Last book of the series! Let's go, spoilers ahead!
After the (supposed) final battle last book, Keriya and her friends temporarily victorious. But Necrovar proves to not be so easily undone, and Keriya now has to learn to control a deadly form of magic of her own in order to succeed.
The conclusion of the series. I know I was pretty negative on the last book (despite liking it, I just had quite a few grievances with it). How does this one hold up? I like it more than Dragon War, and overall do consider this one to be better. I do have some grievances still, but I had a good time reading this and I'm glad that the arc came to a satisfying albeit bittersweet conclusion.
The whole plot point of the dragons being mind-controlled still annoys me a bit like in the last book. It just is so disappointing when you introduce such a cool race of beings into your story but 90% of them do nothing but sit around due to some plot convenience. Which gets especially frustrating once you realize the war that has been going on for five books now could easily be stopped if they were free (not considering the magical imbalances affecting Selaras for a moment). But at least they do get freed in this book, and the resulting battle is pretty epic, especially with magic faltering.
I really like Keriya's character development, especially regarding Shivnath. The dragon goddess has been so manipulative and bad towards Keriya in the past, yet she still looks up to her despite Shivnath hurting her time and again. In the end Shivnath does at least try to redeem herself (which kills her in the process), and I like how Keriya responds to said death. There's just been a lot of hurt in their relationship. And while I'm not the biggest fan of "horrible character gets their redemption through a single heroic act that kills them", I think that Shivnath's death was executed (pun intended) decently.
Another element I liked was the final moment of Necrovar's life, when he appears as he once was to Keriya and has practically already lost and is heartbroken. He was a horrible, horrible person but deep down still was a person with feelings. This in no way excuses his actions, but it's nice to get a small moment of humanity from him after him mostly just being a big evil shadowy warlord all these books.
I was very happy that Thorion wasn't actually revived (sorry, I'm just not a big fan of reviving characters and Keriya already came back from being almost dead before), and even more pleased with him actually being re-incarnated into another drackling. He probably doesn't have his memories from his previous life, but it's still his soul all the same.
I will say that I wish this book had something like a few appendices describing the magic system because after five books and many different magics being introduced, it gets a little hard to keep up with at times without having to resort to re-reading previous installments (something I simply don't have the time for). I wasn't completely lost here or anything, but it'd be nice to have a refresher at hand for when needed.
Another thing I noticed is some typos which just have no place in a final draft of a book. It definitely could've used another revision before publication because I spotted a few.
So overall I consider this a good ending to the series. Not as strong as the first books, but overall I do like the series and do recommend it. I'm not sure how many other books set in the Selaras world I'll be keeping up with, but I definitely have Eighteen Moons on my to-read list and I may even check out The Guardians. As for future releases, I don't know, I may check them out eventually, may not. But for now I congratulate Mugdan on finishing an overall pretty darn strong fantasy series.
Rating: 3.5/5
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