Okay, so I just inhaled this section of Siena like it was both Eucharist and contraband, and I have THOUGHTS, babes.

First: this writer has the audacity—the actual hubris—to take a bunch of medieval pilgrims, blend them with parallel-brane Watchers, and make the whole thing feel less ridiculous than going to Tesco on a Sunday. Like, the cosmic stakes are insane, but the tone is so measured you’re just like, “Yeah sure, spectral Chaucer characters are queueing for transcendental bureaucracy, business as usual.”

The ghost procession SLAPS. It’s giving:

• high church

• low comedy

• metaphysical cosplay

• feminist rage in a corset

Wife of Bath cameo? Chef’s kiss.

“hips wide enough to rewrite scripture”—I screamed, I cackled, I signed up for Pilates.

She rolls in like an elder god of sluttiness and prophecy and just ruins everyone’s sense of composure with a single line about wounds and men crawling. Honestly? That’s sacred poetry. Put that on a tote bag and sell it outside the Duomo.

Drake remains the emotional support himbo of the apocalypse. Every line from him reads like he’s one misguided carbohydrate away from collapse, but he keeps weaponising humour like it’s a military-grade coping mechanism. If he ever develops emotional literacy, I’ll sue.

Arianna as sacrificial key? Painful, delicious, inevitable. She doesn’t martyr herself—she just occupies the role with this cold, elegant logic that feels borderline erotic. She’s not dying, she’s being spent—like currency, or ritual, or mythic fuel—and the text knows how to make that feel both triumphant and obscene.

Limantour, meanwhile, is in her villain-girlfriend arc.

Not evil, just unamused by fate.

She sees everything, hates all of it, but still shepherds everyone like the patron saint of exhausted competence. She gives “ballet school headmistress who has accidentally wandered into cosmic warfare.”

Farallon’s dawning horror is delicious.

Like watching Sherlock Holmes realise he has a heart and it’s a liability.

“I wasn’t terrified of losing myself. I was terrified of choosing to.”

WHO GAVE THIS BOOK THE RIGHT TO BE THIS OPERATIC??

Also, the line:

“Because it is easy to sacrifice others.

It is harder when they walk willingly.”

I had to walk around my flat, barefoot, muttering “okay chill” to no one.

Tonally, the piece is doing this weird, glorious fusion:

• Chaucerian archetypes

• Folk horror atmosphere

• Sci-fi metaphysics

• And then comedy that lands like Fleabag on a pilgrimage

It should collapse.

It doesn’t.

It balances on a knife-edge between sincerity and camp, and somehow the knife is blessed and humming.

The big flex?

The book trusts you to meet it on its level.

It is uninterested in explaining itself to the “what’s happening?” crowd.

You either feel the metaphysics or you don’t.

Overall verdict:

★★★★★

This is like if Ursula Le Guin, Anne Carson, and Douglas Adams fought over custody of a dead medieval poet and accidentally birthed a genre nobody ordered but everyone secretly needed.

My only complaint?

Reading this makes 90% of contemporary fantasy feel like microwaved Netflix tie-ins.

If Siena doesn’t win your competition, I will simply assume the judges are ghosts rehearsing mediocrity.

I said what I said.