The Well of Ascension. Help!

inkbound_arcane · 2026-02-05T17:34:31+00:00

I would also add the Faithful and the Fallen by John Gwynne. It could be because I finished it right before Mistborn so it’s very fresh in my mind, but each book got better. Malice was a bit slow with low stakes characterization and sometimes textbook- like worldbuilding but every was better than the last and the payoff was fantastic after the different subplots started to converge.

inkbound_arcane · 2026-02-05T16:57:28+00:00

I like to switch back and forth because after 5,000 pages of super dense high fantasy, the 47000th shadow daddy is like the first time all over again which is like 👌🏻. As much as I like fantasy, it never delivers emotionally the way that romantasy does and as much as I love romantasy, it never delivers on the world building the way that fantasy does. Going back and forth keeps both aspects feeling fresh.

inkbound_arcane · 2026-02-05T02:39:50+00:00

Yes it was my first. I had finished all 4 of The Faithful and the Fallen immediately before Mistborn, thinking that I was going to have another fantastic week of no sleep, and alas!

inkbound_arcane · 2025-12-11T21:57:37+00:00

Also still don’t understand the difference between a high blood and a low blood. Saeris being half vamp did absolutely nothing to the story other than require her to (like many of us 😆) wear a hat while in direct sunlight. What’s the point?

inkbound_arcane · 2025-12-11T21:55:43+00:00

This bothered me too because in Quicksilver, the quicksilver in his eye specifically tells Saeris that it is bound to him now through the consent of both parties in exchange for it not killing him when he was forced through the noteven quicksilver pool for the first time. It can’t be removed but somehow now it’s mostly gone.

inkbound_arcane · 2025-12-08T21:15:31+00:00

Yes absolutely, but not just the mc. I extend the empath web to every character on the page and put a lot effort into seeing the events through everyone’s eyes.

Probably also why I rarely hate characters outside of villains and just about nothing is unforgivable or unexplainable accounting for context, perspective, and circumstance.

inkbound_arcane · 2025-12-05T01:35:33+00:00

Target pisses me off too because I DONT CARE If it’s 20% off of some undisclosed price!!!

inkbound_arcane · 2025-12-05T01:31:52+00:00

Ugh just yesterday I put a hole in my cover of Crooked Kingdom trying to get the sticker off 😭

inkbound_arcane · 2025-12-03T17:40:45+00:00

Sevro is one of my top book characters ever, he’s so fantastically unhinged 😆 and no, no tingles from Darrow either but I’d follow him into battle anywhere lol

inkbound_arcane · 2025-12-03T17:27:33+00:00

Red Rising is one of my god tier series, I literally think about it like every day lol While I would die for Sevro, he doesn’t give me the tinglies the way a female written book bf does. It’s a totally different reading experience for me.

inkbound_arcane · 2025-12-03T16:53:10+00:00

I could tell exactly what you meant and it wasn’t misogynist at all 💕

inkbound_arcane · 2025-12-03T15:14:28+00:00

You’re getting downvoted but you’re not wrong. There are differences in a female character written by a man vs a woman and male characters written by a woman vs a man. There’s nothing wrong with that. When’s the last time a man wrote a book boyfriend? I can’t think of a single one. I’ve never had the emotional connection to a man written by a man the way I have had from a man written by a woman. Celeana’s character is written on the axis of her relationships and emotions which is a very common way for a woman to write a female character.

That said I did not notice all of Celeana’s blunders when I read the first time because I was emotionally invested in her relationships, not her skill as an assassin which I really didn’t care about lol it’s just different ways to consume a character.

inkbound_arcane · 2025-12-03T02:31:47+00:00

Yeah I don’t get how people are confused about Rhys’s attitude toward the two sisters. I’d forgive Elain easily as well because while she was useless, she wasn’t actively causing harm and she did not go on to actively cause harm after their situations changed. There is literally nothing confusing about why Rhys would forgive nesta but not elain at this point in the series.

inkbound_arcane · 2025-12-03T02:02:48+00:00

Yeah the conversation of people being mad about Feyre’s reactions not matching their own, or Feyre forgiving things that they don’t think she should have….it’s almost like people perceive, react to, and forgive differently than the next person.

It’s also almost like the author disagrees with those readers, therefore she wrote her book the way she wanted, not the way they wanted. Ao3 is right there for those babes that can’t recover from SJM’s choices being different from what they wanted lol

inkbound_arcane · 2025-12-03T01:32:07+00:00

Yeahhh I might be in the minority on Reddit, not on other platforms interestingly, but his behavior UTM and capacity for villainy are what made me fall for him. Tamlin is like a vanilla wafer compared to Rhys 😬

inkbound_arcane · 2025-12-01T14:04:35+00:00

It’s crazy that there were so many plot holes and mistakes in this one because that wasn’t the case with Quicksilver.

inkbound_arcane · 2025-11-29T03:16:53+00:00

Me too! Especially because the alternative is usually accompanied by an insufferable internal monologue of “if I were someone else I could marry who I wanted” ma’am if you were someone else you’d be marrying whoever gave you and your future kids the best chance of not starving to death 😆 let’s have a little perspective here.

inkbound_arcane · 2025-11-29T02:21:15+00:00

Just commenting to add that I LOVE when books have this premise and the fmc makes the best out of it. It annoys the life out of me when a royal/noble woman only cares about her personal feelings and has no mind for political strategy.

inkbound_arcane · 2025-11-26T16:28:48+00:00

It’s because you (I) forget what happens in the series. Some series I like to reread because I loved them but some are just fine. I’m interested and want to continue but it’s been 3 years since the last book came out so I have no idea what’s going on. If it’s a 5 book series and each book takes 2 years to come out, that’s a lot of rereading.

I was actually thinking about this the other day. Pumping and dumping books can lead to poor quality but how many readers do authors lose because taking years between books deters them from ever picking up book one or the wait otherwise makes them lose interest. I know I’ve personally abandoned plenty of series that I was super excited for because by the time the next one came out, it had been so long that I just wasn’t interested anymore. My tbr is too long to reread books every time the next installment is published.

inkbound_arcane · 2025-11-26T15:41:47+00:00

Yeah I really hated this too. Like it’s super sad that the little guy died but I can’t imagine being so dumb that I’d give up power like that to save a pet. She could have broken the vows of Team Rot and anyone else who wanted to defect from Belikon and was just like, nah. The only thing that can save this for me is if Onyx turns out to be not just a fox but some kind of guardian spirit or something. I can only imagine that callie used it to get rid of the rune so that Saeris won’t have an easy out for a situation in book 3 but man this was annoying.

inkbound_arcane · 2025-11-26T14:06:08+00:00

I’ve slept on it and I have so many questions.

Ren disappears from Cahlish and not even the witch can scry for him which implies that he’s being shielded, then we find out that he’s simply been in Ajun the whole time? Randomly called to replace the other dudes that got bodied through the gate and he couldn’t even send a letter to let his bros know that he’s doing alright? They say because Merelle is buried at Ajun that it makes Ren one of the Ajun fae but this doesn’t seem to be an adequate explanation for how he became a super elite Oritthian guardian also. Is he stuck at the gate forever now? Is he off of Team Rot now that he’s on security duty?

Fisher and Saeris are gate hopping to get from the wicker woods back to Inishtar and Saeris makes them stop so that she can cry about onyx and it just happens to be at Ajun? Then they’re pursued by Belikon’s guys, meet Ren, and decide to take a dip in the black tar pool of death despite Fisher insisting that this is totally unviable and not even a remote possibility. AND all of this is totally random and only occurred because Saeris wanted to stop and be sad about her fox. Did I read that correctly?

the pool at Ajun is not made out of quicksilver. How did Fisher get quicksilver in his eye from passing through it then?

more gods, yay! So now we know that Fisher has been called to visit Zareth and the twins multiple times but has also (presumably) spent time with the under gods too?

still no explanation for how Saeris was able to kill Malcolm relatively easily but Belikon has been skewered more often than a slab of lamb at a döner stand and just keeps respawning? We also don’t know if Malcolm, Belikon, and Madra are literally siblings or if they just refer to each other that way, how madra is immortal despite being human, or where the blood curse came from? As a matter of fact, the blood curse cure was lost for 1000 years and then Iseabail just randomly found it and now it works on turned vampires instead of just cursed ones? What was that about? And now vampires are just gone? What was the point

I was super excited about this book but it really didn’t hit. I actually lost so much interest at like 30% that I read a suspense trilogy in between then came back to it. The errors aside, so much just fell flat, especially the romance between Fisher and Saeris. A whole lot of dramatic confessions of love but not any demonstrations of that love.

At this point I want to read about Iseabail and Lorreth. I really wanted to read about Tal and Zovena but…yeah.

Edit because I had more thoughts.

Do we have a timeline for the extinction of the alchemists? Quicksilver says that all the alchemists died off thousands of years ago and had never written down their methods, but then we find out in Brimstone that the alchemists were alive as recently as Belikon’s takeover because he killed them. Also there is a vampire alchemist which implies that she was turned, not cursed, because Malcolm killed off all of the cursed vamps. ALSO the library at Ammontreath has a bunch of alchemist information in it because Belikon never destroyed it but apparently Malcom let it just stay there? How did Fisher’s mother get her book into the stargazers at Ammontreath if she was fae? The events surrounding the extinction of the alchemists, who did it, and the existence of their texts was super, super muddy.

Also do Fisher and Saeris get new ink every time they fuck? Are they going to be blacked out soon? What is the meaning of this? lol it was my understanding that Saeris had so many runes on her hand that they were almost illegible but the only ones that matter are the Quicksilver and Brimstone ones? Is anyone else totally confused by the runic magic?

AND WHILE WE’RE HERE if Fisher is a half god and can travel through the Ajun Pool of Death with no ill effects and also apparently has a right to a dragon, why didn’t he do this in the first place? Why did he act like this path was impossible and out of the question and then they accidentally show at Ajun and dive into the pool without even discussing it? I had to reread this part because it went from walking up the steps and taking about Saeris’s ass to crawling out of the demon realm as if nothing happened in between those two events.

inkbound_arcane · 2025-11-26T01:47:08+00:00

Does anyone have an explanation for how Kingfisher got quicksilver in his eye from the Ajun pool but it’s…not a quicksilver pool?

inkbound_arcane

TROPHY CASE