As Clary and Jace are exploring their chosen part of the tunnels, Clary randomly starts bemoaning the fact that she’s not normal, because apparently she always wanted to be.  Except I pretty well remember the very first chapter of City of Bones where she went to a night club expressly because she was sad about being normal and wanted more Pandemonium in her life.  So…

“I wanted to be. I wanted to have a normal life.” She glanced down at herself, dusty boots and stained gear, her weapons glittering at her belt. “Go to art school.”

“Marry Simon? Have six kids?” There was a slight edge to Jace’s voice now.

How the fuck did you get from ‘art school’ to ‘six kids?’

They come to a giant cavern with a lake in it.

with pillars of quartz jutting up here and there like rods of crystal.

…you just said exactly the same thing twice.

“She had eyes in her face like two ocular organs.”

“The room was perfectly square like something with four right corners.”

“The colors were a mix of blue and yellow, like green.”

I just…sigh.

They sit around and talk about how neither of them really draw or play piano anymore, then hare off into a philosophical conversation about how mundanes have a “spark” of creativity and Shadowhunters a “spark” of warriorism and ne’er the twain shall meet.  Except that’s patently ridiculous because Clary and Jace have both done artistic things in the past, so it’s clearly not a matter of intrinsic composition, and there are a metric fuckton of normal people the world who can’t art worth a damn, though some of them are quite good at warriroring.  And, let’s be honest, you already have a perfectly good excuse for not arting, since you’re busy as fuck saving the world.  Or you should be, at least.

Most of the time this book goes off on a philosophical tangent, I just want to break things, because it has this terrible habit of taking perfectly reasonable situations and giving them magic rainbow-unicorn-heart-fart excuses, as if “it’s sad that we’re too busy for art” isn’t profound enough.  No, we can’t have a talk about responsibilities and trying to weigh that against personal needs and the value of art for strong mental health, nope, no siree, that’s not fucking magical enough for this book.

Switch over to Simon and Isabelle, as Simon mentions that everyone probably thinks they’re off having sex instead of exploring.

“As if we’d have sex in a cave surrounded by hordes of demons. This is reality, Simon, not your fevered imagination.”

…I think sex is the most normal and least imaginative thing in that statement.

They have a brief and minorly angsty relationship conversation, and then thankfully a weird cry distracts them back into plot stuff.  They keep going and find another cave entrance, this one with a broken gate, and outside they see a whole hoard of flying demons.  Off in the distance, Simon thinks he can see a city.

Skip over to Jocelyn, who is getting a visit from Jonathan.

a mother heartless enough to abandon one of her children—”

Okay, am I just misremembering that whole sequence of events?  Because I’m pretty sure that Jocelyn came home to find her house on fire and the bodies of what she assumed to be her whole family, so can you really call it ‘abandonment’ at that point?  I get why Jonathan would call it that, he’s deeply emotionally invested in the event, but why does everyone else go along?

“If you hadn’t thought I was dead,” he said, “if you’d known I lived, would you have looked for me? Would you have kept me?”

“I would have,” she said.

Wait, so, everyone is still aware that’s how things went down?  Then why does no one bring this up during his constant tirades about abandonment?

They banter for a bit about parental love and the lack thereof, and then Jonathan randomly decides to demonstrate some magic.  He makes a…mirror/portal/illusion/whatever into Jia’s office to talk to her, and Jia says they’re not going to hand over Jace and Clary.  But with more words and an attempt to be diplomatic.  Jonathan says it’s a mute point, since he knows that group has already arrived in hell.  Mwahaha?

Switch over to Emma, and we sit through several pages of moping and talking about how hard it is on Jules to be only 13 and yet responsible for all his younger siblings.  (Not…technically, but given the circumstances, he is the oldest one around with enough spare time to think about them, since all the adults are rather busy.  Which is a rough situation, but at least makes sense, given crisis-priorities.)  They talk about what will happen to them after all this; Jules has an uncle that will take in the kids, but Emma’s not sure she’ll be allowed to go with them.

In isolation, it’s actually not a bad scene.  They do have some heavy shit going down, so the moping is more than warranted, and it shows them actually experiencing the exhaustion and heartache of their situation, which is far more powerful than heart-fart philosophy.  There is, compared to the rest of the book, a nice sense of subtlety to the emotions of the scene.  But I feel like it would be even more powerful if we hadn’t spent hundreds of pages already on emotional stalling.

Their character moment gets interrupted when Jia comes by and they accidently eavesdrop on her conversation with Patrick.  They’re talking about Jonathan’s news and the Jace-Clary-group’s disappearance.

Apparently that interlude was completely pointless, because we already know where the gang is and the kids don’t care, because they go right back to their own conversation.  Jules suggests they become parabati to avoid being split up.

When they get back to the attic, one of the younger kids has broken a window to let in a magic flying acorn.  It’s a message from Mark.