Some amount of time later (late spring, but when did the bulk of the book take place?  I can’t remember) Clary, Magnus, and Isabelle stand outside of Simon’s school and spy on him leaving for the day.  Clary approaches to talk to him, describing herself as an old friend and mentioning that her mom is getting married that day.  Simon clearly doesn’t know her still, but he does give her a flier for his band, which is now named “The Mortal Instruments.”

After Clary leaves to get ready for the wedding, Isabelle convinces Magnus that the name must mean he remembers something and that they should go to the show and do…some unspecified thing.

Then we get Simon’s POV.

She’d seemed so fragile, despite the fairly badass tattoos that decorated her arms and collarbone.

Okay, so what’s the deal?  First we’re told that mundanes can’t see the magical world, and then it’s implied that the runes are part of that (Clary’s “see no magic” mind spell from COB included her mother’s scars), but now anyone can see runes?

Then Magnus and Isabelle pop up out of the blue and introduce themselves and show him a book of runes.  There’s also a lot of poetic blathering about specialness thrown in as they give him the Reader’s Digest version of his own history.

Because the world isn’t divided into the special and the ordinary. Everyone has the potential to be extraordinary.

Unless we’re talking about the previous six books, in which case the world is totally divided into Special and Ordinary, and humans fall squarely in the realm of Ordinary and are therefore completely ignorable.

This strikes me as a very entitled thing to say, because based on context, what Magnus really means is that Simon was able to ‘adapt’ to life as one of the ‘Special’ people.  There’s no recognition that he was valuable just as he was, but we carry on with the statement (outright said in COB) that the only good thing about humans is that they have the potential to become Shadowhunters.  There’s no recognition that other cultures or peoples have intrinsic merit, that they are special already, just that “Special” and “Ordinary” still exist, except you can cross the line if you want to.

You see this in a lot of debates recently on all sorts of different topics, and usually it boils down to “No, I think you people are fine, because you could totally act like a Straight White Male if you wanted!”

They tell him that the way around the rules (the rules….that they just broke by telling him stuff already) is to make Simon a Shadowhunter himself, since so many were lost that they’re just desperate to make new ones.  (Um…again, COB said that only small children can survive that process.  I mean, Magnus says he can do some magic to ‘prep’ Simon, but what about for everyone else?  Are there just an influx of five-year-old Shadowhunters all of a sudden?  That doesn’t seem particularly helpful.  And where are they getting them from?  Kidnapping?  How is this any better than what Valentine was going to do way back then – forcing children who can’t make an informed decision to enter into a life of violence.)

Several hundred words of Clary describing the wedding.  …next!

A whole wasted page on Zachariah showing up with some “mystery girl” before they both wander off the page again without saying a word.  …next!

One would think that, in the last chapter, we could dispense with the padding.  Then again, one would have to remember that we’re reading this novel, and there’s never a bad time for padding in this novel.  Apparently.

Clary and Jace wander off to be mushy, just in case we missed every other instance of them clearly intending to stay together forever.

Magnus arrives to put an end to some of the corniest dialogue I’ve ever read.

Over with Alec, his dad tries to make amends by laying out his whole homophobic backstory.  Is this really necessary; backstory in the very last chapter?  Really?  Also, “oo, teh gay guy scared me once” doesn’t really tug at my sympathy.  But apparently it does for Alec, because they…well, start to make amends.

(Honestly, if you want to apologize for something like that, “I was an idiot and acting on my upbrining without ever once examining my actions, the reasons behind them, or the consequences from them, but I promise to dig my head out of my own ass” works well enough.  You don’t really need to blame the gay guy in your past for setting you down the road of homophobia.)

Magnus leads Clary and Jace over to Simon.  No, I don’t know why this little half a page wasn’t attached to the previous scene, or why it’s interrupted again now so we can go back to Alec.  If you expect the scene breaks to make sense by this point, I really can’t help you.

Magnus and Alec act mushy.  Clary and Jace act mushy.  Tessa and Zach act mushy.  Really, there’s just a whole lot of mush going on.

“I remember you said this war was a story of Lightwoods and Herondales and Fairchilds, and it is, and Blackthorns and Carstairs as well

Bullshit.  Emma’s chapters were a self-contained story that did not advance the overall plot except for once, when she told Clary’s group that Edom was (probably) a real place.  And they would have figured that out in some contrived way if she hadn’t, I’m sure.  She was not necessary to this book.  Furthermore, even her one contribution wasn’t known to everyone, so she shouldn’t be considered instrumental to the war.  The only reason to call this “a story of Blackthrons and Carstairs” is if you’re reading this book, which arbitrarily focused on her.  If you were a character in this book, you could just as easily call it a story of the Penhallows, or that guy who had to kill his own parabati and then suicide, or any of the other dozens (hundreds?) of families who were affected by the war.  Yes, Emma and her group were the focus of the book, but that was the book’s decision; they weren’t actually stand-out within the story.  They were just one more group of orphans whom the author thought we should care about more than the others.

Isabelle and Simon act mushy, to carry on the mush parade.

Clary and Tessa meet.  I don’t know why.  We’re at the end of the book, supposed to be wrapping things up, and while there have been plenty of nods and gestures in the direction of Tessa, there’s been nothing that actually requires her to show up.  Certainly we’ve never had any hint that she and Clary were being drawn together for anything.  There is really no reason behind the conversation that follows.  It’s just more of the same purple-prose prattling that the rest of the book is made of, plus lots of backstories.  Backstories which, if you’ve read TID, you probably already know if you haven’t read TID make no sense anyway.  Oh, joy.

Magnus and Caterina talk about the book, and the only thing mildly interesting is that Magnus points out that the fairies are pretty stinkin upset and probably going to cause trouble about it in the future.  Color me surprised.

And then it all ends with everyone being mushy again.

Honestly, I have to say, the epilogue here is pretty much the whole book in a microcosm.  An epilogue is supposed to be “a commentary on or conclusion to” a story, and all that’s getting concluded is romance lines (some of them concluded several times in a row), with an exclusive focus on the favored characters, while any of the fallout that affects those outside the author’s inner circle gets a passing mention at best.  I suppose, in terms of ‘fitting,’ that does make it a perfect ending to this series?