Today at the Bookstock Munich Germany as Cassius. Meeting Pierce Brown. I am so excited.

If you see me say "Hello" and get a small treat from the Morning Knight 😉.

I made the cosplay myself with eva foam and worbla. Its my third Red Rising character I cosplayed. Also feel free to ask for advise.

Instagram: howler_tickler

I was on the fence about starting the second trilogy right away but I am so glad I did after reading that Dark Ages prologue. The fact that Orion sneered "Hail Reaper," gave me goosebumps. She didn't whisper it or whimper. She just went through hell and she's ready to pay it back. She is absolutely going to fuck shit up in this installment and I cannot wait.

Hail Reaper.

I have had this concept swirling around in my head for months. I love how striking the Sons of Ares symbol is, so I wanted to make this two part stained glass piece to bring it to life. I based the helmet on the all black OG Twilight Helm that is briefly mentioned in Light Bringer. The last picture is the sketch with the original concept. Hope you guys like it!

Started Golden Sons, reading through my phone coz i shifted to UAE and books costs soo much compared to India 😭

Should i actually read it now or should give it some time😂, coz there is a teo year gap and i don't understand what the gell is going on all of a sudden🙂

Did anyone else notice the parallel between Darrow and Lysander during their final fights?

The Ashvar between Darrow and Fa was expected to be brutal and bloody, and everything leading up to it reinforced that expectation. From their arrival inside the leviathan to Volga's slaughtering, the entire sequence set the stage for what seemed destined to be one of the most savage fights in the series.

And it started that way. But then Darrow completely changed the game. He transformed the fight into something beautiful, almost like a dance. I genuinely believe that for a brief moment he found peace in it. His goal was never simply to kill Fa. He wanted to expose the truth, and he did so in a way that transcended the brutality everyone had anticipated.

Then we have Lysander and Rhone.

There was betrayal in practically every paragraph of that chapter. The man who constantly presents himself as honorable, as a savior destined to restore order to the Society, is reduced to a greedy, duplicitous coward. Where Darrow's fight was a display of growth, discipline, and something approaching art, Lysander's was ugly and gory. There was no beauty in it, no honor, just butchery.

And I think the contrast perfectly captures Darrow's growth and Lysander's simultaneous downfall.

Darrow has evolved from the Reaper who once relied on rage and brutality into someone capable of finding beauty and peace in the very thing that once consumed him. Lysander, meanwhile, has gone in the opposite direction. From the boy who defeated seven men while blind in the desert, relying on nothing but the Mind's Eye, he has become a pretentious little bastard who can barely hold his own against a Gray.

And to be clear, I'm not suggesting Rhone isn't a formidable fighter. Far from it. He's an exceptionally capable soldier. But I genuinely believe the Lysander we met in the Ladon, at the height of his survival and combat instincts, would have made short work of him.

Darrow's final fight shows us how far he's come. Lysander's shows us how far he's fallen. And the most tragic part? Lysander still believes he's the hero of his own story.

I can't wait to see what Pierce has in store for them in the last book.

Past the halfway point of LB, and all I'm gonna say is Virginia is lucky Darrow is straight and the red society is homophobic.

Man fuck this book for making me feel all good inside just to rip it away. Just read DORD and I knew something bad was gonna happen, but damn. Everything was going way too well for Mustang and it was too wholesome as well. Her making up with Sevro, Dancer and her finally agreeing on something and him call her “his sovereign”, and the chapter with Kavax being her dad and being all proud of her. Then it just goes to shit and every thing is gone. And they killed Daxo. That’s like the fourth brother type in her life killed.

(At least from the reader‘s POV, between end of MS and Light Bringer.)

(Jankily redrawn from an AI image I found and was upset was AI.)

Please, no spoilers beyond the original trilogy!
In a 1v1 razor duel, with both fighters at their absolute best:
Cassius vs. Darrow. Who has the slight edge?
If I had to pick their prime versions from the first three books, I’d go with Darrow during the triumph on Mars at the end of Golden Son, and Cassius shortly before he and Aja crash at the Martian poles.
I really want to give Darrow the edge, but my head tells me Cassius has a slight advantage here.

I can’t wait

"Most call me Bronzie. Students call me Proctor. Some call me Rage Knight. The Sovereign calls me traitor. My son calls me shithead... My wife called me Fitchner. But the Golds made me Ares."

To me, Darrow's description of his senses and mind during the flow state while he fights Fá in Chapter 73 of Light Bringer (The Breath of Stone) felt very similar to how Lysander describes fighting via the Mind's Eye.

The way Darrow describes the events in his surroundings, while calmly reacting (or not) to them and choosing the right action at the right time, seemed very Mind's Eye like to me.

It has been a week since I last touched Dark Age. It was been a week since I finished chapter 31. It has been a week since I threw my book across the room. All I hear now is the rain…. The Rains of Castamere…

Think today I’ll finally pick it back up. But man, what a chapter. Genuinely gave me flashbacks to The Red Wedding.

I have to talk about this somewhere.

I have been autistically ruminating on this series for three years. Tim Gerard Reynolds tucks me in every night.

Recently, I went on a trip to Scotland for reasons totally unrelated. A had a cute little fling during my stay, and I told him about this book and gave him a copy. He READ IT TO ME IN HIS PRETTY ACCENT and while it was absolutely lovely and romantic (and really fucking hot), I had Pavlov’d myself into falling asleep to a fella with a Scottish accent reading to me, and so that’s exactly what happened.

10/10 series, a lovely country, and a magical time with a fiery-haired fae descendant.

Yes, I have read all the books, on my phone, and I plan to buy the rest of them. I’ll buy DA and IG next

I just got to “His name is not Lune, it is Reaper” my god. Holy shit guys. The dramatized version makes it so epic. I’m so so happy, screaming as I deliver mail right now lol. Just wanted to talk about it since my gf and friends haven’t read this peak series yet. Hope you guys are having a phenomenal day my goodmen!

Out all of RR-villains, Atlas au Raa aka the Fear Knight is just something else. He's an outsider/anomaly in many ways: An ideologically motivated Society Gold. An evil Sherlock Holmes. A black sheep among his honor-bound family. He just stands out in several aspects.

One reason why he fascinates me is that he's a fairly complex bad guy. There is more than one ideologically motivated villain in the series (Roque, Lysander, Harmony, maybe Octavia) but there's generally still a selfish element within those. Atlas seems to be the only villain who is genuinely selfless (at least as selfless as it gets with this kind of mindset). He puts ideology above personal connections and feelings and he's willing to make personal sacrifices but he still cares for his crew. He's ruthless but not actually sadistic. Neither is he opportunistic or egocentric. But despite this seemingly unwavering conviction, he does show human "failures"/"weaknesses", he's not a robot: For example, he pretends to be above personal matters but repeatedly shows pettiness and remnants of a grudge against the Rim and individual people (when he provokes Diomedes and Helios on Mercury, when he calls Dido by her maiden name instead of her current name when executing her, when he throws Gaia's parting words ("Do your duty!") back in her face). He comes across as cold and unmoving but actually seems to hide a passionate and emotional side, demonstrated when he nearly cries at seeing his mother again and possibly supported by Gaia's statement of him "feeling too much". All in all, this guy is a fascinating enigma. There are many questions to be had about him including why this apparently secretively sensitive guy is so loyal to the rotten Core Golds.

His dynamic with other characters is equally interesting:

• He's officially a subordinate to Atalantia but he's more than that: They are factually more peers and "co-workers". Atlas doesn't follow her out of personal loyalty but simply for pragmatic reasons and is quite willing to turn against her. His vision above everything. Who leads whom?
• I also enjoyed his (limited) interactions with Ajax (though I felt sorry for Ajax): I wonder if their distance is really just due to Atlas missing out on a big part of Ajax' life and them being so different from each other or if there's more to it (Lysander implies once that Aja hated Atlas. Relationship gone wrong? Maybe Ajax reminds him of something unpleasant?). I was also very curious about the idea of a duel between them: Would they actually be so cold hearted to kill each other? What would the political consequences for Lysander or Atalantia respectively be?
• Atlas may also very well be the only villain in RR who is both an equal to Darrow and has no personal connection to him: He doesn't fear or respect him (simply identifies him as a threat, like some annoying bug) and, unlike most villains, he has little to zero praise for him. There is nothing personal about Darrow to him, it's just part of the job.
• His dynamic with Lysander is the most intriguing to me: It's kind of a corrupted, onesided teacher-student-relationship: Lysander mainly hates and fears Atlas (with a tiny amount of respect) and resents him for using him like the other Society Golds do. Whereas Atlas shows interest in Lysander, spares him repeatedly, and seems to treat him like a potential apprentice. I do believe there's more to their relationship than either we or Lysander himself know.

All of this makes him just so fascinating to me. He's a competent, proper threat. He isn't one dimensional, he's a feeling, sensitive person who commits crimes of the highest degree. There's a well executed aura of mystery and threat surrounding him, leading to his presence catching the reader's attention already by being simply hinted at.

Favorite quote:

“Distance has sanitized war nearly as much as Stoneside’s (…) ramblings. It has made it easy… romantic. I have no interest in sanitization or romance. I apply scientific methods to produce psychological trauma in our enemies in order to create psychological casualties. To end their willingness to fight and shorten this war. That is my purpose.” (DA, chapter 59)

In a way, this kind of thinking makes sense - if you remove or thoroughly suppress any kind of empathy. The disgust at romanticizing war seems logical. Reducing casualties seems logical. Similarly to the heroes, he justifies his actions with the reason that the goal he follows is essential and the methods chosen aren't only justified as a means to an end but also as serving to limit casualities - it's just a really horrendous, dark, corrupt version of the good guys' logic. So far in this series, we've met bad guys who don't care about casualties, at least, not as long as it doesn't personally hurt them - Atlas is an example of a person who is one of the bad guys but actually addresses this part (or, at least, pretends to) in an accordingly twisted way. You can truly justify anything as long as you're devoted enough to your cause.

Favorite theories involving him:

There's a moderately popular theory that he's the other person put on the Pandemonium Chair by Octavia. What speaks in favor of it: Mustang indicates that Octavia used that device on two people, one of them obviously being Lysander and the other one being unknown. Given how valuable and potentially dangerous Atlas is, with no guarantee of never turning against the Core, and given his current zeal for the Society in general and the Core's fate in particular (despite him having absolutely no reason to remain loyal to a bunch of highly ungrateful, decadent, backstabbing, selfish kidnappers who took him away from his family and to betray the same family for them) it makes sense for him to be the other person. Though this does raise the question how exactly the PC was used because there are no indications for Atlas missing any memories (though it's also hard to get a good reading on him). Maybe the Chair has other features that simply hasn't been discovered by the Republic/clone yet? Or maybe it was, after all, a different victim.

Another theory states that he might be Lysander's actual father, leading to Ozgard's line about "son murder father" being fulfilled in LB. Some potential indications:

1. Atlas' behavior towards Lysander in general (Kalindora states that Atlas would die to protect Lysander; Atlas shows interest and kind of a softer side towards him; he always tries to spare him when he's otherwise generous with sacrificing people; leaving the room when kid Lysander enters which is rather odd behavior even for someone who doesn't like children, could be explained by him trying to avoid connections being drawn between them).
2. I believe PB explicitly stated that there's a general rule (with some exceptions, of course) about Core Golds tending to have Roman names while Rim Golds tend to have Greek names. Octavia has a Roman name, marking her as a Core Gold, but her daughter Anastasia and her grandson Lysander both have Greek names, possibly marking connections to the Rim.
3. Lorn keeping distance to Lysander knowing they're not related and he has therefore no obligation to Lysander is much more plausible than Lorn immediately abandoning Lysander after Anastasia and Brutus' deaths, claiming he was already poisoned at the ripe age of six. I always thought the first discussion we witness between Lorn and Darrow was strange in this regard: Darrow is repeatedly shown to be nervous around the topic of Lysander, fearing Lorn's reaction when he learns that Darrow kidnapped his "grandson". But Lorn doesn't give a crap. He doesn't admonish Darrow, he doesn't say "poor kid". He actually compliments Darrow by calling it a smart move. And that's it. Lorn is the embodiment of personal loyalty. Even if this reaction is just him "mourning" Lysander (although he calls Lysander poisoned and corrupted in the same chapter so I really don't see the supposed affection here), this reaction is surely odd. Especially since he goes on to denounce Lysander as his grandson (He is not my kin.). And Darrow being like: ???. I think PB is very much signaling here that Lorn's behavior is odd, both when it comes to regular expected behavior and behavior that is in line with specifically Lorn's character. Lorn surely mourned his dead sons, too, yet he told Darrow about them (including Brutus' marriage to Anastasia). But he doesn't tell him about Lysander just because he mourns him? "Lies! Deception!" I say.
4. Maybe the title of the chapter where Lysander kills Alexandar („Heir of Arcos“), as in „heir“ as singular“, has more than one meaning. Maybe it’s not just meant in a figurative but also in a literal way…
5. There’s another part in DA that could possibly foreshadow such a reveal. When Lysander enters Heliopolis as Cato and gets interrogated by Darrow's people, he reveals a fun bit of backstory of his character: ‚My mother was... well, it's embarrassing.' The machine doesn't care. It just watches. 'She made a bit of a cuckold out of my father from the start, metaphorically, then literally. Her family was older. So...' It’s just the fake background of Cato au Vitruvius but wouldn't it be ironic if Lysander unwittingly just told his actual family background, lol? Especially seeing that the Lunes are probably older than the Arcos.
6. Finally, Atlas and Lysander share a couple of things in common personality-wise while Lysander doesn't seem to have anything in common with Brutus, whether it's looks or personality traits. Brutus is narrative wise generally suspiciously irrelevant for Lysander's character. It's pretty much only Anastasia's character who gets any attention (there's arguably even a bigger emphasis on Atlas' relationship with Anastasia than on his relationship with Brutus). It's also very convenient that Lysander seems to be a male version of his mother looks-wise as that doesn't give any indications to his father's identity.

If you connect this theory to the Chair-related one, maybe he was put on the Chair so he'd forget about the circumstances of Anastasia and Brutus' deaths, reducing the risk of him turning against Octavia? Or possibly the fact that he's Lysander's father?

At any rate, he remains an intriguing and rather tragic character we will hopefully learn more about in RG. Even though he's dead now, I don't believe his role is finished

Bit of detail on my latest commission piece. Glad it came together. I promise to release the complete drawing next month. Until then... Darrow and Cassius before the duel and the Gala.

I hate this pixie prick. I truly thought Lysander was changing for good. He finally had the means to do good for the world.

There are so many what if’s. What if Atlas hadn’t said anything? What if Lysander had no pistol? What if Cassius had backup? What if Lysander had backup? What if Darrow were there, after they had that talk about peace and bringing the heads to their respective sides and asked for forgiveness?

Lysander is just ripping my heart out. He started out as one of my favorite characters. I loved him and Cassius. And Cassius is my favorite character in the entire series. He was coming to the good side until Cassius understands.

“You used me? For that? For this?” Call me Ephraim and just rip my heart out already.

I am sort of rambling here, but I needed to speak. Cassius Bellona. Brother to Darrow. Morning Knight. Gone too soon.

Been reading Golden Son and thought I'd give drawing Darrow a go