#The Cruel Gods

[a-m-pyra]

New God

We need a new god

A great entertainer

We need an angel

Or something that looks like it

—♫♫♫—

Before and after:

[autumn2may]

Today our judges review Trudie Skies' The Thirteenth Hour, first book in The Cruel Gods series, for this year's Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off (SPFBO) finals! 🐉

[lishakayrylantcook]

HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAYS 14TH IN 2024

[geethr75]

Review of The Children of Chaos (The Cruel Gods 2) by Trudie Skies

Blurb When the saints call, the sinners answer.Chaos stalks the steam-powered city of Chime and threatens the existence of the gods and their domains. Kayl swore to protect Chime’s mortals from their gods’ cruel whims, but when she agrees to represent the mortals of a god long thought dead, Kayl is thrust into a political role that goes against everything she’s ever stood for.As the newly…

[beneathathousandskies]

Domain Reading Challenge

Hello!    It’s me again. Yesterday Trudie Skies the author of the amazing Cruel Gods series came up with a new reading challenge based on the Domains that feature in that series. (I couldn’t not share the map again) This looks like a fun challenge and has made me go hunting this morning, and below you’ll find my pick for each Domain/Month. I believe the challenge has also been set up on…

[hinamie]

new official illust of them with puppies healed something in me

[biblionerdreflections]

Cover Reveal - The End of Time

Today I have the absolute privilege of participating in the cover reveal for the forthcoming final novel in The Cruel Gods series by Trudie Skies. I loved the first book in this series (my review) and have been meaning to read the second installment. I’ll be bumping it up my TBR now that I know the final book is on its way soon. 🙂 Let’s start things off with a little information about the…

[lotus-pear]

i love you royal trio (minus akechi)

[drenched-in-sunlight]

i love the DLC man

[sunderwight]

Bingqiu AU where Luo Binghe's the chosen village sacrifice to the evil deity who lives up the mountain.

Normally the village sends maidens, but they've more or less run out of expendable girls of the right age and, ahem, "virtues". So of course Luo Binghe's early life bad luck kicks in. In the wake of his mother's death there's no one to really care about what happens to him, he's fairly pretty, and the village leaders decide that if they dress him up like a girl the teenaged homeless kid should pass well enough. And hey, y'know, he's probably got a hard life ahead for him anyway -- dying in a brothel of some venereal disease or on the streets of exposure or starvation. At least as a sacrifice, everyone else gets to benefit from his loss! And the kid will get added to a shrine and be remembered as a hero! If anything, he should be happy about this!

Binghe is not happy about this.

But he's also a skinny underfed nobody who is easily overpowered, dressed up like a bride, and tied to a post. So. Not much he can do but wait for the evil deity to come and do whatever horrible thing he's gonna do to him.

Meanwhile, Shen Yuan is pretty sure he's been isekai'd into the over-powered hero of some kind of supernatural adventure story? He's not totally sure because he doesn't recognize the setting, but the signs are there. He's got a shrine-like base of operations (though it seems to have become corrupted/ruined, probably he has to restore it somehow), he has a very resilient and handsome new body with spiritual energy of some kind flowing through him, and a very clearly magical sword. Plus lots of neat starter powers! Though it feels like he has other abilities that have been blocked somehow? Probably he has to level up in order to access them.

When he treks out of his "base" and finds what seems to be a distressed maiden, he takes it for his beginner hero mission. The girl claims that she's been doomed to be sacrificed to an evil god. That sounds a little above Shen Yuan's pay grade for dealing with, so he unties her and decides that they had better just get out of the whole region altogether. He already packed up anything useful from his base, anticipating he might get caught up in an adventure once he left, so they follow the river away from the settlement until they reach another one.

While they travel, Luo Binghe tells Shen Yuan about the cursed deity, Shen Qingqiu, who was cast out of the heavens for slaughtering one of his brethren and has apparently being do-who-knows what to maidens from the local village in exchange for his "protection" ever since. Sounds like a real asshole! And also mid-level boss type bad guy at least. Shen Yuan hopes he doesn't have to fight him, but he probably will.

Thank goodness he found Binghe, though! Clearly the helpful little sister type! He's definitely going to require her assistance if he's going to figure out how to navigate this world and level up his skills enough to take on a god.

[a-m-pyra]

A Women's Game

Men fight wars. Women win them.

—♫♫♫—

Before and after:

[alleyesony0u]

literally cannot stop thinking about how intentional it is in pvp civilization that people refer to evbo as "kid" or tell him he is "just a kid". it isn't just a headcanon that he is probably a teenager he IS a teenager. he's impulsive like a teenager, he's naive like a teenager, he doesn't understand romance like a teenager, he's materialistic and looking for anything that will give him comfort or happiness like a teenager because he IS A TEENAGER. he's a kid. he's a kid cursed with immortality, and what do people do with that? abuse it. evbo is a kid in a horrible, violent society, and he knows nothing else, but he still believes, naively, like a kid, that there are people who are better than this society. he tells zam that he and the iron swords don't need to farm him, that it will do them no good. what about his life? what about tabi's? and he forgets where he is. what he is.

in this society, evbo is not a child. in this society, evbo is not the "chosen one". he is a tool. he is an object. what do you do with tools and objects? you use them.

and yet evbo still stands there, a kid. and the adults of this society exploit that. he is just a kid, he doesn't get it. he is just a kid, he doesn't realize how many lives he's saving. he is just a stupid, naive, vulnerable kid with too much love and too much hope in his heart. we can use that.

he is a calf standing on wobbly knees born knowing it is destined for the slaughterhouse.

[lucabyte]

On autonomy, and what it means to be Obliged to Help.

Bonus:

[gavfleetout]

I love how holly black took the ‘brooding and mysterious love interest who is a jerk but is secretly in love with the mc” and instead of making a charismatic asshole with a six pack she made a pathetic loser boy who is drunk all the time, can’t fight, and wants nothing to do with the main plot.

[beneathathousandskies]

Cover Reveal: The End of Time (The Cruel Gods #3)

Hello! Late in the day because this has been a week (I have literally, figuratively and in every way possible been buried with books this week). But today I am delighted to be joining the cover reveal for The End of Time, the third and final book in The Cruel Gods series by Trudie Skies. I have loved this series from the beginning and I am very excited to see this final installment. However,…

[dykedvonte]

I think depictions of Anya being cruel to Curly or drawing out his suffering are artful and chilling but completely miss the point of the story and her character.

I'm not saying she doesn't deserve to have that "I told you so" moment with him but not in something callous or cold. Even if that is how it happened, she'd immediately feel guilty cause at that point she's not tormenting her tormenter or even the person truly at fault. She's doing something cathartic, similar to how Jimmy likely hits Curly to release rage he can't against the rest of the crew. She'd see herself as no different when she'd come back from the moment and see Curly cowering at her. She wants someone to take responsibility but how does being cruel to the defenseless help? Why would she want the power Jimmy has over her over Curly?

The idea of her extending someone else's pain is just so against the struggles she already faces and how she can't even bring herself to cause someone pain even to help them. Her very desire is to release herself from her own suffering and I doubt she'd even fine some sort of guilty release in being cruel to another.