Teres

- The “two physicians” they have on hand are tending the wounded (good luck with that) and the dead are put in graves between two of the Barrows.

...two physicians to take care of thousands of people? What kind of superhuman creatures does Douglass think physicians are? Even with a lot of people killed in the storm, it's still practically impossible for just two physicians, even if they worked around the clock with absolutely no sleep.

- I have to agree with Axis here. He is not interfering with the tombs themselves, and it would be quite difficult to bury the bodies entirely out of the area.

Another option would have been to simply leave the bodies behind, which would have been just awful. (I'm not sure about cremation; does it exist in this world?) Axis is doing a good thing by at least giving them a resting place. You get a crumb of a cookie, Axis, but no more than that thanks to most of your behavior before now.

- Is there any reason you could not have learned this better during your time in Silent Woman Keep? This is a very poor way to keep up a disguise, after all.

I'm starting to think that five goblins in a trench coat would be a better disguise than what these two have. How has no one figured out that they're not human yet? Are they really just that imperceptive?

- Axis spends a large part of the evening among the soldiers, “smiling and reassuring”, comforting where necessary, joking and laughing where necessary.

Okay, you get another crumb. This is the proper way to be a leader. It proves that you actually care about your men, and both their physical and mental health.

- I… you are not here to fight them, Axis! Why are you ready to pull out your weapons?

Two reasons for why I can't actually blame his aggression here. One, he could be transferring his grief of losing so many men, turning it into anger and focusing it on someone else. Two, he might blame the two of them for having lost so many, since they obviously knew what was going on with the storm, and didn't tell him until it was too late.

- Ogden snaps at him how much he wants to hear, and then Veremund puts a hand on his arm and says “smoothly” that they only ever told him the truth.

Oh, sure, technically. But if the truth was a novel, you've barely given him a page of it. It's easy to say that you've only ever told him the truth when you tell him practically nothing.

- Ogden, if Gorgrael sent a magic cloud head, then what does it matter that he cannot make the journey physically?

One might even say that the cloud head is worse, because he can do all kinds of damage to you, but you can hardly hurt something made of water vapor. Your men are dying while he's safely tucked away somewhere, completely unharmed. Not a bad tactic when you know that you're not strong enough to defeat your enemies.

- Veremund now tells Axis to be calm. He should learn from the experience of today, but not “waste [his] energies blaming [him]self”.

Way to neatly weasel out of answering, Veremund. He just asked for answers and you're already being evasive.

- He does not want to give too much information to Axis while he is “in this state of angry self-denial”.

And again! When someone asks you for information, your response should not be "Naaah, I don't think I will."

- They are not “unkind creatures”, they say.

Yet two of your number were contemplating murder just because someone's presence was mildly inconvenient to them. You want to try that again, boys?

- In short, there was every reason not to do things this way, and yet they did.

My head is starting to hurt from how nonsensical all of this is... Look, Douglass, if you can't think of any other reason for your characters to do something than just Because the Plot Says So, then you need to rethink your plot. I know that people make bad decisions in real life, even when the right decision is right in front of them, but the conga line of bad decisions that had to happen to lead up to this moment truly boggles the mind.

- This book is morally bankrupt and I hate it!

By the end of this series, I have a feeling that I'll probably give up on being angry entirely and just sit in the corner rocking back and forth and sobbing in despair.

- This also makes me think that Veremund wants Axis to see Gorgrael as only a “creature of hate” so Axis will have an easy time killing him.

I think so, too. After all these years, has no one done any research into Gorgrael? I guess "know thy enemy" doesn't exist in this world. Alternatively, maybe they do have a lot of information on him, and they're lying to Axis to manipulate him and convince him that Gorgrael (I have so much trouble spelling that, and I don't know why) is the epitome of All Things Evil, even if he's really not. Plus, that theory fits in with their behavior up to this point.

- Gorgrael simply does not consist only of hate, so he must have reasons for this. But here we have Ogden and Veremund telling Axis that Gorgrael only hates, that that is the only thing in his life.

Ogden just undermined his own argument right there by saying “all lands below the line of year-long ice and snow”. If he was truly a being of pure hatred, wouldn't he want to destroy anything and everything? This seems like a very calculated strike for someone who is supposed to be killing indiscriminately.

- So if it means that he needs to invade Axis’s dreams to do so, he is “perfectly capable of doing that”.

I wonder. Why doesn't he invade everyone's dreams and give them nightmares? If he can terrify the entire army to the point that they don't want to fight, that's his problem solved, at least for a while. Showing up in one person's dreams and going "BOOGA BOOGA" at him every now and then shouldn't have much of an impact on other people.

- I am also peeved that he is supposed to be so “evil” for trying to demoralise his enemies, when that is hardly worse than what the “good” people will do.

It's absolutely ridiculous! Demoralization = bad, but mind control = good? I think you have that backwards, Douglass. One would argue that mind control is infinitely worse.

- unless they have been taught to in the womb.

...how does that even work? Are Icarii babies born with fully-developed brains capable of retaining memories from even before their birth? If it was something like an inherited memory that all of them had, I would be more willing to believe it, because magic, but you only know it if you heard it before birth? Huh?

- I like this, actually! I like that Axis is not immediately comfortable about the things he learns and that he even thinks it might be better not to know of it at all. Yes, I might wish there were more here, but I will take what I can get.

I actually dislike Axis a little bit less now. I don't like him by any means, but he's not on the level of searing hatred I feel for the Sentinels anymore. I don't know how long this will last, but after all the cactus-swinging, it's quite refreshing to read something that doesn't turn me homicidal.