A guild slave in a city of mages, Lysium dances on a magical stage while stars drift from her hair and whisper secret persuasions into the minds of her audience. Every evening she chronicles her memories, for every night comes a shadow who steals them away.She lives each day dancing in the arms of the handsome, aloof husband the guild has given her to while their best friend, a fireseller and a … fireseller and a slave as they are, has shorn his hair in a sorrow he refuses to speak of.
Until the day the guildmaster makes Lysium the crowning pawn in his vengeance.
But even greater danger lurks in the background. The enchanted protections on the city walls are weakening, and no one cares, thinking that the enemies the walls were erected to keep out are nothing but myth.
The shadow-hungry are real, though, and they are preparing for battle.
Now only one sorceress holds up the walls, Essence, but her own loneliness traps her in the web of a mysterious mage whose intentions are shrouded in secrecy, a man who brings her the one thing she cannot resist: love.
Three women and one spirit fight in a world where the battle lines are drawn in the wrong places, unions are made with the wrong allies, and when the enemy strikes…
Not one is prepared.
Can be read as a stand-alone novel!
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Oh my darkness, a more twisted and gothic tale of love, manipulation and magic I have never read. A few caveats aside, I loved it even as I kept wondering if I should put it’s discomforting take on relationships aside. You want a high fantasy that is, in essence, Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance”? This second instalment of the Seven Cities saga delivers in convoluted, terrifying spades.
There’s a lot going on in this tome of a book, so let’s see if it’s possible to summarise without spoilers:
Lysium and her husband Loren are dancers entertaining the crowds of the Seventh Demesne. Her memories are full of fogginess, but she knows there’s something between her, her husband, and the fire-mage and fellow guild-slave Lothram whose gaze burns her every night. Owned and controlled by the shadowy Guildmaster, they’re used by him to further his own shadowy plots against the magnate. He has enlisted the mage Melyndra into his plans, keeping an eye on those within the Institute of mages.
You see, the Seventh Demesne is a city of magic, where all the mages and healers of all the Demesnes are trained. Magnate Zeiren, a strong mage in his own right and head of the Mage Council, is in total dominating control. When he comes across a young mage named Essence with powers so strong they cannot be tamed by him, his anger and fear threatens the very foundations of the city. For Essence uses her powers to shore up the city’s magical walls, and should she stop the shadow-hungry monsters of legend could well take advantage of their weakness. But bound as she is the the mysterious, handsome, possessive enigma mage named Elixer, she becomes even more tangled up in intrigues and prophecies than she could ever comprehend.
Those 700+ pages are needed just to get everything set up. You want plot? You got plot by the bucketful. And that’s without including the myriad of subplots, side characters, and teasing references to some of the more mysterious aspects of Heiress of Healing that came before. It is long, it is slow, but it is worth it even if it is open-ended.
Those caveats: for one, it suffered from some of the same issues as the first book in the series, only perhaps more frustratingly so. It does fall on just the right side of understandable, but it’s another case of characters knowing more about the world than we do – to our detriment.
Characters are mentioned as if we already know them. Events are mentioned as if we’d seen them. To my recollection, these characters and events didn’t happen in book 1, so must have been in the intervening 25 years. This made the first part of the story somewhat confusing, and it drew me out of the narrative as I had to stop and logic out what had happened when and between who. There’s also a tiny hint of info-dump when a character reads a book, and it struck me that the knowledge here would actually have made book 1 more understandable.
Also: those confusing parts from the end of book 1 do get some kind of resolution here… But only right at the last minute. There’s a sudden rush of exposition which I wish had had more foreshadowing and more time to develop. Any confusion in a story this long could be problematic, as there is just so much to keep in your head. I was afraid I’d have forgotten half of it before even reaching the end of the book.
While events could be a little hazy, the world building continues on to be really something. The magic systems, the lore, the social structure… You really get the feel for the differences between peoples in the Seven Cities.
Now about that “romance”. I wouldn’t exactly call it romance because it’s not romantic per se. It’s tortured, manipulative, and just generally really messed up. Don’t think anything’s going to be sweet here. Most of the guys are towards the creepy (and dare I say, rape-y) side of things. The girls aren’t all drooping damsels, but it’s all about how scarily easily they can be deluded – willingly – into thinking everything’s fine. These are dark and damaged relationships, and so can be highly uncomfortable at times. They can also be darkly fascinating in their complexity.
There’s also a lot of sex. Nothing overtly shocking or badly scripted, but just FYI. It’s not always easy to read because of the character’s situations.
My favourite characters were the Shakespearian comic relief duo of Olsen and Fel. You don’t expect funny characters in a grim story like this, and while they could be annoying they also lightened the tone and had the best traditional character arcs despite us only really getting to know them through limited dialogue. Some other characters made you want to scream (Jolina – what the actual..?)
After the action-packed finale full of sorrow and revelations, I need answers. It’s a story full of emotion, beauty and terror in a high fantasy setting that muses on how blind love can be… But also how beautiful, whether it’s an illusion or not
-I received a free copy of this e-book in a giveaway hosted by the author. This does not affect my review-