Holy. 
 Shit. 
 Holy 
 shit. 
 This series has ascended, past "really good", through the halls of "magnificent" and on to the throne of "fucking spectacular, perfect cinnamon roll, too precious for this world". This is one of my favourite series of all time. I'll be rereading this in the future, just to experience it again. Just to feel it again. 
 It's so clever, so shrewd and tightly plotted and brilliantly concise. And that character development, guys. It is agonizingly good, particularly Laurent's. You know how sometimes, you come across a great premise, and you find yourself thinking, "I really wish the author had shown us X scenario within this premise, because that would have made it more satisfying". Do not fucking fear. This book knows exactly what its readers are looking for and it delivers it on a fucking golden Veretian platter. It does not leave you wistful, wishing there had been more. It gives you what you want. C. S. Pacat does not faff around, asking you as a reader to "fill in the blanks" of some kind of ambiguous ending (that shit is becoming infuriatingly common). 
 Look, I understand that Bells and then acknowledgments bothered some folks, and it did feel slightly abrupt. Do I wish there had been an epilogue? Yeah, I do. And yeah, we're going to get one. (view spoiler)[But the ending we have now is exactly the one we all wanted. Everybody becomes king and the bad guys get their balls crushed and Damen and Laurent will frolic and make kissy faces in the flowery fields of Ios forevermore. This is not another Half Lost debacle. This is a Kings Rising win-win. (hide spoiler)] But how can you fault the stunning symmetry of that ending? How can you possibly bear witness to a scene like that, "a fight between ghosts" where everything comes full circle, where it's so hauntingly brilliant, where the present war finally cuts back to the event that started it - Marlas - and think, "That was disappointing". I know I can't. It's one of the best ending sequences I've ever read. Maybe even the best. 
 I just... Goddamn it, that symmetry! I'm floored by it. 
 There's nothing else I can say about this book, except that it amazed me. It choked the emotions right out of me. This series is so excellent and I can't believe I waited so long to read it. What was I thinking?