Concrete Proof That A Centaur’s Greatest Enemy Is A Big Cat

Before the Throne: How The Assassin's Blade Reveals the Heart Behind the Legend

This Is Where It Hurts—And This Is Where She Begins

I didn’t expect this book to undo me. I opened it for context, for backstory, for a deeper understanding of a girl I already thought I knew. I was not prepared to meet her here—bloody-knuckled and golden-eyed, standing at the edge of her own undoing, daring the world to come closer.

The Assassin’s Blade is not a prequel. It’s a reckoning.

These five novellas do not orbit the Throne of Glass series—they are its heartbeat, its open wound. They are the story beneath the story, the ghost behind every line Celaena Sardothien ever speaks. I thought I loved her before. But it was here, in these pages of sun-scorched desert and salt-stung shores and bloodstained cobblestones, that I saw her clearly for the first time.

This is the book where the mask cracks.

Where we watch a girl who kills for coin learn what it means to fight for something she’ll never get paid for. Where the sharp edges of her arrogance are dulled by bruised compassion, where her bravado is tested against grief so raw it bleeds straight through the page. She is not softened here. She is tempered.

Her love story with Sam Cortland wrecked me—not because it was tragic (though it is, utterly), but because it was real. No grand declarations. No sweeping gestures. Just quiet defiance and tentative touches. A rivalry melting into alliance. A glance held too long. A boy who didn’t ask to be her hero—but stayed anyway.

And when he’s gone? The silence he leaves behind is the loudest thing in the book.

But this isn’t just a love story. It’s a story about choice. About power.

About what happens when a girl forged into a weapon begins to wonder who she is when she’s not being pointed at someone.

When Celaena walks into Skull’s Bay, she is the blade Arobynn Hamel sharpened for years—obedient, lethal, beautiful. When she leaves, she’s something else entirely. She’s the girl who chose to defy him. Who looked at 200 shackled souls and decided that maybe she didn’t have to be what he made her.

There is no moment more powerful than when she realizes she can choose. That her loyalty was never freely given—it was manipulated, conditioned, beaten into her. That the life she’s been living isn’t the only one available to her.

And it costs her everything.

Arobynn’s shadow stretches long over these novellas.

He is not the loudest villain. But he is the most dangerous. His violence doesn’t scream—it whispers. It gifts. It smiles. He doesn’t break Celaena with blows (though those come too)—he breaks her with belief. He teaches her to confuse control for care, cruelty for closeness. And when she finally sees through it—when she walks away from the Keep, from him, from the man who raised her in a gilded cage—she doesn’t just claim freedom.

She earns it.

Every setting here is symbolic. Every relationship a lesson.

The Red Desert teaches her discipline, the cost of trust, and what it means to be seen as something more than a killer. Ansel offers her friendship, then betrayal, then something stranger: mercy. In Innish, Yrene Towers reminds Celaena that healing and hurting can exist in the same body—and that sometimes, giving away your armor (a ruby brooch, a pouch of gold) can be braver than drawing your blade.

By the time we reach the final novella, the road ahead feels inevitable. And yet, I still hoped. I hoped Sam would survive. I hoped Arobynn’s grip wouldn’t tighten. I hoped, absurdly, that love might be enough to save her.

But this is not a story that spares its heroine. This is the story that forges her.

When Celaena kneels in the King’s court, sentenced not to death but to a life of chains, she doesn’t scream. She doesn’t beg.

She survives.

And on that long, bitter road to Endovier, when the world has been stripped from her and only the memory of love remains, she sees the white stag—the Lord of the North, the symbol of her lost home—and finds something fierce and sacred still flickering inside her.

Not hope. Not yet. But resolve.

“I am Celaena Sardothien, and I will not be afraid.”

Those words hit like thunder. They are not pride. They are not bravado. They are the bones of her future self forming beneath the ash. This line, whispered into darkness, is a prophecy. A promise. And I will never forget the way it made me sit back, breathe deep, and believe in her all over again.

This book didn’t just deepen my love for the series. It reshaped it.

The Assassin’s Blade is not supplemental. It’s essential. It’s the foundation. The soul. The scar tissue. It is the quiet epic of a girl choosing—over and over—not to become the worst thing that ever happened to her.

Reading it felt like remembering something I’d forgotten I knew. Something about survival. About love. About fire.

Rating: ★★★★¾ (4.75/5)

For the ache. For the anger. For the boy who died, and the girl who didn’t. For the blade that became a queen.

I really hate the secularization/tumblrifying of Saint Joan of Arc. like y’all really do not understand her at all

I know this has probably been done before but I thought I was contribute.

Deer season is upon us.

1.) Wear your seatbelt.

2.) If your choice is swerve at high speed or hit the deer you plow Bambis mom like you’re an IT specialist with a secret Twitter account and it’s anthrocon weekend.

Deer are softer than trees. Deer are softer than rolling your car 8 times.

Venezuelan Miku!!

ANOTHER THEORY BECAUSE MY FEVER IS MAKING ME GO CRAZY,

A few months back I made a crack theory that noe is somehow connected to the vampire of the blue moon. I also had a theory that noe is older than we beleive him to be, since the Archvisite massacre is always said to of taken place- a long time ago, or a number of years ago. Despite the fact if we go by Noes age it would of only been less than 18 years ago.

So here is my theory- screenshot from my Reddit post in which I figured it out because I'm too lazy to rewrite it

If Noe is older than his age, that gap could be explained by him using too much of his power as a child and promptly falling asleep for a long time. As we know Jeanne also slept for quite a few years, and chloe seems to be going through that right now. So it's not impossiable to beleive the massacre was a very long time ago and Noe simply fell asleep after it. Which would explain why the only vampires who seem to know what an archvisite is by appearance alone, are the older vampires- Ruthvan, Chloe and Count Orlock. Because they most likely would of met an Archiviste when the Archivistes were Active.

As Noe says in Chapter 58, he never met another Archvisitw then he wonders if Chloe had and finishes his thought with "Do I want to know?" Yes. Does he want to know? Because it could absolutely topple everything he beleived till that moment

Bitte

Sauerkraut

I'm really tired and out of it

if completing tasks feels so good and reminds me completing tasks is easy then why is starting them the emotional equivalent of sending my first born to war

You may have seen photos of him before, such as this one from 1886, when he (on the left) was already 50 years old:

It just struck me today that in his lifetime he has lived through the invention of photography itself, as well as moving pictures, television, VHS tapes, DVDs, BluRays and streaming; sound recording, 78rpm shellac records, 8-track tapes, CDs and MP3s; bicycles, cars, motorbikes, zeppelins, airplanes, helicopters, spaceships, satellites, the Moon landing, the Mars rover; the telephone, the internet, the smartphone, lasers, plastics, cellophane, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, electric ovens, microwaves, atomic bombs; the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and JFK, the American Civil war, the Boer War, WWI and II, Vietnam, 9/11; Vincent Van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, impressionism, surrealism, Salvador Dali, Andy Warhol, Jazz and Blues and Rock & Roll, Disco, Punk, Hip-Hop and Grunge; Charlie Chaplin, Oscar Wilde, Harry Houdini, Sherlock Holmes, Gandhi, Jack The Ripper, Sigmund Freud, Wyatt Earp and Billy the Kid, Communism and the Soviet Union.

None of these things existed before him. Yet he's still alive today, walking around and eating grass.