🔥 Demon Apocalypse by Darren Shan | Dark Fantasy Analysis & Demon War Explained

0:00Welcome back to The Deep Dive, okay, I want you to try something for me if you can just for second close your eyes picture the most mundane safest place you can think of For a lot of us and it's strange to say this it's sitting on an airplane at cruising altitude You've got the hum of the engines maybe a little bag of pretzels. The bad movie playing on the tiny screen Exactly, you're just you're floating above everything all the world's problems are down there It's this weird suspended reality where you feel completely untouchable. It's a totally controlled environment Right, it's pressurized the temperature is set. It's predictable It is like the very definition of modern safety and let's be honest boredom That's it and that is exactly why the story we are covering today is so unbelievably good at creating pure panic We're doing a deep dive into demon apocalypse the sixth book in daren chance the demonata series and if you have any kind of fear of flying This one is yeah, it's not gonna help not at all We are talking about a story that takes that feeling of safety at 30,000 feet

1:03And just turns it into an absolute slaughterhouse in what the first 10 pages. Oh easily It's such a chaotic visceral book, but you know beyond all the gore and trust me we will get to the gore There's a lot of it a ton But this book is a really fascinating look at escalation We're going to explore how shan Takes what was a pretty focused local conflict and just blows it up into a literal end of the world event We're talking time dilation the physics of magic some really deep psychological betrayal and ultimate choice hero or coward and we have a serious stack of notes to get through We've got the source text which is incredibly dense on its own But we're also going to be pulling in some analysis on the mythology that shan is building here I'm thinking specifically about the kai gash and the whole demon hierarchy because this is not just a monster of the weak story anymore No, not at all. You have to understand to get demon apocalypse that the protagonist's grubs grady and his uncle dervish They're basically ants trying to fight a magnifying glass I mean the scale is just completely skewed against them right

2:06So this deep dive is really going to be about what happens when you finally realize you aren't the main character in the story of the universe You're just you're collateral damage. So Let's strap in or well, maybe unbuckle considering what happens The book kicks off immediately with grubs grady on that plane He's just left the horror show of the last book slaughter and he thinks he's finally finally safe He's with dervish and their friend genie swan and genie swan is so important here We really need to put a pin in her name right now. She's been the psychologist the confidant She's been the emotional anchor for both grubs and dervish through some truly horrific stuff She's the mom figure in this whole dynamic. So they're flying home everything's calm and then yeah the air pressure shifts the lights flicker that classic horror movie moment Totally and suddenly standing in the aisle of this commercial airliner Three demons just manifest and these are not your standard red guys with pitchforks Shann gets really really weird with his designs. He always leans into body horror

3:10But this trio is just They're particularly unsettling because they blend the human form with the monstrous in this awful way These are Lordloss's familiars. First up you have spine. Oh spine She's basically a woman who has been fused with a giant scorpion You have a human torso but then this chitness lower body multiple legs and of course a massive stinging tail It's that uncanny valley horror isn't it. It's human enough that your brain recognizes it But so monstrous you just feel repulse exactly then you have artery. Okay. This one is the one that really creeps me out artery is Child-sized like a toddler green skin Heads we do big for its body, but the really disturbing part is the fire He is flames burning in his eye sockets instead of actual eyes in the mouth and mouth in the palms of his hands Which is such a tactile nightmare It's one thing to be clawed or bitten, but imagine being grabbed by hands that can taste you it's invasive in a way that's just Ugh It has this whole other layer of violation to the violence and then there's the third one which I think is the fan favorite just for

4:14Cure absurd terror Camer The rabbit the cute little rabbit just a fluffy white bunny rabbit hopping down the aisle and it spits this highly corrosive acid That can dissolve flesh from bone in like seconds. It's a complete subversion of innocence You see a bunny and your brain automatically registers safe or cute And then it melts a flat attendance face off It creates this cognitive dissonance that completely disorients you And grubs you don't know how to process the threat because it looks like a pet and conducting this whole symphony of violence Is Lordloss himself we're talking about him before but just for context He is a demon master. He literally feeds on sorrow So he's not just killing people. He's savoring the terror. He's like a conductor Just orchestrating the screams. Yeah, he finds the chaos the art in the crash It's a total massacre But in the middle of all the blood and acid and screaming There's a moment that hits grubs harder than any physical attack. It's that betrayal. We mentioned Juni swan

5:14This is the absolute pivot point for the entire first act of the book Grubs looks to Juni for help for reassurance He expects her to be screaming or maybe hiding behind dervish right instead She just calmly walks over and stands next to Lordloss. It's so baffling at first your immediate thought is oh She's mind controlled, you know the demon is possessing her But she isn't yeah, she reveals the truth and it is just ice cold She's an albino pale skin pinkish eyes and she reveals that she uses that appearance to seduce dervish Who's always had this fascination with the exotic and the magical she admits? She's been playing them the whole time that she was the one who lured them to the slaughter in the previous book She's a human who has sworn her allegiance to the demonata There's a specific moment in the text that just makes my stomach clench every time I read it a woman on the plane completely desperate She hands her baby to Juni. She thinks Juni's gonna save the child and Juni takes the baby kisses it on the forehead Kiss it and then just tosses it to the demons to be torn apart

6:15That moment is pure calculated malice. It's designed to completely shatter grubs trust in adults to destroy his entire worldview The text says grubs feels like a fool He realizes his uncle dervish this powerful magician he looks up to was completely tricked by a pretty face Juni even says something like he never looked into my heart. He only saw the surface It's such a heavy lesson for a teenager your heroes are flawed And the people who say they care about you might literally feed you to a demon So, okay, the plane is going down the pilots are dead grubs is cornered He tries to use his magic but against a demon master like lord loss It's like throwing a pebble at a tank lord loss just brushes it off He's toying with him. He wants grubs to feel that despair before he dies He wants the sorrow to ripen put thin we get our DSX machina or maybe Bumex machina is more accurate a man in a dirty worn-out suit appears On the wing of the plane outside at 30,000 feet ran of us and he just rips open the fuselage

7:18Now basic physics tells us this should be completely catastrophic Yeah, the pressure differential should just suck everything out into the sky And it does but brain of us reaches in through the chaos grabs grubs and pulls him out into the open air So now they're just free falling this whole sequence is fascinating because it switches genres so fast You go from this claustrophobic horror movie inside the cabin to this high-octane action survival sequence in the sky and baranifist decides this is the perfect time for a lecture of course he does It's so perfectly in character for him He yells at grubs are you cold and they're falling at terminal velocity It's what minus 40 degrees Celsius up there of course he's cold But he isn't freezing to death and that's the point baranifus is making He points out that grubs's magic is Instinctively creating this skin type barrier a little thermal layer around him He's trying to show grubs that magic isn't just about chanting spells It's an extension of your will. It's an instinct like shivering as an instinct and then he teaches him to fly

8:20But not like Superman, you know, he doesn't say push against the air or anything like that No, it's much more metaphysical. He tells grubs to visualize a bird Not to imagine having wings, but to embody the concept of flight It's a subtle but crucial distinction In this magic system your belief dictates your reality If you can truly deeply convince yourself you're a creature of the air Then gravity just stops applying to you in the same way So they catch an updraft they're floating they're safe But then grubs remembers the plane He can still hear the screams fading as the wreckage falls he wants to go back He's begging Branivus to save Derbysh to save the other passengers And Branivus just says no Flat out not a chance And this really introduces the core philosophical conflict of the book Branivus operates on a cosmic scale He's fighting a war across dimensions to stop the demonet from consuming the entire human universe To him 200 people on a single plane are They're a statistic a necessary loss Exactly Losing grubs who he sees as a potentially powerful magician

9:24Would be a strategic loss he can't afford yeah, so he saves the asset It's utilitarianism taken to its absolute extreme he basically says Some battles you can't win He writes Derbysh off his dead he writes off all the passengers He forces grubs to literally fly away from their suffering and think about the trauma that inflicts on a kid Grubs has to survive knowing he flew away while his uncle was being tortured and killed That creates this deep-seated survivor's guilt that just drives his character for the rest of the book It's a truly brutal way to be inducted into Branivus' world So they fly for hours and eventually they land in a desert We find out later they've crossed entire continents They find this cave hidden by magic and they descend into it And that's where we meet the third member of our little party Colonel Fleck Colonel Fleck Colonel is such a tragic character He's described as a teenager maybe a little older than grubs But he looks like a tired old man He's bald covered in bruises He's missing the tips of some of his fingers He's cooking sausages

10:24It's that juxtaposition again right The mundane and the magic He's just roasting sausages over a little magical fire he's conjured But it's his whole demeanor that stands out He's just so cynical he's tired He is a child soldier who has seen way too much He barely even acknowledges grubs So let's talk a bit more about Branivus We saw him as this bum on the plane wing But down in the cave we start to get his real backstory Who is this guy? Branivus is, well he's an enigma wrapped in a dirty code Yeah He is arguably the most powerful human addition alive He's centuries maybe even millennia old He spends his entire life just hopping between the Demata universe and Earth Plugging leaks, killing demons He's the unofficial leader of a group called the Disciples Who are human demon hunters though he absolutely hates that title But he doesn't act like a wise Gandalf style wizard He acts more like a grumpy borderline abusive uncle He has zero patience for social niceties or for coddling anyone He's been fighting it forever war And he explains to grubs exactly why he saved him

11:26It all comes back to the Grady curse Right, we should probably clarify this for anyone who might be new to the lore The Grady family isn't just unlucky They are genetically different from other humans That's right Centuries ago one of their ancestors interbred with a demon Now usually the offspring of demons and humans either die Or are born as mindless monsters But in this specific family line The genes somehow stabilized It manifests as a curse Sometime in their teenage years Most gritties transform into werewolves Mindless slavering beasts But if they can control it If they can somehow beat the wolf inside them That same doom and blood gives them access to immense magical power It's the ultimate double edged sword The source of their potential insanity is also the source of their greatest strength And Branivus tells grubs that he is special Even among the Grady's because grubs instinctively hit his magic Most magicians he says Flare up like beacons that demons can sense from miles away Grubs buried his power so deep that even his own uncle Dervish had no idea he had it

12:27Branivus literally calls him a latent weapon And he wants to deploy that weapon immediately He tells grubs We're going into the demonic universe to hunt down Lordloss And grubs just Refuses I mean, can you blame him? He just survived the plane crash Where everyone he knew was murdered He wants to go home He wants to see his brother Billy in play video games He wants normalcy He does not want to go to a literal hell dimension And this is where the book really deconstructs the idea of a hero We usually think of heroes as people who volunteer for the quest Grubs is a draftee Absolutely Branivus uses shame as his primary weapon He gives grubs this binary false choice Hero or coward There is no in between I hate that kind of logic It's so manipulative It is deeply manipulative It completely lacks empathy But from Branivus's perspective In a war for the survival of the entire universe Nuance is a luxury they just don't have He bullies grubs He says if you stay here you're useless You're a coward

13:28You'll let your uncle die for absolutely nothing And grubs being a teenage boy with a lot of pride and a lot of anger Eventually just snaps and agrees to go So they step through the window We're basically a patch of light that acts as a portal And they leave earth behind Right into the Deminotto universe Now the book describes this place so vividly And it's not you know Dante's inferno It's not just fire and brimstone It is truly alien It's surrealist almost Yeah The geometry is all wrong There are these blue cubes just floating in the air The ground itself shifts under your feet And the smell it smells of rotting peaches and pear That sensory detail always stuck with me too It's so nauseing It implies this sweetness that has just gone bad It's the smell of decay It suggests a fundamental corruption of nature itself And Branivus explains that you can't use a map here Because the geography is completely fluid You have to track demons by their spiritual vibrations It's like tuning a radio to a specific frequency of evil Exactly so they're trying to tune into Lordloss's frequency

14:31But instead they stumble into a trap Or maybe it's more of an environmental hazard They encounter what's called a universal demon This concept really expands the lore in a huge way A universal demon isn't an entity that's standing in a room It is the room It is the entire world around them They've stepped into a universe that is entirely composed of sentient fire So imagine standing on the surface of the sun But the sun personally hates you And is actively trying to digest you That's a perfect description The fire is attacking them intelligently And this scene is so crucial for showing the massive power gap between the characters Branivus is literally grabbing handfuls of the fire And stuffing them into his mouth He's eating the demon to assert his dominance over it And Colonel is inhaling the flames They're fighting an element with their own elemental power And Grubs Grubs just freezes He chokes He panics completely His magic just locks up He is so overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the threat And you know what, it's probably the most realistic reaction in the entire book

15:34He's a kid, he's not a soldier, not yet But in this world, panic gets you killed Colonel sees Grubs is about to be incinerated And Colonel, the cynical child soldier, makes a choice He opens the window back to the cave on Earth And just shoves Grubs through it to save his life Leaving himself and Branivus behind to fight a universe of fire Grubs lands back in the cave, safe But he is completely and totally alone And this begins what I think of as his coward arc Grubs spends weeks in that cave, just waiting It's a psychological pressure cooker, he's trying to get stronger You know, he's doing push-ups, running laps inside the cave But mostly he's just wallowing in the fact that he ran, he failed the test He feels pathetic But during this isolation, he finds something There's a drawing on the cave wall A face that he recognizes Now listeners who know the series will know that Beck is the protagonist of the previous book Which was actually a prequel called, simply Beck It was set 1600 years in the past in Celtic, Ireland

16:34She was a priestess, a very powerful magician Grubs had seen her face before in a rock formation back in his hometown of Cars 3 Vale So Grubs realizes that Beck's spirit is somehow trapped here She's been guarding the tunnel between the human and demon worlds For a millennium and a half She is the ghost in the machine of this whole place When Brannabis and Colonel finally return and they are battered, scorched, but alive Brannabis is just furious with Grubs at first He calls him pathetic for running But then he sees the drawing of Beck He realizes she's trying to communicate with them They perform what's called a remembering spell Grubs basically acts as a medium He lets Beck spirit and her voice channel through him And the message she delivers is just It's catastrophic, it completely upends their entire understanding of the situation Right We thought the mission was just to go hunt and kill Lord Loss But Beck reveals that Lord Loss had a much bigger plan He wasn't just torturing Dervish for fun on that plane It was a distraction A total distraction While Brannabis and Colonel were often some other dimension hunting him

17:38Lord Loss came back to Earth and opened the main tunnel And here's the real kicker Time dilation Time moves differently in the demon universe Grubs felt like he was gone for maybe an hour Brannabis and Colonel felt like it was maybe a day or so But on Earth Seven weeks have passed Seven weeks The tunnel has been opened for seven weeks The demonata have been pouring through This is the moment the genre shifts again We go from like a portal fantasy adventure To a full-blown post-apocalyptic dystopia They step out of that cave and the world they knew is just gone It is absolutely shocking Brannabis checks the magical currents in the air and confirms it Carcery Vale grubs his hometown was ground zero But the corruption, the demonic energy has spread across the globe It's not just the town anymore, it's the whole world They get a report from the few surviving disciples Charmilla Mukherjee and a guy named Shark Shark is this hardcore ex-military guy You know, tattooed knuckles, cuff as nails And even he just sounds completely broken

18:39The report they give paints a picture of total societal collapse The governments of the world tried to fight back They sent in the army, tanks, fighter jets, soldiers with rifles And the demons just laughed at them Yeah Conventional weapons are useless against high-level demons Bullets either pass right through them or they just heal instantly The armies were slaughtered, it was a complete route Charmilla even mentions that the world's governments Authorize the use of nuclear weapons on their own soil I mean, think about the level of desperation required to do that Yeah To drop a nuke on one of your own major cities That is the level of threat we're talking about here Humanity was willing to irradiate itself just to stop this tide But the disciples knew it wouldn't work A nuke is just physical energy A magic tunnel is a metaphysical problem You can't close a hole in the fabric of reality with a big explosion So humanity is effectively extinct Or at least on the fast track Millions are dead The infrastructure is gone And for grubs, this hits him on such a personal level

19:39Cars reveal is gone That means dervishes dead Billy is dead All his friends from school Everyone is dead It's the ultimate failure It's one thing to lose a fight It's another thing entirely to realize You were in the locker room while the game was being played and lost without you They missed the war They were safe in a magical cave While everyone they loved was being butchered This leads to a very very dark conversation Branibus being the pragmatist that he is Comes up with one last desperate plan A suicide mission He believes there's a loadstone deep inside the original cave And cars reveal that's anchoring the tunnel open If they can somehow get to it and destroy it They might be able to close the tunnel It won't bring back the dead But it might save what's left of the planet from being completely consumed Look, there's a cost There's always a cost with the Branibus He looks at grubs and kernel and tells them Explicitly To close this tunnel, I have to perform a sacrifice I have to kill one of you One of you is going to die today He says it so casually, so matter factly

20:40And the craziest part They both agree Grubs agrees It just shows you how far grubs has come from being the coward Who ran away in the cave He's seen the end of the world He has absolutely nothing left to lose He is willing to die if it means taking the demons down with him It's born from fatalism But it looks like bravery So they gear up Shark manages to get them some helicopters And the flight into what used to be carcery veil is It's haunting The description is just purely apocalyptic Grubs looks down at his hometown He sees his old school He sees bodies impaled on spikes Which is a favorite decoration of the manana He sees the smoking ruins of his own house The text says the land looks like the face of an asteroid Just gray ash and dead rock All life has been erased They jump from the helicopters And it is instant chaos It's like the battle of the song but with monster It's a complete meat grinder The few human soldiers who came with them are killed almost instantly They're just there to buy the magicians a few seconds We see the disciples fall Sharmaela who's a powerful magician in her own right

21:42Is fighting with fire but she just gets swarmed Shark is ripping demons apart With his bare hands and magic But there are just too many of them And then we get to kernel Poor kernel This scene is genuinely difficult to read The demons buy the scorpion woman From the plain ambushes kernel And she doesn't just stab him She stings him In the face Or wrickly in his eyes And she injects something Eggs Yes Demon eggs It just makes my skin crawl even thinking about it And the eggs hatch instantly into these squirming maggots Kernel's eyes are eaten from the inside out He is blinded Permanently in the most agonizing way imaginable It's just brutal top tier body horror But it serves a narrative purpose right It takes the group's navigator off the board Kernel is the one who can see the magical lights The windows between worlds Without him they're trapped In the middle of all this Grubs finally makes it to the cave entrance And there, floating, is lord loss

22:43Just gloating And he has a trophy rack with him He shows grubs the severed heads of dervish and billy That is the breaking point Grubs sees the head of his uncle and the head of his little brother And something inside him just snaps But it's not a breakdown It's a breakthrough We talked about his latent power earlier This is the damn finally breaking Grubs unleashes this incredible torrent of magic It's described as pure white fire He isn't using spells He's projecting raw rage He incinerates all the demons around him He creates this protective barrier That even lord loss has to pause at He finally becomes the hero That baranabus wanted him to be He stands his ground But it's the ultimate tragic irony Because too late The loadstone is too powerful The tunnel is fully formed The world is already dead Grubs is displaying godlike power In the middle of a graveyard And this brings us to the climax And honestly the most confusing Mind-bending part of the entire series lore The Cogash Right So picture the scene Grubs is holding this magical barrier

23:43Kernel's on the ground screaming blind Bleeding from his eyes And below them in the actual rock of the cave floor Is the trap's spirit of Beck And the three of them touch Physically and mentally they link up And the universe just hiccups Baranabus sees what's happening He screams it out The Cogash So what is the Togash? In the mythology of this series The Cogash is the original weapon The ultimate power It's rumored to be able to destroy entire universes Eons ago It was split into three pieces And hidden across time and space to keep it safe And the pieces are People The pieces are souls Grubs, kernel, and Beck They are the Trinity When they link up they form the weapon They complete the circuit But they don't blow up the universe No Because the weapon responds to their deepest Most overwhelming desire in that moment And what is that desire? Undo this The description here gets so trippy The sky starts pulsing like a trampoline Gravity literally reverses The demons, the rocks, the ruins Everything starts getting sucked upwards Into this massive funnel of light

24:44And the three of them Grubs, kernel, and Beck Who has now formed a physical body out of raw magic They're pulled into that tunnel too They're riding a wave of pure magical energy Grubs describes it as traveling through a tunnel Made of windows and lights Glashing past them at impossible speeds It's a wormhole But it's not a wormhole through space It's a wormhole through time They're essentially reversing the entropy of the apocalypse And then they land Silence Grubs opens his eyes He's in a forest It's green There's no ash There are no bodies Kernel is there next to him He's still blind The injury traveled back with him Ranabis is there too Looking completely bewildered They look over at the cave entrance It's intact The Grady House is still standing in the distance And Ranabis figures it out They didn't just teleport They rode the wave of energy from the tunnel Opening all the way back to its source point They traveled back seven weeks in time They are back at the exact moment Before the apocalypse started

25:45It's the second chance A complete, hard reset of the timeline This changes the genre again Now it's time travel heist movie They know exactly what is about to happen In that cave in the next 10 minutes They know Lordloss is down there They know Juni Swann is down there And most importantly They know Dervish and Billy are alive down there They aren't severed heads on a trophy rack Not yet The relief that Grubs must feel is just overwhelming But Ranabis snaps them back to reality He identifies the key Right The mechanics of the tunnel require a willing human sacrifice To open it permanently The person who makes that sacrifice Becomes the key The tunnel can't fully materialize Unless the key merges with the load stone Ranabis instantly deduces that Juni Swann is the key She was the one who was going to trigger it So the new mission is simple Kill Juni Swann before she can complete the ritual Which is, of course, easier said than done She is surrounded by Lordloss and his three very nasty familiars But this time the team is different

26:45They have a blind but furious colonel A resurrected and powerful Beck And a battle-hardened Grubs Who has seen the end of the world They drop into the cave And Ranabis immediately drops a bombshell on Juni He calls her by a different name He calls her Nadia Nadia Moore This is a deep cut from Ranabis' own past She was his assistant, his apprentice, years and years ago He thought she had died on a mission Turns out she faked her death She defected to the Diminata And her motivation is It's really twisted She hated being human She saw the power of the demons And she coveted it She wanted to shed her mortality or weakness Her pain and become one of them She viewed humanity as a disease And becoming a demon as the cure So the fight breaks out And this time Grubs does not freeze He swears up against femur The acid-spitting rabbit This fight is a perfect showcase of his growth The rabbit spits its acid And the first encounter on the plane Grubs ran This time He uses his magic to freeze the glob of acid in mid-air

27:47Then he grabs the rabbit And this is graphic He shoves his entire fist down the rabbit's throat And unleashes a massive blast of magic from the inside Boom No more rabbit It's efficient It's brutal And it is completely devoid of hesitation He's a soldier now He's internalized the violence necessary to survive Meanwhile, a blind colonel is fighting Spine The scorpion woman who took his eyes from him And the other timeline This is just incredible to read Colonel can't see But he can sense her magic Her spiritual vibration He pins her down He just beats her senseless It's pure raw revenge But the real emotional core of the scene is dervish He's just standing there watching all this chaos unfold But he's not fighting He's trying to protect Juni Juni still has him under a powerful love spill A magical charm He literally cannot perceive her as a threat He still sees her as the love of his life Grubs his screaming at him She's the bad guy She's a demon And dervish is just confused He thinks they're all attacking the woman he loves It's terrifying Because dervish is the powerhouse of their family

28:48If he turns on them They lose this fight But Juni in her arrogance She makes a fatal mistake She gets annoyed with Billy Who's tied up in the corner She calls him silly Billy A childhood nickname And she threatens to start torturing him And that is the one crack in the armor Dervish's love for his nephew That deep familial protective instinct Is older and stronger than any magic spell It's the mama bear override You can mess with him But you do not mess with the kid The spell just shatters In an instant Dervish sees Juni for what she truly is And what he does next is Well, it's just heartbreaking He picks her up And she thinks he's hugging her She's actually smiling And then he just drives her down On to a sharp stalagmite rising from the cave floor Impaled It's so visceral And dervish is weeping as he does it Because the emotional residue of the spell is still there Part of him feels like he is murdering his one true love Even while his rational brain knows she's a monster He has to murder his own heart to save the world Juni dies

29:48And with her death, the key is broken The tunnel ritual fails and collapses The invasion is thwarted before it can even begin And interestingly, Lord Loss actually mourns her He pauses over her body and says, I will miss you It just adds this little layer of complexity to him He's a monster But he clearly appreciated her loyalty and her potential Then he retreats Taking the bodies of his familiar with him So the battle is won The timeline is saved But we have to look at the aftermath Because this is not a happily ever after ending Not even close This is a classic, purek victory Colonel is blind forever He's a teenager who just permanently lost his sight To save a world that will never even know he did it That injury is a permanent reminder of an apocalyptic timeline That technically no longer exists for anyone but them Dervish is emotionally shattered He just had to murder the woman he loved And he has to live with the memory of that love Knowing it was a complete fabrication But feeling like it was real

30:49That kind of trauma doesn't just go away Because the bad guy is dead And grubs Grubs now has the memories of the apocalypse He remembers seeing the heads on the spikes He remembers watching the world burn He has what you could call the burden of the timeline He knows just how fragile their safety is He is no longer that innocent kid Who just wanted to play video games He's a veteran of a war that never happened He's grown up But at a truly terrible cost And then there's the whole issue of the Kogesh Brannabis is absolutely terrified of it Rightfully so He realizes that grubs, kernel, and back When they're together Essentially have the power of gods They reset the universe He speculates that the Kogesh could just as easily wipe out All of existence if they aren't careful They are walking, talking, atom bombs So the book ends not with a celebration But with a warning Brannabis basically says we got lucky This was a close call The Domenodis are still out there This isn't over It just reinforces the central theme of the entire series You don't win against the Domenna

31:49You just survive to fight another day It's an endless war of attrition It's a heavy ending But it really makes you think about the definition of heroism It's not about glory or winning It's about how much you are willing to lose Precisely Grubs lost his innocence Kernel lost his sight Dervish lost his heart That was the price of admission So here's the thought I want to leave you with today We talked about Dervish breaking the spell And it's a classic troquerate True love conquers the magic spell But think about the reality of what he did Dervish choice Exactly If you had the power to reverse time To save the entire world from a literal apocalypse But the one condition was that you had to look The person you loved most in the entire world In the eye Your spouse, your parent, your child And kill them with your own hands Could you do it? That is the ultimate test, isn't it? Whether you could sacrifice your own humanity In order to save humanity itself Sit with that uncomfortable thought for a while And maybe check the locks on your windows tonight

32:51And definitely stay away from rabbits Definitely stay away from the rabbits Thanks for listening to The Deep Dive We'll see you next time