After the great spell of Kindolhinadeltil’s Mirror, Kellen learns that Wild Magic and High Magick working together will kill the immortal Demons. With the harshest winter in a very long time only half over, the war is harder to battle and win.Kellen is still strongly attracted to Vestakia and bonded to Shelkan with the Price of a year and a day of chastity and celibacy. Vestakia remains with the Elven army working with the Crystal Spiders to find the final enclave of Shadowed Elves. (They remind me of the drow.)Cilarnen can’t do any of the beneficial High Magick without a source to draw power from. He is desperate and asks permission from Kindolhinadetil to use the Elemental Forces/Beings that are the power of the land-wards of the Elven Lands as the source of his power to perform the High Magick. But can he gain permission from the Elven ruler, and can he survive a summoning as dangerous as this?Jermayan and Ancaladar are used by the Elven army as a kind of chauffer and protector when the King of the Nine Cities orders all the expecting females to the Fortress of the Horned Crown. It is in their evacuation of Lerkelpodara where Jermayan learns of the strong offensive approach the Endarkened are taking in this war. With his Elven Mage magic, Jermayan performs an unbelievable act at the mountain pass that saves those refugees from the lost city of Lerkelpodara. The Nine-now Eight-Cities.Using a High Magick spell to see into Armethalieh to spy on Anigrel, Cilarnen feels tainted on the inside. By searching his mind where Anigrel was suppose to burn away his Magegift; he discovers that a trap was laid by Master Anigrel. He only laid his Magegift to sleep, until it could be of further use to Anigrel’s Dark Mistress.Queen Savilla returns to the place of her dark magic working with large numbers of blood sacrifices, in order to reach her ultimate goal of ruling forever not only the World Without Sun, but also the World Above. She means to bring He Who Is back! Prince Zyperis learns of his mother’s intentions and knows what it means for him. He takes the initiative desperate to please her, by starting the plague on the Brightworlders. Just like it was with the first war, the Shadow’s Kiss kills not only warriors but the land too.With her hard and determined work with the Crystal Spiders, Vestakia discovers that she is linked to her father’s mind. She knows what They will do next in order to win the war. But can he see her mind too?At the Caverns of Halacira, Kellen’s army not only runs into the last of the Shadowed Elves before Vestakia‘s warning arrives, but he succeeds in turning it into a safe refuge, with the help of Jermayan’s great Elven Magic. I wonder if Shelkan’s good luck wish from a unicorn of ,”Good hunting,” (just like in Battlestar Galactica), to Kellen was just what he needed to be successful against such great odds, even with Kellen’s Knight-Mage abilities.tIn the battle at the caverns of Halacira, Kellen agrees to another Mage Price, to let go. When he learns from Jermayan that Andoreniel is sick from Shadow’s Kiss, does the Mage Price refer to the King or will the Healers be able to save him? In the meantime, who commands the Elven Army? They will not answer to anyone besides Andoreniel.The High Magick spell to see into Armethalieh is not only good to find out what is going on behind the walls of the city, but it can work the other way too. Cilarnen witnesses the massacre at the undefended farming village of Nerendale. They put on a bloody show just for him, that Cilarnen would never be able to forget.With more of the questions about the history of the first war against the Demons being answered, Idalia learns of the Great Summoning. She is able to use one of the places of power on one of the powerful days to summon the Starry Hunt. They are a frightful force of Light that are as many as there are stars in the sky. They are so tremendously powerful that even the Elves are scared of what Idalia has done for their victory against the Dark. This power is as old as the immortal Demons themselves. They hunt down and kill all agents of the Endarkened.The final battle will have the Elven army at the walls of Armethalieh to defeat Anigral and have the race of men fight along side them against the Demons. Queen Savilla will steal away the one to the place of significant power to make the final sacrifice that will bring the return of He Who Is forever. Idalia is willing, but will be able to pay the Mage Price for the spell she used to end the drought in the Elven Lands? Will Vestakia survive her father’s hunt for her, and will Kellen give up Shelkan so that he and Vestakia may be together, When Darkness Falls?
When Darkness Falls by Mercedes Lackey and James Mallory is a typical good versus evil novel. This young adult to adult fiction novel was made to become the conclusion of the Obsidian Trilogy, and the two previous books really help the understanding and background of this book a lot. I would even go as far and say to not read this novel unless you have read the previous two in the series. When Darkness Falls also has the side purpose of setting the stage for the two authors succeeding series, which happens roughly a millennium later. The most obvious and reoccurring theme in this book is good versus evil. In this book, everyone is either completely good or completely evil, with the exception of the High Mages. The good is good to the extreme, annihilating even the enemy infants, and the evil is as evil as the author could possibly think of, even going into detail during torture scenes and slow, excruciatingly painful deaths. As usual, the good triumphs over evil, but by a sacrifice, another theme of the book. Lackey and Mallory almost made all of their protagonists too willing to sacrifice themselves even to the point of death for good, and although sacrifice is good is some contexts, these authors again took it to the extreme.tWhen Darkness Falls was a narration telling the events of a great war, focusing on five or six main characters, with Kellen as the main protagonist. The two authors made good use of the point of view of third person omnipotent so that the reader could understand the main plot and all the sub plots, all while keeping the many characters with obscure names straight. Mallory and Lackey also did a good job of making the reading interesting, by changing the mood of the story when it was focusing on certain people. Sometimes the mood was desperation or determination, but it also swung to feelings such as envy, lust for power, uselessness, business, and arrogance. All of these kept the reading interesting and varied. I thought that this book was well written and very interesting, and had a good blend of politics, battles, fantasy, and very little romance. Unfortunately, the authors made a failed attempt of romance on literally the last page, which made the whole series seem cheesy. The only things that I would change about this book is maybe make the torture scenes less grotesque and add a traitor high up in the good teams lines to add suspense. The worst part about this book is that almost none of the ideas are original. This book is just another twist off of Lord of the Rings, as almost all adult fiction books containing dragons and elves are. The idea of bonding to a dragon and getting its energy has already been seen many times, like in Eragon, and the idea of learning magic from books and harnessing it through wands has been used way too much. Nevertheless, it was at least a very well done series, and When Darkness Falls did a fairly decent job of finishing it off.
What do You think about When Darkness Falls (2007)?
Well....this one might best be thought of as a 3.5. I like this series and was very drawn in. I jumped from the second to this one immediately after finishing it.This one however slowed down a bit in that it got very repetitive. Ms. Lackey seemed to for a while to have fallen prey to "Robert Jordan syndrome" in that starting with a retelling of the end of the second book (as the second book began with a retelling of the first) after which she, instead of launching out into the the plot began relating a lot we already knew. We went through a lot of internal angst we already knew about and a lot of details are retold we have already been made aware of. The book really should have (my opinion throughout of course) rocketed out of the gate at a breakneck pace as THEY/THEM (the demons who like Lord Voldemort must not be mentioned by name lest it draw their attention) are moving to crush the world. Instead we get a great deal of filler and stories that are drawn out much more than needed. I think large swaths of the first half of this book could be missed without harming your understanding of the story.However, the last third of the book recovers and again draws us into a fast moving satisfying tale that ties up most plot points.The annoying point I mentioned about the last book is still here (view spoiler)[ the "time dilation". As noted either this is an exceptionally small land....no that wouldn't even work now. It has to be that the year here is much, much longer than the year we know here. The "year and a day" plot line has brought about a situation where everything in the 3 novels had to take place in a year. The year in this world must be 2 or 3 times as long as the year we have here. (hide spoiler)]
—Mike (the Paladin)
I didn't like this book as much as the previous ones. It felt like the book was rushed and ended up missing something. I was happy that it didn't have quite so much over-descriptiveness as the first two books.It bothered me that Jermayan was the only one that could put two and two together about the last enclave of Shadow elves even though early on Vestakia was given images of jewels and water. Was she not talking to any of the other elves or were they all too stupid to put two and two together?
—Cheryl
I wasn't a big fan of this book or this trilogy overall. I had three main complaints:1) It's morally simplistic. There are the good guys and the bad guys. To make it even easier, you can basically tell whether someone is good or bad by what species they are and if they are from the "bad" species (demons, shadow elves, etc) then they should all be annihilated down to the last baby. This is not how things are in real life and I find it a cheat. The high mages were the only ones remotely ambiguous and I found their behavior unrealistic at the end of this book.2) This book glorifies self sacrifice in a way that I might have found appealing as a teenager but that horrifies me now. Each of the 5 main characters is bent on destroying themselves for the good of everyone else and I just can't stomach idealizing martyrs. Also, even as it does this it doesn't actually draw me in emotionally (nor did it draw me into either of the supposed "romances")3) For some reason Lackey and Mallory derive great pleasure in describing horrifying torture scenes in loving detail. I had to skip all these sections of the book/trilogy but the little that I accidentally read always made me feel nauseous.It wasn't all bad - after all, I did complete the whole trilogy which is due to slightly more than the fact that I am a completist. I was kind of curious about what would happen and some of the world/characters were semi-interesting, but overall I was unimpressed.
—Karen
