I am however looking for the story line to progress chronologically. I’m super interested in the whole Great Weapon story line.

Thanks for all the great nights spent reading your novels and losing imense amounts of sleep.

Here’s how on reviewer interpreted the role of the Jhegaala in the novel:

The Part headings and descriptions of the Jhegaala’s life cycle are meant as a parallel to the plot and Vlad’s own internal shifts.

Part One: (Egg) is the stage where the mother must leave the vulnerable egg alone with a father or father-substitute. The parallel to Vlad’s inquiries about his early days with his absent mother, and clues from his own father-substitute, is obvious.

Part Two: (Apoptera) is the stage of curious inquisition with all senses, while sight (and insight, by frequent metaphor in the book) is the last to develop. During this stage Vlad is inquisitive but ignorant, constantly assaulted by smells, and tastes, but sights are always obscured by darkness or shadow. His understanding is similarly bewildered.

Part Three: (Steminastra) is the Jhegaala’s vulnerable yet reckless stage. The plot shows Vlad undertaking self-healing spells in a way that shows (in retrospect) “reckless disregard for the size and characteristics of his predators”.

Part Four: (Notonide) is the Jhegaala’s fast adolescence, a period of high vulnerability, intense and rapid physical transformation, development of wings and venom glands, and yet the Jhegaala is “never so much itself as when under intense pressure”. Vlad is during this time helpless and tortured, being crippled and intensely damaged, and yet learning fast and finding the information levers and threats (the venom glands) that will allow him to be effective when he is himself again.

Part Five: (Levidopt) is both a state of maturity and a recapitulation of the previous developments. The parallel to Vlad’s reassessment of the rest of the story in light of his new outlook is evident. An interesting side note — in this stage, Vlad spends most (all?) of his time bedridden, gathering information and manipulating events from his immobile position.

Does Berkely retain the exclusive publishing rights to those early books, or when you moved to Tor, did you bring those with you? I imagine the odds of omnibus editions eventually being made for the whole series goes up significantly if Tor has access to all of it, so they can produce their own from the beginning.

Am I the only one who noticed that Jhegaala is the first book in the series that didn’t feature a member of, or give us deep insight into the character of members of the House after which the book is named?

Maybe I’m just too hidebound, but I hope there’s an Iorich featured in Iorich!