 Hello, hello, folks, I'm Philip Magnus, and today I'm talking about Death's Beating Heart, the fifth and final book in the War Eternal series by Rob Hayes. Its protagonist, Escar Helzine, has been, across the course of this series, many things. An angry teenager, the victim of brainwashing and abuse, queen and villain, and an enemy to the gods themselves. In Death's Beating Heart, she aims for the stars by trying to save the world from severized nightmarish hunger, a creature known only as Norvet Maroon. The issues with that are numerous, first among them the fact that no one is altogether too eager to listen to the corpse queen and her daughter, a young woman, whose actions brought about an apocalypse, you know, in that previous and awesome book since of the mother. Not my use of an apocalypse, by the way, this isn't one of those joyous worlds that only guess to have the one. How do you trust the monster mothers scare their children with? When she tells you the world's about to end, you're more than likely to point at her in accusation, right? After all, wherever Escar Helzine shows up, Death follows. Once you've got her reputation, it's not difficult to blame anything bad happening to Escar. And here I quote, A family was found murdered in their home, stabbed and slashed, claw marks on the walls. All knew the corpse queen had been in the area and it was no great leap to make the connection. Escar Helzine was seen in the local graveyards digging up corpses and feasting on them. A plague had come to town, picking off the weak and infirm, and a dark winged form had passed overhead just a day before. Every shitty situation, every misfortune, every unexplained death and every ill omen, predicted by some useless hedgewitch, all were laid at my feet. My talent feet, apparently. While Norvet Maroon strats frames the other events in Death's beating heart with a sense of urgency, they are by no means of little importance. Some sense of the mother's epic conclusion, Cyrilis, the daughter I mentioned, caused an ecological and humanitarian catastrophe that killed hundreds of thousands of the denizens of this world and doomed millions more to death by starvation and environmental fallout. The very world's atmosphere is poisoned. The sun hidden behind clouds blackened with ash. How's that to be fixed? I won't say, but of course some familiar faces pop up as we get to this hatchet job of fixing the world. There are the worlds as well, not just the one against Norvet Maroon, namely a violent decade-long conflict between Escar's former fiefdom and its neighboring nation of Torre. I was a little bummed out by how that wrapped up, but that's not throwing shade at Hayes. He executes the entire plot brilliantly well. It's more my own emotional attachment to places and characters. The result is that when Escanizapar structure the most to support her attempt to bring the world together, she's completely unmoved from anything to do with that, costing only of her reputation as the world-class villain. Which means of course she's gonna need to look for help. Since Escar has never been good at making friends though, she can only get said help from an enemy. And it's a lark. Escan might not be good at making friends, but that might be because the friend she made along the way is the Shadow Nightmare creature inside of her. That's right. The Syracuse reunion happened at the previous book's conclusion and seeing these two together, seeing them come to a new arrangement and redefine their relationship more than once. It has to be one of my most favorite elements of the book. And makes for my favorite human-nightmare relations, at least in fiction, can say I score it as highly as my own relationship with my personal nightmares, but what can you do? Part of the other are characters who shine through in the novel. There's the Queen of Ice and Fire, Lestray Alderson, whose frightening power is fully realized in the battle against Norvet Maroon. The conversations between Escar and Lestray are filled with tension, making for some of the most terrific and tense engagements I have read. In recent memory, as far as fantasy is concerned, the revelations these conversations result in, I can't describe to you how satisfying they are, how they change your understanding of Escar of her emotional and psychological make-up. An assembly of other characters return to the series Joseph, Tamara and Hart principle among them. The adopted son of Escar makes his first proper appearance as a grown-up and he's got plenty in common with their old mum, especially where murderous tempers concerned. One or two characters even gain something resembling a happy ending, but I wouldn't put my money on all of them making it out if I were you. The final battle against Norvet Maroon will live in my mind as one of the finest large-scale battles in fantasy. The scale of this enemy itself is daunting. I quote, as the dust settled, I watched in horror. The entire canyon wall, leagues of it, was gone. It was all the beating heart now, up pulsing, growing, devouring, tied a flesh. How do we even fight something like that? Happily Rob Hayes' answer is quite the inspiration. As is all of that beating heart, all the war eternal. It's a novel in a series I'm fond of, a fondness that will translate to many return trips via audiobook and e-book and hopefully at some point through the gorgeous hardcovers Rob has published too. I will miss this world. It is a great shame that Rob Hayes is not at present planning to make a return to it, but also very understandable. Five books are a hell of a long time to spend in any one fictional universe. If you're wondering whether you might enjoy this series as a whole, you will, if you like any of the following. Dark Fantasy Worlds with a real deep sense of history to them, a protagonist whose character arc goes from strength to strength in the span of five whole books, memorable supporting characters across a variety of species, an engaging, storied, magic system and so much more. If you've enjoyed my video review of this book or the previous four, I have some news you might find interesting. After a chat I had about the series with Mihir of Fantasy Book Critic a few weeks ago, we managed to rope Rob Hayes into an hour-long spoiler-heavy interview about the series. That first video is already on Mihir's channel and the second will very soon be on mine. Look forward to it and hopefully you will have a great deal of fun listening to me, Mihir and Rob. Talk all things war eternal. I'll see you next time. Thanks for watching. If you enjoyed this video, please share it with your friends, like it and don't forget to subscribe. Looking forward to talking more books with you, I'm Philip Magus, bye!