Dustworker and Shining Boy

There has been so many new developments within the last chapters I have read that have left me wanting to know more and with the sad, post feelings of losing characters already. I love gaining the knowledge and understandings of a fantasy world, its terminology and language and what it all means and the histories and interweaving storylines, which puts me right in the worldbuilding and surrender to its laws of fantasy. More has been revealed about the origins of the talents and how Cairndale is a safe haven for them to protect one another, hone their skills and powers and to defend themselves against darker forces. Marlowe, the blue shining boy, is the adopted son of Dr Berghast, founder of the institute and Jacob Marber, the monster made of shadow and dust, is hunting him. They are complete binaries of each other, where Marlowe is made of light and a shine that can both heal and inflict pain. That is not why Jacob wants him, it is much more than that, it comes from his own haunting demons and of loss and to take away a love of somebody else. They meet face to face on the train to Cairndale, where the children and their protectors are riding with the creature Walter as well, hoping to somehow save him from what Jacob made him into. I love train scenes and this one was filled with brutal intensity and dread and powerful sequences, it was glorious. Jacob was able to find and track where they were headed through Walter being on the train with them. They are somehow tethered to each other and the voices that Walter talks to in his head is now confirmed to be Jacob, soothing and luring him, always calling to him. Walter is one of my favourite characters. I know the things he does to others is gory and monstrous, but I love a good monster and he is also extremely complex and interesting to read. He has his own story before he met Jacob that is very slowly being told. I am thinking he might have been a talent himself before he became one of the undead or at least is connected to this secret world that overlays the real one. I like that he is more than just a creature and that some chapters are even read from his own perspective, along with Jacob’s voice in his head. “Jacob Marber stood with his arms at his sides, that eerie dense smoke streaming out behind him. And crouched at his side, on all fours, spiderlike, malformed, Walter Laster glared”. I want to see more into Walter’s life and of him and Jacob together. If Walter who was human, is now described to be a thing made out of no love, the only love he knows is for Jacob, his maker. I also got to read more of Jacob’s fury and power and learned that he was a dustworker talent and now that the essence of the drughr lives inside him and uses him, his abilities are deadly enhanced. During the action like sequences on the train, Jacob unleashed his smoky powers throughout and revealed more of what he can really do and how much he should be feared. He can even make a scythe shaped cloud of black smoke extend from his body like an appendage and cut through bone. In Marlowe though, he seems to have now met his match. Nothing could touch him or hurt him, he was after all dust and smoke. But Marlowe could and his blue shine from his little hands latched onto Jacob’s smoke and made it retract. This scene, among others on the train, was the coolest. I have now entered a new and different section of the book, titled “The Vanishing of Jacob Marber”. I hope these chapters will be following his perspective, before the drughr and I get to read about who Jacob is within the monster of himself and learn more powers of the talents.