Content Warning: This section contains discussion of racism, child abuse, child death, death by suicide, graphic violence, physical abuse, and emotional abuse.

This novel tracks Rin’s turn to Machiavellianism: This character type, extrapolated from Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince, uses political and interpersonal manipulation and a strategic lack of morals and empathy to gain and hold onto power. Rin’s Machiavellianism shows how manipulative, corrupt, and self-interested actions can lead to the accumulation of power, especially as Daji mentors her in the art of manipulating public perception. Rin’s character arc demonstrates that the accumulation of power itself can be a corrupting influence—a point reiterated in the sections that narrate Riga’s past journey into Machiavellianism, which parallels Rin’s in the present.

Daji’s two point-of-view chapters, which begin Parts 1 and 2, show Riga’s trajectory of being corrupted by power. In the first, he sacrifices a deer after they’ve just killed the Ketreyid Tseveri, in order to begin the anchor bond ritual between himself, Jiang, and Daji. It was a ritual they “lied, tortured, and murdered to obtain” (4) to become the most powerful Nikara alive. Here, they commit corrupt acts to gain power, while later Riga’s power itself leads to corrupt acts.