Black Sun

“‘A child in a foreign place to a foreign man,’ she murmured, and Serapio knew she was talking to herself. ‘I’ve done everything required. Even this.’”

Serapio’s mother fulfills her part of the prophecy for the Carrion Crow clan. She views it as fulfilling an obligation for the greater good, regardless of what she wants for herself—it comes at the expense of her son’s ability to freely choose what he wants for his life, as well as her own ability to choose. This moment where she talks to herself foreshadows major events which will come later in the text. However, because it’s focused through a close third person point-of-view on Serapio, the reader is not given all of the information to understand what it might mean.

“Some Teek had eyes the crystal blue of the brightest waters, some the storm gray of gales, but the rarest of Teek had eyes like hers: a kaleidoscope of jewel colors, shifting like sunlight in shallow water. A man in a port she couldn’t remember now once told her the nobles of Tova collected Teek eyes like hers to wear around their fingers like jewels.”

Xiala is from the Teek culture. The Teek have unique eyes that differentiate them from everyone else. Kaleidoscopic eyes are rare even among the Teek, but they are only found among Teek. Because of the discrimination the Teek face, Xiala’s eyes are one of the ways that she will never be able to pass as a non-Teek. Even though the world is a secondary world fantasy, the fear of ill will, discrimination, and lesser treatment is ever-present, as is in the fear of violence: other people literally collect Teek body parts to wear as adornments, without any thought that the Teek are people too.

“The truth was that as much as she loved the city, the city did not love her back. It had little use for a Maw beggar girl; some use for a clever servant who caught the attention of the aging and eccentric Sun Priest; more use for an unlikely dedicant who had an uncanny ability to read the stars and outshine her society classmates; and a final and blistering use for an idealistic young Sun Priest who thought she could make a change to her beloved city but instead only made enemies.”

On the day of the convergence, as Naranpa is dragged from the river, she considers how Tova regards her. Throughout this quote, “Tova” is used as a synecdoche, or word that encompasses all of the people, clans, neighborhoods, and organizational structures of the city. Although the place is her home, and as a lifelong Tovan she has every right to it, Tova does not love her back as she loves it. Yet, she has faith in it—in this manner, Roanhorse explores Naranpa’s character motivations primarily through the lens of faith. Additionally, we see the use of parallelism, or parallel rhythm, cadence and structure. This creates movement in the sentence as it builds on linked ideas, the uses that Tova has for Naranpa—as well as a sense of the uphill climb she’s faced as she tries to earn its regard.

“...a vision flashed in front of her. A face. That of a young man, smiling. Teeth stained red and something like a bird skull carved into his skin at the base of his throat. His hair as black as a crow’s wings, curling back from a handsome face. He wore a cloth tied around his eyes, but he raised his head as if he had seen her, too. And then he was gone.”

Xiala first comes to the ship, where she connects magically with Serapio. He has taken the form of a bird. This vision foreshadows the future of their connection to come—a connection that neither of them expects and which neither can easily explain. It’s her first glimpse of recurring images associated with Serapio, the Carrion Crow, and the old crow god: the dyed teeth, the carved skin designs, the physical connection to crows.

“Serapio pulled a small skin bag from around his neck and opened it. He licked the pad of his index finger and dipped it inside. Star pollen clung like shattered light to his wet skin in a fine sheen of silver dust. He pressed his finger against his tongue and sucked it clean. It had a slightly bitter taste, sharp and acrid.”

Despite being blinded, Serapio can see. Through the use of star pollen, he can cast his mind and astral project into the bodies and minds of crows. This moment in the narrative is when he realizes how closely his mind is connected to Xiala’s. Serapio’s use of the crows is not a one-way power dynamic, but a shared connection and consensual partnership. Roanhorse destigmatizes drug use and disability through Serapio’s ability.

“It was his triumph, an ornately carved trunk of rosewood, the lid a map of the Meridian continent hewn in meticulous detail [...] His tutor had whipped his hands when he’d gotten something wrong and made him start again.”

The intricately carved rosewood trunk represents the lengths to which Serapio must push himself—and be pushed by his tutors—to train for his future as the Odo Sedoh. His tutors treat him with harshness in the service of their mission. When Serapio is growing up, no one is kind or tender: he must fend and fight for himself. His ability to perceive through his other senses is honed in a way that others with typical sense abilities might see as superhuman.

“Her mission had always been a gamble [...] Naranpa had set out to seize some of that power back, not for herself but because she believed that the priesthood could be better, do better, for not only the city but the entire continent. But she was beginning to admit that she had underestimated how much the game was rigged against her.”

This moment is a turning point or reversal in the plot: it’s the first time that others in the priesthood who want to usurp Naranpa take a risk and make a big move by rescheduling a meeting without asking her. Because this section is focalized on Naranpa in a close third person point-of-view, the reader can see how she tries to put others ahead of herself. Her desire to serve the collective makes her a true leader in contrast with the usurpers, who want to use the power of the priesthood for their own gain and the gain of their natal clans.

“These were not words of love or sentiment, things said from a mother to a son upon his birth. These words were a warning. A prediction. He ran a finger over the ink. On the paper was a single glyph: the glyph of life with a diagonal line breaking the symbol in half, shattering ‘life’ [...] For him, the glyph was clear. His mother had been murdered.”

In this passage, Okoa opens a letter that his mother wrote him before his birth, to be delivered in case she died before her time. This letter is how he finds out that his mother was probably murdered in his absence. The use of glyph language evokes Mayan writing systems, which used glyphs as their primary mode of representation.

“Someone none-too-skilled had taken a knife to his upper body and carved. On his bare chest was the bird she had seen last night, but in skeletal relief with gaping eyeholes and a sharp beak that pointed down toward his stomach. It was a crow’s skull that started at the dip in his throat and covered his chest.”

This is the first time that Xiala sees Serapio’s half-naked body. She notices the carvings Serapio’s mother engraved—it’s a moment of recognition for the characters, as Xiala first recognizes that Serapio is the same person to whom she felt magically connected earlier in the text. The recurring imagery of the scarification and body writing creates a distinctive symbology for the Carrion Crow.

“[L]et me tell you what we say of ourselves. We are Teek, which means ‘the people,’ and our ways are Teek, and our islands Teek [...] We call the water Al-Teek. Our mother. Constant, life-giving, sustaining.”

Xiala tells Serapio not only about her culture, but about the wider Teek worldview. The close ties between people and the land echo those of real-world Indigenous peoples.

“[Naranpa] was back in her yellow vestments, day cape, and sun mask. Slipping that mask on had felt like a warm wash of summer air even in the heart of a snowstorm. She felt her power close, the wonder of the universe and the wheel of the sky at her fingertips.”

This passage foreshadows the importance of the relationship between the sun mask and its wearer, which is a key plot point: Serapio kills the person wearing the mask. The mask itself does not automatically imbue its wearer with power: it’s the investiture ceremony which does so. The mask represents the wearer’s anonymity and how members of the priesthood are supposed to be symbols of the power they hold rather than individuals with their own goals.

“The sea was darkness, vast and alive, and it swallowed her whole like she was no more than the smallest minnow. She dove deeper, past the surface tumble and rain, eyes seeking her lost men. She could feel her eyes change, her Teek eyelids coming down to keep the water out, the shape changing to let in more light, the field of her vision expanding.”

When two of Xiala’s crew fall overboard during a severe storm, she dives into the water to rescue them without thinking about the consequences for herself. Like Naranpa, she values others and the collective above herself. This passage is focused on Xiala through the close third person point-of-view. We see that Xiala’s change to a mermaid-like creature is as much a surprise to the reader as it is to her. The change terrifies a crewmember Xiala is trying to save; his fear ties back to the fear of the other and of the monstrous.

“The sky had become a black wall. A living, undulating, screeching wall of feathers and claws and beaks that was descending on them like a nightmare [...] Men jolted back to life, screaming as birds ripped flesh from cheeks and plucked eyes from sockets.”

Serapio’s crows pull out the eyes of the people trying to harm him and Xiala. This serves as a callback or echo of Xiala’s story about rich Tovan people using Teek eyes as jewelry. This scene foreshadows the destructive power that Serapio has at his disposal and the severity of damage he will be able to inflict on the priesthood.

“[Naranpa] realized her gambit to restore the Sun Priest’s power had truly failed. In fact, she had somehow made things worse.”

The removal of Naranpa’s power as the Sun Priest and success of her usurpers serves as a reversal in the book—it seems like she has failed. Naranpa resolves to return to Coyote’s Maw, the neighborhood where she grew up, and ask her brother for help.

“She moved slowly, methodically, nothing like her old self who had fearlessly scaled the Maw. But she did move, and she smiled grimly as she passed a row of narrow windows that marked the third floor. Only two stories to go, she told herself. Nothing for a Maw brat.”

This passage serves as an example of irony. It’s only Naranpa’s upbringing and childhood in the impoverished neighborhood of Coyote’s Maw that allows her to free herself from a genteel incarceration in the celestial tower. Her freedom also allows her to formulate a plan for dealing with the usurpers and winning back the priesthood.

“[S]he leaned in, only a matter of a few feet, and kissed him. He resisted at first, as if confused, and she wondered if he’d ever been kissed. But then his mouth softened and returned her interest [...]

‘Xiala,’ he murmured. ‘I can’t.’ He drew his mouth away.”

Serapio rejects Xiala’s kiss because of his single-minded focus on his mission as the Odo Sedoh. For religious reasons, he’s celibate; he also refuses the intimacy because he is not only human: he is more than human. 

“Whether the violence starts with the Odohaa or the priests, another Night of Knives would be the end of us all. Tova would not recover. The Crescent cities already regard us like a ripe fruit, waiting to pick us apart.”

Naranpa’s brother Denaochi, a crime boss in Coyote’s Maw, examines the broader context for the power shift within the celestial tower. For the first time, it occurs to Naranpa that some of the clans have ulterior motives for shifting power away from Tova and to cities elsewhere on the continent: in her naivete and predilection to assume the best of others, she had not considered this possibility. Instead of Naranpa’s interests being aligned with the celestial tower, she is aligned with her brother: the crime bosses want to keep power in their city too.

“He listened to her move about the room, trying to be quiet so as not to wake him. He wanted to ask her to join him again, to share the narrow bed, but was afraid she would say no. Fear. It was an emotion he had not felt in a while. Want was not something he had felt recently, either, but he experienced it now, a sharp pain in his chest. He wanted her close, wanted her scent of sun and salt and ocean magic in his nose.”

Serapio’s desire for Xiala illustrates an inner conflict. Through training, he controls most of his own impulses, but he cannot stop himself from disregarding want. For a twenty-two-year-old, he is an old soul. He blames a simple desire on his own inability to concentrate and his fear of what might happen when he confronts the Sun Priest in Tova.

“‘[...] [I]f the crow god at the height of his influence were to devour the essence of the sun invested in the Sun priest at the nadir of hers, then the power in our world could be flipped to favor the crow.’

‘So it’s not only the institution you and my mother are after, it is the god itself. The very ordering of the world.’”

This moment illustrates a conflict between man vs. society. Serapio’s tutor explains the larger context for Serapio’s attack on the Sun Priest. The goal for his attack is to shift the balance of power in the entire world. Achieving this goal will be a test of both prophecy and magical theory without guaranteed result; however, those who help prepare Serapio for his duty suspend disbelief to try to make it come true. 

“I am something else, although sorcery was used in my making. I am an avatar of a god. I am the object, the vessel, that contains the power, but unlike the sun or a stone or the sea, I am, as you say, a man. But not just a man, Xiala. Don’t make that mistake [...] I am also a god.”

The reader learns how Serapio conceives of himself from dialogue rather than from direct access to his thoughts. There’s a dualism to his existence: he is a human and a god—not entirely a god, but a vessel for one.

“Serapio, for the first time, was coming home. To a people who didn’t know him, to a house he could never truly live in, even if all he could do was die for them.”

In this passage, Xiala ponders a recurring theme of both the book and her relationship with Serapio: their respective lack of home. Though she may be able to cope with her exile, Xiala will never feel at home without the Teek. It’s this personal experience which helps her understand Serapio’s willingness to die for Carrion Crow: even though he will never get to live among them, he can die as one of them.

“She took the moment to launch herself at the railing, grasp the top, and haul herself over into nothing. It was the fall she had always dreaded when she was a child in the Maw, her body plummeting to the rushing river below, the descent she was sure ended in death. But to Nara, it felt like flying.”

Naranpa’s jump from the bridge to the water below demonstrates a thematic counterpoint between her origin story as a child in the Maw and her life as an adult in the celestial tower. She is escaping from her current life and heading back to her old one. Her leap away from members of the priesthood bent on her murder and toward (what she hopes will be) safety is a literal leap of faith—the plot elements literalize the metaphor, “leap of faith.”

Another life had flashed before him […] He would have friends like the brothers on the barge, and he and Xiala would grow old together surrounded by children, and he would care for his crows by carving them houses from wood, and the only revenge he would take would be in the pleasure of a long and well-lived existence.”

Serapio imagines another possible life for himself. Instead of choosing this fantasy, he proceeds with his original plan to get revenge on the Sun Priest for the murders in a previous generation of members of the Carrion Crow. His conflict exemplifies man versus self.