"Balefire" by Deborah Koren

Is it weird that my favorite character is the BBEG's second-in-command? I mean, he does have like the best character arc out of all of the characters, so... maybe?

He's also my new favorite example of "high-magic character in low-magic setting": not wielding apocalypse-tier magic or anything, but what he does have outmatches basically anything he comes up against. (Until it's revealed that this |isn't a low-magic setting|, it's just |a high-magic setting where the country we're in has been forcibly de-magicked|. And then he has some trouble.)

Anyway, I digress. (I do that a lot. Most of my mini-reviews are just digressions sans their parent reviews. Hey, look, I'm digressing again!) The plot is basically: the BBEG is looking for an Illegal Magic Artifact (illegal because Magic Is Banned™), which is stolen by a homeless woman (one of our two main characters). She and the other main character (a captain in the royal guard) abscond with it. (And I fill this paragraph with parenthetical statements.)

The BBEG dispatches my favorite character to get it back. Plot ensues. The Mentor Figure |dies without finishing teaching his protégé how to do stuff, because he has to. It's the rule|.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T15+ for swearing and some graphic violence (thanks for that, Orin).

4 stars.

(Endnote: The Illegal Magic Artifact is called a valens. My brain helpfully took it upon itself to remind me about valence electrons every single time I read its name.)