I May Be Reading Too Much Into This Passage, Or Maybe Someone's Mentioned It Before But I Think It's

I wonder what Alastair and Cordelia would think of Emma. I like to think there are bits of Alastair that shine through in Emma and that Jem eventually tells her about them.

congratulations alexias son of myron you just invented christianity

Gideon: Sophie and I are having a baby.

Alastair: That's gre--

Gideon, slamming adoption papers on the table: It's you, sign here.

i'm dying to know what Cordelia asked Alastair - - did she tell him about the paladin situation? did she really give him Cortana? If she did, what was his reaction? How did she get through it? Did he comfort her? Did they plan to find a way out of the whole thing?

There's also something grand about Alastair as a child, demanding the blade be his, to Alastair now as an adult refusing to wield the sword at all. He doesn't just love Cordelia, he respects her as a Shadowhunter and fighter and will not take her weapon for himself 😭 I really doubt, even if she gave it to him, that he would use it.

I just heard my mom tell my brother, “when you die, you will go outside and garden until your father says you’re done” and it took me a second to realize that my brother was playing a videogame and this was not a theological discussion.

james is actually just gonna wander around with Cordelia's glove and mourn over it for at least 1/3 of chain of thorns lol 😭

did it hurt? when you forget your headphones and couldn’t romanticise your walk home?

Hello there, I would love to hear all your thoughts on 'The Last of the Wine'!

Hey, thanks for the ask! I really loved Last of the Wine! Alexias was a lovely character, and it was really interesting to watch his development and the development of his relationship with Lysis! He was so sweet in the beginning and then he became harder as the book went on; his father said that he once thought Alexias was 'too soft' to be a soldier, and I think he was right to feel that way at a certain point! His entire character progression was a trip to get through!

I absolutely loved the writing, which was beautiful as always, and there are some parts of the story I don't think I'm going to forget about anytime soon; the story of Phaedo (I cried), the moment Alexias exposes his brother and asks him 'bear no ill-will to me' (I cried), quotes like 'at Gurgos's once I lay awake considering how to kill him. But already it was too late,' 'I saw death reach out for you; and I had no philosophy,' 'if there be any god who concerns himself with the lives of men, the god himself must suffer with me,' etc. etc. It was just so good but very disturbing in some points...sometimes, you never stop to wonder why people do the things they do and only see that what has been done is evil. In a way, this is good; evil things ought to be derided as such no matter the circumstances, but in another way it is unfair and unhelpful. This is how I feel about a lot of the last third of the book: I understand why and how certain things happened, I just wish that they hadn't happened.

Something that made me laugh though and which I will think about forever are the few scenes where it's apparent Mary Renault is writing with a modern audience in mind, like the absolutely hilarious scene where Alexias is afraid of asking Xenophon if he only likes girls because he doesn't want to offend him 😭 or the scene where Alexias, assuring his dying father of vengeance, says: "Am I so base of soul as to forgive my enemies?" They're really cool scenes because they kind of play with the expectations of a modern audience and subvert common sentiments and understandings in modern culture and society; the opposite situation in the Xenophon scene would seem likelier to a modern person (especially at the time Mary Renault was writing) with Xenophon worrying about offending Alexias by asking him if he likes boys. And it's really a head-trip to read that question asked by Alexias because it's a direct contradiction to the common and widely known sentiment of forgiveness and loving your enemies within Christianity...this becomes 10x funnier 10 pages later when Alexias accidentally stumbles onto the whole point of Christianity 'God with us' 😭😭😭 I love the whole sequence of these scenes because they seem written specifically to challenge the reader; to get it through your mind that this was a foreign place and time, and these people are foreign to us; they have an understanding different from our own...but maybe not completely different at the same time.

Anyway, I don't know if this makes sense, my thoughts are kind of all over the place with this one but the tldr version of it is: I loved it! The writing was beautiful! It made me sad!

was the inquisitor corresponding with Tatiana lightwood? is that why he would want to burn a random letter and any other evidence he had that he had a vendetta against the lightwoods and herondales? 😭😭😭

I don’t have links but I really want to talk about The Last Hours because I’m so excited, so I’m just gonna ramble??

The theory I heard that makes a lot of sense to me is that the baby Sona is currently pregnant with will be raised by Alastair. This would explain how Alastair had a child (despite claiming he’d never marry) and is the great-grandfather of Emma Carstairs according to the family tree. It would also explain why the third Carstairs child is nowhere to be found on the family tree itself; since CC has claimed that it’s been purposefully altered, perhaps this is one of the alterations -- Sona had a baby, for some reason could not take care of that child, and so they were taken in by Alastair and raised as his. This is a sad theory though, because Sona is lovely and I don’t want anything to happen to her at all :( 

I am really hoping there will be a very close relationship that will develop between Jem and Alastair and I base it on this one point, in Forever Fallen, where Jem mentions a specific cradle, which he’d personally seen carved over 100 years earlier at Cirenworth ---

“The cradle had been carved more than a hundred years ago from an oak felled in these woods. Jem had seen it made, with careful hands and patient love.”

He doesn’t mention who carved it by name, but Cirenworth has only been owned by the Carstairs since 1895. It was bought by Elias Carstairs, years after Jem had become a Silent Brother, so the only way this passage could make sense is if he’d seen either Elias, Alastair or a child of either of the two build the cradle. 

Now, he can’t have seen Elias, because it’s known and pretty much canon that Elias refused to allow Jem to visit or be near his family whatsoever. It can only either be Alastair or someone directly after Alastair, which means Alastair must’ve had a close enough relationship with Jem if he’s just let him casually show up for a day of woodworking or to be close enough to his child that he’d be there if his child were the one doing it.

So, there is a baby; there is a cradle built by either Alastair for a child or a child of Alastair that Jem would’ve seen at Cirenworth.

I don’t know if this makes no sense but I just wanted to write it all out. I’m really excited!

I’m looking to go down the rabbit hole of theories for Chain of Iron and Chain of Thorns from The Last Hours trilogy. If anyone wants to comment, or link me to any of the theories, I would be much appreciated.