Charlotte Kersten

Yeah, I read this because sometimes I have to be evil and hate-read romantasy. This isn’t how I usually do my reviews, but I decided that summarizing the plot of this book is the best way to help communicate what exactly is going on here. Also every time I spotted a suspiciously familiar plot point, I marked it with an asterisk!

SUMMARY

The book’s world is divided into five countries and a central area called “the Central.” Three hundred years ago, the Fae and Celestials had a war called the Faelestial War. The Fae won, the Celestials retreated beyond “the Veil,” and now the evil Fae king is using vampires to terrorize and control the human populace. He hosts a tournament called the Libertatem every 100 years, and in this competition, 5 warriors from each country fight to have a century where their country is free from the predations of the vampires. 

Our main character, Astraea, has no memories, silver hair, and strange silver tattoos. Five years ago, she was found unconscious in the woods by a man named Hektor, who owns a successful gambling-brothel-crime den. He took her in and she has been his mistress since then; of course he is a very scummy, abusive guy!!

Astraea likes sneaking around Hektor’s manor, and as the book starts, she sneaks into a room where she immediately meets a devastatingly handsome dark-haired man with golden eyes in a scene that’s almost beat for beat the same as the scene where Poppy meets Hawke in From Blood and Ash*. For some reason she has to do a sexy dance for him and we get a “Who did this to you?” from him right away. We also learn that his name is Nyte.

Hektor is scummy and abusive and locks Astraea in her room*. He’s also giving her pills “for her blood” and she believes that she will get incredibly sick if she doesn’t take them. While locked up, she is able to sneak out, thanks to guidance from Nyte’s voice in her head. She gets attacked by a vampire and saved by a Fae warrior who seems to recognize her and wants her to leave with him, but she runs away and never thinks about him again. When she gets back to the manor, Hektor creepily presents her to some men and she finds out that he’s going to sell her to them because she’s so special-looking.* Fortunately, she is secretly best friends with the land’s princess, Cassia, and she arranges to run away with Cassia when Cassia leaves to compete in the Libertatem.

After getting this set up (with Nyte’s help), she decides to go back to the manor for some reason that isn’t clear to me. Hektor is creepier and more abusive than ever because he has discovered her plans to leave, and she ends up stabbing him while she escapes (with help from Nyte). 

Cassia and Astraea start to travel to the Central with Cassia’s bodyguard, Calix,. They have a lovely night together where they get drunk, Astraea solves a line puzzle to the delight of a bunch of men at the bar (?) and they vow to be there for each other forever. When they go back to their room, Cassia is immediately attacked and killed by a vampire. Calix is furious and blames Astraea, who runs out onto an icy lake and attempts suicide, but Nyte saves her. While he’s trying to keep her from freezing to death, they banter about how she can’t die yet because she has to dance sexy for him again. 

Astraea is suicidal while recovering at a random fae’s manor for about two days, and then she pretty much stops being suicidal and decides that she is going to enter the Libertatem while impersonating Cassia to honor her death. In order to do this, she apparently just has to reach the Central before Calix lets them know that Cassia is dead??? I do not feel like that is an airtight plan, but Astraea is not worried about the logistics, so neither am I. 

When she gets to the Central, she immediately meets her friend Zathrian from Hektor’s manor (he’s basically this book’s Lucien). He accompanies her to the castle, which is made of glass,* and she disguises herself to begin the trials.

The other competitors are assholes except for a woman named Rose, who immediately recognizes that Astraea is not Cassia because she and Cassia were friends. We learn that Cassia was terminally ill and did not tell Astraea this, and the vampire killed her because he could sense that her life was reaching its end. None of this really gets addressed again or matters after the chapter where it’s mentioned so whatever. 

We also start to get some lore from Nyte. The powerful Celestial Star-Maiden, who is now dead, fell in love with someone she shouldn’t have fallen in love with, and because of this, the Celestials’ ability to recycle the souls of the dead got messed up and so now their magic is dying…and the stars are dying, too. Wow, that Star-Maiden sure does sound mysterious and important…and she was in love with someone she shouldn’t have been in love with, you say!?!

There’s a training scene where a man rudely dismisses Astraea’s abilities and she throws her blade directly into his food while he’s eating it.* She meets the vampire prince, Drystan, who takes her to the library and flirts with her and gives her a magical map that tells her exactly where to go in the games. There is also a forgotten monster in a big dark pit in the middle of the library.*

We learn the rules of the game: each competitor has to find clues that lead them to pieces of a key. Then in order to get each key piece, they have to overcome challenges related to “human flaws” like greed, desire, envy, etc. The person who completes their key first wins.

To start out, Astraea has to solve a clue involving a riddle, and then the challenge to get the key piece requires her to solve another line puzzle (!) while a child is getting threatened by a wildcat? Idk, it was very poorly described. Nyte helps her get through this trial, of course… Oh, and it happens at a sanctuary for people who have experienced trauma and now prefer to lead lives of solitude and study.*

All this time, Nyte is interjecting in her head and showing up as a sort of vision that is physically tangible (for sexy reasons). They flirt and argue incessantly, and he keeps trying to get her to make a bargain with him to free him from his imprisonment. I would say that about three-fourths of their conversations involve Astraea begging him to give her more information because he clearly knows and is withholding a lot of stuff from her; Nyte always refuses in a smug/flirty way, and then Astraea is like “Well, okay, then I don’t trust you enough to make a bargain with you.” Then Nyte sexily warns her that she shouldn’t trust him because he’s sooo dangerous. Rinse and repeat ad nauseum. He really is Temu Rhysand, with all of the “charm,” “witty banter,” “sexual tension,” and “mysterious broodiness” that that entails. 

At one point he does infodump to her that the Star-Maiden hid her powerful magical key before she died and it becomes possible to find it every 100 years through these trials that she set up. The evil king tried to win her key but he couldn’t, so he set up the Libertatem as a ruse to get 5 humans to try to get it for him instead. This brings up some questions: why only 5 random humans? How did the king co-opt these trials created by the Star-Maiden to make them work for his ruse? If the Star-Maiden didn’t want people to access her key in case anything happened to her, why did she set up trials in the first place? Well, we never find out answers to any of these questions, so don’t worry about them.

We’re also getting flashbacks at this point – Astraea discovers that her memories are somehow connected to Prince Drystan, and she has a memory of fleeing from the forest and getting attacked by him. She also recalls that at one point she murdered a bunch of men who were trying to rape her at Hektor’s manor, and her Inner Darkness feels very connected to Nyte’s Inner Darkness when she remembers that. 

She discovers that Nyte is actually chained up behind a magical barrier in the palace, and she eventually gets sufficiently worn down and agrees to make the bargain to free him. She gets a new magical tattoo marking her arm to seal the deal*, and she discovers that Nyte can now force her to obey him as a part of the bargain that he did not tell her about. Of course, this is “for her protection!!!!!!!!!!”

The second trial is to make tea from a poison apple in a hut in a garden (?). Nyte tells her how to do all of this and then the tea makes her fall asleep. She gets the key piece by refusing her inner greed when Dream Hektor offers her a life of luxury and protection.

That night, Astraea gets locked out of the castle, gets attacked by vampires, gets saved by Drystan, and wakes up to him doing some sexy blood-drinking in a brothel.

 Then comes my very favorite chapter, Chapter 40. This is what happens:

1. Astraea starts to leave the brothel but wanders into a room because she hears a familiar song
2. There are people having sex in the room and she just stands there watching them
3. Nyte shows up, she gets horny, he gropes her a bit, and then he tries to get her to snap out of it!!!! Because this all part of the next trial!!!!!
4. Nyte vanishes but shows up again immediately; Astraea continues to try to get sexy with him but he commands her to stop with the power of their bargain. Wow, it actually is good that he can command her to do anything he wants and I was silly to think that was bad 🙂
5. It turns out that the person Astrea was humping is actually Arwan, another of the contestants, in some kind of magical disguise for the trial. The mechanics of this are never explained, but Arwan tells Astraea that only she can find a secret sixth key (the Star-Maiden’s key) when all of the other keys are collected. WOW I WONDER WHY!! For the record, Astraea takes this completely at face value and does not wonder about what it could mean at all.
6. Idk what’s happening with the people having sex all this time
7. She tries to get into a carriage that Drystan called for her but another contestant, Draven, runs up out of nowhere and steals her spot in the carriage. Later she sneaks back to the castle to see his murdered corpse taken out of the carriage lol. 

After this she and Nyte go to a tower room where they make out etc. Nyte crumples to the ground in pain and it’s clear that his real body is being attacked/tortured back where it is imprisoned; Astraea rushes to try to save him but is stopped by Drystan.

Final trial time! It’s a maze with a giant snake.* In a shocking twist, Hektor is there because she didn’t actually kill him back in the beginning, and he’s brought Calix with him. Astraea has to fight Calix, who screams at her and blames her for Cassia’s death until he suddenly stops attacking her and says “I forgive you.” Astraea immediately says “I forgive you, too.” It turns out that Calix got drugged by Hektor to make him attack Astraea and the drug just wore off right in time! Thank goodness! 

Anyways then they all get attacked by the giant snake and Astraea gets swallowed by it. She wakes up in some kind of strange liminal dream realm where a snake man cryptically tells her to follow her heart and look within herself for answers when the time is right. We never learn who this is and he never comes up again. 

She wakes up, kills the snake, and gets all the final key pieces.  She returns to the palace to free Nyte and they have gross sex. He gets very emotional and is like “no matter what you find out next, I promise that what we had was real and I would never do anything to hurt you.” Then they return to the palace and he goes Dark Mode and massacres a ton of people, including Hektor. 

It turns out that he is actually the Other Prince who was brought over from “across the Veil” to be a weapon of destruction and conquest for his father. He and Astraea (WHO IS THE STAR-MAIDEN?! WHAT!?) fell in love but together they disrupted the balance of the universe and caused the stars to start dying. 

Using Nyte, his father won the Faelestial War, Astraea died and somehow returned with no memories, and Nyte got imprisoned. He “guided” her to the Libertatem so she could get her key back and thus free him. Also basically everyone else knew that she was the Star-Maiden and was trying to use her to get the key, too. 

 The king escapes with Astraea’s key and Astraea is deeply shocked and betrayed by how Nyte kept so much information from her and used her for his own ends. She gets locked up For Her Own Good to withdraw from the pills Hektor was drugging her with (they actually suppressed her Celestial powers!) and while she’s sick she tells Nyte how much she hates him and feels betrayed/manipulated by him. She stabs him but he’s perfectly fine.

Once she’s healthy again, she meets up with her old friends. It turns out that Nyte actually sent Zathrian to see if she was happy with Hektor and because she wasn’t, they guided her to escape and then continued with the rest of the plan. This doesn’t really make sense because she was originally going to the Central with Cassia for Cassia to compete in the games; Zath clarifies that they didn’t have Cassia killed for Astraea to take her place, so that’s good, but I still don’t know what they were going to do when Cassia and Astraea got to the Central together. 

Astraea decides that Nyte actually manipulated her for her own good at this point and asks if she can go back beyond the Veil with him when he leaves this realm (to stop the stars from dying). They decide they have to defeat the evil king first. 

In the last chapter, we learn that Drystan is trying to take over Nyte’s control of the vampire army and that Astraea apparently has a “Bonded” that Nyte didn’t tell her about. Then he forces her to summon her key and she remembers that she used the key to give him the scar on his face.

THE END. 

NYTE 

So clearly the plot of this book is incoherent, remarkably silly, and full of numerous gaping holes. It’s also obvious that Peñaranda was very, very inspired by Sarah J Maas, my forever nemesis; Nyte is clearly drawn from Rhysand’s appearance and personality, but the author also understood that Rhysand’s fundamental dynamic with his love interest Feyre involves doing shitty things to her “for her own good” and withholding crucial information that she has every right to know. And all of this is actually very romantic and empowering to her as an abuse survivor!

As I mentioned, the relationship dynamic here mostly involves Nyte trying to make this bargain with Astraea to free him, Astraea asking for more information, Nyte refusing to tell her anything, Astraea deciding that she can’t trust him, Nyte warning her that he’s sooooo dangerous and Astraea deciding that she is attracted to him even though he’s dangerous. In the span of chapters towards the end where it’s revealed bit by bit that Nyte has continuously manipulated Astraea for his own ends, forced her to do things via magic, and denied numerous pieces of information that she needed to know, he also repeatedly assures her that there are no more secrets (there are more secrets), he would never hurt her (he has hurt her and continues to do so) and she can trust him (she clearly cannot trust him). 

The really vile piece of all of this is that Astraea is initially enraged by how she’s been treated and articulates that Nyte is essentially the same as Hektor – only for characters to tell her that she’s wrong about him and all of it was for her own good until she decides that this is true and ends up feeling GUILTY for her initial anger over what he did to her. This dynamic – he hurt her but actually it was for her own good for convoluted reasons that don’t make sense and actually he’s empowering her/helping her heal from her trauma by hurting her and she should feel bad for being mad at him- shows up in romantasy far, far too often imo. The abuse apologism that’s engrained in it is actually kind of deeply vile to me, to say nothing of how it undermines the books’ flailing attempts to say anything helpful/interesting/coherent about trauma or to have any kind of understandable character motivations or relationship dynamics. 

The big thing for me is that Nyte is trying to get Astraea to help free him so he can defeat an evil king and go to his home realm that he was unjustly ripped away from, they are inextricably drawn to each other through a love that cannot be vanquished, he learns that she is unhappy living with Hektor because he is scummy and abusive, and he keeps telling her that she is amazingly powerful and resilient and brave. So if all of this is true, WHY is all of the manipulation and omission and force via magical bargain necessary???????

Nyte could very well have told Astraea the truth about everything, supported her in escaping, and still gotten her assistance in his own escape, and that is a much more feasible plan than hoping that she gets to compete in the trials somehow and bullying her into bargaining with him while clearly being very shady and untrustworthy. Like yeah, he’s very clearly just a scheming creep who loves mind games…which would be FINE, I guess, if the author actually acknowledged it and had the guts to write that with her whole chest instead of weaving a flimsy layer of nonsense excuses for how it’s actually totally good and fine and makes sense. 

The sex scene is consciously consent-forward, but how consensual is it, really, when Nyte is continuously manipulating Astraea and actively denying her information that would certainly change whether she wants to have sex with him? Consent has to be informed consent, and once again I’m begging authors to have even the slightest grasp on these topics if they’re going to try to write about sexual violence and recovery!!!!

On that point, here’s one of my favorite scenes that tries to explore that theme:

“I gasped, stumbling back until I met the wall, and he closed in, planting his hands by my head.

‘You’re scaring me,”’ I whispered.

‘Yet I’m still here,’ he challenged.

My mind was mocking me. Laughing and laughing, and I didn’t know what to do. 

‘Push me out,’ he said like a dare, and I closed my eyes. ‘Do it, or I could kill you right here.‘

A hand wrapped around my throat, snapping my eyes wide, and the gold irises that pinned me now were burned bronze. I reacted. My hands store his wrist from me, and I shoved his chest. Hot anger and the instinct to defend myself pricked my eyes and labored my breathing.

‘Don’t fucking touch me like that.‘

Nyte searched me, eyes blazing. Not at what I’d done, but he’d read my response too easily. He knew why.

Humiliation threatened to cast him away and never let me surface another thought of him. Until his expression softened. So slowly. Tentatively he closed the distance, reading my every flicker of a reaction. 

I didn’t stop his approach. 

His hand rose again, pausing at my throat when my whole body locked. Only when I relaxed, calming to his careful movement, did he continue.

He’s not going to hurt me. 

Why was I so certain?

‘It’s not the touch you fear, but the intention,’ he said softly, grazing a light caress over my neck that inspired a tingling warmth this time. He angled his head toward mine, dipping, and I almost held my breath. Not knowing how to release the anticipation coiling within me, I flattened my hands against the wall behind me. ‘He doesn’t get to win,’ Nyte said, a growl of a threat so close to my lips…’He doesn’t get to take this from you.‘”

Astonishing when a woman has a fearful reaction when I choke her and threaten that I can kill her; it must be because of that ABUSER that she used to be with; surely it does not matter in any way that I MYSELF am actively using the exact same form of physical violence on her; let’s turn this violent moment sexy; I’d better empower her by reminding her that she gets to feministly reclaim the act of being choked by me. 

You just can’t make this kind of thing up, it’s so stupid that I almost can’t be insulted by how wrong it is about everything it’s trying to tackle. 

WRITING

The writing is incredible. All I can do is share some of my favorite quotes:

• “My vocals were silenced”
• “Bodies tapered off” [as the crowd thinned]
• “Laser focus”
• “Crowds I feared being trampled by, getting lost in, or which would prevent me from breathing.”
• “When you go to use your beautiful darkness, make sure you aim for his heart.”
• “Toward the back of the shop I was drawn not to anything of vibrancy; the stark blacks and leather materials inspired a thrill.”
• I had certainly never seen [Celestials], only in fairy tales – or those I had thought to be.”
• “Tears wet my temples”
• “Droplets of water rolled down his complexion”
• “The following day, I stood staring at the sky, welcoming a new dawn, when the sight brought forth one set of eyes I couldn’t shake from the forefront of my mind.”
• “She made quick work of securing me into high-necked dark leathers and various holsters.”
• “Yet all it took was one keen eye to swat me. And this one I should have known had a target on me all along.”
• “‘Is it because of him?’ A dark chill entered his voice, turning silver notes to black, and I looked at him trying to figure out the nagging sensation that disrupted my mind. A gravity that pulled me toward a darkness a part of me knew I would devour given half the chance.”
• “About the strategy of the game I shouldn’t care.”
• “I huffed a laugh, then a chuckle, before the eeriness of my own sounds chilled me, because he had to be fucking joking.”
• “Killed. It was as if death’s chuckle had seeped into the echoes of that one word.”
• “Blood-red irises of sinful amusement.”
• “Concern and rage waged a war as a fiery tango in those irises that burned ethereally bright.”
• “’I would show you, but it’s for the stars. It’s called a telescope. I have a great depth of field through the stars without it, but this is unparalleled.’
  ‘So can I.’” 
• “I shook my head. ‘Power. That’s all this is in aid of. It will corrupt you.’
  ‘I am flattered you consider me not to be already.’
  I shouldn’t have been so naive, yet I couldn’t let go of the confliction in his words.”

OTHER FAVE MOMENTS

1. Astraea gets beaten in a training fight, faceplants, and then huffs away while declaring to the room, “I think I’ve made my point here.”
2. Nyte manages to stitch an arrow wound in Astraea’s leg without her noticing the pain by kissing her upper legs while he does it. He’s just that good!!
3. SNAKE MAN?!?!
   

IN CONCLUSION

Congratulations on your acquisition, Bramble!