How Rifthold made and unmade her

The city

Beautiful and rotten in the same breath.

Rifthold is the capital of Adarlan, the conquering empire at the centre of Throne of Glass — a river-port on the Avery, ruled from the glass castle by the King who outlawed magic and salted the rest of the continent into obedience. Walk it top to bottom and it's all there at once: white walls and river-barges above, and below them the Assassins' Keep, Madam Clarisse's courtesans, and the Vaults fighting pit, where opponents beat each other unconscious over spilled ale and worse. A jewel with a slave-camp underbelly. Celaena knew every roof of it.

What happened here

This is where they broke her, and where she came back.

Rifthold is where Rourke Farran tortured Sam Cortland to death on Arobynn Hamel's order — because Arobynn does not like to share what he owns — and where Celaena, caught in a cloud of paralysing smoke, was dragged before the King and handed nine lifetimes in Endovier instead of the axe. It's also where she came back, again and again, worse and more herself each time: to gut Arobynn in his own bed through Lysandra's hand, to blow the roof off a banquet with Madam Florine's dancers and cut Aedion free, and to stand in the rubble and give the whole city to Dorian.

What it means

The empire, paying its bill all at once.

Rifthold is the argument of the series in one skyline: a jewel of an empire built on salt mines and slave ships, glittering because of what it does to everyone underneath it. It made Celaena, and it made the monster she then had to stop being. So when the Ironteeth came down on it with wyverns in Empire of Storms and burned it to the waterline, it didn't land like a loss so much as an invoice — the empire finally paying for the thing it was. We didn't cheer. We didn't quite mourn it either.