Hello everyone!
Because I'm not sure you are. I know I certainly wasn't, and I willingly signed up for whatever was coming at me at the time.
See a while ago, I kept seeing these gorgeous book covers (and similar book art) all from the same author. Bookstagram was going HARD, y'all, and eventually I caved and had a look around the author's page to see what it was all about.
Turns out, she's writing a fantasy series that's literally like someone wrote it especially for me.
So I grabbed the books and read the first one, but unfortunately then ran out of time as I had other ARCs waiting for me to read and review them.
Then this one came about - I'd seen the promos on her Instagram, but randomly stumbled over an open call for eARC readers, and signed up on a whim. I honestly didn't think I'd get it, and would have been fine just waiting for the book to release, but guess what? I GOT THE ARC.
And with the book releasing in a few days, here's your glowing review for it. What's it called? The Stars are Dying.
I'll link what I have from Chloe C. Penaranda down at the bottom of the page, as per usual. You don't NEED to have read An Heir Comes to Rise before reading this one, but there are definite Easter eggs from the other series in it, and there might be a cross-over in future so ... you know, just do what I'll be doing and pick the series up!
Okay, back to the show.
The Stars are Dying opens with a man gazing up at a constellation and being unreasonably sad because apparently, his love is gone and he's just done. He also knows she has to come back at some point, but that he can't be here when she does, so he goes to the King to tell him he's done, and we jump straight into our heroine's POV from there.
Astraea doesn't remember her life other than the past five years, nor how she got to her partner, er, captor, er, whatever, Hector, who gives her medicine for her weak blood and keeps her under lock and key in his manor. Since she kinda doesn't want to always be locked up, she's been able to slip away and make friends with Cassia, the eldest child of the leader to their human realm.
I say human, because this is important - the world is ruled by vampires, some who feed on souls, some on blood, and just overall want to eat humans, no questions asked. Any Fae that remain have been conscripted into the King's army, and he holds a Libertatem every hundred of years: a game where all five human kingdoms send one competitor to participate, and if they win, they're granted immortality, a place in the King's guard, and their kingdom has one hundred years of peace from the vampires.
That's what Cassia's training for. And that's eventually what Astraea joins her on the road for - because Hector is honestly a monster.
He's the kind of gaslighting, manipulative boyfriend who'll tell you it's your fault he had to chain you up, and also he wants to sell Astraea to the highest bidder, but she's got a friend he has no idea about.
His name's Nyte, and he seems to pop up practically everywhere and at any time, offering advice to her when needed, and aid so that she can both slip away to Cassia (and have an encounter with some random-ass dude who seems to recognize her and wants to take her to HIS leader), and to plot running away from Hector, which almost goes to shit, by the way, because Cassia gives the ruse up when she comes to return something of Astraea's to the manor (like she couldn't just hold on to it until they left!).
This means Hector locks Astraea up in a dungeon, basically, but she's sprung by Zatharian, one of the boss' right-hand-men who's had a soft spot for her since forever, and because Cassia's come along (with her reluctant bodyguard, Calix), it of course turns into a fight, but Astraea stabs Hector and runs off.
Now she's free, she can contemplate the deal Nyte offered her (a bargain with him for his help) in peace and quiet, and tease Cassia about her love for Calix ... until the night they're attacked by vampires and Cassia dies in Astraea's arms, even though our heroine does kill the vamps. Calix rages and sends her off because, well, he's heartbroken (and an ass at the time).
So she goes, and nearly freezes/drowns in an icy lake, but Nyte rescues her from it and drops her off with a friendly Fae, to whom Astraea admits everything and eventually decides to assume Cassia's identity to go and compete in the Libertatem, in her dead friend's honour.
Zath tracks her down so then they both take off to the Central, where Prince Drystan takes immediate interest in her, as does one of the other competitors, Rose.
Nyte's still there, too, warning her not to trust anyone, which turns out to be correct when she witnesses the prince escort a Fae she remembers being forcibly taken by the King's people, and said Fae then seems to be perfectly happy to serve the king for the "war". Only, there's no war, and Astraea remembers well enough that she was rebellious before, so what gives?
Turns out, a heck of a lot.
Because she finally finds Nyte in person - having realized that he's only a projection of her desperation and can come to her in astral form, but not in reality, until he leads her to where he's imprisoned behind a magical veil he can't break, chained like an animal, and kept there to be the King and Prince's plaything, it looks like.
And while there's back and forth between Astraea and Nyte - mostly because he can be sweet as pie one moment and then the worst sinner in the next - she eventually makes the bargain with him, sealing it with blood (which is USUALLY a pretty good sign that it's a bad idea LOL).
Meanwhile, she's got to do the Trials, which are a doozy, because they're formed so that the humans competing in them have to contend with their greatest sins (think the seven deadly sins), and collect pieces of a key. Five keys, altogether, and one of them opens the door at the end of the Trials and wins you everything.
Astraea's trials give her more questions than answers, pitting her against her own darkest demons (which I won't enumerate here because I think you should read for yourself, actually), until something happens and her connection to Nyte breaks.
Of course by this point, Rose knows she's not Cassia, and a few of the other competitors are dead, along with several others who somehow either helped Astraea and/or were mistaken for her, which just lights a fire underneath her because OBVIOUSLY someone wants her gone. But who?
Not the prince, who turns out to know her real name, and who wants her to finish the Trials to get the key, so that she can then open that door - just not for his father, but for him. See, opening the door will lead to the God of Dusk and Goddess of Dawn, which can be kind of problematic if you think about it ... so obviously, we don't trust the prince.
Astraea and her friends are dumped in a maze for the last trial, find what looks to be an egg of some sort that doesn't seem to be from this realm at all, and long story short (after Zath's perfect impressions of Ron Weasley running in Half-Blood Prince, and Calix and Astraea punching out their anger at each other) she gets the other keys, and gets to the door.
Only none of them open it.
Of course this is until she figures out that the King's had the key under his nose all this time (she's super good at puzzles, btw): a piece from each of the five keys forms the key they've all been looking for. And Astraea's first deed with it is to go free Nyte.
They have one hawt night together before things go to hell, because she and her friends miscalculated rather badly: see, Rose and Cassia weren't planning on bothering with the Libertatem, they only wanted to participate to get close to the King's commander, Nightsdeath - whom everyone assumes is the prince.
Turns out, it's Nyte (and nobody can see the forest for the trees, because Nyte is LITERALLY THE FIRST PART OF THE NAME NIGHTSDEATH).
And he's got a bone to pick with everyone, starting with his father - the King - and brother - the Prince.
LE GASP.
See, Nyte's a ... mix? Mix. He's not supposed to be in this world, but his father brought him here, either because his mother didn't want him (she named him Rainyte, by the by), or because the King just took him against her will, I wouldn't trust anything the man says at this point. And his golden tattoos, which are mirrors to the ones Astraea has in silver, tell the story of exactly what he is.
A God of Stars. Just like the star-maiden, daughter of Dusk and Dawn, who was set up as his opposition when the two armies met ... only for them to fall in love.
Also, if you haven't figured out Astraea's the maiden by this point, I don't know what to tell you. It's pretty much obvious from the second third of the book on.
The story goes like this, actually, or what we know of it at least so far: the vampires, Fae and humans lived in harmony together ruled by beings called the Celestials. Their souls are their most treasured belongings, and when they die, the souls lift to the heavens to create stars. When the stars die, they fall down to help create Star Matter, which fuels the magic in this world, is then consumed by who lives in said world, and returns to the skies upon their death.
See, circle of life! Naaaaaaaaaaants ingonyama bagithi babaaaaaaa ...
Ahem.
Then five hundred years ago Nyte was brought into this realm, and the stars started dying faster, because he and the maiden could never co-exist in the same place, being basically the same, and so much power was throwing everything out of whack.
And also, things went to shit because when everything's happy-go-lucky, someone will want to break the pretty picture. In this case, it was the King - who has no magic of his own, by the way, and is insanely jealous and bitter about it, and wanted to craft Nyte to be his perfect weapon (by what means, one can only imagine).
The King pitted the vampires against the weakened Celestials (because there was so much Star Matter on the ground now, it lost value and potency, and so their magic went bye-bye), with the Fae caught in the middle and the humans as cannon fodder.
And Astraea, the most powerful Celestial ever to exist, against Nyte.
In a confrontation with the King, Astraea sees Nyte finally unleashed - because, as Zath explains to her (by the way, Nyte's been trying to help a lot of people even from his prison, Zath included, as well as Astraea's handmaiden, the Golden Guard, those guards the King created into a new species of vampire with Star Matter, etc.) he has this place he goes to, probably when he disassociates from whatever the King inflicted on him, where all he knows is darkness.
And he wants to destroy all light.
Astraea manages to bring him back (but you can tell that, even though she can't remember their relationship, it had to have been volatile) but the King runs off with the Key. Then Nyte gathers all our players together and explains that his purpose has always been the same: to find a way out of this place and return to his own world, so that he can bring balance back. He honestly hadn't been planning to be here when Astraea returned, but he was tricked by the King and the Prince both, and locked away.
Since his powers were subdued, however, there wasn't such a clash in terms of magic when Astraea DID come back (and by the way, she bargained her memories so that she could, confident she was going to find him and somehow have everything return to her ... and apparently Drystan was there when she came back and lost them? The details are still fuzzy, because someone drank her blood at the same time!).
Now though ... now Nyte locks her up to wean her off those stupid pills Hector got her addicted to (oh yeah, she didn't in fact kill him there at the beginning, but Nyte takes care of it at the end), so that he could suppress her magic, which she isn't a fan of, but I'm mostly confused because it feels like it's actually Astraea talking, not her addiction, when she says how mad she is at him for locking her up.
However, just when you think things are now as they should be, and Nyte has Astraea release Cassia's soul, which she accidentally took into herself after her friend's death, Nyte's brother pops back up.
And he says that he's going to try to Ascend so that he can go against Nyte and his powers, but also that Astraea has another Bonded, who'll be coming for her - something Nyte kinda sorta didn't tell her. There's honestly probably A LOT that she doesn't know yet, but I'm pretty sure Nyte never actually lied to her about anything.
Drystan insists that Nyte's always been horrible for her, and as the book comes to a close, Astraea recalls the key that the King ran off with (since she was the one who spelled it, sensing her impending death, it answers to her alone) and realizes that she knows how Nyte came by the scar on his face - when the key transforms into a sword between them.
DUN DUN DUN!
Listen, LISTEN.
I am here for it.
I didn't know if I was going to like this or not, because I remember not being fully sold on the first book in the An Heir Comes to Rise series, BUT OHMYGOD AM I HOOKED.
There's like, ten thousand things we still don't know, things Nyte hasn't said yet, and Astraea still has to fully own her powers (and her wings!!!) while she's at it.
I'm hooked on the world, I want to know more about the different vampires, the Celestials (!), the story of Nyte and Astraea and what the heck kind of dysfunctional relationship they got themselves into. And apparently, there are theories running amok that Nyte might have been taken from the world of An Heir Comes to Rise, so ... CROSSOVER, BBY!
I loved this so much. I also know I shouldn't love Nyte so much but, hell, I love him anyway haha.
He's been portrayed as the perfect villain this far, though I'm convinced he's more an antihero rather than pure villain, just the same.
The author's writing is ON POINT, delivering when it has to, slowing down when it wants you to linger (bathtub scene, anyone???), and generally painting a wonderful picture of this world that's about to enter another world-rending war, if you ask me.
Mostly though, I'm hooked on Nyte and Astraea. And I hope, I HOPE, that instead of having them go toe-to-toe against each other, like every single other fantasy series would have done, Chloe chooses something else: let them be together. Let them embrace their dark relationship, and let them work through it - but don't have them break it off and Astraea run to hang with Drystan, PLEASE. I'm worried that's what's going to happen, as it's the most obvious trajectory, but I really, really hope not.
Because I'd love to see something new: the people who are supposedly bad for each other and made a botched attempt the first time try for another go-round, embracing their flaws, trying to work them through together, maybe taking a time-out but ultimately always coming together once more.
I hope that's what happens. It's not a huge hope, but it's there.
And of course, there's the prophesy, which I have a feeling we don't know the full story behind.
When falls Night, the world will drown in Starlight.
Everyone and their ancestors seems to believe that, for one of Nyte and Astraea to live, the other has to die, and the stars falling seem to make a compelling argument for that. But I kind of have a theory that IF Nyte ends up falling, then the rest of the stars will drop too - because drowning in starlight could mean the stars will all be unveiled and shine so brightly that they'll figuratively drown the world with their light ... OR it can be literal, and when Nyte falls, the stars will all drop and die and drown the world with Star Matter - going for a big hoo-rah and THE END.
So I kind of get the feeling it's either both of them, or neither of them, not one or the other, but we'll have to see how it goes.
EITHER WAY, that cliff hanger nearly got me on the spot. I NEED BOOK TWO YESTERDAY.
So make sure to pick this up when it releases July 11th. You have no idea what you're in for, but you're going to love it.
When you do, welcome to the club.
xx
*image not mine
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