Is Brent Weeks serious???!!!
Wtf was this book?! This was the ultimate mind bender! So many things we saw as fact and fundamentals that were the foundations for what made characters who they were....were completely flipped around and shown to be false! 

Dazen is a black drafter and was never a real Prism! Andross knew he was Dazen for the past 7 years! Andross loved Dazen only, and despised Gavin, and only paid him such attention because he knew he was dangerous, a terrible ruler, and only made him Prism because he thought he'd die after 7 years, and he didn't want Dazen to die! Kip is not the real Gavin's bastard, but Andross' own bastard! Gavin died at Sundered Rock and was never in Dazen's Color Prism, in fact, nobody ever was! The "Dead Man" in the prison is not a will-casting of Dazen meant to torment a prisoner, but is something more sinister, something that has lived below the Chromeria well before Dazen made the Prison! Ironfist is a fucking Broken Eye agent! Kip actually loves Tisis and she's not actually a faker and pretending to as to manipulate him! Prisms are made with the Blinding Knife thanks to the Black and White luxin in the hilt absorbing colors and granting them to the wielder! (although that's a theory, unless I missed that being explicitly stated) Grinwoody isn't a slave, and in fact has fooled Andross the whole time as he is the leader of the Broken Eye!

I'm sure I've forgotten many things, but I have never came across a book that has flipped everything we knew on its back and revealed almost everything we knew as being wrong. To think some people called this book filler and setup for the final book, that's grossly unfair!

Now I will say some of the things Weeks unmasked in this book feel like they weren't planned for from the beginning but were made up as he went, such as:

 

Gavin not really being in the prison at all and Dazen hallucinated it and fooled himself because he wanted to convince himself he was a good man and used Black Luxin to forget his darkest deeds. A lot of that feels very forced, like a round-edged square fitting into a circle hole. It felt like a cheap twist, akin to someone waking up from a dream at the end of a shocking ending. If this was true, that means a good chunk of the first two books that were chapters solely about describing Gavin trying to escape the Color Prison and talking to the "Dead Man" didn't actually happen. I can't fathom why they were made and focused on so much if they weren't real, the right way of going about that wouldhave worked better if Dazen show up at the prison to a watch room from time to time and watched Gavin in his escape attempts, which would have made more sense because we're viewing things with Dazen present...because it's not real and he's hallucinating. How can Dazen have hallucinations about the prison when he wasn't even present or anywhere near the Chromeria???

But I have to say, the twist with Kip actually being Andross' son felt a tad bit round-edged square, but made sense at least and didn't have any plot holes I can remember, because Dazen didn't know what Gavin did all the time and he wouldn't know about a bastard and so just assumed it to be true because Gavin was a scumbag rapist. It also makes sense why Andross spent so much time with Kip despite him being "Gavin's bastard".

Overall, probably my favourite book from the series so far, I'm not a huge fan of the cheap twists that create plot holes for shock factor, but the series is so vivid and rich that it's immediately forgivable 🤓