Tears of Liscor is the 9^th book in the series and the third part of Volume Five of The Wandering Inn Web Serial. And it is well named because by the end of this book I was bawling.

Blood of Liscor ended on such a high note, with everything and everyone coming together to defeat the Raskghar and free Mrsha and Ceria. And it would be so easy to keep it as a high note, to move onto the next adventure. But The Wandering Inn treats its characters as real people and so we don’t get to just walk on. We need to acknowledge that, although people are now safe, they underwent something horrific and they have trauma that they will have to deal with. And time is spent on that but not too much because Tears of Liscor has its own huge plot approaching.

It’s honestly got a lot to live up to as, arguably, everything in the series up until this book has been building to this point. I mentioned in the last book that one of the strengths of Blood was that it focused entirely on Liscor and what was happening there, instead of sending the readers’ perspective off somewhere else. Tears does the same trick but it doesn’t feel closed off from the rest of the world. Thanks to the scrying system set up in The Rains of Liscor moments of great import are broadcast around the world now, so we can see how some of the characters in far away places react to what’s happening. Which is just fantastic come the ending.

And as to the ending…look, I’ve already said that it left me in tears. My heart hurts to read it. But it’s so good and so well written. And it’s an emotional payoff that’s been masterfully build up over so many books and is absolutely deserved. It hurts me but I love this book.

It does leave me asking what’ll happen next though. As I said, most of the series basically built up to this point and now that it’s happened it’ll be nice to see what comes after it. The last chapter set up a lot of intriguing hints and I can’t wait to see where they lead. Tears of Liscor is an ending but it’s not the ending and I couldn’t be happier about that.