5/10.

Story of a happy slave Changeling who serves the racist high elves (zida’ya). It is 1st person view, and he is unreliable and constantly lying to himself about his love for slavery and being a slave and love for his nice slavemaster.

He is present only to tell the story of the racist high elf brothers. One of which is a big bad in later stories. Ineluki’s motivation is basically that he makes a dumb oath causing his brother to get injured. He is too prideful to admit fault, and now wants to genocide all humans and non elven peoples. Great. Cool man.

Prose is hard to read, as Williams does not like making new paragraphs.

Enjoyable enough, though a really meandering plot with no real goal. It reads like a 1st-person travelogue.

Still, skill in crafted word, poetic license, and expository setup make this readable as part of a series. As a standalone, bleh.