But I do wish the book had a glossary. It would have been very helpful!
Cal of course does not take this well, and immediately starts planning how to get out of this (and specifically how to kill the S-level mage, even though Cal himself is only a B-Level dungeon).
Dale is no longer Baron (although he remains a Duke with the Dark Elves), and so is in major danger of being conscripted into the army. So he signs himself up at the academy as the protege of the headmaster whom he had just hired. The clerk takes a disliking to Dale, and conspires to get him booted out of the academy by not issuing Dale receipts for his tithes to said academy (but luckily Dale gets wind of this and is able to remain in the dungeon long enough to more than make up for the shortfall). Unfortunately, all his training, specifically to strengthen his aura, makes an imbalance within him, and Dale starts becoming uncharacteristically aggressive, both in the Dungeon and without. It takes the intervention of his teachers to knock some sense into him (quite literally!)
While I enjoyed reading Dungeon Desolation, I didn't think it was quite on par with the other few books. For one thing, there was a lot less Dani than in earlier books (she was training their daughter, Grace). For another, there was a lot less of Cal doing fun and crazy things - it was kind of more of the same from book 3 (he was mostly finishing up his ley lines, and dealing with flying). He did make a few new monsters and floors, but nothing really fun (I guess other than his battle royale of elementals that he set up and let fight and evolve on their own).
The ending was rather unexpected though: everyone was manipulated by Xenocide, the super-ranked Mage of Madness (I have no idea what his level is, but it appears to be more powerful than anyone else, even the Master) for the last several hundred years so he could get everyone into a particular place at a particular time to power a ritual for him to attract one of the planet's moons to the planet, killing everyone and "freeing them of their madness." Now everyone has to work together to stop him, if it's even possible.
While not the best in the series, Dungeon Desolation still had some fun moments. It'll be interesting to see how the series ends in Dungeon Eternium.
Toby's immediately pulled away to the Tea Gardens, to find something equally unsettling: Lily is sick. As an undine and pureblood, Lily should not be able to get sick. Toby vows to get to the bottom of it. But before she can do much investigating, she has to make an appearance at the Torquill's Beltane Ball. Only while there, she is the only witness to Luna fainting, possibly from being poisoned from wine. Toby got a whiff of Oleander de Merelands' magic - Oleander is one of the ones who were responsible for turning Toby into a fish for fourteen years. Oleander is also an assassin extraordinaire, whose weapon of choice is poisons. But there's one problem: every time Toby seems to believe Oleander is around, no one else can see her. Is Toby's changeling blood finally making her go mad? Or is there a sinister plot afoot that she's tangled up in?
I was quite interested in the story up to about this point (and was even thinking of ordering the next two books in the series because I was having so much fun with it). But then things started to take a rather...dare I say: familiar...turn. Rayseline, Sylvester's daughter, hates Toby. When Luna is incapacitated, and Sylvester turns mad with grief, Raysel uses the opportunity to take control of the Knowe, naming herself in charge. She banishes Toby, and starts spreading rumours that Toby is the one who hurt Lily and Luna. After Lily dies, Toby returns to the Knowe, but Raysel uses it as a chance to have her arrested. You see, having been named Countess, Toby is now no longer under Sylvester's protection, but the Queen's. And the Queen orders her to stand trial, a sham used to convict Toby and sentence her to execution. She's locked in an iron dungeon for a few days; her friends break her out and bring her back from the brink of death by iron poisoning. But Toby cannot stand idly by, and insists on returning to Sylvester's Knowe in an attempt to save Luna.
While the plot trappings are different, the second half of the story was, in many ways, a repeat of An Artificial Night, and how Toby kept charging back into Blind Michael's lands. She was even held prisoner and poisoned (although it was more a mental poisoning rather than the iron poisoning she suffered here). But even after all that, she had to charge back into danger after barely healing to see it through. There's nothing necessarily wrong with this plot on its own merits, but reading it right after An Artificial Night got very, very boring.
Now sure, there was some interesting things going on too. Toby got shot with Elfshot, which is deadly to Changlings. Her mother mysterious showed up and changed her, making her far more fae. This saved her life, but also means that iron is now a problem when it wasn't before (the change happened just before she was sentenced and thrown into the iron jail). Her features even changed, becoming more fae.
Another thing that was interesting (though sad) was Lily's death. Lily's subjects were able to mourn, but Toby never was (she was just a crazy exhausted mess running from one fire to the next trying to put them all out). I would have loved if the book slowed down a bit to deal with (and really show) some of this stuff. But Toby herself even says that there's no time to deal with it now.
I'm also a fan of the relationship she's developing with Tybalt. Somewhere along the lines she's started trusting him. And while he's still very aloof, you can tell he cares for her. That's all going to get complicated in the coming books because Connor, her one-time crush and Rayseline's husband, is freed from the marriage at the end of the book (Raysel did some unforgivable things, and his Selkie clan dissolved their political marriage immediately).
So all in all, this ended up just an okay read. I do wish I had waited awhile before reading it, rather than starting it immediately after An Artificial Night. But thanks to all the repetition in the plot, I'm done with the series for now - if I go back to it, it won't be for a long while.
This time around, Toby starts off by having a really bad day - her Fetch arrives, which means that Toby's death is immanent. That's followed by frantic calls from one of her best friends, Stacy, because two of Stacy's five children are missing and one is now in an un-wakeable slumber. Toby goes to investigate, finding clues but nothing definite that points to what happened to the children. With Stacy's permission, she brings the slumbering Karen to Lily's Tea Gardens in the hope that the undine can wake her. Along the way, Tybalt finds her and asks for her help, because several of the children from his Court of Cats have gone missing as well. Though a great healer, Lily is unable to help Karen. But she sends Toby to "speak to the moon" - which brings her to Luna, Sylvester's wife. While figuring out that riddle, she finds Quentin at her place - his human girlfriend has gone missing as well.
Luna is the one who fills in the missing pieces. The culprit is Blind Michael, one of the Firstborn Fae, and master of the Hunt. No one would ever willingly join him and his hunt, so every hundred years he takes the unwilling: the children. He takes faerie children to be his riders, and human children to be their steeds. He twists them all and binds them to himself. And he has taken all of the missing children that Toby is looking for.
To find him, Toby needs the help of the Luidaeg, the Firstborn Seawitch. The Luidaeg can send Toby to Blind Michael's realm on one of the few roads that are open. First Toby takes the Child's Road, which involves Toby being transformed into a child. She manages to bargain with Blind Michael for the children - if she's able to get them out undetected, she can take them home. But Toby takes more children than were bargained for, and so the Hunt pursues her outside of Blind Michael's realm. Next she takes the Rose Road, care of Luna, to try to stop the Hunt from pursuing her (and to save Karen, whose soul was taken by Blind Michael while she slept). Blind Michael agrees only if Toby stays in Karen's place. He begins to bind Toby to him, but before the final binding can finish, Toby's friends manage to save her (along with some of the other children who were taken). But Blind Michael has already done some major damage to Toby's mind, and she is determined to end things with him. Which leads her back using the final road, the Blood Road, which demands a tithe be paid in blood, either Toby's or Blind Michael's.
I wish I had read An Artificial Night a bit closer to A Local Habitation. It's been a few years, and I forgot who many of the characters were (like Quentin). Yes, the book kind of explained things well enough so I could follow it alright, but it would have been a lot nicer had I actually remembered people! But I did enjoy An Artificial Night. It was a really interesting story and I didn't want to put it down (I read almost the entire book yesterday afternoon). My biggest complaint (other than some weird things that were repetitive and should have been caught in editing, like how the book explained who Lily was both times Toby went to the Tea Gardens in almost exactly the same words) was that it wasn't scary enough. When a story is dealing with childhood bogeymen and the main character gets turned into a child, that's a story that's ripe for some creepiness and (childhood) horror! Unfortunately I just never felt that during the book - Toby went on treating everything kind of just like business as usual.
Other than that though, I really enjoyed An Artificial Night. I'm looking forward to reading the next book in the series, Late Eclipses (and without letting several years pass before I pick it up!)
