#sethra lavode

"Duty, that is Aerich. Love, that is Khaavren. I am friendship, and Pel is loyalty. There, you see? That is why we get along so well."

We continue to stan Tazendra, for as little as she was in this book. This would have been a significantly shorter book if she hadn't been put in magical stasis for a year.

Something I intend to come back to, when I get to Teckla: when Aerich goes to Daavya to look for Tazendra, only to find the castle abandoned save for a Teckla. There is a character that Vlad meets in Teckla (or maybe Phoenix?) who described a similar scenario - he had moved into an abandoned castle, was pestered by some nobleman, and he'd harried them with spells he knew. Something like that. A similar situation, but two different perspectives. And who even can say if either is a reliable narrator, if they are describing the same scene? Anyway, when I get to that bit, I hope to come back to Sethra Lavode to see how well the accounts align.

All of the Piro scenes after this point are really rough for me. I love the Battle of Adrilankha chapters, it's fantastic that Morrolan gets some big damn hero chapters, but Piro's chapters are the ones that destroy me. Like, Five Hundred Years After is absolutely a tragedy, but it's mitigated by the fact that most of our favorite characters survived. Sethra Lavode is not a tragedy, which makes the deaths of some of our favorite characters hurt so much more.

"They killed Srahi."

Fuck.