The last book in the third arc and possibly the penultimate book of the main series. Let's see if it's good. Spoilers ahead.
In order to fight the Othermind, Luna, Sundew, Cricket and a select few dragons of Pyrrhia are flying back to the Lost Continent to look for a dark abyss that is said to hold the key to defeating the evil plant. However, things soon get complicated when the group gets split up and partially captured, with Luna eventually being trapped in the abyss. Here, she unlocks its secrets and hopefully finds a way to save the world, or she'll perish and be stuck there forever.
Whatever you were expecting the finale of the third arc to be, it probably wasn't this. I avoided spoilers like hell but this was absolutely not what I saw coming. No epic battle with the mind-controlled dragons, no direct confrontation with the Othermind. Heck, Luna is stuck in the abyss for what feels like half the book, being unable to pretty much do anything.
I'm not saying she isn't a pro-active character, she definitely wants to be an active player in the story. But in the end she doesn't really do...all that much, especially once she's stuck in the abyss with Dusky, Cottonmouth and Lizard/Freedom.
I'm just gonna be honest here: Luna is by far my least favorite protagonist of the third arc. I feel the same disconnect with her that I feel for most of the arc 2 protagonists. And that's kind of a shame, because so far arc 3 had a really good track record of protagonists I liked. Blue and Cricket I liked (although their constant pining for one another was kind of annoying). Snowfall was great as well, and everyone and their grandma knows how much I love Sundew.
But I just have no strong feelings on Luna except that I don't vibe with her as a character. She's kind of an intermediate character, so to speak. Not as pacifistic as Blue, but also not as aggressive as Sundew. And that's fine, such a character could work, but it just didn't work for me here. The only trait of Luna I kind of genuinely liked was how she tended to view situations or people as in a tapestry (she's an artist, after all). That was a neat and clever way to portray her inner thoughts, similar to Turtle and his affinity for writing and reading stories. But other than that Luna is just a protagonist I did not connect with. And She's the one we're stuck following all book, of course.
Also, before I forget, I think that the two prologue characters (names were Raven and Mole, I think), are pretty much pointless. The prologue seemed to be setting them up to be major players in the story, but they only showed up for a couple of scenes and...that's it?
Ah well, back to the plot. Our heroes arrive at Pantala and get split up. One half (the one including Luna) travels to the caves and meets up with the humans, using Wren as an interpreter. They look for the abyss, and pretty soon Luna and a SilkWing dragonet called Dusky end up trapped in there. And from there the book just...comes to a halt for most of it. And this is where we'll be spending most of our time. Luna and Dusky trapped in a mindspace of the Othermind and two other individuals: Cottonmouth the human and an ancient dragonet called Lizard (later Freedom).
Who are these two? Pretty much very major players in the Scorching that took place five thousand years ago. The humans (under Cottonmouth's rule) stole dragon eggs in order to try and train them, the dragons rebelled and overthrew the human societies, with most of the humans abandoning Pyrhhia to travel to Pantala instead, hiding in the belowground caves. One of the stolen dragonets was Lizard, who together with Cottonmouth has been fused with the Othermind and now lives in perpetual suffering with him, both being neither exactly alive or dead. And they don't really mentally reside in the abyss, but rather in a mindspace that can be altered to show various things and memories. From here on out we pretty much travel from memory to memory in the mindspace while Luna consistently tries to convince Lizard to abandon her frail loyalty to Cottonmouth and put a stop to everything.
And this part is really what drags down the book for me. It just feels like the plot comes to a screeching halt in order to deliver a shitton of exposition. And the exposition we're shown is interesting, but it just feels kind of out of place here. I'd much rather have had a Legends installment explaining the Scorching in a more natural-feeling way rather than our hero being trapped and forced to witness all of it for what feels like twenty chapters. And it feels repetitive. Consistently Luna going "you are loved, help me end this" and Lizard consistently being like "nope" for chapter after chapter. It's exhausting and gets grating and boring after a while.
This ultimately causes the final moment where Lizard does decide to help Luna feel completely hollow. I didn't feel emotional when this dragonet died, I just felt glad to finally be out of the mindspace and abyss where we've been spending the past chapters constantly doing the same. So it kind of killed the emotional core of the story, since this is supposed to be a truly heartfelt moment. Luna, after finally befriending Lizard, realizes that the only way to stop the Othermind and Cottonmouth is to put an end to all three of them, including Lizard. There's emotional goodbyes with her and Dusky, and it's all played like Lizard (now Freedom) is making the ultimate heroic sacrifice. And she is, but it completely loses its emotional core because of the chapters that came before feeling so boring and repetitive.
And after that the conflict is resolved like, really fast. The HiveWings are punished for their crimes (not enough in my opinion, they really did own slaves and were dragon racist for years and did fuckall to stand up to Wasp when they weren't being controlled) and Jewel is their new queen, Swordtail and Luna are re-united, Blue and Cricket get together, both continents are now in regular contact with one another, etc. And it just...comes too soon and feels hollow because the "climax" felt so weak. It doesn't feel earned. I'm not one to always solve things with a big epic battle scene, but things really should've been more epic here. This has been so far the biggest conflict the dragons have had to face, spanning two continents and going back further than even Darkstalker's time. And its all solved with a quick slice of Luna, killing the Othermind, Cottonmouth and Freedom. No epic battle, no epic setting, no nothing. Just a hole in the ground in a bunch of caves and an emotional moment that's ruined by how boring and repetetive the chapters before it were.
I feel like I should clarify that I don't hate this book, but it was just overall mediocre and low in quality when compared to the rest of the arc. There's definitely some elements I enjoyed, such as a non-binary character and our first confirmation of an mlm couple in the series, and of course the scenes where they're re-planting trees on Pantala. But that's not enough to keep me invested.
I can't honestly recall the last time I was this underwhelmed by a Wings of Fire book. Probably somewhere in the second arc. I just don't vibe with this ending at all. Which is a shame, because, again, arc 3 really had a great track record with consistently good books to me. But it ends on such a dud and if this really is the last main-series book to come out of Wings of Fire, it's a pretty sour note to end on. I do hope we get at least one more book that deals with the conflict set up in Dragonslayer. If that's the case, please be less underwhelming than whatever this was.
Rating: 2/5
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