So I just finished reading Silvercloak by L. K. Steven, and I'm left with the very strange, persistent lingering thought that she is, well, probably writing the wrong book 2.
Heavy spoilers below the cut. Seriously, if you think you want to read this book, here's the elevator pitch: extremely violent, queer, sorta kinky kinda, very soft magic system, solid worldbuilding, conflicted loyalties, enemies to lovers, I found it entertaining and that's the only unprompted qualitative statement I'll make. If that sounds like the kind of thing you'd want to read ever, do not finish this post. Silvercloak is jam-packed full of twists, and doesn't so much have a twist ending so much as a series of increasingly violent twists that eventually run out of book. Proceed at your own risk.
So, the ending, for those of you who've read it but forgotten or simply don't care, sees the main character, Saffron Killoran, attempting to fulfill her mission of infiltrating and bringing down her parents' killers, the criminal organization known as the Bloodmoons, by betraying them to the investigative force, the Silvercloaks, who she is truly loyal to.
She does this at the end of a battle between the two groups at a place called the Havenwood, only to discover that the only two Silvercloaks who knew she hadn't really defected are out of commission, the Captain slain in the battle and her (honestly should be primary) love interest Nyssa in a coma rather than fully healed as we previously assumed. Additionally, she is forced to kill her other love interest Levan, son of the Bloodmoon kingpin, after he reveals that he has compulsion magic, which is bad as we previously learned he is somehow the only known person who overcome her seemingly impossible immunity to direct magical effects.
Faced with the impossibility of proving herself to the Silvercloaks due to said immunity and the depths she had to sink to in order to gain the Bloodmoons' trust, she decides to use her newly discovered, exceedingly dangerous, and highly villainized power of Timeweaving to turn back the clock a few minutes and instead accept Levan's plea to abandon her Silvercloak allegiance he uncovered moments ago and help the Bloodmoons win.
Unfortunately, when she does this, she is unable to save her Captain or Levan's father, meaning she is now trapped in the Bloodmoons under the command of a man she now knows to be a genuinely scary monster and far, far more dangerous than we thought, with no way to reestablish contact, much less trust, with the Silvercloaks.
So, what's her plan? The current form of the Bloodmoons exists to hoard the magic-boosting mineral ascenite, in hopes of using it to resurrect Levan's mother, the Timeweaver Lyssa, and Saff decides that the only way to fix everything that has gone wrong, namely all the deaths she has suffered, is to dedicate herself fully to this goal, until there is enough ascenite stockpiled that she can hijack it and Timeweave herself back, not to before the Battle of the Havenwood, Nyssa's injury, the death of her friend Tiernan, nor even the secret assignment to infiltrate the Bloodmoons. No, Saffron resolves to become as much of a villain as she needs to be to bend time back to her childhood so she can save her parents, slain when the Bloodmoons tried to convince her mother to use necromancy to resurrect Lyssa, slain the same night.
What she doesn't know as she decides this is that Levan, being familiar with Timeweaving thanks to his mother, figured out not just that she wove time, but that she must have done so to undo betraying, and likely killing, him, and he privately resolves to destroy her for it.
Ok, that was long as fuck, I apologize. Like I said, a lot of twists and last second reveals. If you haven't read it, trust me those last few pages are genuinely a roller coaster.
So, what do I mean about Steven writing the wrong book 2?
Well, admittedly I have no idea what her actual plan for the sequel is, and it's almost certainly too late for anything to change since I think it's supposed to be published later this year.
But just based on the vibes of Silvercloak and the writing style she displayed in it, my assumption is that book 2 will be a direct sequel, following Saffron trying to navigate her desperate fall to evil as she sacrifices everything she believes in to pursue that impossible sounding goal, alongside her deteriorating relationship with Levan as he tries to break her.
And I think that is the least interesting way it could be handled.
A better idea, at least in my opinion, is to switch POV characters to Auria, ambitious and incredibly powerful fiance of the murdered Tiernan, Saff's inflexibly moral former friend and classmate who essentially singlehandedly forced Saff to undo her betrayal of the Bloodmoons with her, admittedly justifiable, refusal to accept Saff's word about the infiltration. This feels like it might actually be possible, but it's not what I want to see.
I want a book where Saffron succeeds.
I want to skip all the drama and presumably light bondage hatefucking with Levan, and Saff's descent into criminality and torture and drug dealing and what have you, and go straight into her Timeweaving back into her six year old self, keeping her extremely traumatized adult mind as Timeweaving seems to do, and saving Lyssa.
Just... imagine. Does Saffron try to join the Silvercloaks again? Reconnect with her friends? With Levan? With Nyssa? How do the Bloodmoons turn out with Lyssa keeping them as a quasi-revolutionary force instead of just criminals? How does Saff's magic change with her parents there to guide her? How does she try to shape the future at all? We know Timeweaving is dangerous at the best of times and far worse when done on that scale, what are the ramifications of that? We still have the prophecies from the Augurs, not to mention the zealotry of the Augurists. Does Lyssa keep an eye on the random little girl who stopped her from going on that heist?
Gah. It's just... it seems so much more interesting to me than just Silvercloak but more angstily violent and sexual and vaguely kinky, which is what I really expect book 2 to be. I'm gonna read it no matter what, the series definitely has my attention, but... man. L. K., if you see this, 1: what are you doing here, I'm a nobody and also it's a bad idea for authors to read reviews and stuff; 2: you can just have this idea, assuming I'm not doing you a disservice and you haven't thought of it already. I'll sign paperwork if you need me to. I had issues with Silvercloak, yes, but I also enjoyed the heck out of it and it's still on my mind days later, and I just really want to see the concepts you've laid out carried to their full potential, and idk, to my mind not doing a full timeline reboot just seems like a waste.
Anyway, that's uh... that's it. I welcome other people's thoughts on this.
