Feyre wakes up in a dungeon which is the dungeoniest dungeon to ever dungeon. Distant screams and cracking whips and all. Honestly, at this point I’m so numb to this sort of scene in fiction that I just can’t be nervous, or impressed, or whatever it is I’m supposed to feel. Instead of “oh no, poor Feyre!” it’s “*snortgiggle* yeah, sure, cracking whips off in the distance, whatever.” Frankly, I could give this a pass if it was for a younger audience; obviously you have to have been exposed to something a lot before it reaches the snortgiggle phase, and younger readers haven’t had time for that. But this book? This book is clearly aimed at an NA audience (or, more accurately, the adults-who-read-YA audience), and by that point this shit is old news.

It’s not like you have to get particularly worse to make a scene like this work. You don’t need to up the evil ante over every other book out there, get as evil as evil can get or whatever. Just…go sideways a little bit. Try total silence over screaming, that’s also scary. Or a repetitive noise that can’t quite be classified, that’d fuck with someone’s brain. You don’t need to be over the top, because oftentimes the scariest things aren’t loud and flashy. They’re small and vaguely unknown.

Lucien comes to visit her, and they bicker about how she shouldn’t be there but she’s there anyway.

“So you know everything, then.” […] “Well, at least we don’t have to lie to you anymore. Let’s clean you up a bit.”

You know what’s missing from this? Any hint about why you ‘had’ to lie in the first place!

Tamlin heals her, except for the visible parts like bruises so it won’t be so obvious. They talk about more about the backstory, because yeah, that’s important right now, and then he leaves before her guards come by on their rounds.

Some undeterminable amount of time later, Feyre is dragged off to the throne room.

I marked the path, picking out details in the hall—interesting cracks in the walls, features in the tapestries, an odd bend—anything to remind me of the way out of the dungeons.

Because after days (possibly) of isolation, malnutrition, pain, poor sleep, etc, humans usually are super on the ball about this sort of thing, yes?

“You know,” Amarantha mused, leaning against an arm of her throne, “I couldn’t sleep last night, and I realized why this morning.” She ran an eye over me. “I don’t know your name. If you and I are going to be such close friends for the next three months, I should know your name, shouldn’t I?”

I prevented myself from nodding. There was something charming and inviting about her—a part of me began to understand why the High Lords had fallen under her thrall, believed in her lies. I hated her for it.

…there is? Because thus far she’s mocked you, taunted you, threatened you, insulted you, had you beaten (still not explanation for that, btw), and then threw you in a dungeon. So if this is, like, magical senseless charm, I’m gonna need more than just a throwaway half-a-line about it, please.

Otherwise, no, comments so saccharine that they’re not even pretending not to be insults doesn’t cut it. It feels like the book is so hard-up for hating Amarantha that it can’t be bothered to make her an actual character. She’s just a vehicle for evil tropes.

There’s like three fucking pages dedicated to Amarantha asking Feyre’s name, which Feyre refused to give, because…reasons? Because we needed her to torture Lucien into giving it up for the sake of…drama? Even after she gives it up, nothing happens so…????? So yeah, that was just protracted stalling for the sake of showing, again, that the evil queen of all evil is evil, because fuck logic and character development, we’ve got EVILTUDE over here.

Then Amarantha gives her riddle.

There are those who seek me a lifetime but never we meet,

And those I kiss but who trample me beneath ungrateful feet.

At times I seem to favor the clever and the fair,

But I bless all those who are brave enough to dare.

By large, my ministrations are soft-handed and sweet,

But scorned, I become a difficult beast to defeat.

For though each of my strikes lands a powerful blow,

When I kill, I do it slow …

It’s love.

The answer is love.

The answer is so obviously love that I could have answered this without even hearing the riddle, that’s how obvious it is that the answer is love. You could get that answer just by knowing the cliches of this book, that’s how predictable it is, and even if you only saw this riddle you could figure out that the answer is love.

Now, you could give Feyre a pass because she’s tired and hungry and injured…except that hasn’t had a single solitary effect on her since this scene started, so fuck passes. She doesn’t get to meticulously observe exits, plot escape plans, make inferences about the identities of stranger fairies, AND fail to answer the most obvious riddle ever asked.

Failing to answer the riddle (come on, look at the ridiculous terms of Tamlin’s curse, of course she likes to use concepts of love as a game), Feyre goes back to her cell trying to figure out which disease or poison might answer the riddle despite death being mentioned only in the last stanza. Because…this book wasn’t long enough, apparently.

(God, if you’re going to have love be the deus ex machina, at least have the decency to have be an actual deus ex machina, not THE MOST OBVIOUS RIDDLE TO EVER HAVE RIDDLED.)

But, onward. Two days later, Feyre gets dragged out for her first task. What is it, you may ask?

A sandworm.

…

Yup. From Dune. A giant worm with teeth. They’ve got this big ‘labyrinth’ of trenches in the middle of whatever room, and there’s a sandworm in it, and they toss her in.

I…I got nothing. It’s not even that bad; it’s not like I need my every monster to be 100% original. Sandworms are fine. But it’s just…so…exactly as lackluster as the rest of the book. “Giant sandworm? Eh, yeah, okay. If you insist.” I might care in a better book, it’s kind of a neutral event. “I was already bored and this didn’t change my mind, so I guess that…makes it boring by default?”

Feyre runs around until she finally manages to lose the sandworm, finds a pit full of bones, and gets the idea to snap them into sharp points and stick them in the bottom of the pit as a trap. (BTW, a human femur takes 1,700 psi to break, which is at the higher end of the ‘average range of a heavyweight boxer’s punch.’ So Feyre, who hasn’t been eating or sleeping well for the better part of a week and living in a dungeon, delivered at least a heavyweight boxer’s punch to each of these many – maybe a dozen or more, not clear – bones. And that’s being generous, because she notes that the bones are very heavy.)

(Bones – turns out they’re kind of hard to break on purpose!)

She tricks the worm into falling into the pit full of spikes that she couldn’t possibly have the strength to have set up.

(Would it really be that hard to say that the sandworm just crunched bones and left them already-broken around the pit?)

I was shaking—shaking all over. But not with fear. Oh, no. It wasn’t fear at all. I’d proved my love—and then some.

…how? From where I sit, you proved your ability to run faster than a sandworm. Which, while a useful skill, isn’t really in the same realm as love. And if we’re going for motivation, that was 110% self-preservation. Even within the scene, all she thought about was not-dying. If you wanted it to be a test of love, you need to leave an out for Feyre, so that love becomes the main impetus. If someone has the capacity to save themselves but stays to save a loved one instead, then you can call that a test of love. But “kill this beast or die horribly” is just that, kill or die. It’s entirely self-serving.

Had there not been an insurmountable trench between us, I would have ripped her throat out. Someday—if I lived through this—I would skin her alive.

Should I be shocked at this? Honestly, hating Amarantha is just another sandworm at this point. More of the same. Already bored, so this is boring.

As she’s being dragged away back to her cell, Feyre notices finally that she was injured and has one of her own bone-lances sticking in her arm. Dun dun dun.