Let me start by saying I really enjoy this author’s work and the narrator as well. its just one thing that bothered me about this one. Its very depressing. And I feel like the interactions between the MC and his wife were kind of forced to be the worst possible interactions. Like Calder leaving her on the island in the first book, that didn’t make sense, even if he was angry at her. How do you leave your wife like that while under duress? Even taking into account what she was it doesn’t make sense for someone to be married for years and then just leave their spouse for dead like that even if they did something really wrong in the middle of a battle. I really thought these two would come back together multiple times, even till the end. Like I was expecting there to be some point where the MC would tell or show his wife the truth about the elders at the end but then he just doesn’t and proceeds to kill her in one of the most brutal ways possible which was kind of cold blooded. He never actually really tries to convince her she’s wrong, and at the same time she never really gets confronted with the truth either. I was really hoping to see what she would do if confronted with the choice of helping the elders or her husband if she knew the truth. But that never happens because she never learns the truth! And she believes what she believes because thats what she had been indoctrinated to believe since she was a child! On top of that, through out the story she expresses lots of remorse over lying to calder but he just can’t see past it. Its not like she was cheating on him or sacrificing children by being apart of the sleepless. What I’m trying to say is it feels bad and forced that that was the ending chosen for her and Calder here. These two were together since they were like 14 and this is the ending they get? I get doing something different and there isn’t always a happy ending in life, but why force it here? Why does Calder even kill his wife at the end? That was totally unnecessary seeing how overpowered he was compared to her at that moment anyway. He could have just as easily restrained her and taken her emerald away. To me personally it just seems like a big let down and a very sad and depressing ending to a pretty good series that was unnecessarily and weirdly forced for some reason.