Darkest Hour ongoing Darkest Hour AUTHOR: Emilieee
LEAD: Baekhyun
GENRE; SETTING: action, adventure, angst, romance; fantasy
CHAPTERS: 36, as of 10/01/2017
READER INFORMATION: Subscribers and Members Only  

"The darkest hour is just before dawn.  Dawn, when the sun rises.

But how can there be a dawn if the sun hasn't risen in the sky for more than a decade, when every hour is the darkest hour?"

Hwang Jinae lives in a world shrouded with a blanket of fear, despair and darkness.  A world, once beautiful, that fell into catastrophes after catastrophes and became home to monsters that moved under the cover of night.  Setting one foot outside was guaranteed daeth, whether it be in the claws of monsters or from the cold and lack of resources.

Eighteen years ago, the sun stopped rising.

When Jinae is cast out of safety for a sin she didn't commit, a quick death was the only gift she dared to wish for, though even that seemed to be impossible.  She certianly didn't expect a boy, looking almost as tired and half-dead as she, to leap out of the cover of shadows to her rescue.

With sunlight glowing on his fingertips.

thoughts PLOT: Where do I even start with this?  I've had it on my reading list basically since it was started but only really just got round to actually reading it.  I've read a few published fantasy books with the concept of a permanent darkness, and this is definitely on a par with the best of them.  I love it.  The world is well thought out with some interesting creatures and powers (some based on Mama powers for the members of EXO that have so far featured), and initially, like our main character Jinae, we have misconceptions of what those powers actually do.

Jinae grows up, orphaned (like many others), in the Fortress, one of the few safe places in the Darkness.  Leaving it is certain death: permanent darkness means it's permanently cold; resources are extremely scarce (if you even have the light to find them); and terrifying monsters are abundant.  The mages rule the Fortress while the non-mages work to make sure that there's enough (though, barely, at that) food to go round.  When Jinae's unfairly kicked