"It’s not a problem we usually have, you know,” he spoke. “Needing a reason to fight. They always tell us it’s in the blood. But it isn’t, for me. I don’t get the battle-joy when smashing some poor bastard’s face in. Still, I was prepared to just… drift through the rest of my life.”
He shook himself, as if waking up.
“Then you arrived. Some slip of a girl with a fake name, who looked defeat in the face and decided she would win anyway,” his lips stretched into a grin. “You had blind spots, though, needed someone to cover them for you. I did, and it made me realize I’m good at this.”
He waved, encompassing everything and nothing.
“So I followed and I watched. It was during the melee that I realized half the Empire would rather set the table on fire than let you have a seat – and they expected to win, too. Don’t they always? Sooner or later, better blood wins out. We mongrels are only ever meant to bow.”
His skeletal hand tightened, grinding against the hilt of his sword.
“The presumption makes my blood boil,” he growled. “It makes we want to crush them, cut through them with fire and sword down until there’s nothing left but wails and a field of ashes. It doesn’t really matter, if you end up making the world better or worse with your plans. I just want to break the odds, to bring down the ceiling on their fucking heads.”
The tension went out of him as suddenly as it had appeared and Hakram laughed, the sound delighted.
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I need to stop reading EE fiction while consuming other media. Any other media. It inevitably a) completely fucks my sense of who is supposed to be a villain and who is a hero and b) makes me disappointed in everyone else's worldbuilding
2025 Book Review #12 – Pale Lights Book 2: Good Treasons by ErraticErrata
Pale Lights has been, for the last few years, the only serial fiction I have been consistently reading week-to-week as each chapter drops. So I’m truly not sure if I can give any sort of objective recommendation on whether you should read it, both because I have long since lost all perspective and because reading this as a complete work is almost certainly an entirely different experience from inhaling each chapter as it comes out. That said: it’s really good! If you like janky epic fantasy webfics I would even say it’s actually the best out there (note that I hate most janky epic fantasy webfics).
Set in the subterranean, god-haunted, repeatedly post-apocalyptic and roughly early modern fantasy world of Vesper, Book 2 of Pale Lights picks up pretty quickly after Book 1 finished – though now with twice as many protagonists. Along with Tristan (alley rat, unrepentant thief, sole follower of a very involved and often unhelpful goddess of luck) and Angharad (noblewoman fleeing her family’s purge and massacre, masterful duellist, swore her soul to an ancient eldritch god for the strength to take vengeance) from the first book, the story now gives equal time to the POVs to their minders from the last trials: Song (expert sharpshooter, aspiring officer, heir to literally the most cursed and hated family name in the world) and Maryam (‘Navigator’ (sorceress), technically princess and first witch of a now-conquered and enslaved people, recipient of a ritual that was supposed to fill her with generations of occult knowledge and might which inexplicably failed). Together they form a cabal at the newly reopened Scholomance, the incredibly cursed and actively malevolent but otherwise extremely useful university used by the god-hunting Watch to train the next generation of their officer corps.
The book follows the four of them through their first year of studies, first at the Scholomance itself and then on a practical exam where the four of them are sent to the troubled principality of Asphodel to fulfill a contract for its ruling Lord Rector. As might be expected, nothing at any point goes according to plan, and all four of them are hounded at every turn by the ghosts of their past. Also scheming gods, titanic monsters, and incredibly unwise romantic entanglements.
Now this is serialized web fiction, and has both the strengths and the weaknesses typical of the medium. You spend an immense amount of time just existing in all four protagonists’ brains, and every one of them is by the end intensely nuanced, interesting and compelling (likeable, even!) after getting their own richly detailed character arc through the book (The friends reading along with me week-to-week basically all disagreed, but for me at least the story managed the rare trick of not having a single POV I sighed in disappointment to realize was the focus of an update). The worldbuilding is also full of fun details and extraneous little complications that don’t serve any particular purpose in the story, but do an incredible job of making Vesper feel like an actual place with a real history and not just dark fantasy set dressing. On the other hand, the pacing is...let’s be nice and say unhurried. Some of those fun tangents outstay their welcome, and I literally needed a reference page to keep track of all the supporting characters at points. It was also written in pretty much real time across nearly two years, and you can definitely feel that it took some time to decide just what the defining arcs and conflicts of the main cast were going to be – not to even mention the number of plot hooks or details that were basically forgotten about as things progressed.
The plot is divided fairly sharply into two sections – first at the Scholomance and then on mission in Ashpodel. The break is sharp enough I wondered for a while why this wasn’t just broken into two books instead of one (it’s certainly long enough), but having actually finished it all four character arcs really do run through both sections and only get really satisfying thematic resolutions at the very end. Of the two, I vastly preferred the second half – but then, that’s at least mostly just because my tolerance for magical school/university plots has worn incredibly thin these days. (Even the Asphodel plot verged a bit too close to ‘this is all the protagonists running through their teacher’s rat maze and everything is going according to plan’ at times, especially with a couple late revelations that irked me for entirely petty and subjective reasons). But even the true university sections thankfully only spend a bare minimum of time on expository lectures and stressing about exams in favour of politics, vendettas, and kidnapping or murder attempts.
I really can’t figure out quite how to phrase this without sounding dismissive, but the overall shape of the story is basically about the power of friendship, and learning to implicitly trust and rely on (and risk and sacrifice for) your friends instead of trying to control or manage everything yourself. But it really genuinely works! In large part I think because all four protagonists have arcs that approach and reflect it in their own distinct ways and end up reinforcing each other (the big climax cutting between all of them as they culminated was incredibly well done) – but also just because the sheer length the medium enables let the story really dwell on the 2nd act where they’re all wounded and resentful and keeping increasingly dangerous secrets from each other. Entertaining, compelling dysfunction that almost convinced you they really were just going to fall apart.
The worldbuilding is – well, hardly groundbreaking (the historical inspirations of every cultural are entirely transparent, though there’s at least a little twist on each), but a fantasy world that’s early modern rather than medieval in inspiration is honestly still refreshing enough to buy more goodwill than it’s ever needed from me. And the execution of how it’s portrayed does an immense amount to make the place feel lived in and just compelling – the different cultures and states all cohere and are full of enough bigotry, hypocrisy and petty vendettas to be believable, mostly. The gods, monsters, and magic is all genuinely eerie and on occasion awesome in the literal sense. The aesthetics of the whole series are just incredible, really - just don’t think too much about the whole ‘everything is a giant underground cavern’ thing when picturing scenes.
It helps that sheer constant, unrelenting practice have left Erratic really quite good on the level of prose. The banter and little slice of life moments are endearing and both heart-warming and funny as they’re supposed to be, and the dire ruminations and real drama almost always lands like it’s supposed to. Not always in either case, but honestly far more consistently than a great many traditionally published (and edited) authors seem to manage.
It’s impossible to really recommend sprawling web serials like this to 90% of people, but if you are in the market for a secondary world fantasy epic I really don’t think you can do better than this one.
Working on catching up on Pale Lights and as a bitch 1) who took a several-month break from it and 2) has a real, neurological problem with names…………. Bro who are we ever talking about
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Vesper, the world of Pale Lights (this is my last big Pale Lights post after my reread of Book 1 I swear) is fucking huge:
And this is the parts of it we've seen:
See those four red circles? Yeah, we're 2 books and a bit in and that's all the places we've visited. We have met people from many of these other places (and even from places not on this map), but the actual narrative has barely left the harbour it started in, when looking at that broader scale.
Yet it's a world that's also so incredibly dense. We spent essentially the entirety of Book 1 on the Dominion, and we still didn't explore what the actual dynamics of the Red Maw cult are. We spent the second half of Book 2 on Aphodel, and we barely left the capital, let alone see the eastern and western sections of that island. We spent the first half of Book 2, and now the start of Book 3 on Tolomontera, and we're only just now pushing into the island outside the town, and we barely saw anything of Sacromonte before we left in.
And yet, despite how little we've seen of the world, there is so much going on. The plots per square mile ratio of this place is ridiculous. I said in my sort-of-assessment of Book 1's success at being a Battle Royale that the narrative felt crowded, but this is the case for the whole world. It makes perfect sense that one of the highest callings within the Watch is 'historian', because you need those to keep track of what's going on. This is a world where 2/3rds is covered in darkness, but the parts of it under the light are bursting at the seams, and this is true of the Watch as well.
ErraticErrata's always had an interest in exploring institutions. Even on PGtE's Calernia, a place where Great Man Theory is literally divinely mandated, the polities that see success are the ones that manage to adapt and build its institutions to meet the demands of changing times. Hell, the second half is literally about building first the Endbringer Truce, and then the Geneva Conventions (with Teeth).
But Calernia felt less dense than Vesper. This is, in part, due to the divinely mandated Great Man Theory making it so that there were still distinct people in charge of various factions and polities and conspiracies. In part this is also the fact that Pale Lights is gesturing at the Age of Sail as its basis for its fantasy, rather than the more traditional Medieval Stasis of PGtE. The population growth associated with its technological advances forced institutions into a growth spurt to keep up, and also made people look elsewhere to escape how crowded the world was getting.
Where PGtE, then, was interested in establishing these institutions, Pale Lights is interested in what those institutions look like when they've had a good couple of centuries to grow beyond what they were meant to be.
The Watch of Pale Lights is a bloated mess of a bureaucracy, with a hundred different factions and conspiracies competing for the ability to push this unwieldy, ungainly beast into the direction they want it to go. (This is likely just as true for every other Great Power on Vesper as well, but we're specifically dealing with the Watch.)
The Watch is obviously incredibly decentralised, with its nominally central body of government (the Conclave) being essentially powerless, with all decisions being made by committees, and every Garrison, Free Company, and Covenant having their own political agendas as they struggle for power over those committees, even at the cost of the grander purpose of the Watch as a whole. As a result, each of these has grown in its own direction, considerably more organic than planned, introducing more and more inefficiencies as two different institutions-within-the-institution end up doing the same thing for themselves, and then clashing over who really has the 'right' to do that thing.
We see this in how the Covenants all see themselves as the smart and sensible ones, with all the others being a gaggle of self-important idiots who don't really understand what the Watch is about, each of them growing apart, with even the one tasked with keeping it together growing so self-important it makes the others resentful of it.
All of these Covenants could be used to serve the grander purpose, but they've grown bloated, and their seams are set to bursting as well. They've grown in ways that anyone actually putting this institution together from scratch would never sign off on.
Like, why is internal affairs part of the espionage Conclave anyway? it makes sense the Academy would like to include the Kryptiea within it, right? It would be such a coup to bring internal affairs under the same roof as the rest of the Watch Officer Corps! Never mind that this would put all power in the hands of a clannish, cronyist collection of officers who already have plenty of power to throw around. Why would any of the others give them the ability to investigate themselves when they cross lines?
(Of course, who keeps the Kryptiea in line? Oh, another faction within the Kryptiea? That's alright then!)
And even if they saw this, and recognised the need for institutional humility, the first faction to back down and stop grabbing for power, would get overrun by all the others! So they keep going, even if this leads to absolute nonsense dick-waving contests like what Marshal de la Tavarin and Colonel Cao are doing in Book 3. It would make more sense to pool their resources as a whole to make the most of the two approaches to the problem, but instead they insist on making it a competition between the two.
Now, we've seen this exact situation be addressed within the text. The Kuril Dance/Long Burn saw the three continental Great Powers get into a war that got disastrous enough they could all see that retreat was the wise option, but they couldn't coordinate that retreat as anyone making that attempt would see it taken advantage of by the other two. It was the Watch's role (as indeed it is what the Watch is for), to step in and resolve that coordination problem.
So, who does this for the Watch?
Well, it seems to me that Tolomontera has gathered the next generation of the Watch's leadership, so if any cultural shift within the Watch is to happen, it would start here. I don't think all of the teachers have necessarily understood that they aren't simply impressing their own view of the Watch onto their students so much as they are shaping what the Watch will be going forward.
But I'm especially looking forward to when the students realise this.
Thanks to the prodding of a friend, I decided to read Pale Lights, written by the same author of Practical Guide to Evil (which I have not read), and let me say this:
I binged Pale Lights in a week and a half, and I don't regret it. I absolutely love one of the MC's almost as much as I love Victoria Dallon from Worm/Ward (and if you can't tell by the username, that means a lot from me), and the story itself is just very enjoyable on every level.
I have some mild to minor complaints about some potential unintended implications, but other than that, I recommend the book.
And with that, I'm officially caught up with ALL of EE's writing! It took about 3 months (I think I started and finished on the same day - the 27th of December and of March respectively) but it feels like no time at all at the same time.
Thoughts time, and anticipation for book 3 and what lies in the future for ErraticErrata.
To start off, for anyone interested in the series but hasn't heard the news, Pale Lights will no longer be updating on WordPress, but will instead live on the (functionally more friendly to read on) Royal Road site. Which is fine by me, as it means cover art to show off, and @gwennafran's gorgeous designs. [book 1 and book 2] I love the choice of scene for book 1, probably Tristan's best chapter in Lost Things, while book 2's cover is a brilliant visualization of the Great Orrery, and our main setting for the series (probably).
Getting into spoilers below:
I'm just gonna lead with this: words cannot express how VINDICATED I feel to have been in Angie's corner since the very beginning, despite all the hate her character gets! Huh, it seems like now EVERYONE in the Thirteenth Brigade is a Problematic Fave.
Shame, that.
Except Izel, maybe, he's shaping up to be Just a BigLittle Guy like Tristan pretends but for real. I'm watching you, Coyac. You'll get your time, lad.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
I was totally on the money in calling Scholomance Murder Harvard in my book 1 thoughts. I like that we've reached the point that "fantastical school designed to train Elite Badasses in the most unethical way imaginable" has become such a solid trope, there's no need to make comparisons to any hypothetical wizard schools that would remain unnamed or I'll block you on sight. I know that I was imagining book 1 as a really ambitious Blades in the Dark campaign with some custom rules for contracts, but now I'm picturing in my head a full on Pale Lights-flavored hack that introduces the 7 different covenants as the playbooks, corruption rules for aether entity possession, gloam exposure and sainthood—as much as I've waffled between systems to place the Guide in, I think Pale Lights fits nicely into the Forged in the Dark family of games. Especially since, by book 2's end, everyone in the Thirteenth has leveled up their capacity for intrigue and skullduggery, and not just killing/blowing shit up. More on that later.
Something I've noticed EE does regularly is he'll write one "book" that is technically two in one, as the plots on Tolomentara and at Scholomance are pretty neatly separated from those on Asphodel, such that I could see them being divided up in a hypothetical future publication. I've gotten a look at his latest AMA, and it doesn't seem like that's in the plans, aside from tightening up the part 1 pacing, but I can't be the only one who feels this way, and not just because the Guide is getting this treatment.
Not that it's a negative in any way, I enjoyed both sequences immensely, and how the characters changed and grew over even this single book is honestly really impressive. You can really tell he's gotten everyone to where he wants them to really start rolling on this series (assuming it's going to be as long lived as the Guide and not wrapped up in 3 or 4 books total).
That being said, phew it was really touch and go in that first part, huh? The thing they don't tell you about Bands of Misfits, is that they're often Misfits for a reason, and won't necessarily work well with each other just cause they're all equally anti-social/unhinged. And man, the way this team fights with each other, UGH, it gets BRUTAL at so many times. Like, Hakram and Catherine's fight was cathartic and rough, but things get ugly between members of the Thirteenth, and they don't really get better until they've all been reforged in the fire of Asphodel's revolution.
And speaking of one of those fights, uuuuh so this was probably real funny for anyone reading my book 1 thoughts and was caught up on this one, when I laid out how there's no way Song could have been the one to have shot Isobel back on the island. And no, "Song and Ferranda both shot her" doesn't change that, the intent and attempt was there and she'd do it again. Damn. So two things about that; my biggest reason to disbelieve it originally was because if that was the case, it was a phenomenally stupid thing for Song to do if she intended for Angharad to remain an ally. And not only was it still a terrible idea, not coming clean about it at the end of the trials when all was revealed was what sealed the betrayal, as far as Angharad was concerned. Which, yeah, that would have been the time to come clean, but sadly the Song from Dominion is not the same as the Song from Asphodel in terms of lessons learned. In her attempts to keep her "hand on the chisel" as she puts it, she treated those around her as her hammer, her tools, and that's something she had to learn not to do the hard way.
The second thing about that is, since we've now confirmed that, since she did in fact shoot Isobel, then we all can agree she definitely also shot Lan later on when they were all escaping the battle with the devils, yeah? She was down and wounded, Angie charging into danger after her, only for Lan to then be taken out in the exact way she thought Isobel had been shot (spun from the impact to account for her facing). Which is immediately followed by Song shouting for Angharad to come back out of danger. In fact that also answers how Isobel died facing Song and Ferranda, as it wouldn't have made sense for her to turn back to face them while they were all running from hollows; shot went through her head from behind and spun her, making it appear from Angharad's perspective that she was shot from the front and spun around (I guess muskets don't leave obvious exit wounds compared to entrances? I have no idea.)
That second thing hasn't actually come up yet, as only Tristan seems to remember Ju and Lan, but if it ever does, I called it.
Anyway, yeah I knew that Angie was gonna be mad about that. Emotion-manipulation contract or not, it still means Song executed someone she cared about but even worse, made that choice for supposedly her own good. Honestly I think Angharad took it pretty well despite how furious she was during their argument, if I had Angie's skills I can't say I'd trust myself with my sword at hand during that conversation.
I'm still glad it came out eventually, even though Angharad had to ask not once, but twice, for a straight answer from Song. Especially since that first time was right after Song was saved by Maryam's shade and woke up to the fact she needed to connect better with her squadmates, and then just didn't apply that to Angie. Needless to say I was not a fan of Song for a while there, but by the time of her dealings with the Yellow Earth and her dealing with the assassination attempt on Evander I was back in her court. In fact I'm gonna say everyone in the Thirteenth were lowered in my estimates at some point or another, only to rise back up and exceed my expectations.
Which I think is definitely something EE as an author is just amazing at; letting characters make mistakes, be genuinely flawed and at times unlikable people, and then put them through a crucible where they are forced into a position where they need to, not just trust someone, but put their faith in them. And come out the other end a somewhat better person, and better for it as well. I eat it up every time :D
Speaking of, the last few chapters were real standouts, it's kinda hard to pick a favorite, but by far the most impactful ones were Tristan and Maryam. Izel is here! And Cressida... is not a friend, but she's still in the story, which is good cause I like her. And Maryam! She has a sister, and she's her Stand! What? Okay! And their big moment was so cool, Tristan being willing to die by Maryam's side was barely a footnote in the same chapter by comparison, and that was also a moment of amazing sweetness.
So book 2 ends at pretty much the most cliffhanger cutoff point. How is everyone reacting to Angie staying on? How frigid are Maryam and Song toward Izel? Is anyone gonna ask about why Maryam now has a ghost popping out of her chest? Does Hooks count as a member of the Thirteenth? I have so many questions!
Speaking of new members, with Izel added on, EE has confirmed two more figures in the banner
So it now is confirmed to be Song - - Angie - - Izel - - Maryam - - Tristan - - ????
I have no clue on who the sixth member is. I'm not banking on anyone we know so far, it seems more likely to me they'll be someone introduced in book 3, same with how Izel was introduced to us and recruited in the same book.
I also notice the brigade membership cap happens to also be the same as the number of covenants at Scholomance. So far we have Academy/Stripes (Song), Skiritai/Militants (Angharad), Akellare/Navigators (Maryam), Krypteia/Masks (Tristan), and now Umuthi/Tinkers (Izel). All we're missing are Peiling/Savants (Scholars) and Arthashastra/Laurels (Diplomats). Hmmm. Given that Hooks has access to the Cauldron, were she to somehow end up in a separate covenant she could be Peiling with all that knowledge, but I have a feeling she's more attached to Maryam (being her Nav and all). So we have the potential for TWO more members from what are so far the two covenants we know the least about.
I'm looking forward to the next book taking place back on Tolomentara, I really liked that place and wanted to see more. A deadly school that's trying to eat you while you attend class is amazing, and there's still so much potential there. And now that everyone has been through their second major adventure, and, as I said before, seem to be at the place where EE wanted them to be so they can actually be a functional team for once, I look forward to what further intrigue they're going to get into.
So far it seems their skill sets have grown more broad rather than deep; Angie is slightly better at using her contract in a fight, but where she really excels with it now is information gathering, espionage that's nearly undetectable (able to know what's in a safe without opening it? Potentially busted when it comes to intrigue!). Song reading people better will make her both a better leader and tactician, if not any more deadly with a gun. Maryam and Hooks have a literal library in their brain(s). And Tristan has the potential to have gotten the biggest boost compared to any of them with his probability sight, but could lead to him taking more risks and leaps of faith, as he just did.
I feel like we're also gonna see what genre the book is gonna land in come book 3. We've broadened out from pure dark fantasy this time, but since what the team seems to be building themselves toward is getting deeper into intrigue and skullduggery, and then thriving in chaos when it inevitably breaks out, I can't really say we're gonna go full high fantasy again like in the Guide. Like Asphodel was the Thirteenth punching WAY above their weight class, and that was given circumstances lining up for them to even attempt it. But as a hint of what's some of the bigger threats out in the world? That was thoroughly demonstrated, and will likely have consequences for what further instructions/assignments they get now.
I have to say, it feels really nice to finally be caught up, and to actually be waiting on reading weekly updates instead of binging. This must be a fraction of what One Piece fans feel when they've caught up. I like it :)
Until next time (which shouldn't be too long, I may do more live reading highlights now that I can take my time)
