 I'm back. Didn't think you'd seen the last of me, did ya? So, uh, The Fifth Sorceress. It's, um, it's pain. This is the introduction song. It's not very good, but it's not too long. Some of you know about The Fifth Sorceress. It is infamous among fantasy fans for just being a gigantic flop, and for deserving to be a gigantic flop because it's absolutely terrible. Like, even if you haven't read it, you've probably heard a little bit about it before. Like, it came out when fantasy was just starting to get big and starting to be less of a niche genre. Like, in the early 2000s when, uh, after we had gotten stuff like, uh, A Song of Ice and Fire and Wheel of Time, which were pretty big and semi-mainstream. And it came out around that time. It was marketed really heavily, and it just, it flopped. And it has largely faded into obscurity by now. Not completely, but largely because we just have so much other fantasy to discuss, which is much better, and we'd rather talk about that, which, quite frankly, yeah, I would rather talk about most of that most of the time. Like, even people who are fans of, like, classic-style fantasy, y-you know, because classic fantasy, like Lord of the Rings and Sword of Shinara and stuff, is a bit different than modern stuff like, say, Mistborn or the Power of Mage trilogy. Uh, but, you know, classic-type fantasy does still have its audience, and that sort of thing does still come out sometimes. And even fans of that don't like the Fifth Sorceress. Like, there's no audience for it as far as I can tell. Now, I did do a review of this book when I first read it about five years ago, and you can watch it if you want. It's not a good video, in my opinion. You know, it's very old, but, you know, I did need to go into this in more detail. Like, I've been saying for quite a while that I wanted to just do a really, really long review of it for quite a while, and, you know, you can see all those tabs and everything, so. Obviously, I have plenty to talk about, and, uh, then I also wanted to talk about the sequels because no one has ever spoken about those things before, because I don't think anyone's ever read them before. I think after the first book, everyone said, yeah, I'm good, and, well, they're not good. Like, I'll admit, I was curious about what would happen, but they're just not good. Daniel Green, another YouTuber, did do a review of this first book a while ago, and he said it was the worst book that he had ever read, if you want his perspective. I personally would say that it's one of the worst I've ever read, but not quite the worst. And another reason I wanted to cover this book is that I do cover a lot of young adult stuff in this format, which, I mean, I just like doing it because it's fun, you know, a lot of young adult stuff is bad in, like, a crazy way, which is fun to poke fun at. And sometimes people accuse me of just going after stuff that I'm not the target audience for, like, going, yeah, no, no shit, you don't enjoy this, you're not supposed to, and I'm like, well, number one, I can still point out its flaws and the way it fails to tell the story that it's attempting to tell. Like, even if I'm not in the target audience and I'm not going to enjoy it all that much, even if it does what it's trying to do well, I can still point out that it fails at what it's trying to do. And number two, there are plenty of terrible books out there that are written for me and people like me. Like, there's plenty of trend-chasing, incompetent, unedited piles of crap out there that are made for me, the same way that there's tons of crap out there that is not made for me. So I don't want to say, like, I'm doing this to get people off my back because I don't care that much, but this should show people that, yeah, I do get outside that realm and I'm perfectly happy to make fun of other genres as well. And it's easy to always want to one-up myself, especially with these, you know, big, long reviews, because it's just easy to want to make the next one bigger and call it the worst book ever, and then, like, after that you're looking for the next worst book ever, which is even worse and even stupider. And if you do that too much, you can wind up entering a spiral where you're just always looking for more hyperbole, always trying to make it longer just for the sake of making it longer, always trying to go into detail about even smaller problems which you wouldn't have picked up on before and you wouldn't have talked about before. You're basically entering an arms race with yourself at that point, so, like, you know, you need to know when to pull back. And, like I said just a few minutes ago, the fifth sorceress is not the worst book I've ever read. It is close, but it is the worst epic fantasy I've ever read by far. And I think that's also an important thing to talk about is not just, like, the worst book you've ever read or the worst movie you've ever watched or something like that, because, you know, seeing that can help you figure out what not to do and know what to do going forward, but it's also important to look at, like, the worst of specific genres, so that you can know what works and doesn't work within those specific genres. Before this series, the worst epic fantasy I had ever read was The Sword of Truth, or as I like to call it, The Adventures of Ayn Rand Alphor. And The Sword of Truth was really bad because it's, you know, derivative, it's got two-dimensional characters, the story is dull, it's full of the author's thinly veiled sexual fetishes, libertarianism is in there, like, etc. You know, there's just a lot of stuff in there which is really bad and awful and it's just not a fun read. But, as bad as Sword of Truth is, Terry Goodkind understood the basics of the epic fantasy genre that he was trying to write in, at least. Like, he understood that you need villains and you need heroes with motivations, and the story can't just be a series of fights to make the main character look cool. Like, I hate that I have to sound like I'm praising Sword of Truth a little bit here, but it is at least competent on some baseline level. And from what I've heard here, Robert Newcomb, the author of The Fifth Sorceress, had never read epic fantasy before, he just decided he could write one one day. And I guess he wasn't wrong, I mean, he did type this thing out and he did take it to a publisher and they did publish it and it did sell at least a little bit, so he wasn't wrong, it just isn't a good fantasy that he wrote. What's this actually about though? Well, the story follows Tristan, he is the prince of a kingdom called Eutrasia, and it follows him on his quest to save the world from a coven of evil sorceresses who have killed his family. And, well, honestly, saying evil sorceresses is redundant because in this series women who use magic are just inherently evil, but we'll get to that later, don't worry. So, story-wise, it is pretty simple, it really is, and simple is hard to fuck up. Newcomb still managed though. All of the characters here are basically just Disney animatronics that give monologues when certain events are triggered. Like, none of them have any depth beyond what the immediate plot demands of them, except for Tristan, who gets told what to do a lot, and acts really childish. And that's mostly what there is to him. Like, the lack of depth for characters can sometimes work if the characters are still fun or likable, but, I mean, you know I wouldn't be complaining about this this way if they were. Like, obviously they're not. Most of them are douchebags. I've talked about the world-building in this series in the past and how little sense it makes, but what's worse is just how little world-building there is. You know, we see two kingdoms, not just in the first book, but in the entire trilogy. Like, that's all we see, and there's very little that separates them at all, other than one is ruled by good guys and one is ruled by villains. And, like, that's it. Like, they have the same language, the same religion, or lack thereof, the same basic geography, similar climates, similar flora and fauna. Like, there's zero creativity here. Just picture medieval European-inspired fantasy world, and you will get an idea of what Eutrasia and Parthalan look like. Like, you know what this world is like. It feels like if someone took Middle Earth and then photocopied it a hundred times and then ran out of ink halfway through. Like, it's the exact same thing, but it's done so poorly that there's just nothing to it. Frankly, the only thing about this series at all that is even kind of unique in the genre is that there's a lot of hyper-hyperviolence in here, like, to a ludicrous degree, and some of the crazier plot points did catch me off guard, but... I mean, they're not good, but at least they did stand out in a few ways. So, anyways, yeah, like, that's enough of an intro. Let's get started. Spoilers, obviously. And, like I said, there's some fucked-up shit in here, so just be aware of that going forward. We open on a line from the prophecy because, of course, there's a prophecy. And a great war shall come to pass in which many shall die before the easing of its flames. The dark side of the conflict, those of the Pentacle, shall come to defeat before finding their fifth, and only after the discovery of the stone and the tome by their enemies, the banishment of those of the Pentacle shall occur upon the sea from which few have returned. Okay, all that does is explain the plot in fancy words, like, it's not even vague or anything. Like, a big war will end, the sorceresses will later come back after someone discovers the tome and the stone, and we don't know exactly what those are referring to, but it becomes really obvious really early on. Frankly, we didn't need that at the beginning of the book. Like, we could figure out all of this on our own pretty quickly. Like, just cut it and we'll lose nothing. And then, I also need to mention that the prophecy, that little bit we get, is apparently on page 2037 of the prophecy, and page 2037 is still chapter one. So, like, how long is this thing? So this is the prologue, which follows Wig. And Wig is a powerful wizard who has custody of the leaders of the sorceresses after the Sorceress War, which was this massive conflict which devastated the land and nearly killed everyone in Eutrasia, but eventually the good guys were victorious. And after the defeat, the leaders of the sorceresses were taken prisoner, they're put on a ship, and they're sailed out onto the ocean, and that's where they all are now. And it's specifically mentioned that the ship is falling apart because it was damaged in the fighting, and they didn't stop to repair, which is very stupid and a good way to kill everyone on board. Like, even if you're in a hurry, like, just spending a day putting some plywood and stuff in places to keep the ship together would be better than just going out when it has holes and shit in it. Like, what the shit, dude. Wig and the captain have a brief conversation where the captain mentions they've sailed 15 days east into the Sea of Whispers, which is the farthest they can go because no one has ever gone further than 15 days out and returned to tell the tale. Now, 15 days of sailing is not a unit of measurement. Like, the distance you go in 15 days would be dependent on things like the type of ship you're in, or the wind, or the currents, or if there's a storm, etc. So, like, you'd be going a lot faster or slower depending on all those things, but whatever, that is a small issue. We also learned that the sorceresses are being fed, but, like, just barely enough to keep them alive because if they're well fed, they'll get their powers back and they'll be able to escape using them, which I suppose that does make some sense, like, you know, make them weak and they can't use their powers anymore, but even after reading all three books, I don't know how the magic here works. Like, I don't know where the energy they use comes from, because the magic just does what the plot needs it to. Like, sometimes it pretends to be a hard magic system, and there's, like, actual rules that the characters need to work around, and sometimes it's just soft and we know nothing about it and it just kind of does whatever, and I have no idea what it can do, what sort of limits there are, I don't know how it works, I don't know what sort of cost there are, if any. Like, even after all three books, like, the magic is there and it affects things, but it doesn't affect them in any sort of consistent way. But like I said, keeping people half-starved to restrict their powers, like, okay, that makes sense, that's not the issue. So Wig and the sailors bring out the sorceresses, they put them on a lifeboat with some provisions to last them a couple of days, and then they just send them off into the ocean. And Wig also makes some currents with magic to push them out further east so that they cannot possibly follow them. Like, he just makes little waves and little currents and shoves them off. And the sorceresses, while they're out there by themselves, they make a small evil speech about how they'll return one day and how one of them stayed behind, so the fifth sorceress is still back in Eutrasia, and they'll just, they'll be back one day. Now, you may be wondering why didn't Wig and the others just kill the sorceresses? You know, they're evil, they're a threat, the big war just ended, this seems like a good way to make sure that the threat never comes back. And the reason is that the wizards are good guys, and part of using their good magic is that they cannot kill people unless there's a direct threat to their life or without prior warning. Because when Wig sends them off, he straight up says, if you come back, we will kill you on pain of death. Like, so apparently it's also, can be used to enforce the law, I guess. And that makes some sense on the surface, but you think about it for even half a second, it just falls apart. Like I said, Wig says that if the sorceresses return, they will be killed, so clearly they can execute people for breaking rules or laws as long as they've warned them about it beforehand. Like, they specifically mention all of the crimes that the sorceresses have committed too, including stuff like murder, torture, inciting war, and rape. And I'm pretty sure the sorceresses would have known that the penalty for most of those would be death if they were caught, so I feel like the wizards should be able to kill them in that case. And the reason that they had to send them off into the ocean, rather than just keeping them imprisoned in Utrasia, where the wizards could keep an eye on them, is that the only way to suppress their powers would be to keep them barely fed, and then they would either die of starvation or they would get sick and die of that. And that apparently also counts as murder by the rules that the wizards are following. But if that counts as murder, then so should sending them off into the ocean with very little food and no way back. Like, Wig specifically says, well, they had to have at least kind of a chance to survive, otherwise it doesn't count. And oh my god, that's just... none of this adds up, man. And I get that this is the very beginning. You know, sometimes you ask questions about the setup of a story, because it just doesn't make that much sense, and you're like, well, why would the characters do this? Or why would they do that? And sometimes you just have to say, like, well, because if they did it a different way, then there would be no story, you know? Like, sometimes people do dumb things and that leads to bigger conflict. However, you can set it up better than this, man. Like, this is part of a trend of all of the problems only occurring because the good guys are stupid. Here's a better idea for how to start this story off. Have it be, like, the end of the war, you know, the sorceresses have been defeated, their armies are shattered, and they just sail off into the ocean to escape, and everyone assumes that they died. Like, you can even have this same bit with Wig on the ship, and they're like trying to chase after them, and they get 15 days out, and they realize, like, okay, you know what, if they're gonna keep going past this point, then they're already dead. We just, we have to turn back, or we'll be dead, too. Like, that would be a better beginning, at least. Now, in Wheel of Time, the Aes Sedai have to follow kind of a similar oath to the Wizards here. Like, they cannot use magic as a weapon, except in self-defense, or against servants of the Dark One, who is basically just an evil god who is behind all bad things that happen in that world. And so there's enough exceptions here that they can still function. You know, like, if someone comes at them, they can kill them. And if they come across, like, evil creatures or evil servants or something, and killing them is the best way to do it, then they can just do it, no questions asked. And so they can function. The Wizards in the Fifth Sorceress cannot. And this is not the last time I'm going to have to compare it to Wheel of Time. There's a weird number of ways in which it kind of tries to ape that series, but does a bad job of it. And of course, the pros here is just awful. He turned his attention to the woman at the end of the line to the right. Tall and still shapely. Despite the effects of near starvation, she was exquisitely beautiful. No one looks sexy and beautiful all the time. Like, that's just not a thing that happens. Like, I know this is something that Hollywood does a lot. Like, people will live in the woods or it'll be after the apocalypse, but they still have, you know, perfect hair and teeth and makeup and stuff. And that's kind of cringy in visual form. But it's even worse when it's written. And it's done often with the women in this series. Like, they're always pretty, even after they're suffering and even after they're being tortured and everything. Like, they're always pretty. They're never allowed to look anything other than pretty. It's just dumb and it makes their suffering seem like it's really not that bad. The prologue lasts until page 32, by the way. And, well, like, I didn't really leave anything out there. Like, everything I described to you is what happens. It just takes more than 30 pages to happen. And that's probably the biggest single issue with this series. Like, everything takes about five times longer to happen than it should because the animatronics trying to pretend that their characters have to monologue about things before and after the things happen. Like, for example, Wig spends about six pages in the prologue explaining the rules for why he couldn't kill the sorceresses and that was after he already sent them off. Like, I get that it's a convoluted setup, but like I said, you could probably have set that up better and even if you didn't, you didn't need to spend that long explaining it. You could have condensed that substantially. Now, this might be acceptable. Like, all of these characters monologuing about stuff might be acceptable if the monologues were shorter or if there were just fewer of them. But every big event in this series, and even a bunch of the smaller ones, are prefaced with a whole bunch of explaining and then followed by a whole bunch more explaining like, what's about to happen? The thing happens. What just happened? Like, that's this whole book. It feels like Robert Newcomb heard that you're supposed to build up to big events by making the readers care about the characters, which is true. Yeah, you can't just have like big, shocking events or action scenes or something without us giving a shit about the people involved. But rather than giving them dialogue so that they can actually develop personality or having them do things so that they develop personality, they just jabber on and on about the plot and he thinks, yes, this will make the... the readers love them and this will build up to the big events so that when they happen, it'll be cool and everyone will love it. After the prologue, we cut forward 327 years and we meet the protagonist of the story, Tristan. And through a whole lot of him just thinking and the narrative... I mean, let's be honest, the narrator is basically monologuing to the audience at this point. We learn that he is about to inherit the throne of Eutrasia and he's conflicted about it because he doesn't really want to be king. Over the course of pages and pages of exposition we learn that the kings of Eutrasia always abdicate when their sons turn 30 years old and plus there's a bunch of other intricacies in the inheritance law as well, which we don't need to get into, but it's there and it goes on for quite a bit. And Tristan is about to turn 30 years old. Now, I want you to keep that in mind throughout all of this. He's not 16 years old. Like some of the actions he takes part in later on might make some sense coming from someone that was like 16, 17 years old, but he's a grown-ass man. Please keep that in mind as we go forward. But yes, this whole beginning part basically boils down to he doesn't want to be king because being king means he has responsibilities. Wham! He wasn't looking forward to his 30th birthday and he didn't want to be king. He also did not wish to be counseled by wizards for the remainder of his life. No matter how he tried, he just couldn't get the truth of his feelings out of his head, nor could he forget the oath that the old ones would make him take at the ceremony when he succeeded to the throne. He would then be forced to follow in footsteps of his father until his first-born son turned 30 years old. He sighed. He didn't have any sons yet. He didn't even have a wife. Like, you see this so often in stories and just like, dude, why don't you just find some noble in your kingdom and have him be your prime minister? Like, just go up to him and say, hey, bro, you can have all the real power and I'm just gonna drink and party while I get to be your puppet. Like, you want to be a corrupt leader of a country, right? Like, just do that. Like, you could find someone to do that with. Like, just do that. Like, I'd like to see that just once, you know? And this might be fine from a teenager again, but he's 30. Like, dude's older than me. This is ridiculous. So while he's brooding, he goes to his happy place, which is the woods, and he just practices some knife throwing. And that's fine, but during this sequence, we learn that he apparently invented throwing knives. Like, yeah, in this world, no one had ever stopped and thought to themselves, like, I need to stab that guy, but he's way over there. Why don't I just do that? Like, that's stupid. Someone would have thought of it beforehand, especially because throwing knives isn't really that difficult. Like, getting good at it takes a lot of practice and hard work. Yes, and Tristan is really good at it, so it spends time showing how he practices and everything. Like, I believe he's good at it, yes. But the thing is, you can learn in, like, 10 minutes how to reliably throw it and get it to hit a target the size of, like, a person from, like, 10 or 20 feet away. Like, it's not that hard. I've done it before. Someone would have thought of this, is what I'm getting at. And while Tristan is brooding, something pushes him off a cliff, and he nearly falls to his death, but he manages to grab onto a branch that's just hanging off, and he climbs his way back up, and you may be wondering, well, who would try to kill the prince like this? And it turns out it was his horse. Like, his horse was annoyed with him, for some reason, and just, like, shoved him off, and nearly spared us the pain of having to read the rest of this story. That's a very thrilling way to handle the action scene, by the way. Like, just, oh, no, I'm about to die. Climb up. Oh, hey, it was my horse. My horse threw me. And his horse is named Pilgrim as well, which is not a problem, I guess. Like, it's a fine enough name. I just, every time the book mentioned it, it made me think of John Wayne. Pilgrim also plays fetch with Tristan, which, when I first read this, I thought that was especially stupid, because I was like, okay, horses, don't play fetch. That's not a thing they do. It turns out that they can play fetch. It's just really uncommon. So I'm not sure why they would put it in there. It's an odd scene. Like, I don't know if Robert Newcomb just knows anything about horses at all, or if he just thought that they're big dogs, but they're not. So Tristan sits in the woods for a while after his near-death experience and thinks even more about how the succession is going to work. And he thinks about, okay, his dad is going to abdicate, and then he's going to get enchantments put on him to make him stop aging, and then he will join the Directorate of Wizards, who is like the group of wizards who are, you know, in charge of all the magic in Utrasia, and they advise the king and everything. And they handle all the magic stuff, and just, yeah, his father, King Nicholas, will be part of that. And it's actually implied that the Directorate of Wizards are the real power behind the throne, but it's never outright stated. And I admit that. That I kind of like that. You know, it's subtlety that we don't see elsewhere. Because, I mean, think about it. Like, all the kings have to abdicate when their son turns 30 years old, but you've got to think, like, there would be some dudes who wouldn't want to give up their power until they're dead. How do you enforce that they're doing that? Well, how about these immortal wizards who are advising him and have control over all the magic in the kingdom, essentially? Like, they are basically the power behind the throne, and the fact that they never come right out and say it is an impressive level of restraint coming from Robert Newcomb. And of course, Tristan has to spend a little bit of time thinking about how much of a Chad he is. As Tristan continued to watch the sky, his mind turned from affairs of state to affairs of the heart. Even though he didn't have a wife, he should soon say, Queen, he reminded himself, there had nonetheless been many women in his life. He sighed, far too many, according to his parents. Even his twin sister, Shailaha, his most staunch defender of what some would call his recent disregard for his royal duties and responsibilities, had begun to criticize him about his romantic dalliances. But the prince had always been kind to those women who hoped to capture his heart. Because of his good looks and royal position, the realm was positively overflowing with women who were more than willing to try. Sometimes during his public appearances at court, he couldn't decide which flapped faster, their batting eyelashes, or the unfolded fans that each of them always seemed to obligate to flutter while trying to cool the quick blush of their cheeks. Wow, that's a long sentence. Many, to the increasingly obvious chagrin of both chagrin of both his family and the directorate, had ended up in his bed, but he had never fallen in love. So it's important that we know he's not only a Chad, but he's a nice guy. And then right after this, he thinks about how awesome he is as a sword fighter, which is, yeah, that's clearly better than just showing us how good he is as a sword fighter by having him get into a fight or something early on, you know, that would be much worse. I can't imagine why anyone would want to do that. But please, please, tell us more about how cool and hot the main character is. Please. People who have the capability to learn magic in this world are referred to as having endowed blood, and men who have endowed blood are referred to as endowed males. Yes. Tristan is a very well-endowed male, I'm sure. That would explain why he's such a Chad, I guess. It's not just size. You gotta know what you're doing, man. And his blood is like super well-endowed. It's like super pure, which means something. It just means he's really powerful. He has the potential to be a super amazing powerful wizard, I think, but he has not done any training yet, even though he's an adult. And we never see much difference between the power levels of different magic users, though. Wig and a couple others are the top, top tier of this world, but we don't really know what Tristan can do that they can't. Sometimes, characters will basically just say, yeah, I can't do that. I'm not powerful enough, and then they'll go on to do other really impressive feats. Wig and some others are really powerful, and some other wizards are less powerful just because I don't know exactly why. And I want to remind you all that we are still in the first chapter. So Tristan sees some butterflies that glow with magic, which he's heard about but never seen in person before, called the Flyers of the Fields, which are said to go around this area. And he follows them to a cave wall, which collapses, and then he falls in and is unconscious. And that's the end of chapter one on page 58. Look, all the chapters here are way too long. Like, they mess with the pacing and make the story feel even slower than it really is. Like, you can have chapters that are too short and then it just feels choppy and it messes with the flow, but when chapters just go on and on and on, like, it's just obnoxious to go through. Like, they should have a few scenes with important stuff, but rather than that, we have a few scenes with important stuff and then they have monologues about one thing and then maybe something will happen and then another monologue about that thing and then another monologue about something totally different and so on. And then these chapters just go on for like 50 or 60 pages like that. It's really obnoxious and makes it difficult to find a good place to stop. When you're writing something long, whether it's like a book or a YouTube video or a movie, pacing is really, really important the longer it is. Like, the longer it becomes, the more important pacing is. Like, you need to properly space all of the events and the important information just right to make it feel like it's moving but not too fast. If it's too much all at once, then nothing really has time to sink in and especially if there's exposition involved it can feel like it's going too fast and you can confuse the audience but if it's going too slow, then it just becomes tedious and annoying to get through. For example, I'm doing this in two parts because the end of the first book is a pretty good stopping point before I get to the rest of the series. Like, it gives your brain a chance to reset and make sure I don't ramble on about anything that's unimportant. Imagine if part one of this video ended mid-sentence and then it just continued after the next one. Like, even if it's the same content and it's the same length, it would be a bad stopping point and it would mess with the pacing and it would leave everyone unsatisfied. If people complain about something being too long, it's probably due to poor pacing. Like, if something is really long and it has good pacing, you don't notice the length usually. And I admit this is a difficult balancing act but Robert Newcomb clearly wasn't skilled enough to do it and he fails. So when we get to chapter two, it starts with Wig, who is still alive because he was enchanted to never age and he'll still die if he's wounded, like if you stab him or something, he'll still bleed to death, but he just never ages. And so Wig and Tristan's twin sister, Shailaha, are riding horses through the woods and they're looking for him. And this line, just this line exists. She frowned. As the date of her father's abdication ceremony drew near, Tristan somehow seemed to get into more and more trouble and she was determined to keep today's incident from their parents. This man is 30. He's 30 years old. Shailaha is also pregnant, which doesn't really affect anything in the series. It just makes her seem more vulnerable, I guess, but it really doesn't lead to anything at any point. So they ride for like 10 pages, just thinking again about Tristan and how cool he is and how he's getting in trouble and blah, blah, blah. And they get attacked by a creature which Wig later calls a bloodstalker. And bloodstalkers look kind of like humans. They're just bulky and misshapen. And we actually get a detailed description of this thing's genitals and how they hang down, which is cool. Really glad that's there. And Wig kinetically grabs the axe that it was holding and hits it in the skull with it and kills it. And Shailaha faints upon seeing this. You know, how like how women be like, you know, they just, they can't handle violence. They just be fainting. Women be fainting. This line is kind of funny out of context, though. Suck on this from time to time. Little one, he said, compassionately. Through another really long monologue from Wig, because if I'm being honest, he does most of the monologues in this book, we learned that bloodstalkers were wizards that got mutated by the sorceresses and they go off to hunt other wizards. And touching their blood will kill you. Like their blood is yellow, and even just touching it with your bare skin will kill you very quickly. And Wig also thinks about how he's heard some wizards in the countryside have been going missing and he thought that bloodstalkers were all wiped out at the end of the sorceress war so he thinks, wait, this thing or maybe others like it might be hunting wizards down in the countryside. That's not good. And then we go back to Tristan. Tristan is in the cave where he fell, and he's perfectly fine because falling unconscious is just a shitty writer's best tool for cliff hangers. You know, just like very convenient unconsciousness used as a plot device. That's a common tactic of crappy writers. And he wanders around for a little bit, he sees a pool of just red water and it entices him and he just, it calls to him and he decides to bathe in it because plot. Like, you know, plot needs to happen. And he also realizes that the flyers of the fields are just regular butterflies but they drink from this magic red water and that's what makes them glow. And then he leaves and he finds Wig and his sister and Wig can instantly tell that he found the cave of the Paragon and that he bathed in the water and Wig is horrified by this. Like, that's the actual word that the book uses by the way. He's horrified for some reason. Like, it apparently activates Tristan's powers but his powers didn't need activation at all. His blood was already really pure and he doesn't really do anything with those powers at any point. Like, this never comes back up. I don't know why they decided to start the book this way. Like, he bathes in the water and that's how he finds out about this cave and the cave and the waters there are kind of important but the fact that Tristan bathes there is not. So during yet another monologue Wig explains that they only won the Sorceress War because they found this cave and the cave had the water in it it had a tome, like a really big book full of a bunch of magic knowledge and there is like a stone on a necklace which they decide to call the Paragon and the king of Eutrasia wears the Paragon around his neck and getting it is part of the coronation ceremony and like it just gives wizards really powerful magic, I guess. Like it makes magic super strong and water from the cave is used in the ceremony to give it to a new master and the water is also magic and is used for plot devices. I need to let you know that we just reached the 100 page mark. Like this is all that has happened in 100 pages. Like this book is long like 900 pages this copy but the length is very deceptive. Like almost nothing happens throughout. Like I'm not leaving things out here. Everything just takes so long and it's like 90% monologues so it just it simultaneously feels like it's way too long and also you look back and you realize like what even happened it's really obnoxious. So Tristan despite being tutored by wizards for his 30 years of life apparently hasn't learned anything about magic before so wig monologues about it for pages and pages and pages just something happened. And he explains that magic falls into two categories there's the vigours which is good magic and the vagaries which are evil magic and the vagaries are what made the sorceress's evil back in the day and after the war he and the other wizards decided that women are forbidden from using magic because and I'm not making this up women are just naturally predisposed to be evil when given power and they're just naturally predisposed to start practicing with the vagaries. Jesus there is a lot to unpack there and frankly I'm ignoring it because like if you don't see the problem there then no explaining will make you understand so I'm just moving on. Like and I'm not reading into this like I said it just straight up says that in the book and even after all of that monologuing and all the other stuff we learn later I have no idea how magic is supposed to work like how it's powered what sort of limits it has what it can do etc that's just I don't know anything about it it's just magic comes along and does what the plot needs it to. So wig can also apparently summon a physical manifestation of the vigors and it's like this glowing golden orb and he just summons it and shows it to Tristan and Tristan's like oh that's cool and then he also summons the vagaries which is like this glowing black orb cool and there's some talk about how both sides are very important and the whole world operates with like opposing forces each thing in nature has its opposite the wizard said calmly as he stood before the orbs male and female light and dark and so it goes throughout the entire scheme of the world as we know it the two sides of the craft are no different but unlike the other examples I just mentioned the vigors and the vagaries cannot join now the fact that they can't be mixed is kind of odd to me like there are a lot of real world philosophies which bring up this whole idea of dual forces like Taoism is a very good example like that's where Yin and Yang comes from the ancient Egyptians also had I forget exactly what it's called but they had this idea of order and chaos which were constantly working against each other in the world and the thing is Yin and Yang and a lot of others like it they work together and against each other simultaneously like the whole point of it is that while they are different neither of them can exist alone like it's not as simple as good and evil now again Wheel of Time did something similar to this with two halves of magic and with gender relations in general like men could use one type of magic, women could use another and both sides needed the other to function properly and when one side was gone for millennia by the time the story begins like the world was worse off for it and that is extrapolated to talk about men and women in general not just magically and there's no commentary like that here there's just figures are good and the vagaries are evil if they mix the world will end probably wig isn't totally sure about that he just thinks that if they mix the world will end and he drones on and on about it for a while and then he just decides Tristan isn't ready to hear everything else about the paragon and magic which I'm pretty sure just means the author didn't know what to put there but okay so the next chapter we are introduced to Natasha and she was the fifth sorceress who was left behind when the others went across the ocean she's been hanging out in utrasia for 300 years and just waiting for her time to make trouble which is coming up soon nowadays she's a noble woman and she's biding her time to do evil stuff and she travels to utrasia's capital which is called tamerland for the coronation ceremony and she just sits there and thinks about how evil she is there had been many younger and more vital men in her bed to amuse her since her wedding day it always made her laugh to imagine the looks that would have come upon their faces had she told any of them how old she truly was but that was unimportant there would always be more especially since her husband's existence would soon be coming to an end you may as well just put up a flashing neon sign that says I am evil and apparently just being horny is evil if you're a woman like that's what it seems to be saying and that's a common theme throughout this book it's not just that one bit it's like every woman who ever shows any sort of sexual desire whether for men or for other women winds up being evil except for one who shows up not in this book but in the next one however her desire is apparently okay because number one it's for the main character and number two it's very downplayed like she only has the hots for this one person who she's in a committed relationship with but you know going around and having sex with a bunch of multiple partners like that so that's just evil if you're a woman remember Tristan can still be a fuck boy and also be the chosen one so it's not like they're saying that sex is bad in general it's just like women being horny is evil Natasha meets Tristan and they talk about how awesome he is and this goes nowhere but he does think about how she is quote the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen and he has a sword fight with his sister's husband who is Frederick and is apparently also his best friend but the only evidence we get that he's his best friend is that Tristan sees him and thinks he's my best friend and then they don't really do anything together at all and they fight for a bit and Frederick does the trick where he looks over his shoulder and goes look behind you and then Tristan looks over and Frederick beats him like that which is just that that's just embarrassing Tristan like what is wrong with you like this would be a better way to show that Tristan is apparently a great swordsman you know show him practice a little about that'd be preferable at least it is also funny to me when names like Tristan and Frederick are mixed with names like wig and Shailaha like it's not uncommon in fantasy but it does make me chuckle when it happens so we cut to wig meeting with the directorate of wizards and the king who is named Nicholas and he brings up the blood stalker and shows them the axe and even straight up tells them like hey don't touch the dried blood axe because it'll kill you and he mentions the disappearances of the other wizards and just say hey evil people might be planning something so he and the other wizards suggest maybe canceling the coronation ceremony because it would be a target for attack and the king refuses to do so because it would make him look weak now keep in mind during the ceremony they take the paragon off of the king's neck and when they do that it loses its power like it turns from red to being clear and the way they restore its power is by dipping it in some water from the cave and then the water turns clear and the stone turns red again that restores its power they put around the neck of the next king and then they all have their powers again like during that interlude the wizards are powerless and vulnerable and so obviously yeah this could be a security issue but the king refuses to cancel it so they suggest okay what if we do the real ceremony in the giant underground maze below the palace where it's safe and then we could do a fake ceremony for the public and the king still says no to this why does he say no to it because he's stupid and I mean again I mentioned before the directorate is the real power behind the throne but they can't oppose him publicly or straightforwardly so it seems like there is more give and take here than you would normally expect to see in a fantasy story at least one that isn't focused on politics so again that's a neat little detail but the thing is if they did the ceremony below ground privately and then they did the fake one for the crowds then the coming disaster would be avoided like the whole story would end at the first act and a whole bunch of people would have survived like look the heroes can have flaws which cause problems especially problems for themselves but it's really hard to care about them when they're this openly incompetent so they all bring Tristan into the meeting with like the king and the queen and the other wizards and they have a talk and it's not that interesting they basically just tell him hey Tristan you have responsibilities you need to be king blah blah blah and he finally agrees okay fine I'm going to be king and he like accepts the responsibility it's a kind of a nice moment I guess like I don't like Tristan at all but he does have some character to him like he's not a total blank slate which he very easily could have been he has one or two small things about him that aren't annoying and a whole bunch of things about him that are annoying but honestly I would rather him be annoying or just bad in general than have him be boring and have no personality like it could be worse is what I'm saying and then finally we cut to the sorceresses who are across the ocean in the land of Parthalon and they're obviously still alive and one of them who is named Suck You so Suck You is whipping a slave because he couldn't get an erection when she tried to play with him against his will let's say and remember women being sexual is bad and we need to remind the audience that the villains are pure evil so every chance we get we have to show them torturing people or killing people or just having some sort of weird BDSM sex now I'm fine with this bit being there like cuts away to show us the villains doing their thing for a little while like that's fine but it should have been earlier like ideally it would have been right after Tristan landed in the cave like that chapter ends and we're like oh no what's happening with him and then it cuts to this one and so it avoids bringing the pacing to a complete halt right as things were starting to happen like because you know that whole first bit where Tristan finally accepts that he's gonna be king like it felt like the story was finally beginning to move forward and then it halts and we go somewhere else and we have to learn all this exposition and we have to meet these new characters and everything and it just grinds everything to a halt so mixing it together would have been better even if you changed nothing else so we learned that the sorceresses came over from Eutrasia and they landed here they crossed the ocean which no one had ever done before and when they got to Parthalan there was no government or army and apparently no one over there had magic so they just conquered everything relatively easily which that's kind of dumb like you would expect there to be some sort of governing structure even if it's just on a village level and I'm not sure why there's no magic here either I guess Parthalonians aren't the master race I don't know and so sorceresses refuse to procreate with the men over there because the men are not well endowed the way Tristan is and that means their children would be less powerful with magic which raises the question of how people with pure blood arose to begin with and it seems like Tristan and Shailaha should be just as well endowed as their parents rather than more powerful but okay sure we learned that all of the troublemakers in Parthalan are put into a walled off city which they call the ghetto of the shunned and plus they have stables full of slaves both men and women for the sorceresses to abuse because they are evil and we need to be reminded that they are evil and also being bisexual is a sign of evil here like later on when a character is brainwashed to be evil in order to show how evil she is they just show off that she's bisexual now which like that's horribly homophobic just throwing that out there and again I'm not doing any sort of reading into this or anything like it just straight up says all this so Suck You off also has a servant named Gelden and Gelden is a dwarf like not a fantasy dwarf creature that lives in Moria just a human with dwarfism who is also hunchbacked and she decided that she liked having him as a pet so she enchanted him not to age and I bring him up because he's a really minor character now but he becomes important later and you need to know that he's there so Suck You off also meets with the other sorceresses to talk about how evil they are and how their evil plans are evil coming to fruition because Natasha is preparing things in Utrasia and they are preparing to go over there and do their evil things and how do they talk to Natasha over such long distances magic why is this never used again for the rest of the series because convenience you know characters being able to talk to each other easily over long distances would just it would make things too easy the leader of the coven is named Phaley and then there's Suck You and Natasha and you can just forget about the other two they are not important like you don't even need to know their names or anything just they they're there they exist but you don't need to know anything about them so while they were over in Parthalan the sorceresses created a race of warriors to serve them and they are basically just humans with giant like leather bat wings so they can fly about them they can fly around places and they go into detail about the breeding programs they used and how men are not allowed to have sex with human women and how all the females of the species are just put into these I mean essentially brothels where they're just there for breeding like that's all they do and they mention that coitus interruptus is not allowed like it literally says that Google it if you don't know I really don't know why they felt the need to bring that up at all like you know you could just say like yeah there's a big breeding program there aren't allowed to have sex with human women the females are only brood mayors like we get the picture you know you don't need to specifically say like hey there's a point where your world building is too much you know like the only example of this I can think that's this bad is wizards at Hogwarts used to shit on the floor like that's the only thing I've ever seen in fantasy that comes to this level and what are these terrifying winged creatures called minions so we meet the leader of the minions who is named Cluj and Cluj is in love with Suck You but he knows that she'll never love him back because he doesn't have magic and Suck You is infatuated with Tristan because he has magic and also he's the main character and Cluj decides he wants to kill Tristan and we spend, no joke, 25 pages explaining who the good guys are like the characters we spent the whole first part of the book learning about like Tristan and Wigg and Shailaha like 25 pages explaining who they are and that they're going to attack at the coronation ceremony which we already knew and we don't even get a lot more detail or anything like just saying we'll attack then now having a chapter or two introducing the villains is good that's a good thing to have having it be just giving a bunch of information we already know about and giving a bunch of exposition which we don't care about and doesn't factor into the story that much instead of giving these villains more character depth is bad so we finally go back to Tristan and it's like the next morning after he's had sex with someone because he's the main character and while he's training with some guards a big winged creature with a woman's face comes in and attacks the soldiers while they're training and a short battle follows which is it's okay, like it's an okay fight really they make a big deal about Tristan trying to get into position to throw a knife into the beast's eye and hopefully kill it but that winds up just annoying it and then Wigg shows up and crushes it in a magic cage and makes bars of energy surrounding it and then it gets smaller and smaller until it crushes it which is a cool way to kill it but also Tristan just seems useless here and he's supposed to be the main character so like it's no fun for him to be useless the real problem here is that this alerts Wigg and the others to the sorceresses planning an attack because they realize okay if all these creatures are coming out then the sorceresses must be planning something or someone with magic must be planning something and so they prepare a little bit like the heroes would not have prepared at all for the attack if the sorceresses hadn't sent these monsters to attack them and even Faeli chastises the others for this later but again remember the heroes if they had done the coronation ceremony privately a little earlier they also would never run into this same trouble later like both sides are dumbasses they both foil their own plans they're just they're all so stupid like this whole story only exists because all of the characters involved are stupid so back to the villains Cluj and Succu off are having sex because they're evil and they're sailing across the sea of whispers and right when they get to the middle point which is like the point where no one has ever crossed before other than the sorceresses these massive monsters called necrophagians appear in the water they're like giant human heads that float under the water made of rotting flesh and they eat whoever comes nearby and they also create these giant hands out of fog which grab hold of the ship so they can't sail away and the sorceresses throw 40 dead slaves overboard the necrophagians eat them and then they can pass because apparently 300 years ago the sorceresses when they first got here made a deal with the necrophagians that anytime they passed they would give them 40 dead people to eat rather than just having a couple of them to eat. I'll admit I do like this it's cool like most fantasy stories do have like impossible ocean or impassable oceans or mountain ranges that characters can't cross usually the reason they can't cross them is just because they're big and here it's like an ocean with mysterious powerful scary monsters that are stopping them and we learned very little about the necrophagians over the course of the story which just makes them cooler and you know that's why the 5th sorceress as awful as it is is not the worst thing I've ever read there's a few things in here that kind of work now why nobody other than the sorceress is thought to make a deal when they ran into the necrophagians I'm not sure like you think some fisherman would run into them and just be like oh well if you let me go I'll come back with even more people and then just left and never come back like it seems strange whatever and finally on page 294 the coronation begins and this is the climax of the first act it should have happened a long fucking time ago like imagine if in Star Wars Luke did not leave Tatooine until 2 hours into the film that's what this feels like so during the ceremony they take the paragon from the king like I said they all temporarily lose their power and during this brief interlude the minions attack like they crash through the glass ceiling they massacre the guards they massacre the wizards all the civilians that are nearby a total one sided slaughter and Tristan lives because Wig just makes them briefly invisible so they can hide for a few minutes and they survive the initial chaos and the only reason Wig was prepared to do this was because the sorceress has warned them so if they hadn't done this then they likely would have been killed in that initial fight or at the very least captured although they're kind of captured right after and Tristan comes out of hiding and tries to fight Cluj and it's he gets stomped like it's a total one sided fight like it's not even a contest it's not difficult for Cluj in the slightest like Tristan just loses right away and I will admit the first time I read this I was shocked by how easy it was for the bad guys to win here like they just completely wiped the floor with the good guys here like I was expecting this to be a battle and then they like have to run off and then like the rest of the book is about a war going on in Eutrasia but like no the minions immediately massacre everybody and then right after this they go out and just conquer half the country with no trouble whatsoever it's laughably easy and I'll admit that did catch me off guard the first time I read it so the minions are holding Tristan and a bunch of other people who survived the initial fighting hostage and Frederick is killed during this and Shailaha because of the shock and the trauma just like she goes into shock she's catatonic she's dissociating whatever she's just holding totally still silent not reacting to anything which is fine I guess that does happen sometimes when something traumatic happens and they reveal that Natasha is evil and that they want to take Shailaha somewhere or nefarious purposes we don't know exactly what and we need reminders that the villains are evil so they like mutilate bodies and stuff they cut off the heads of all the wizards except for Wig who is still alive and then they string them all together on a rope and like hang them up and fly around with them stuff like that just that we need to know that they're evil so Cluj forces Tristan to kill his father King Nicholas and he does it by just telling him like hey look I can torture your father to death in front of you and everyone else here and it'll be very slow or you can just behead him and he dies quickly and Tristan doesn't want to do it but eventually his father convinces him like look just do it son you need to be king now you're gonna have to take responsibility for this sort of thing and he kills him and it's like super sad I guess and then Cluj takes Tristan's mother and throws her to the minions who proceed to have non-consensual party time with her and all of the other women there it's tasteless and not described in a lot of detail but again just very tasteless and Wig just grabs an object and they use it to teleport him and Tristan to the catacombs below the palace so they're safe and they're hidden away and they never use this teleportation again throughout the series and they hide out there for a few days and then Tristan swears revenge and he swears to save his sister because the minions go around and just cause as much destruction and chaos as they can in Utrasia while they're there you know they kill as many people as they can burn crops, destroy livestock in just a huge area and there's basically no one to stop them and then they immediately go back to Parthalan along with Shailaha and this is where the real story begins and it's over 300 pages in now the thing about this is that huge is just pure evil for no reason he has zero depth, he's just evil for fun and he doesn't even have like a bombastic personality or anything so he's not fun to be around he's just boring to watch Tristan and the others do have very real reason to hate him so it motivates the heroes if nothing else to go on their journey he killed Tristan's father, killed his mother killed his friends and kidnapped his sister real reason to go off on this quest and to want this guy dead so on that level he does work a little bit as a villain like he's better than the sorceresses at least because none of them really do anything to harm the heroes personally except for Natasha but we'll get to her in a little bit and then Suck You off but that doesn't happen until like very close to the end of the story so it doesn't really motivate them on their journey so it just it doesn't work and we spend dozens of pages with Wig and Tristan just deciding what they're going to do and I'm just going to read you this next bit so to give you an idea of how long it takes to do anything in this book a man can only wade into any river once the old one said because the river is always moving and therefore each time he approaches it the river is different as is the man who wade into the same river twice because change is a constancy of nature to embrace change is effortless but to resist it is impossible and goes against the natural order of the universe now that is a real saying like the saying is a man can never cross the same river twice for it's not the same river and he's not the same man so normally it is one sentence and they stretch it out to be an entire paragraph like everything is just obnoxiously verbose that should give you an idea of how long it's going to happen in this Godforsaken book so they gather up some supplies and then they leave to go off on their journey and I should note that the first couple of times they mention money in this series they call it Kasi and then later it becomes Kisa and it's not like it just happens once so you think okay it's a typo which is a shitty job editing but it happens a couple of times as Kasi and then it's just Kisa for the rest of the series so I guess the author like changed his mind with the problem with the editing like Jesus bad editing is not a good sign for professional writers but for a first time author it is the kiss of death like your book will not be good if it's not properly edited I also want to note that Tristan has Cluj's sword still it's called a dragon and basically it's a regular sword but it has an extra foot of blade hidden within the blade so if you push a button it'll pop out and pop back in and it apparently has enough force that it'll go through someone's head if you push the button so I think this is kind of a cool idea but they specifically mentioned a bunch of times that dragons are curved and so that wouldn't really work you couldn't really have it in there like if you tried it it would come out like this it wouldn't come out straight but okay so while they're on their journey they see that the entire country instantly fell into chaos et cetera and that makes some sense the minions did destroy and kill as much as possible before leaving but at the same time there was no other authority after the king and his guards were killed there were no nobles town guards mayors there was no church of any sort that could help restore order none and then they're crossing a bridge and a mysterious creature appears it's said venomously yet also somehow casually the creature's speech was perfect almost eloquent belying the horrific nature of its appearance it pointed one of the talents at the prince and you shall not find me such easy prey as those ignorant blood stalkers or screaming harpies I take great pleasure in what I do and I am an expert craftsman I am one of those whom the mistresses call upon when the task is to be very specific and you must have great importance to them for ones such as I to have been called forth to a foreign land so he just can't stop monologuing the first thing that happens when he arrives is to introduce himself as a victor and then explain what a victor is I guess that's just how people talk in this world anyways they kill it and then they continue on their journey and there's days of traveling afterwards and then they reach an inn and they stay the night and they find a woman there who works as a waitress and she's being abused by everyone and it's implied that she's sexual but they mention afterwards that she hasn't been sexually abused yet her name is Lilith she says she was kidnapped and forced to work there because the innkeeper apparently just right after there was no law around decided that slavery was cool with him so that's just the thing he does and Tristan decides to save her and Wig discourages him from doing that because he's like hey you can't help everyone if you do that it might cause trouble and get you killed we need to go on this journey so that we can defeat the sorceresses and then that will save everyone but Tristan just can't bring himself to abandon her because she gives him a boner and like I kind of like this character trait where like he knows that he has to save the whole world and he knows that it would be smarter to sacrifice a couple of people along the way to save the many but he just can't bring himself to ignore the human cost of his actions and so he goes off and does stupid things like this and saves people but it still makes him look stupid because he really has no reason other than yeah she's hot and also like it describes her again as the most beautiful woman he's ever seen like it literally says that that this is the second time it's happened in a book that a woman and described her as the most beautiful he's ever seen and it's not the last time it happens either so they take Lilith with them on the road and she travels with them for a few days and then a few nights later she lures him to a pond away from wig and they start having funky time in the water and I have to be careful with this so as not to get demonetized but also because it might drive me insane if I voice it all out loud before finishing Lilith reveals that she's actually Natasha like she just magically altered her appearance and she also binds Tristan with magic so that he can't move and then continues onward while specifically mentioning that she's going to kill him afterwards and that he's going to get her pregnancy and then she can have a really magically powerful baby Christ Almighty Robert Newcomb like at least pretend you aren't typing this up with one hand it's a very hard erection it actually arouses me very much thank you I'm not kink shaming you but chill okay like again Wheel of Time has a lot of scenes which have stuff like characters getting tied up or characters getting spanked or something like that but it's subtle you know it doesn't really detract from the story I'm pretty sure Robert Jordan was a kink lord he just wasn't this obvious about it and anyways wig comes in and kills her before the end and they say that apparently it doesn't count as sexual assault if Tristan didn't finish that that's actually disgusting and I'm moving on now it's also really dumb for Natasha to just reveal who she was before the end like if she had just waited another minute then she could have just killed Tristan been done with it and then run off like this I don't know this scene is gross okay it's gross it's dumb it makes me cringe and I don't want to talk about it anymore so next up we go to Shailaha who is being tortured and brainwashed and this takes several chapters like the sorceresses give her nightmares while they're also being nice to her during the daytime and eventually she believes that they're her friends and she decides to be evil and she's forgotten most of her old life and the reason they went over to get her is because they wanted her as their fifth member because five sorceresses is a full circle and they couldn't do this with Natasha because Natasha's mother had no magic so even though she's a powerful sorceress she was weaker and it just wouldn't have been good because shut up the author says so this part is okay I admit like we do get into Shailaha's head quite a bit as her reality crumbles around her and then gets rebuilt it takes too long but it's okay I don't hate this section of the book and then we get a chapter about Gelden who remember was the dwarf servant of Sucu off and as her favorite servant he has more freedom than most other slaves do so he goes to the ghetto of the Shund he gives out some food to the people there who might need it and he sends a pigeon message across the ocean to Utrasia to someone named Fagan and this is when I started to like Gelden as a character like he's been biding his time for literal centuries to get revenge on Sucu off and the other sorceresses and at the same time he isn't callous to the suffering of other people like it would be easy to write this character as okay he doesn't care about anyone or anything else he just wants revenge because he hates Sucu off that much but no he's still trying to help people along the way doing this for his personal satisfaction but also just because it would make the world better and yeah I like that Gelden becomes a better character at this point so Tristan and Wig reach their destination which is called the Shadowwood and they are there to find Fagan who we just learned Gelden was communicating with and Fagan is like a powerful wizard who's been hiding for centuries and he might help them and the Shadowwood no one ever goes in there and no one ever comes out because like the entrance to the woods it's surrounded by a canyon which if you fall in you will die but it's enchanted so there's an illusion and it looks like a forest which seems like a shitty thing to do because someone could just wander by and fall in and die couldn't you just do the opposite where it's a forest but it looks like a canyon so no one would go walking into it like you would keep them away without killing anybody that seems like a nicer thing to do but okay and anyways they go across a bridge it's guarded by a gnome who is named Shannon the small which is dumb because all gnomes are small but whatever and Tristan being the beacon of morality he holds Shannon over the edge of the canyon and threatens to drop him if he doesn't guide them into the Shadowwood and show them where Fagan is and eventually Shannon agrees to do that and they have a grand old time of it and Tristan decides to be racist we had better get back there before he drinks all the rest of that stuff and becomes drunk again Tristan said still laughing we truly do not need a guide who is both obstinate and inebriated the afterlife only knows he'll probably steal the horses too yeah that that's not the only time they mention that the gnomes are just alcoholic thieves like geez dude they're a fictional race you can write whatever you want about them Robert why did you have to make them like that they fight some giant spiders in the woods because we need an action scene and then they meet Fagan and Fagan is confined to a wheelchair because many centuries ago the sorceresses tortured him and his legs just never healed properly and he's actually more powerful than wig we find out but and that doesn't affect the story all that much it's just he knows even more about magic than wig does he's also Natasha's father which is not relevant but it's a thing that I should say and he's impressed because Tristan is the chosen one and we've heard about this plenty already like Tristan is the chosen one we just don't know what the chosen one is supposed to do he's important to the prophecy but we don't know what he's supposed to do as a result of the prophecy he's just yeah he's the chosen one like the whole point of a prophecy is that it says someone is going to do something like they might save the world or unite all of England or something but Tristan he's just he's the chosen one we don't know what the chosen one does but he's the chosen one they have a long conversation where we learn that Fagan is communicating with Gelden via pigeon which we already knew but Tristan and wig didn't and then they know the situation in Parthalon it seems like Fagan could maybe have warned people in Utrasia about this but whatever and we also learned that Fagan can open a portal which will they can just walk through in Parthalon because the plot needs it to happen like just yeah apparently magic can open portals now I don't know at least they use this later it's not just discarded so they go and because they can't communicate very easily Fagan will just open the portal at noon every day and wait for them for a bit so that they'll have a chance to get back and so they go through and there's an obligatory moment with Gelden and one of his friends where they're like holding them at knife point and they eventually agree to work together and Gelden gives them leper cloaks so that no one will look too closely at them and he leads them out of the ghetto and in order to get out they have to swim into a broken grate and out in the moat basically which is very unpleasant because that's where all the sewage goes and while swimming Tristan his sword gets stuck and he nearly drowns which makes him look stupid quite frankly like it needed to happen so that he could fall unconscious and then Gelden could drag him out and save his life and then they realize okay we can trust this guy which I guess that's fine but a better way to handle it would have been like to either cut that out entirely or to have Tristan like fight some guards or something and nearly die and Gelden saves him them like it would at least make him look less dumb we still have 200 pages left guys so they're on their way to the sorceress home base which is referred to as the recluse and they find a field where the minions execute people in a very unpleasant way basically they tie them to wagon wheels and like the wind kind of blows the wheels around and when it turns it cuts them and twists their limbs in very unpleasant ways like the sun out there burns them really badly the water so they slowly die of thirst the birds attack etc it's a very unpleasant way to die and they see a couple people tied to them who are clearly already dead and they see one woman there who is still alive and she has white feathered wings and Tristan decides he wants to save her because she's naked and she makes his hose jump so he kills some of the guards and then he unties her and we learn that her name is Narissa and Tristan describes her as the most beautiful woman he's ever seen like it just I'm not paraphrasing it just it literally says that and it's not the last time it happens it's the last time it happens in this book but it's not the last time Tristan does this when will this end so Narissa is what's called a Gallipoli which is kind of an odd name because that's one letter off from Gallipoli but whatever and basically just sometimes minions are born instead of having the leathery bat wings they have white feathered angel wings and the minions view them as abominations and they hate them and so Tristan's like okay I guess we'll take Narissa with us and they take her with them for a while and then they leave her at a safe cabin which is hidden in the woods that Gelden showed them and she decides that she loves Tristan after a couple of hours with him because main character is confused by pretending that they are slaves and that he's bringing them to the stables and they like walk through it and gawk at some stuff that they see for a minute and then they are immediately found out and captured what was even the point of that like they could have just been captured the instant they arrived in Parthalon if this was how it was going to go or hell even way back at the palace during the initial attack like it would have saved time and it wouldn't really have changed anything you know I get that the story is more about the journey than the destination this journey is so stretched out and painful I would rather shove broken glass up my nose so Tristan awakens in a cage and the sorceresses are standing over him gloating and several very very long monologues later we learn that their plan is to summon the vigor and vagary orbs and then combine them and they think that will make them super mega powerful and then they will use that power to kill everyone on the planet except for the five sorceresses and Tristan and they just like they needed a whole circle to do that that's why they had to kidnap Shailah and they couldn't just use Natasha and then after they've killed everybody else they want to repopulate the world with their inbred magically gifted babies I'm going to repeat that the villains plan in this book is to kill everyone in the world except for the main character and the five villains and then repopulate the earth with their said magically gifted babies and like it specifically mentions that they spent time developing a spell to counteract the negative effects of inbreeding like you had 300 years was there not a better use of your time this is whatever man I guess villain plans don't need to make sense when they're just pure evil pure insane like who cares about things like motivations or just being sense in general so wig thinks that if they combine the orbs they will destroy the world and he tells Tristan is like hey we need to stop them or everyone will die not just most of them everyone will die and Tristan sees Shailah who has been brainwashed and like I said she's bisexual now which means she's evil and she also tries to grab Tristan by the crotch because sexual depravity because she's evil and suck you off ties up Tristan with magic and then she proceeds to have a horny rendezvous with him when he doesn't want her to and this time he does finish and she immediately confirms that she's already pregnant never been more aroused in my life I had to know this and now so do you like it's not a tasteful scene it's described in explicit detail and it's not good I want to move on it is an awful scene but it is followed by a kind of good one like I'm not even joking like Tristan is you know in his cage away from Gelden and wig and he feels horrible and he's traumatized and Gelden actually spends some time comforting him like he basically tells him look man suck you off has been torturing me for centuries like she's made me impotent she's made me a pet like I barely have a will of my own but I'm alive and as long as you're alive there's hope and we can keep going and like it's a decent scene it really is like I mean Gelden is and wig are the only decent characters in this whole thing they're not great but they're decent characters and scenes like that or why it's like there's little glimpses where it's clear like okay Robert Newcomb kind of knew what he was doing I shouldn't even say that much like he accidentally knew what he was doing for one scene so suck you off comes back later and she apparently magically sped up her pregnancy so she's already almost ready to give birth after like a day and isn't just mere does that sound horribly painful like you know pregnancy is already unpleasant to begin with but like if it's growing that fast I feel like you would feel your organs getting moved around and your skin and muscles stretching out and everything I feel that just sounds really unpleasant to me I don't know maybe maybe I'm the only one but so the ceremony begins and they do it in the room with Tristan and wig because I don't know and when they pull the stone out of the water it should lose its power Tristan thinks and Tristan realizes that the magic light that they are summoning and is hitting it is sustaining the stone or rather his magic blood just kind of tells him this and he also realized that the knowledge was no longer coming from his mind but from the endowed blood that now so quickly course through his veins and then there's an entire page of his blood like speaking to him which I'm not reading like it's not that interesting and it's not that important like the point is you could have had Tristan figure out this one thing alone like you know you could have had him figure out just this one little thing and realize oh okay I'm the hero I can do one thing right and now I can use it to save the day but like no he just gets that handed to him magically like I don't like the term deus ex machina because it's so too much of a cliche but that that's what this is and he finally decides to try using the magic that he apparently has and so he uses telekinesis to pull the paragon and it just comes out of the light and then all of its power is immediately gone and the sorceresses really should have restricted him somehow from using magic but they're just they're dumb I guess when they lose the power the spell just immediately collapses there's a big explosion it sends shards of rocks and hits all the sorceresses except for Shailaha and it looks like suck you off is dead at first but she pretty quickly turns out to still be alive so just that's it that's that's how the sorceresses are beaten that's how the villains of the story die like it was just that easy like I mean I I'm glad that Tristan doesn't just power through obstacles and he has to think a little bit in order to save the day but it's just too quick and too easy like we don't have time to really enjoy the climax and it's just okay it's it's done like I mean I mentioned Star Wars earlier but like imagine if that scene with the Death Star lasted 10 seconds like it wouldn't be nearly as iconic as it is nowadays so we learned that Faeli the leader of the sorceresses was once Wig's wife hundreds of years ago and he's kind of sad about her death and that doesn't really lead anywhere but it's I mean it's worth mentioning I suppose and then some more Wiktors appear and Wig grabs the Paragon and I guess it just it has power back now it just it's it's no longer a useless stone like you don't have to dip it in the waters of the cave it's just it has its power back and he uses it to make massive bursts of fire which kill all the Wiktors which is kind of cool I guess and then because the magic is gone the recluse starts to crumble and it's about to fall in on itself and Suck You has fled to the roof and Tristan follows her up there and they have a brief conversation brief by this book standards where he tries to convince her to come with them so that she can give birth and then apparently when this happened she just lost her powers and I guess it's permanent and she doesn't want to live that way and she also thinks that she'll be taken prisoner forever so she just commits suicide by jumping off the roof and afterwards when Tristan escapes the collapsing recluse he goes back and cuts the dead fetus out of her and buries both of them there's a joke about abortion in there I'm not gonna make it so they can just hop in the portal and go home but Cluj and the minions are already there waiting and they already know that the sorceresses are dead so Cluj just decides like okay I guess I'm in charge now I leave the army so I'm in charge now and they have captured Narissa and they found the portal and he mentions like I'm gonna go over to Utrasia and I'm gonna conquer there next and he says more evil stuff and he'll make Shaila his wife just muaha he is evil and we need reminders that he is pure evil and Tristan challenges him to a duel and Cluj accepts because he wants revenge on Tristan because Tristan killed Sucu off and remember he was in love with her and he also doesn't want to look weak in front of his soldiers so he just like accepts his challenge and they fight for a little bit and before Tristan just got his shit immediately rocked by Cluj but now he can fight toe to toe with him a little bit for a while like he hasn't done any training or gotten any magical power ups or anything he just is better he's able to fight Cluj now and for a minute it looks like he'll lose but then he does the same trick that Frederick did at the beginning where he looks over his shoulder and he's like look behind you and then Cluj like a fucking dumbass looks over and then Tristan throws his knife at him and wounds him and that's it that's how he wins like he's wounded he cuts his head off there are two climaxes in this book and they both suck like the second one's a little better because like I've said before Tristan and Cluj have an actual rivalry Tristan has reason to hate him so like there's build up and it's not over too quickly it's just dumb and plus during the fight Cluj throws a weapon of his own and it hits Narissa and she's wounded and she dies a couple minutes later and the end of three days is gone it's so sad and so among the minions if you kill the leader you become their new leader and this was brought up earlier like when they first introduced Cluj they mentioned that he became the leader by killing the last guy and so it's not out of nowhere but like just now Tristan is in charge and he orders them all to like free all their women that are in the brothels and to start taking wives and to stop sexually abusing people and to just stop killing people in Parthalan and just all this stuff that they've been doing for hundreds of years he's just telling them to stop and then they just agree with no coercion because he's the main character and then they just go back to the portal and they go home and then we go to the epilogue which is really short mercifully so and just some spiritual presence that we know nothing about appears at the grave of Tristan and Sucu off's child's grave and he named his son Nicholas by the way and the spiritual presence like grabs the child's body brings it back to life which apparently that's a thing that can be done and it just takes him up into the sky and that's the end it did you what the fuck like the first time I read that I was like what the goddamn fuck just happened like she commits suicide and then he cuts the dead baby out of her and buries it and then it comes back to life and some evil presence takes it like that's just that's a thing that's how this book ends I'm losing my mind so I hope everything makes sense now I've called this the worst epic fantasy I've ever read and that's for good reason I seriously doubt there's anything out there that is genuinely just worse than this like the plot is stretched out and slow as fuck except for a few points where it just goes way too fast like you know the first climax with the sorceresses where they're all just dead right away Tristan the protagonist of the story is an obnoxious man child who has a low IQ normally and a negative IQ when his dick is hard but he's also the chosen one who's here to do something and he has crazy magic that he uses exactly once in the story or has to train with or anything the villains are all just tackling madmen which could be kind of fun some of the time but the hyper violence and all this sexual assault make it impossible to get into that mindset like it just makes this story too dark and too serious so I can't really just laugh at how over the top they are except for a few brief moments like none of the characters here have any depth whatsoever like they all just act out their most obvious emotions that are all on the most surface level possible like you already know everything about them they're boring like there's not even really a way for me to talk about them much because you having watched this video already know everything about them there's no depth there's no subtext there's nothing to even go into like the only characters that I thought were kind of good were Wig and Gelden like they're both still two dimensional don't get me wrong like there's nothing to them they both just again act out emotions just in your face there's no subtlety about it but they are at least both likable while they're doing that there's nothing here resembling themes even though it seems to be trying for them like maybe it's trying to do a sort of wheel of time dichotomy between men and women or between different types of magic but like it's just it's too vague to actually say anything you know it doesn't go into any real detail it's just like yep this is good this is evil don't mix them or bad things happen and like yep men can be trusted with magic sometimes there are some evil men who use magic but women are just evil naturally and that's why we can't trust them and they can't be trained in it which really is even stupider when you remember that there are men like Cluj who do not use magic at all and they still do such disgusting violence like clearly you don't need magic to be evil but like it just makes women evil that's just a thing like wheel of time got weird sometimes with some of its gender essentialist ideas but at least it had ideas and at least it was commenting on the real world and beyond that the closest we get to anything resembling themes is like some half-assed fantasy wisdom and half-assed fantasy proverbs which sound more profound than they really are and the story it's a mess I think you can tell that by now like there's nothing but monologues and a couple of action scenes and again just like with the characters it's all totally surface level there's no interpretation to be had like just try to imagine for a moment fans reading this and then trying to form theories about it you know trying to discuss it with each other or thinking themselves like what will happen next what's the true nature of this world that we're not understanding you can't imagine them doing that because there's nothing to build off of here like there's nothing there's no depth to any of this that it's hard to even criticize a lot of the time for that exact reason I will say that this works okay as a standalone like at least at least as long as you ignore the epilogue like there's not a huge cliffhanger or anything that's kind of nice you know it's just some evil dudes attacked the prince killed a bunch of his friends kidnapped his sister and then he rescues his sister kills the bad guys and then goes home like okay that works as a standalone story but again Nicholas is apparently brought back to life and something nefarious is going on there so we know it's going to continue and just don't even get me started on the extreme misogyny and homophobia like I pointed out that women who have magic are just kind of evil just because they're into the vagaries and the vagaries are evil magic but once you give in to the evil magic it also makes you a bisexual raping sadist and it's like again if I have to explain to you why this is bad I'm probably not going to change your mind because it's just like I'm not even reading into this like it's not subtext or anything it's just straight up said and like you can't even say it's a product of its time or anything because it's only 20 years old it came out in like 2002 or 2003 like jeez man chill like newcomb clearly just is not skilled enough to even write subtext like if he was trying to make all this subtext well he failed he failed completely like the only real positive here are that there are some parts of the story that are so crazy or so bad that they become hilarious like I said before the villains evil plan is just inbreeding to populate the whole earth or the Wiktor literally just introducing itself by saying hi I'm a Wiktor here's what I do here's what I'm about the over the top nature of the villains is sometimes entertaining enough that I was able to get through this entire book twice and it's again it's not short it's a long book and that's about all I have to say for now I will be back with the rest of the trilogy soon I could maybe have fit this all into one really long video but like I said earlier that would be bad for the pacing like this is a good place to stop let it sink in think about it some more and then I can go do the second and third books together like if I didn't have the pacing right it would make things stretched out even if it's the same length and I'll see you soon with books 2 and 3 it might be like a week from now it might be a month from now I don't know but it'll be soon and I'll just tell you right now books 2 and 3 get worse goodbye special special special thanks to everyone who watched including all the patrons whose names are here and the $10 and above the $10 patrons are Appo Savalainen, Olivia Ray and Brother Santotys, Buffy Valentine Carolina Clay, Dan Anceliovich Dark King, Dio Echo, Eevee, Flax, Great Griebo Carcat Kitsune, Elle Lindberg Liza Rudikova, Lord Tiebreaker Matthew Bodro, Microphone Peep the Toad, Robi Reviews Sad Martigan, Silia the Vixen Stone Stairs, Tesla's Shark Vaivictus and Wesley thanks to all of them I couldn't do it without them well maybe I could but 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 goodbye