A Goodreads user asked:

Wait .. i'm confused . Can someone explain to me the ending . Please help me ! I need a clear explanation :( Anyone?

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9 years ago
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This answer contains spoilers… (view spoiler)[HEAVY SPOILERS
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Okay. i just read it and the ending confused me as well. But I'm going to try anyways.
Shade+Ignifex=Lux (the last prince who everyone thought died). Everyone in Arcadia thought that the last prince was killed by the Gentle Lord. NO, it's a lie. The prince was too scared to fail the kindly ones' test that he bargained with them to not kill him and protect his kingdom. But the kindly ones (the nasty ones in my opinion) tricked him and locked his entire country into permanent darkness. Then the they proceeded to change Lux into Shade and Ignifex, lock them both into the castle, where they have to stay for an eternity.
Nyx let the children of Typhon to attack Ignifex so he and Shade can combine into the prince. Then the prince opened the jar (which contained the entire kingdom), and rewinded time, freeing the country from demons but locking himself into the darkness of the jar forever.
Nyx woke up one morning and thought she had a bad dream. Everything was fuzzy but she had this weird feeling that something had happened. When she was about to marry TOM-A-LONE, she suddenly remembered what happened.
Okay, this is the confusing part. When Nyx woke up, technically the 900 years of demons had never happened, because time had been unwounded by the prince. That is why she couldn't remember anything. So the events she experienced in her life and her love Ignifex had never existed. However, because the prince unwounded time, he also locked himself permanently into the darkness of the jar. He was stuck in the castle.
Nyx rushed to the castle, saw the prince coming with the kindly ones, and tried to bargain with them. She wanted to free the prince, but nothing can exchange his freedom. Finally she said that she would stay with him in the darkness of the jar. The kindly ones laughed at her and agreed.
So the duet suffered through the darkness, and was saved by their own heart. Because both Nyx and Lux had kindness in their heart, and the kindly ones valued the moral so much.
So they were free!
YAY!
I hope this answered your question. (hide spoiler)]

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Grace

This answer contains spoilers… (view spoiler)[This is how I interpreted it. So in the beginning, the earliest king had made a deal with the Kindly Ones about finding Pandora's jar, and he became the only person to not be tricked by them. The Kindly Ones offered another proposal. If the king looked into the box and his heart was pure, Arcadia would never be invaded and the people would prosper, but if he loved himself more than the people, then he would be trapped in the box with the Children of Typhon.

Generations later, Lux (the prince) made a bargain with the Kindly Ones because he knew his heart wasn't pure. He told them he wanted Arcadia to stay safe, to take the evil out of his heart, and he didn't want to end up in the box alone. The Kindly Ones agreed, but there's always a catch. Arcadia was trapped in the box, but it also stayed safe from most harm except for the few demons that escaped, and Lux was trapped in there too, so he wasn't alone. They cleansed his heart by pulled the evil out of him and making his evil side an actual animate being (Ignifex). The Kindly Ones said if he were to open the box in the trapped Arcadia, all events after his bargain would be reversed, and he would open the box and be trapped forever. Now, Shade (the prince without the evil) knew everything of what happened, but couldn't say so, and Ignifex could act but he didn't know what to do. Ignifiex was given the duty of the Kindly Ones and he made the bargains instead of them. Somewhere along that time, Ignifex made a deal with the Kindly Ones that if one of his wives guessed his name (Lux), he would be free of doing their job anymore. But none of the villagers knew any of this, so that's why Nyx couldn't guess it. The Kindly Ones made sure they forgot it and the bargain; they only knew that Ignifex was an evil bargainer.

The box couldn't be opened because Shade wasn't the full prince, he was only half, so Nyx kills Ignifex so that they become one, and the now whole Prince opens the box.

Nyx wakes up in the alternate universe where the Sundering never happened (where they were never trapped in the box). 900 years had passed since Lux looked into the box and was trapped, also implying there is no more monarchy. It's the Day of the Dead, the one day when the Tom-a-Lone is allowed to see his people. Now in this universe, that fairy tale somehow ties in with Prince Lux. And in this universe, Nyx always gets these messages from the Kindly Ones that something is off and wrong. Everything in the universe is the same as the other one, but there were different causes. For example, Nyx's mother died, but it was of a sickness and not childbirth.

The particular day Nyx wakes up, she realizes everything that happened in the other universe and she sets off the find Lux. She seeing him ready to reenter the box after his one day to check over his people, and she calls out his name to the Kindly Ones, but they said it doesn't count and he isn't free because Ignifex made that bargain and he never existed in this universe. So Nyx bargains to stay in the box with him, and the Kindly Ones find this 'bargain' so ridiculous that they let her stay with him with no cost. But they break out of the box because she made a bargain against a bargain. The other bargain (the one made by the first king) was that if the heart wasn't pure, they'd stay in the box alone, but for Lux, he was with Nyx, so it didn't count. And that was the end. (hide spoiler)]

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Keri
But here's a major hole in the logic with how the story ends....

SPOILERS:

If time has rewound itself, and things go back to how they were before Prince Lux made the deal with the Kindly Ones.... then how are Nyx & her twin alive? The only reason they were born is because their father made a deal with The Gentle Lord so that his wife could become pregnant but if there is no Gentle Lord then there could never have been a deal. So how are Nyx and her sister alive????

Any takers on trying to answer that question???

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