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I'm going to warn you now, I can't do this without spoilers.
There's too much and I need it all.
Warning: complete.
Cabeswater began to work.
Humans were such tricky and complicated things.
As it began to spin life and being out of its dreamstuff, the remaining trees began to hum and sing together. Once upon a time, their songs had sounded different, but in this time, they sang the songs the Greywaren had given to them. It was a wailing, ascending tune, full of both misery and joy at once. And as Cabeswater distilled its magic, these trees began to fall, one by one.
The psychic's daughter's sadness burst through the forest, and Cabeswater accepted that, too, and put it into the life it was building.
Another tree fell, and another, and Cabeswater kept returning again and again to the humans who had made the request. It had to remember what they felt like. It had to remember to make itself small enough.
As the forest diminished, the Greywaren's despair and wonder surged through Cabeswater. The trees sang soothingly back to him, a song of possibility and power and dreams., and then Cabeswater collected his wonder and put it into the life it was building.
And finally, the magician's wistful regret twisted through what remained of the trees. Without this, what was he? Simply human, human, human. Cabeswater pressed leaves against his cheek one last time, and then they took that humanity for the life it was building.
It was nearly human-shaped. It would fit well enough. Nothing was ever perfect.
Make way for the Raven King.
The last tree fell, and the forest was gone, and everything was absolutely silent.
Blue touched Gansey's face. She whispered, "Wake up."
It's hard to quantify exactly how I feel right now.
I thought it would be easy, I thought after four books, a whole series, a quest undertaken, I'd know what to say, how to form my words, but I don't.
And it's not disappointment. And it's not exultation.
It's... closure? An exhalation? An answer?
In this case, and in many ways, I relate a lot to Gansey.
Four books ago I set out on a quest in a sleepy Virginian town with four Raven Boys and a Blue to find a sleeping Welsh king, to wake him, and request a favour.
That has been the goal, Maggie Stiefvater laid it out for us all to see; we knew the plan.
And the plan failed us, Gansey and I.
Where we thought we'd find answers, we found only the dust of it.
Owain Glyndŵr, Gansey's sleeping king, is finally, finally unearthed but ultimately it doesn't matter. He's dead, gone, unreachable.
And it's devastating because we've spent four books searching and searching for this slumbering monarch, knowing we need that favour to prevent Gansey's death, to bring Noah back to life, to reverse Blue's curse, to release Adam from his bargain.
We needed it and it was taken from us by nothing more than time, and fate, and circumstance.
No Glendower, no favour, no magic.
That's all there is.
But ultimately it felt like the only possible outcome.
Inevtiable, almost.
It's certainly disappointing; I've been imagining for over fifteen hundred pages what this great ruler would be like, what he'd look like, whether he'd be good or corrupted, how the conversation between him and Gansey would go.
I've imagined and hoped for these things to come to pass, and to have them snatched away so unceremoniously hurts terribly.
But are they what I or Gansey actually wanted or needed in the end?
Strangely, I don't think they are.
I may feel wounded but I don't feel cheated or let down. The way things played out felt conclusive and right because perhaps Glendower wasn't the answer we were looking for; maybe what Gansey and I so desperately needed was to be put on a path to find Adam, Ronan, Noah, and Blue. His people, his family, his questing party.
They don't need a king to grant them a favour, they have each other; they are magicians, after all.
"You said you were Gansey's magicians. Do something."
That's what I find so achingly beautiful about this story.
It's full of magic, it's a breathing entity snaking its way through all of their lives, it affects everything but it isn't what makes these five seemingly randomly brought together people so special.
They are special, how they belong to each other is special, the belief in everything they're doing is special.
Everything already in place: [one] boy [...] searching Virginia for his own grave; [...] one boy's bargain with the magic forest; one boy's ability to dream things to life; one dead boy who refused to be laid to rest; one girl who supernaturally amplified 90 per cent of the aforementioned list.
The fact that they possess inexplicable supernatural talents is almost superfluous.
Gansey's unavoidably human, but his tenacity and faith in Glendower grants him power.
Without Blue and her ability to amplify, none of what they've done would have been possible but she herself feels anything but special.
There is no Cabeswater without Ronan - at least as Ronan summoned and built upon it, but his very human emotions are what fuel him.
Adam, perhaps the most powerful of them all is also the most human of them all, agonisingly so.
And Noah... Oh, Noah. If he hadn't lived and died, and, died, Gansey couldn't have lived, and lived.
This quest, as fruitless as it seems in the end, would never have even begun without these five extraordinary people.
And how they love each other, and protect each other, and sacrifice for each other.
The buzzing hummed-struck-hummed against the walls close to him. It was hideously loud.
They were here.
"Something that won't hurt me," he said out loud.
His vision went red and then black.
Red, then black.
Then just black.
"Leaves," Ronan Lynch's voice said, full of intention.
"Dust," Adam Parrish said.
"Wind," Blue Sargent said.
"Shit," Henry Cheng added.
Light striped across Gansey and away, red and then black again. A torch.
In the first swept of the light, Gansey thought the walls were trembling with hornets, but in the second, he saw that they were only leaves and dust and a breeze that sent them all scuttling down the tunnel. And in this new light, Gansey saw his friends shivering in the tunnel where leaves had been.
"You dumb shit," said Ronan. His shirt was very grubby, and the side of his face had dried blood on it, although it was impossible to tell if it was his own.
Gansey's couldn't immediately find his voice, and when he did, he said, "I thought you were staying behind."
"Yeah, me too," Henry said. "Then I thought, I can't let Gansey Three wander around in the mysterious. pit alone. We have such few old treasures left; it would be so careless to let them get destroyed. Plus, someone had to bring the rest of your court."
"Why would you go alone?" Blue asked. She flung her arms around him, and he felt her trembling.
"I was trying to be heroic," Gansey said, holding her tight. She was real. They were all real. They'd all come here for him, in the middle of the night. The completeness of his shock told him that no part of him had really thought they would do such a thing for him. "I didn't want you guys to hurt any more."
Adam said, "You dumb shit."
They laughed restlessly, uneasily, because they need to. Gansey pressed his cheek against the top of Blue's head.
I could so easily be frustrated by how The Raven King played out.
For a while there I was mentally questioning: where's Glendower? Is Stiefvater going to make me wait the entire book? Why are we introducing new characters in the finale? This feels like meandering, why are we meandering?
I was plagued by these questions because this was it, the final curtain, make way for the Raven King, excelsior!, and all those wonderful make-believe things.
And they were nowhere to be seen.
A lot of exciting, shocking and wonderful things happened but that hazy, summery drowsiness that's blanketed the pages of the series since the beginning was still firmly in place, and it was unexpected ... at first, and then it felt, again, like the only way.
Because we've already had those big battle moments, those moments of loss and grief: imagined, mechanical dragons in battle, winged, nightmare creatures and fleeing fauna frozen in time.
We've woken mad princesses, released dryad fathers, and escaped death many, many times.
We've had our battle, and now it's time to pay up.
Prophecies fulfilled.
Nowhere left to run.
Gansey knew who voices whispered along the ley line on St. Mark's Eve. But he had spent several years chaining his fears and wasn't ready to unhook their leashes just yet.
It wasn't until one of the psychics at 300 Fox Way died, until death became a real thing once more, that Gansey couldn't deny the truth any longer.
The hounds of Aglionby Hunt Club howled it that fall: away, away, away.
He was a king.
This was the year he was going to die.
The tone of this final story may have taken me off guard at first but had it been a loud, messy battle from the off, it wouldn't have rung true with the rest of the series.
Everything about their quest has been almost mundane, even discovering Cabeswater felt somewhat anti-climatic because these five? They just fit. They belong there, together.
Magic's in their blood.
A magic that from page one, line one has been something that's felt almost possible; an elemental sort of magic you can feel as an unseen touch lingering on your skin.
For us: an unnatural change in sky colour, an impossibly intricate flower, pareidolia in the ordinary.
For them:
[Gansey] lifted his arms above his head and swept them in time with the music like a conductor, reaching for falling autumn leaves when they drifted close. Each dead curl that he managed to brush with his fingertips transmuted into a golden fish that swam through the air. Cabeswater listened attentively to his intention; more leaves swirled to him, waiting for his touch. Soon, a flock — school — current of fish surrounded them, flashing and darting and changing colour as their scales caught the light.
The unnatural in the natural and vice versa.
The Raven Kingis the corruption of that. It's what happens when those instances of magic are put in the wrong hands and unmade and perverted.
In the back of my mind, before starting the finale, I thought perhaps once the gang found Glendower that he would turn out to be a not so beneficent ruler and the final battle would be between them and their woken king.
I really, really didn't want that but I couldn't see any other way for the story and the tension Stiefvater had conjured to find its resolution, and I'm not entirely on board with a demon, unearthed from the same tomb as Gwenllian (Glendower's adorably batshit daughter) being the villain of the piece.
It kinda came out of nowhere, if I'm honest, even though it's a classic trope.
While Piper Greenmantle slept fitfully, dreaming of the upcoming sale and her rise to fame in the magical artefact community, the demon unmade.
It unmade the physical trappings of Cabeswater — the trees, the creatures the ferns, the rivers, the stones — but it also unmade the dreamy ideas of the forest. The memories caught in groves, the songs invented only in night-time, the creeping euphoria that ebbed and flowed around one of the waterfalls. Everything that had been dreamt into this place it undreamt.
The dreamer it would unmake last.
He would fight.
They always fought.
Stiefvater's been playing by the classic rules of a quest since the beginning, so maybe I should have expected it but honestly? It didn't feel right.
Or it didn't feel right for the Demon to be the sole villain.
It should have been a living weapon utilised by a Mordred-esque character, and to a degree this happened with Piper Greenmantle commanding and the Demon serving but we all know it's playing a bigger, more dangerous game; that it could consume her at any point, and that strangely made the stakes seem less extreme, predictable.
Or, I don't know, maybe I just wanted an evil warlock to come strutting up to the gang and maniacally boop them on the noses instead of a... hornet monster.
A hornet monster that lacked a lot of personality but certainly made up for it with life-altering cruelty.
Destroying Cabeswater.
Possessing Adam with murder in mind.
Murdering Ronan's mother.
Attacking Matthew, Opal, Ronan.
This wasn't a villain for soliloquising and wasting time on head games, its intent was to kill, and kill with purpose, which made for some of the creepiest and most terrifying moments of the series so far.
Adam stepped in front of the glass, his hand over his eye, looking at his gaunt face. His nearly colourless eyebrow was pinched with worry. Lowering his hand, he looked again at himself. He saw no pinkness around his left eye. It didn't seem to be watering. It was ―
He squinted. Was he slightly walleyed? That was what it was called when your eye didn't point in the same direction, right?
He blinked.
No, it was fine. It was just a trick of this chilly green light. He leaned in closer to see if there was any redness in the corner.
It was walleyed.
Adam blinked, and it was not. He blinked, and it was. It was like one of those bad dreams that was not a nightmare, not really, that was just about trying to put on a pair of socks and finding they suddenly wouldn't fit on your foot.
As he watched, his left eye slowly sank down to look at the floor, unhitched from the gaze of his right eye.
His vision blurred and then focused again as his right eye took dominance. Adam's breath was uneven. He'd already lost hearing in one ear. He couldn't lose sight in one eye, too. Was it from his father? Was this a delayed effect of hitting his head?
The eye rocked slowly, like a marble sliding in a jar of water. He could feel the horror of it in his stomach.
In the mirror, he thought the shadow of one of the stalls changed.
He turned to look: nothing. Nothing.
Cabeswater, are you with me?
He turned back to the mirror. Now his left eye was travelling slowly around, wandering back and forth, up and down.
Adam's chest hitched.
The eye looked at him.
Adam scrambled back from the mirror, hand smacked over his eye. His shoulder blade crashed into the opposite wall, and he stood there, gasping for air, scared, scared, scared, because what kind of help did he need, and who could he ask?
The shadow above the stall was changing. It was turning from a square into a triangle because — oh God — one of the stall doors was opening.
The long hallway back to the outside felt like a horror gallery gauntlet. Black spilled out of the stall door.
Adam said, "Cabeswater, I need you."
The darkness spread across the floor.
All Adam could think was that he couldn't let it touch him. The thought of it on his skin was worse that the image of his useless eye. "Cabeswater. Keep me safe. Cabeswater!"
There was a sound like a shot — Adam shied away — as the mirror split. A sun from somewhere else burned on the other side of it. Leaved were pressed up against the glass as if it were a window. The forest whispered and hissed in Adam's deaf ear, urging him to help it find a channel.
Gratitude burned through him, as hard to bear as the fear. If something happened to him now, at least he wouldn't be alone.
Water, Cabeswater urged. Waterwaterwater.
Scrambling to this sin, Adam twisted on the tap. Water rushed out, scented with rain and rocks. He reached through the flow to smash down the plug. The inky black bled towards him, inches from his shows.
Don't let it touch you―
He clambered on to the edge of the sink as the darkness reached the bottom of the wall. It would climb, Adam knew. But then, finally, the water filled the plugged basin and flowed over the edge onto the floor. It washed over the blackness, soundless, colourless, sliding towards the drain. It left behind only pale, ordinary concrete.
...
[Adam] began to move through the forest, He was careful to cling to his body back at the Barns. His hands one the cold scrying bow. His hip bones against the wooden floor. The smell of the fireplace behind him. Remember where you are, Adam.
He didn't want to call again to Ronan; he didn't want this nightmare to forge a duplicate. Everything he saw was terrible. Here a snake dissolving while still alive, here a stag in slow-motion pedal on the ground, vines growing up through its still-living flesh. Here was a creature that was not Adam but was nonetheless somehow clothed like him. Adam flinched, but the strange boy was not attending to him. He was instead slowly watching his own hands.
...
[Adam] turned his head and rubbed the blindfold off his eyes.
He saw the end of the world.
[...]
Ronan clawed briefly back to consciousness; flowers spilled out of the car in shades of blue Gansey had never seen. Ronan was frozen in place, as he always was after a dream, and black slowly oozed out of one his nostrils.
Gansey had never understood really what it meant for Ronan to have to live with his nightmares.
He understood now.
There was no time.
This wasn't the Wild Hunt, speaking to ancient trees, or loquacious collectors of the strange.
This was life and death, and no exit routes.
Because there's the plan I mentioned, the prophecy, the death we've been trying to wriggle out of since the beginning.
Gansey's going to die and there's no avoiding it.
I just didn't realise how cruel Stiefvater was going to be in order to make it happen.
"How do we get rid of it?"
Very reluctantly, Artemus said, "Someone must willingly die on the corpse road."
Darkness descended so rapidly on Blue's thoughts that she reached to balance herself on the beech tree. She saw Gansey's spirit walking the ley line in her mind. She remembered abruptly that Adam and Gansey were within earshot; she had completely forgotten that it was not just Artemus and her.
"Is there another way?" she asked.
Artemus's voice was quieter still. "Willing death to pay for unwilling death. That's the way."
[...]
"Well," Adam said, his voice as tired as Artemus's. "That's that."
The inevitability of this didn't make it any easier, it was never going to be but the circumstances, the bittersweetness of it, made it damn well heroic.
Rather than a freak accident it became a choice, a choice to finally kiss the girl he loves knowing it'll lead to his end.
Choosing that to save the people he loves.
He understood it now.
There was no time.
[...]
Blue said, "I hate this."
It was right, though. Gansey felt the feeling of time slipping — one last time. The sense of having done this before. He gently laid the backs of his hands on her cheeks. He whispered, "It'll be OK. I'm ready. Blue, kiss me."
The rain spattered about them, kicking up splashes of red-black, making the petals around them twitch, Dream things from Ronan's newly healed imagination piled around their feet. In the rain, everything smelled of these mountains in fall: oak leaves and hay fields, ozone and dirt turned over. It was beautiful here, and Gansey loved it. It had taken a long time, but he'd ended up where he wanted after all.
Blue kissed him.
He had dreamt of it often enough, and here it was, willed into life. In another word, it would just be this: a girl softly pressing her lips to a boy's. But in this one, Gansey felt the effects of it at once. Blue, a mirror, and amplifier, a strange half-tree soul with ley line magic running through her. And Gansey, restored once by the ley line's power, given a ley line heart, another kind of mirror. And when they were pointed at at each other, the weaker one gave.
Gansey's ley line heart had been gifted, not brown.
He pulled back from her.
Out loud, with intention, with the voice that left no room for doubt, he said, "Let it be to kill the demon."
Right after he spoke, Blue threw her arms tightly around his neck. Right after he spoke, she pressed her face into the side of his. Right after he spoke, she held him like a shouted word. Love, love, love.
He fell quietly from her arms.
He was a king.
...
And it lasted all of about three pages so I didn't have to mentally bash anyone's brains in for hurting me that way.
Some might call it sloppy writing, I call it not torturing your readers with unnecessary character death.
But there's that bittersweetness again; Noah died once before in order for Gansey to live and we've come full circle.
A life for a life but this time Noah chooses it and it broke my fucking heart.
Noah crouched over Gansey's dead body. He said, for the last time, "You will live because of Glendower. Someone else on the ley line is drying when they should not, and so you will live when you should not."
Gansey died.
"Goodbye," Noah said. "Don't throw it away."
He quietly slid from time.
...
*sobs eternally*
And they'll never know what he did, what he gave for them; part of me thinks they don't even remember him anymore because there's no mention of him at the end or, as far as I can tell, in Ronan's spinoff series.
He's just gone. Gave what was left of his life to save a life, and poof! Noah Czerny is no more.
It hurt to watch him fade away when everyone else was living so purposefully.
It didn't feel right.
It didn't feel right at all.
Noah's always been somewhat of a peripheral character but he's a Raven Boy, one of five, he matters, and to sacrifice him, yet again, for somebody else and not even acknowledge him, not once, feels... honestly, like Stiefvater has plans in store.
Maybe no time soon, perhaps only in passing but by no means done.
...
Or I'm clinging to hope because Noooooooaaaaaahhhhhhh.
Soft, smudgy, sweater boy Noah.
(Even when he's being possessed and trying to enucleate Blue's eye with his fingers. Even then)
The severity of my love for him is unparalleled.
My love for all of them is.
Because the story itself has never been my favourite part, and I love it wholeheartedly because hello, so fucking beautiful, but the boys and Blue are what turned me feral and fiercely protective of the books.
The progression of their characters and the confidence in who they are, what their purpose is became some sort of linguistic magic.
Spending four books with these fictional people has been fucking joyous, and the moments Stiefvater gave us with Pynch and Bluesey, the secrets she lets us in on in this finale are worth a sleeping king's ransom.
Adam and Ronan becoming canon:
(I almost almost malformed my book from squeezing it so hard when this finally happened)
[Ronan] wordlessly crossed the floor and sat beside Adam on the mattress. When he held out his hand, Adam put the model into it.
"This old thing," Ronan said. He turned the front tyre, and again the music played out of it. They sat like that for a few minutes, as Ronan examined the car and turned each wheel to play a different tune. Adam watched how intently Ronan studied the seams, his eyelashes low over his light eyes. Ronan let out a breath, put the model down on the bed beside him, and kissed Adam.
Once, when Adam had still lived in the trailer park, he had been pushing the lawn mower around the scraggly side yard when he realized that it was raining a mile away. He could smell it, the earthy scent of rain on dirt, but also the electric, restless smell of ozone. And he could see it: a hazy gray sheet of water blocking his view of the mountains. He could track the line of rain travelling across the vast dry field towards him. It was heavy and dark, and he knew he would get drenched if he stayed outside. It was coming from so far away that he had plenty of time to put the mower away and get under cover. Instead, though, he just stood there and watched it approach. Even at the last minute, as he heard the rain pounding the grass flat, he just stood there. He closed his eyes and let the storm soak him.
That was this kiss.
Blue and Gansey attending magic-free toga parties and stealing unguarded moments:
It was this: [...] Here, he could play his fingers over her fingers as they stood close, she could lean her cheek on his bare shoulder, he could hook his ankle playfully in hers, she could herself with an arm around his was it. Here he was unbelievably greedy for that laugh.
[...]
It was this: [...] Henry starting a quiet, drunk conversation about whether or not Blue would like to travel to Venezuela with him. Blue replying softly that she would, she very much would, and Gansey hearing the longing in her voice like he was being undone, like his own feelings were being unbearably mirrored. I can't come? Gansey asked. Yes, you can meet us there in a fancy plane, Henry said. Don't be fooled his nice hair, Blue interjected, Gansey would hike. And warmth filled the empty caverns in Gansey's heart. He felt known.
It was this: Gansey starting down the stairs to the kitchen, Blue starting up, meeting in the middle. It was Gansey stepping aside to let her pass, but changing his mind. He caught her arm and then the rest of her. She was warm, alive, vibrant beneath thin cotton; he was warm, alive, vibrant beneath his. Blue slid her hand over his bare shoulder and then on to his chest, her palm spread out flat on his breastbone, her fingers pressed curiously into his skin.
I thought you would be hairier, she whispered.
Sorry to disappoint. The legs have a bit more going on.
Mine too.
It was this: laughing senselessly into each other's skin, playing, until it was abruptly no longer play, and Gansey stopped himself with his mouth perilously close to hers, and Blue stopped herself with her belly pressed close to his.
It was this: Gansey saying, "I like you an awful lot, Blue Sargent."
It was this: Blue's smile — crooked, wry, ridiculous, flustered. There was a lot of happiness tucked in the corner of that smile, and even though her face was several inches from Gansey, some of it still spilled out and got on him. She put her finger on his cheek where he knew his own smile was dimpling it, and then they took each other's hands, and they climbed back up together.
Ronan's secret revery of Adam's hands:
Ronan crossed his arms to wait, just looking. At Adam's fine cheekbones, his furrowed fair eyebrows, his beautiful hands, everything washed out by furious light. He had memorized the shape of Adam's hands in particular: the way his thumb jutted awkwardly, boyishly; the roads of the prominent veins; the large knuckles that punctuated his long fingers. In dreams Ronan put them to his mouth.
Gansey and Blue and a coat:
As they watched [the phone] together, Gansey opened up his overcoat and tucked Blue inside it with him. This, too, was a weird and specific magic, the ease of it, the warmth of him around her, his heartbeat thumping against her back. He cupped a hand over her injured eye as if to protect it from something, but it was only an excuse for his fingertips to touch her.
Adam and Ronan hoarding secret feelings:
Ronan wrenched his tie loose. "You working after school?"
"With a dreamer."
He held Ronan's gaze over his locker door.
School had improved.
Adam gently closed his locker. "I'm done at four thirty. If you're up for brainstorming some repair of your dream forest. Unless you have homework."
"Asshole," Ronan said.
Adam smiled cheerily. Ronan would start wars and burn cities for that true smile, elastic and amiable.
...
[Ronan] caught Adam's eye. When Adam's mouth quirked, Ronan's expression stilled for a moment before turning to the loose smile he ordinarily reserved for Matthew's silliness. Adam felt a surge of both accomplishment and nerves. He skated an edge here. Making Ronan Lynch smile felt as charged as making a bargain with Cabeswater. These weren't forces to play with.
...
[Ronan's] feelings for Adam were an oil spill; he'd let them overflow and now there wasn't a damn place in the ocean that wouldn't catch fire if he dropped a match.
These moments, they're what matter.
Not Glendower, not Cabeswater, not that bloody favour.
Each other, that's what mattered in the end.
Throw whatever you want at them: blood raining from the sky, lakes of acid, demonic possession, the world ending as we know it.
They'll take it all and flip it the giant fucking bird.
KERAH!
Because they're kings and magicians and together, and just try and stop them.
They'd come here for him. They'd come here for him.
They'd come here for him.
This wasn't the ending I was expecting, or at least, the way I was expecting it.
And there are certainly things I would selfishly change, elaborate, erase entirely but altogether, this was the ending I didn't know I needed but ultimately gave me everything I wanted.
Do I have questions?
Uh...
🪶 If Ronan created Cabeswater, Matthew, and Opal, can he bring his mother back?
🪶 Can Blue kiss Gansey now that's she killed him and he's been resurrected? Doest that counteract the curse?
🪶 What is Gansey? Cabeswater couldn't bring him back exactly the same, so is he part of Cabeswater now? A part of Ronan? And what does that mean for the future?
🪶 Will Ronan rebuild Cabeswater?
🪶 If Blue's essentially half-dryad, what does this mean for her power in the future and if Gansey's possibly part Cabeswater, would she have any power over him?
🪶 What the hell are we going to do about Gwenllian? With her father being dead, is she a Queen now? Can you be a queen with that many pencils in your hair? (You can)
🪶 Is this really the end for Noah?
🪶 Henry Cheng. You can't fully introduce this glorious creature at the end and not make me pine for more. Can you?
🪶 Mr Grey's coming back, right? RIGHT?!
🪶 Is Cabeswater gone for good?
Do I have questions. Hah.
But even though there are so many unfinished storylines, my heart, so easily bruised by the fiction I trust it with, isn't screaming out for more or enough or how could you do this to me?
It's contented, restful.
I want more, I do, I always will, but after this and knowing Ronan's story (and ultimately Adam's as well because my boys are boyfriends! FUCKING FINALLY!) is being continued, I can let these characters go for a while, leave them in Henrietta, at the height of summer, coasting down country roads in the Pig with laughter and bickering flowing out the windows. Like magic.
Yeah, I can leave them there.
Depending on where you began the story, it was about this place: the long stretch of mountain that straddled a particularly potent segment of the ley line. Months before, it had been Cabeswater, populated by dreams, blooming with magic. Now it was merely an ordinary Virginia forest, green thorns and soft sycamores and oaks and pine trees, everything slender from the effort of growing through rock.
Ronan guessed it was pretty enough, but it was no Cabeswater.
Off along one of the banks, a scrawny hooved girl crashed merrily though the undergrowth, humming and making disgusting chewing noises. Everything in the forest was interesting to her, and interesting meant tasting it. Adam said she was a lot like Ronan. Ronan was going to choose to take that as a compliment.
"Opal," he snapped, and she spat out a mouthful of mushroom. "Stop dicking around!"
The girl galloped to catch up with him, but she didn't pause when she reached him. She preferred to form a lopsided perimeter of frantic activity around his person. Anything else might give the appearing of willing obedience, and she would do a lot to avoid that.
Up ahead, Chainsaw shouted, "Kerah!"
She kept hollering until Ronan had caught up with her. Sure enough, she had found something out of place. He kicked through the leaves. It was a metal artefact that looked centuries old. It was the wheel off a 1973 Camaro. It matched the ancient, impossible wheel they'd found on the ley line months earlier. Back then, Ronan had taken that to mean that at some point in the future, they would wreck the Camaro in the pursuit of Glendower, and the ley line's bending of time would have sent them back in time and then forward again. All time being the same-ish on the ley line.
But it looked as if they hadn't got to that place yet: They had future adventures waiting for them on the ley line.
It was a thrilling and terrifying prospect.
"Good fine, brat," he told Chainsaw. "Let's go home."
...
Ps.
There's always a moment in the series where Stiefvater delivers an innocent stringing together of words that knock my heart straight on its ass, that make it feel known:
[...] it wasn't that Henry was less of himself in English. He was less of himself out loud. His native language was thought.
the original painting in case you've never seen this glorious Hermes had lots of choices to make to properly translate values and hues to black and white pic.twitter.com/CnCZayw9hO
This is an incredible essay on the subject of religion, death, faith, and monstrousness in Midnight Mass.
It cleared all the niggling questions pestering me after the finale and I'd had a moment to digest everything.
All those references that as an agnostic (I'd say atheist, but I find that just as arrogant as faith. Give me irrefutable evidence, and I'll consider believing or not believing, but until then? I'll sit here happily in my unknowing) passed me by were suddenly intrinsic to my understanding of what Mike Flanagan was doing here.
Midnight Mass is an eerily beautiful meditation on what faith is to each and every person, and how they, we wield it.
All whilst nestled in a Stephen King(but done infinitely better; hands up if you're not a King fan and feel constantly attacked?) nightmare of mundanity.
It's everything my 80's horror loving heart could have possibly wanted, and it reminded me why I payed so much attention in those Religious Studies classes in high school.
Not because I believed or even wanted to, or had any significant opinion on those who did, but because they're fascinating stories.
Midnight Mass is a fascinating story, whether you're religious, or into horror, or even fiction.
...
Read the above article if you've seen it and want someone with a clearer voice to explain the nuances of the show.
And read this article by Leah Schnelbach if you want a slightly less spoilery take on the shit that went down in a sleepy fishing town when a new priest comes to town:
The greedy, gore-loving monster in me started this series wanting it to be something else entirely.
A scare-fest. Viscera everywhere. A band of honourables to save the day.
I'm historically awful at listening to podcasts, my attention's always wandering off, but for Tom Lum, the sweater boy of science, I forced it to stay in one place so I could learn about bees and why they're so fucking cool.
I'd seen Margaret Qualley in a few things before this, most notably The Leftovers(which I've only watched the first season of because shit, so good, but so emotionally exhausting), but I didn't know she was capable of this.
I have love in me the like of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.
When monsters love, it's rent with tooth and claw, and an unbearable, unknowable tenderness.
To look at this book you'd consider it a children's story; with Jeffrey Alan Love's monochromatic illustrative style and a font that borders on the childish, you wouldn't, and I didn't, expect it to contain such barbarity.
But when you peel it open, peek inside its pages, corruption and obsession spills out.
Joy and sinew mingled together to birth a reimagined breed of love story.
First, there's our monster, Johann of Elendhaven; anaemic and cicatricial, carved from angles and bloodlust.
His skin was pallid and thin, stretched taut over a skeleton that threatened to slice through his flesh at every knobby juncture. He walked with a deliberate slouch, arms knifing out from his body at hard angles when he placed them in his pockets. He cultivated a persona with the dedicated fervour of a character actor: a practised charm that appeared natural, a crooked smile, an easy laugh, spider-leg fingers that snapped and threaded through the air as he spoke. The role became so lived-in and claustrophobic that the effort required to peel back the skin was not worth the reveal. He never took his gloves off.
[...]
Johann learned what sort of creature he was by accident.
One day he slipped on a patch of ice. His ankle turned in the wrong direction and plunged him off a roof like a crow with a clipped wing. The ground swallowed him up, and the crunch of his neck against rock reverberated through every joint in his spine. It shuddered through his limbs and popped out the tips of his fingers and toes, a tiny earthquake that made ruin of his bones. He lay absolutely still for ten minutes, and then he stood up and wrenched his skull back into place.
"Well," he said aloud. "That was fucked up."
Spat out by the black waters of Elendhaven's harbour - darkly named the Black Moon of Norden; abused, unwanted, and unnamed from his first breath.
He grows and he's named, and he stalks the streets of Elendhaven like a nightmare with death-tipped fingers and a face you'll never see coming and never remember.
Johan the Thing. Johann the Demon of Elendhaven. Devil Johann, Johann in Black, Oil-Dark Johann. Monster was the best, his favourite word. The first half was a kiss, the second a hiss. He repeated it to himself again and again: :Monster Johann. Monster, Monster, Monster."
He's base and queer and thirsty.
And looking for his mate.
Our monster in disguise, Florian Leickenbloom.
An Erl-King in the truest sense, thistledown and sharp-eyed, a honeyed trickster with bodies supine in his footsteps.
A sweet face and a filthy heart.
A perfect match for a monster outright.
I could speak fondly and nauseously of the horror in the prose of this story, of the beauty in the unsavoury, how Jennifer Giesbrecht's lyricism transforms disembowelment from savagery to eros, the slick of blood in moonlight from a scream to a sigh.
Johann lowered the knife and eased back on his heels. It was not what he had been expecting. It was better, perhaps―this strange man who gave lip while quaking. A branch bending beneath the wind, but not snapping. A grin pulled form one of his face to the other, slow and pleasant. "Herr Leickenbloom," he said sweetly. "I am about to show you a brilliant trick. I guarantee that you've not seen anything like this before, and unless you take up on my offer, odds are you'll never see it again."
He took a step back and slit his own throat in a fluid, well-practised movement. The cut flopped open, fish gutted, making his breath stutter and bubble, his vision spin out, showing where all the veins had frayed and turned the blood frothy. He let Herr Leickenbloom get a good look at the carnage before cracking his neck straight with the heel of his palm. The wound healed seamlessly, and Johann drew a gloved finger across his jugular, chuckling at how Florian had grown red and splotchy along his cheekbones. That wasn't all that was red: he'd been sprayed across the face by Johann's blood in a clear, brilliant arc―ear to ear, like a carnival grin. Johann found something about that attractive: his blood marring that immaculate facade. Florian tried to wipe his cheek, but all if it did was smear his mouth with crimson.
"Y-you're right," he stuttered. "That is quite the trick."
I could describe to you her rankling landscapes; sulphurous, frigid, and unforgiving.
The same frigidity that seeps through the pages into the pads of your fingers, takes root and changes you biologically until the book slips and you're set free.
I could speak of these things, they're worth talking about, but they aren't what holds you both captive and captor.
Our monsters do.
Johann and Florian.
Every needling, sickly sweet endearment nestled between the first sip of poison and the last slice of flesh is said with ghoulish devotion and barely leashed violence.
Johann looked at him for a long time. Florian was the colour and temper of a white flame, his skin and hair porcelain bright against the coal-stained edifices and the dark grey sky. Slowly and with great deliberation, Johann stood up. He towered over Florian and asked in a low voice, "Cinnamon-sugar, duckling-sweet, my little honey-flower . . . what is it, exactly, that you want?"
Florian craned back his beck and smiled serenely. He held out his hand and asked, "May I have a knife?"
If it were possible, our monsters would tear each other apart and delightedly consume, simply to understand the ill-formed soul of one another.
He felt Florian bristle beneath his chin. "I'm a student of economics," he explained, tone defensive. "Tracking patterns and behaviour through comparative equations. I am taking the mathematical shape of you."
"Yeah, well, if that's all you wanted, you just had to ask, honeydew. You don't need to add three plus six to get me out of my clothes.
[...]
"You're awful," Florian hissed out between chuckles. "You're a vile creature."
"Herr Leickenbloom, please." Johann smiled easily. "Don't underestimate me. I'm more than vile; I'm an honest-to-god monster."
Master and maker, maker and master.
Two monsters: one a mistaken wish, the other a misbegotten wish-maker.
They're perfect for each other.
Totally fucked up and toxic but that's where they live, where they're most comfortable, in those dank, stygian corners most of us can feel in the dark, some primordial signal in our brains telling us to stay back, don't go in there, here be monsters.
That signal isn't a deterrent for Johann and Florian, it's a siren call.
A scent they follow and delight in the depravity it leads them to, that they cause.
I started this review with a quote from Frankenstein,in part because the tone of The Monster of Elendhavenfelt like a twin to Mary Shelley's anatomical nightmare, but more so because of the relationship between monster and maker.
The line between evil born and evil created.
Who's more monstrous, a creature innately vicious or one learned so?
And what if it doesn't matter?
It's never explicitly confirmed that Johann is a wish Florian threw into the sea, who crawled his way from its depths to find his master, but Johann's reaction to Florian the moment he sees him from his shadowy perch is confirmation itself.
A missing piece, the other half, a soulmate.
"Do you know what a hallakind is?"
"Sure," Johann kicked at a speckled red shell that peered out through the sand. It crumbled to dust under his boot. "It's dock slang for lad-whores. For little boy prostitutes."
"An ancient term transformed into crude modern vernacular. Here." Florian dipped gingerly, right at the sodden border cut by the tide, and plucked out a stone: perfectly round, an inch in diameter and opalescent in sheen. He held it aloft for Johann's benefit. "The oldest stories of the North called these rocks Hallandrette's Roe. She lays her clutch along the beach, and protects them from the destructive hands of mortal beings." Florian turned on his heel and pitched the stone at the cliff-wall as hard as he could. It bounced off the slate harmlessly. "See? Hard stone. Unbreakable."
Johann frowned. "How do you crack one open, then?"
Florian smiled, secretive. "A privilege reserved for Hallandrette's chosen. When a wretched child, one wronged or wounded deep in the soul, throws what they love most in the ocean they may cast a roe against the stone and a hallankind will be born, Keep the stone in their pocket and the Queen sends to them one of her children."
"A friend for a lonely soul."
"A companion," Florian affirmed, "made from the same dark matter that coats the bottom of the Nord Sea. A hallankind will love that wretched child as a brother or sister. They will drag whoever wronged their brother-sister-friend into the sea and wring them through the spines of their mother's baleen until they are foam and sea particle, forgotten in the cradle of her belly."
Florian was breathing heavily from the effort of his speech. His eyes were wet and lucid, fixed on some distant point beyond the horizon. He trembled, unnoticed, in the chill. Johann reached out to brush a lock of hair from his face and Florian met his eyes, sudden and fierce.
"Your eyes are black as the sea," Florian told him. The words were almost an accusation. Johann breathed a few cautious beats before responding.
"That's sweet, peach. You're saying that I was made for you?"
But like Frankenstein's monster, Johann is something of a mistake, a misreading in a jaggedly worded wish; he isn't what his master intended.
"You're a hiccup, or a flinch. Something that tripped and fell off the carriage, which continued on as if it's forgotten you. You're a living thing that somehow fails to generate or absorb the world's energy."
"Could we avoid framing it in terms of failure?" Johann put his chin in his palm. "It makes me feel so . . . inadequate."
But unlike Frankenstein, Florian loves his creation, craves his perversion and his inhumanity because it's a naked reflection of his own.
Febrile and untethered.
Sex and death.
Master, maker, maker, master.
"I need you to do a favour for me," he said.
Johann slithered up behind him and wound his arms around his wait. He nudged his nose beneath the soft curtain of Florian's hair and found the pulse at his neck.
"Ask me nicely," he whispered. Florian jerked back his elbow to throw Johann off, but it was a weak gesture, perfunctory. All a part of the song and dance.
"I was asking nicely," Florian bit out, going still beneath Johann's hands. Johann dug his fingers in deep and spun Florian around, pinning him against the edge of the table, one palm set to either side of his rib cage. The vials rattled violently.
"Nicer, then." Johann dipped down to kiss him, relishing the way Florian still trembled a little―entirely unbidden―when they were close.
Florian turned his mouth away. "D-don't," he stuttered, "d-don't. Th-the glass will break―"
"Well, that's entirely in your hands, isn't it, sugar-snap?" Johann purred, brushing back Florian's hair. "Nothing gets broken if you don't struggle."
There's no divide between the two, they're the same, one entity.
Brothers, lovers, comrades, murderers.
Where Johann begins, Florian ends, and vice versa.
Where Frankenstein created himself a man, a perfect specimen and in the end turned away in disgust, Florian embraced his monster and welcomed his demon in.
Because what's more welcome than someone, something, who sees you for exactly what you are, and revels in it?
Is this it? Johann wondered. The longer fall I was looking for? To know that I was summoned up from the dark ether to do a monster's deeds for Hallandrette's truest son?
And when our work is done, I will carry him to the bottom of the sea, where be both belong. Deep beneath the silt our bones will turn to salt.
The Monster of Elendhavenis a grotesque and beguiling tale of love and obsession, murder and revenge.
It claws at your throat and sweetly begs for a way in, to nestle in your deepest corners, and you allow it because it really is a convincing little monster.
Is it perfect? No.
The ending felt inevitable and unwanted, but if we're following Mary Shelley's script, it's the only cut we're allowed to bestow.
The only answer to a terrible mistake.
But an ending?
Perhaps not.
Who would have ever thought that a thing, once named and held in open palm, would want to curl up and stay there forever? Johann stroked a hand down Florian's side to feel where his guts were loose and spilling out onto the floor. It was hard to believe it came out of him, the same slippery meat that was stuffed inside everyone else. He pulled off both his gloves and took Florian's hand in his bare palms. "Florian, this . . . this is a stupid way to die."
Florian struggled to speak, but there was blood in his mouth. Johann gripped his hand harder.
"After all that, you can't intend to actually die."
"Goddess . . . Johann . . . sh-sh . . . shut up . . ." Florian coughed up blood all over his chin, over his collar where mud had been streaked the night before. "There is . . . still one thing I need you . . . to do. C-come closer."
Johann obeyed.
[...]
Blue-lipped and shivering, Florian whispered, "A hallankind exists to make its master's dreams come true. S-so go forth . . . and do that . . ."
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