#throneofsalt

With dragonfly speed She bites the sword in two; with her teeth she destroys the sword of bronze. She strikes him in his side. His blood paints the moon; Crimson his blood paints the plains of the moon. Two trunkless legs fall; nothing beside remains.

Born Vircir Inotem Tolius Xenvi, he ascended to the throne at the age of 17 upon deposing of his impotent and opium-addled father. The body of Tolius III had barely stopped swinging from the Bridge of Crowns when Tolius IV became Darvatius I, and he made his goal known to his people: to be the greatest emperor the world would ever know. He would succeed.

The rusting carapaces of the last few war machines of the Bull's dread army are reclaimed by root and rain. 

"The Sphinx" - Footage of an enormous black cat-like creature with an androgynous, bright red human face, grooming itself. 

Vast is her compassion, unbreakable is her spirit, clever is her tongue, and most terrible is her wrath. She is our mother. Here is a story of how she stole fire.

She is aflame. There is fire in her eyes. There is fire spilling forth from her lips. It fills the air around her like liquid gold, licking at the fringes of her surcoat. She is radiant as the sun, as the Painted Ones of long ago who learned at Mother's knee. There is a crown of fire upon her brow. She has struck a blow on Darvatius the Eternal, whom no sword can touch nor spear injure!

Moloch is the hell that man has made.

I finished the Book of the Fallen just over a year ago now (after 8 months of work at it), and I have sung its praises to anyone willing to lend an ear, and to many who weren't, to be honest. My drive to read the Ian C. Esslemont Malazan books was never particularly strong, and so in the last year I have only read one of them, Night of Knives, and begun on the second, which is the subject of my musings today. I've been carving away at Return of the Crimson Guard since May. Given that I am still three hundred pages from the ending two months later, it's safe to say that it hasn't lit the same spark as the main series did. This is somewhat to be expected, of course; Erikson and Esslemont are two very different authors and I can't expect them to be the same. Return of the Crimson Guard is a good book, but it is also a weak book. My biggest issue, I think, is that Return takes a great deal of time to really start tying the plot together. It's something of a silly complaint in the Malazan universe, but here it carried a bit more weight than usual. The first three hundred, four hundred pages or so are mostly spent getting grounded, and it's not incredibly efficient at that - the cast and location are shuffled constantly, and this is without location tags or POV tags when the scene shifts. Even for a Malazan veteran it gets to be a bit much, though it falls into place eventually. Though, I must admit the mess is appropriate: the book is dealing with events in the Imperial heartland while the main series focuses elsewhere, and the result is what appears to be a game of Crusader Kings that's gone sour - rebellion all over the place, scheming administrators, incompetent leadership, the whole shebang. It's delightfully complex and chaotic, and actually quite rewarding for those who like watching train wrecks in slow motion. Everything is happening everywhere, all at once, and when things get moving there are interesting scenarios to be had. The problem is that there's not a lot of engagement in the build-up to those interesting scenarios. Even the interminable Tiste Andii segments in Toll the Hounds, or the even more interminable Shake chapters of Dust of Dreams, came with the knowledge that eventually I would be back on the Darujhistan streets or back with the Bonehunters and all would be well again. I never have that feeling in Return - it's never as boring as the Shake (though I think it would be incredibly difficult to top that), but there's no part of the cast that I am invested in enough to really get excited about. I'm in it to see what the outcome is in terms of the greater conflict, but the individual people are more or less out of the picture. But, this is a dreary portrait I paint. The book is still good, especially in seeing the train getting wrecked behind the scenes of the main series, the Malazan standard of morally-grey conflicts is still there (notably with the Wickans and the Seti - they're being thoroughly mistreated by the Malazans, but are still some of the most obnoxiously stubborn, xenophobic, violent heel-draggers I have ever seen in fiction). Perhaps things will really pick up and impress me in the last 300 pages. I'm not going to write it off, but it certainly could have used a better editor.