🖤🖤🖤🖤
This book is like Marmite, you’ll either love it or hate it. It’s long, dense, and unapologetically heavy on world-building, and it expects your full attention. I went in completely blind. I knew it originated as fan fiction, but I hadn’t read it or looked into it at all which, in hindsight, was the best possible way to experience it. No expectations, no comparisons. Just the story on its own terms.
Helena Marino is a captive. Once a gifted alchemist, she has survived a long and devastating war one the necromancers ultimately won. The resistance has been slaughtered, her friends are dead, and the world she knew has been erased. All she has left are the secrets she carries, secrets valuable enough to have her delivered to the High Reeve himself, whose task is to extract whatever knowledge she still possesses.
The novel is structured in three parts: after Helena’s capture, during the war, and the gradual recovery of her memories. This framing is deliberate and effective, constantly reshaping what you think you understand about Helena, the conflict, and the choices that were made along the way.
This is not an easy read. The trigger warnings are there for a reason, and some scenes are genuinely harrowing. It’s a bleak, unflinching examination of how war strips away humanity, how it corrodes people, relationships, and morality until nothing is left untouched. Running through it all is a dark, complicated romance that never softens the brutality, but instead deepens it.
And the final line? I won’t spoil it, but… excuse me, what?! You’ll know exactly what I mean when you get there.