After the “HOLY FUCK WHAT AM I READING???!!!” prologue of yesterday, I’ve recovered enough to begin tackling Chapter 1. And, this time, I won’t be alone, because I have some exciting news for you all! Because Chapter 1 in its entirety forms the publicly available excerpt online, you can read it at the same time as me! Lucky you!

…I know, you can feel my sarcasm, can’t you? Anyway, I’ve put this off for long enough, so, without further ado, it’s time for us to read Chapter 1.

Chapter 1

The timeline has moved forward 15 years from the event of the prologue, and Rammi (who shares my hair colour, goddammit) is now a Death Keeper. I hope this means she kills people for a living, but I’m not going to be surprised if the reality is much more disappointing. She’s in a very boring meeting about something, involving a ton of characters arguing and whose names I’m not going to even bother trying to remember. Then, just as shit starts to get real, this sentence appears in the middle of the page:

A stunningly beautiful woman, the High Priestess had always made Rammi uncomfortable. Beauty as a whole held no appeal for Rammi.

She dealt in reality, justice and death.

What the fuck is that supposed to mean? Is fictional Rammi butt-ugly? Do the beautiful people in this world not care about reality, justice, or DEATH? Why is this random collection of words supposed to mean anything?

It soon becomes apparent that Tilden Delmont, the Death Master, Rammi’s boss and presumably the father of the hero we haven’t met yet, Tavon, is mad. Why is Tilden Delmont mad, if anyone still cares?
He’s mad because his son, Tavon, is accused of murdering some couple with weird names, Kayrin and Larot, who are, in all likelihood, related to one of the people arguing in this meeting.

Fictional Rammi, of course, is assigned to retrieve Tavon from wherever he is – after all, this forms the basis of the entire plot of the book – which again leads to some more hilarious attempts at writing.

“How much force is acceptable if I must subdue him? Search and destroy is more my style.”

It may be just the after-effects of having to suffer through 50 Shades of Grey, but that just hints at foreshadowing of an abusive relationship where the male has all the control…
I DUNNO. Why am I even trying to analyse the wet dreams of some surburban housewife, anyway? Basically, Rammi’s dialogue sucks monkey balls.

After mentally fapping over the High Priestess’s beauty again, she complains that she’s an assassin (yay, so she does get to kill people!), and makes more terrible dialogue that is meant to serve as some sort of vaguely thrilling cliffhanger for us. It fails.

She spoke the words for him. “I will learn what drove him to murder. Then I will end his life.”

And thus concludes Chapter 1. Not as horrible as the prologue, I must admit, but that’s probably because she didn’t get fucking raped this time.

Subscribe to the RSS feed so you know when I read Chapter 2, which immediately begins with the words “Master Tavon,” so we know the plot’s getting serious. Well, as serious as it can get before the inevitable sexytimes happen.