So they keep walking, and suddenly they reach the center of the Tomb. All of the group. Just…arrive. All they had to do get there was walk enough and not die. They didn’t have to prove themselves (the guides did the majority of the fighting) or pass any tests or show any amount of cleverness. Just…just walk, and then you get there.

So fascinating. Much entertained.

Ember, the god-ram, is there and welcomes them and starts to give a big grand speech about starting the new golden era, and Q spaces out like a numpty and just wonders if Penny will get to be high-king instead of him because Q IS THE ABSOLUTE WORST AT ALL TIMES.

Mid-speech, Q interrupts the all-powerful Ram to ask, hey, what’s up with you being down here?

You are a good, and things are really falling apart up there. I mean, I think a lot of people are wondering where You’ve been all this time. That’s all. Why would You let Your people suffer like that?

Like…what? You’ve seen one bar. You’ve met a sleepy bear, a very young tree, and two guides do all the work for you and haven’t really given us much info about recent history. WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?

Ember is basically “look, there’s a lot of evil around, we had to fight it, and I got hurt” and then gang is like “but if you’re all-powerful why did you make something that could hurt yo-“

They just fucking ran with the idea that this wooly deity is exactly the same Abrahamic God, didn’t they? It’s a fucking magic ovine, y’all, maybe it doesn’t work the same way you learned in Sunday School, hm?

Ember tries to equivocate, and Q finally realizes that Ember is actually trapped down here.

That’s why You’re down here? Somebody put You down here, and You can’t get out. This wasn’t a quest, this was a rescue mission.

The fuck do you think a quest is?

Ember keeps trying to explain things to him, and the kids keep interrupting with “why isn’t X like Y?” until they finally just snap in a fit of OMG THIS ISN’T EXACTLY LIKE MY HEADCANON and start yelling and the GIANT MAGIC RAM.

Also, none of you have taken a theology class and IT SHOWS.

There’s some malevolence approaching (the narration just tells us this, it’s there, off-page, just trust me) and Q is suddenly like “hey, let’s blow the horn.” Ember tries to stop them, but they don’t listen because HOW DARE THE OVINE GOD NOT BE LIKE I EXPECTED.

And then Ember is like “you fucking little shits, now you’ve done it. And also, how dare you come here and fuck things up because you wanted to play dress up and be entertained.”

The Beast answers the horn call – that weird little demon man that froze everyone back at Brakebills and then just left again. The Beast casually kills Ember and then reveals at the ‘helpful’ birch tree and the ‘convenient’ guides were really his minions (NAW, YA THINK?) and this was all part of his plan to take over Fillory.

Why does everyone want this place so bad? It’s just a bunch of countryside.

And the Beast turns out to be….Martin Chatwin! Character from the book-within-a-books.

Yeah, I don’t care either.

Martin is after their magic button, and they all kind of nervously avoid telling him who has it. Penny tries to cast a spell to do…something, but Marin literally bites both his hands off to stop him. Neat. Finally, something new happened.

Anyway, Alice promptly starts to wipe the floor with Martin’s ass, because she’s an awesome spellcaster. The others get in pot-shots here and there, but it’s mostly Alice.

Q is laying on the floor injured and all like wow, I love Alice so much, she’s so powerful and it just doesn’t ring true for me. Guess that’s just how it goes when two characters have zero actual chemistry and also your main character is a flaming asshole.

After quite a bit of cool magic and even at one point TURNING INTO A DRAGON it’s clear that Alice and Martin aren’t going to get to an endpoint any time soon. So she…somehow turns herself into a niffin. (They were mentioned earlier in the book, the story about Alice’s brother and he turned into a niffin, but honestly I can’t remember why and they never explained what that means.)

She turns all blue and made and fire and weird inhuman spirit thing and then she rips Martin’s head off.

All while Q is just…laying on the floor.

Okay, so, that’s it. Big bad down, and he existed in the book for all of two chapters. In one chapter he didn’t do a damn thing, and in the other he just got his ass handed to him and then died.

Wow, not since ACOTAR have I been so impressed by a villain. -_-

Ember, apparently not dead after all, says they can take the crown now so Eliot just throws it into a wall.

Sometime later Quentin wakes up in a nice white room a-la Frodo after Mordor and he just sits there and has a philosophical revelation about curtains. It basically boils down to “wow, pre-industrial shit was AUTHENTIC, not like our FAKE society we have today” and my, what a big brain boy you are, go on and have yourself a cookie.

A lady centaur comes in and tells him he’s almost recovered from his injuries and he’s been asleep for six months.

Uh. He had like some blood loss and cracked ribs. Why did that take six months? At six months, you’re more injured than you started, not less. The body just isn’t made to stay still that long. Q’s probably covered in bed sores.

Q starts to cry big boo hoo tears because it’s all his fault that Alice died and what were they thinking, a bunch of kids going into an ‘alien war.’

1) It’s really hard for me to not call the group ‘kids’ in these summaries because the narration does it constantly even though they are all at least 23-25 years old.

2) You didn’t actually get involved in a war, buddy, you just kind bumble-butted along for absolutely no reason, with zero motivation or goals, and fought one dude. Even if it was a fight between Ember and Martin, that’s not a war. We still have seen zero-zilch-nothing of Fillory in a wider sense.

Q finds out that he’s in a kind of centaur monastery and the others brought him there for medical help. They hung around for a couple of months, but after he didn’t wake up they left again.

There’s several pages of Q just wandering around the Retreat, doing mundane things, being dubbed The Reluctant King by some animals because he’s human, until one day he finally finds a letter from Eliot that…no one thought to tell him was there? Anyway, the letter is utterly useless and just says ‘hey, sorry we left you’ and no information about how to contact them or where they’re going or anything.

I know I said I didn’t need a family to become who I was supposed to be, but it turned out that I did, and it was you.

So fucking un-earned that I can’t roll my eyes hard enough.

He also finds the missing Fillory book from waaaaay back at the start of this mess, and sits down to read it. It follows Jane, the youngest kid, going back into Fillory to look for Martin, getting a watch that lets her control time, and then it just abruptly ends.

The paramedic from the start of the book randomly appears in his room and, yup, she’s Jane Chatwin. She’s also the Watcherwoman from the books, which Jane explains as early experiments with time travel gone wrong and also the author embellishing the actual events to make her seem more diabolical for the sake of the story.

Apparently….all of it was set up by Jane? To stop Martin?

Fuck, we don’t even know what Martin was doing, other than killing ram gods. Literally, no idea. Just…laskjdflaksjdf I cannot get over how completely and utterly pointless this whole thing is. Jane and Martin are just so much absolute nothing and now they’re trying to stitch this together on the back end to make it seem like there was a plan all along? Fuck this book. This is ridiculous. This is pathetic. This is…

…aw, fuck me, I want to write Jane/Martin/New Earth Kids portal fantasy now. But, like, with an actual plot and not several hundred pages of whining at a school thrown in for no reason.

Q wants to go back and do things properly and Jane says no, she’s already played out this plot a million times and this is the only iteration of the timeline that ends with Martin dead. Which…uh, he didn’t seem that hard to kill, frankly. Maybe if you wanted this to actually be something, you should have put him in more of the book.

Jane breaks the watch so that no one can go back and undo Martin getting killed.

Oh great, and then a last minute little child-abuse backstory to give Martin some pathos which doesn’t work at all because 1) who the fuck even is Marin as a character? 2) child abuse leading to villain-hood is already a fucking awful trope.

Q mopes on his bed and thinks that the moral of the story is he should never have gone to Brakebills at all, he should have stayed home and ‘nursed his depression’ with alcohol like ‘everyone else’ because I guess therapy just isn’t a fucking thing, and also if you get everything you want out of life you just turn into Martin Chatwin.

There’s only two chapters left, but damn I hope we get a different moral. Q already changes his mind on a dime, there’s time for another one!

He starts practicing magic again and becomes super powerful in the course of a single paragraph. Because…practice and not having emotions anymore. He even successfully finishes Alice’s senior thesis project when she couldn’t, because FUCK YOU QUENTIN.

One day he sees a white stag and decides that’s a sign to leave the Retreat and go hunt it.