Helpful Score: 4
Overall a good story that kept me reading... However, it kind of bothered me at the same time. The magical stystem in the story is based on persons who are so strong willed and determined not to die that on the brink of death their "soul" latches onto another persons and basically borrows life force from it in order to maintain their own life. From that point forward the new born sorcerer can peform magic using the power they obtain from their vessel. Unfortunately, every spell they cast uses up life force of the vessel their soul latched onto. As an aside, no sorcerer knows who his power-vassal actually is and are bound by convention not to find out. The upshot of this of course is that all the sorcerers powers are like those of a vampire - they suck the life force from another person in order to fuel their own power. By agreement the sorcerers have never revealed to mortals the secret source of their powers so when someone becomes a "power vassal" they are just told that they have the "wasting disease" which is incurable. The fact that the magic users don't know whose life force they are using up doesn't make it more palatable for me, in some ways it makes it worse. In this world all the sorcerers have always been men, apparently because women are too weak-willed to become a sorcerer. The sorcerers all bind themselves to a "mortal" ruler and help them in the capacity of adviser/court wizard. Yet, if this was to approach reality it seems that sorcerers would rule this world on their own because they can apparently do almost anything and are basically immortal barring accident because when their power-vessel dies their soul just latches onto someone else. In any case, the protagonist here is a woman who is so bound to live that she manages to become a sorcerer and has to hide the fact from all the male sorcerers. She gets embroiled in a variety of politically and personally motivated trouble and even manages to find and get involved with her own "power-vassal" more or less by accident. There is a race of powerful beings that threatened the extinction of the human race at a time in the distant past before being defeated and exiled behind a magical barrier in the frozen north. There is a hereditary lineage of knights who protect and maintain the barrier in order to keep the soul-stealers bound captive. Now the barrier is weakening and the horrors are escaping. Sorcerers, normally extremely singular and uncooperative with each other, are forced to work together to try to save humanity. Our heroine gets involved and the fate of humanity is at stake. As said, the story is engrossing and well written... I just had a continuing problem with accepting our protagonist as a good guy given the nature of the magic because every time she used her magic she was killing an innocent person somewhere.
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