranny do not form any sort of romantic bond but With moments like this I kind of wish they had because at least they had You know some interaction with each other and there is clearly some mutual respect going on there And they did help each other out in some ways whereas his like one true love interest winds up being celeste and There's nothing about them at all That would cause me to believe they're in love like he saves her life Once at the very beginning and then after that there's there's just nothing there So they all meet back up and there are several chapters of them just hanging out And talking about how awesome Tristan is for being the chosen one And I still don't know what the chosen one is supposed to do You know they they give like a brief hint of it later, but it's I don't know what the chosen one was chosen to do Uh, so they finally get a vision of where the scroll is and they rush off to find it You know because they saw marcus has it and they know the villains also know where it is And the bad guys go there too and they clash and ronald mcdonald throws some magical orbs at tristan and he misses But he kills pilgrim You remember his his horse pilgrim you were so attached to that Like you you know, you were super invested in him You loved pilgrim so much like I I haven't been this sad since I played shadow of the colossus Oh my god No, no, no, no not this So they meet marcus and he agrees to give them the scroll if they give him money and or cure his sister's bum leg And they agree to do both because you know, they're they're good guys And you may be wondering what are these scrolls actually for because I haven't explained that yet Well, the heroes were wondering the same they They've been searching this whole time for the scrolls without knowing what they are or what they're supposed to do Or what they're for Basically the villains need them because they're going to summon the orbs of the vigors Remember in the first book you had the orbs of the vigors and vagaries which the sorceresses wanted to combine And that was Supposed to make them super powerful, but it probably would have destroyed the world Well, wolf guard just wants to summon the orb of the vigors and destroy it And that will destroy all good magic and possibly just destroy all good in the world Period it's not super clear And this is really similar to the sorceress's plan like they were able to summon the orbs without scrolls So why does he need them? Couldn't he summon them and destroy them without the scrolls? I I guess not. I don't know At least nicolas' plan in the second book was different. This is just way too similar to being the same thing So that hint at what the chosen ones might be here for is given right here Basically while wig was in the spirit realm He heard that they're apparently supposed to combine the vigors and vagaries in the future somehow And they don't know how they're supposed to do it, but one day they might learn And again, that's just the evil villain plan from the first book But it's apparently fine because they're the heroes and not the bad guys so they can do that My pain is without end As is the case with so many things of magic. We do not know fagan answered We have theorized that it may be so that future beings of the craft you encounter in your struggles to join the two sides Shall know you for who you are now and therefore willingly accept your aegis over them Or they may or there may well be deeper even more meaningful reasons for this only time will tell and time is the one thing we don't have What the fuck does that even mean? Like that that description is so far off its own ass. It's incomprehensible So wolfgar goes to the necrophagians Remember the giant heads in the ocean that eat people and he gets them to follow his orders by showing them the scroll of the vagaries And telling them, hey, I'm gonna destroy the scroll of the vigors and they're thinking Oh, he's going to destroy all good in the world. Awesome. We can go around and eat people all we want And then they start swimming super fast towards the coast and they're just gonna attack and That's the only good moment in this whole book. I got to be honest Like I genuinely sat there for a minute and thought oh, shit Like the necrophagians are stupid powerful even the sorceresses weren't strong enough to fight them They had to make a deal with them. So Like how are the heroes going to avoid or kill these things that was Just something I was thinking about and it never really leads to anything interesting But for just a moment I was I was into it So the heroes find some apprentices that had been in hiding like you remember the girls who learned magic and Have not actually been in this story at all, but they've been mentioned or briefly shown like yeah They show back up the heroes find them and wig makes them full members of the redoubt Undoing centuries of prejudice and tradition with zero effort. So good on him I swear we're almost done. Okay. We're very close to the end here. So then the big climactic battle begins and obviously Obviously by now, you know the details Are not going to be good like the details are the important parts of these things But you already know that they're dumb and me spending another 10 minutes going over all of them won't add anything It's just dumb in the same ways over and over. So I'm just moving on past that like Fagant or excuse me. Wolfgar kidnaps Fagan and Celeste his evil demon minion friends including the necrophagians Attack and some people are killed nobody important But you know some people are killed and Tristan confronts them as Wolfgar is performing his final spell And I swear to god. I'm not making this next part up Wolfgar is casting his evil spell so that he can summon the orbs so that he can destroy the good one and then I'm not sure exactly what happens But for some reason The demon servants all just attack and kill wolfgar Right before he finishes the spell ending it and foiling his plans like just at the last second The the heroes do nothing same as the last book the villains just Their plan was shitty and They couldn't do it How the fuck do you do that twice? Like you know the the heroes could literally do nothing and the world would still have been saved So then wig heals marcus's sister's leg and they clean up after the battle And they just have one last meeting of all the magic users and the last line of the book is this By my order the directorate is no more Tristan said solemnly. We are now the conclave of the vigors Yeah, that's clearly what this series was leading towards You know all that talk about how both sides are opposites and women can't be trusted with power Was leading to the idea that both of them need to work together like What is that? That doesn't make sense Like it's just a shitty attempt to ape the themes of wheel of time Which I talked about in the first video, but in this one it just shifted gears so much like like at least in wheel of time It was made pretty clear from the beginning that the people who thought that they shouldn't work together were wrong Whereas in this it was made very clear that the people who thought women were bad and shouldn't have power were correct And just at the end for no real reason they've decided that okay women can have magic power. It's I don't know. That's that's it. That's the series What a terrible journey that was You know, it wasn't even across a stormy sea so we can brag about making it Like it was just a rough one that made us sick and Frankly, what else is there to say at this point, man The books are horrible in almost every way like where they aren't insane They are cliched and where they are cliched they fail to understand what makes fantasy work And they don't use the cliches properly like the appeal of epic fantasy is to visit an incredible new world You know one with magic and heroes and all these wondrous events Like there's a risk of uh evil gods and demons and stuff coming in to kill you But you can also be protected by or work with paragons of virtue like the appeal Of epic fantasy at least to me doesn't seem to be in a world that's simple But it seems to be a world where flawless heroes exist and you can really look up to people like that because Flawless heroes don't exist in real life. People are flawed. This is a segue into how awful tristan is Tristan is pretty clearly a self-insert. You know, he's a gigachat who gets all the ladies. He's just born super powerful and cool He doesn't have to work at it at all. He's a great fighter But he's not a good self-insert like he's a self-insert who is not helpful to anyone at any point He's not cool at any point, but he's treated like he's supposed to be cool and helpful and a hero by everyone like Self-inserts are generally not a good idea, but you can do them well and you can do them poorly This is doing it poorly because the self-insert isn't even cool or heroic or anything So why would you want to be him? He's childish. He's stupid. He makes the same mistakes repeatedly And he's just annoying to be around like even even if I hated him That would be better than just being annoyed by him or feeling nothing towards him But like i'm just annoyed by him. That's all like he allegedly has all this magic power And he uses it exactly once at the end of the first book to move the paragon out of the light But he never does it after that Like either have him use his powers or don't you know It might have been interesting if the characters thought that tristan had all these powers at the beginning of the series And later it turned out that he did it You know, maybe they got the prophecy wrong or his sister was the chosen one all along or something You know that that could maybe have been kind of neat Uh, and if he didn't have his powers he would have to rely on his wits and being a good fighter to get out of trouble Which is still mostly what he does when he's not just Waiting for other people to sit around or he's not sitting around and waiting for other people to solve all his problems But you know, I just feel either give your hero magic powers or don't you know If they're not going to use them then don't give them to him because it doesn't affect the story And I just have nothing to say about the others at all Like I said in the first review all the characters are two-dimensional cutouts that cannot exist outside the very narrow context of the events in the story Like if you asked me how would celeste act in this situation, like I I don't know Like with good characters I can at least guess at how they would react if put in a different situation because I know something about them and their personalities but That there's nothing here and frankly these two Gates of dawn and scrolls of the ancients are worse than the first book But in a way that's not fun to read and not fun to discuss They are boring Like five years after reading the first book I still remembered a lot of it You know, I still remembered most of the major events. I forgot about these within a week Like all the major events I had to be reminded of while I was putting my notes together for this video Like in the first book the sorceresses were stupid Cluj was laughably over the top with how evil he was But I remember them as villains You know, I remember their plan to populate the planet with incest babies Now, I remember the minions when they first attacked the palace and slaughter everyone I remember the necrophagians. I remember that weird fucked-up ending where tristan like cuts his fetus out of suck you off's womb Like there's nothing worth remembering in these last two books at all and honestly Honestly, that is the saddest thing here Like the first book at least stands out in some way for just how bizarre it is Like the others are destined to fall into obscurity Like the only reason anyone even remembers them nowadays is because they are attached to this first book Which is infamous because of how fucking crazy and bad it is It's it's similar to the first dungeons and dragons movies Movie versus all the sequels like they're all bad But the first one is hilarious You know people still rewatch that one nowadays, but nobody is rewatching the second and third ones Like the first is hilarious because there's so much earnestness and so little idea of how to do a good fantasy story while the others are just well effort and That's what this trilogy felt like, you know, like it felt like there was Very little effort put into the second and third ones. It was just like, okay Here's another villain that the heroes can fight and defeat And how do they defeat them? Well by doing nothing the villains just foil their own plans Now I can't pretend that Robert Newcomb didn't improve a little bit in some areas. Like I said his Pros improves a little bit. There's fewer cringy lines and there are One or two neat moments that are spread throughout the whole series But you know, there's a couple of them in there, but that's all it ever reaches That's the highest point it ever gets to is oh, that's kind of neat, you know and quite frankly Not having high points to talk about and remember and discuss is worse than having low points that are this bad I would rather read a series that the good parts are just absolutely phenomenal And the bad parts are just some of the worst I've ever read than a series that fails to reach the greatest parts I've ever read like I don't know. Maybe I'm alone in that but the fact that there's not even anything Cool or fun or interesting at all to talk about or to write home about in here is Really its biggest sin and I will say there is a sequel trilogy to this to the Chronicles of Blood and Stone With you know the same characters takes place in the same world and everything but I'm not reading it Because what would be the point man? What would be the fucking point like there's another dull villain who threatens things and then the heroes win like what? There's nothing new to add. There's nothing new to observe. It's going to be bad In the same ways over and over and over again like Frankly, there's nothing else in this series that I can really observe or analyze This is the most bare bones surface level story I've ever read There's nothing about the characters the events or the world that can be looked at in any depth or from a different angle Because there is no depth and there is no other angle. It's two-dimensional. You look at it from the side. It fucking vanishes and Frankly soon after I'm done putting this video together Together I'm gonna forget about everything in this series like except again some of the crazier bits from the first book like The second and third ones i'm gonna forget everything about them and I'm not gonna regret forgetting everything about them like this video series is going to be the most entertainment these books have ever produced Bar none and I don't want to talk about these books anymore so the next project i'm doing is another big one because I hate myself and Some of you who have been around for a while might remember that the first super long in-depth review I did in this style was elixir by hillary duff and Literally since the first day I posted that I have been getting requests to do this next series So everybody please stay tuned for evermore This uh, this might take a while because i'm doing all six books like I have all of them. Just holding the first one here Whatever see you later. Goodbye Special special special thanks to everyone who watched including all the patrons whose names are here and the 10 dollar And up of above the 10 dollar patrons are uh, aposavillainan olivia ray and brother santotes Buffy valentine carolina clay dan ancilliovich dark king deo echo evie flax great grebo Carcat kitsune el linberg lyza rudakova lord tiebreaker matthew bodro Microphone peep the toad roby reviews sad martigan sillier the vixen stone stairs tesla sharp shark They victus and wesley thanks to all of them. I couldn't do it without them Well, maybe I could but it would it would be much less fun much worse to do And thanks to everyone who watched if you want your name on here Consider donating if you don't feel like doing that then, you know, just rate the video comment subscribe share it around Annoy all your friends with the spam. Uh, goodbye