Finale

“Tella didn’t know if their touching would put an end to their shared dreams, or if keeping his hands to himself was just another one of the many ways he maintained control, but it frustrated her endlessly. Tella wanted to be the one in control.”

On the surface, the nightly dream meetings between Tella and Legend seem romantic, even indulgent. But beneath the dreamy aesthetic is a constant power struggle that Tella is acutely aware of. Legend’s refusal to touch her is representative of his emotional withholding, and the distance that he maintains drives Tella’s frustration. While she once was dazzled by Legend, she now wants something more tangible: honesty, intimacy, and a connection that isn’t carefully choreographed.

“Tella wanted to believe that Legend really cared about her and that she was his exception. Although she couldn’t help but fear that all that belief really meant was that Legend was actually her exception, that her desire for him was the weakness that could destroy her if she didn’t conquer it.”

This quote cuts to the emotional core of Tella’s complicated relationship with Legend. She wants to be the one who can break through his inability to love, but the tragic irony is that her love for him, her hope, is rapidly becoming her fatal flaw. In wanting him, she risks losing control of herself.

“I’m not trying to win her hand. I’m offering her mine, and everything that comes with it, hoping she’ll take it and decide she wants to keep it.”

Amidst the puffed chests, subtle jabs, and escalating tension between Julian and Nicolas, this quiet declaration cuts through the performance. Unlike Nicolas, who is tailored to be the “ideal” suitor, Julian wants Scarlett to choose him because of who he is and what they already share. Yet despite his honesty, his past actions undermine him. Even though Julian’s speech is deeply meaningful, it arrives too late to stop the challenge that she has already declared.

“Fear was a poison that people mistook as protection. Making choices to stay safe could be just as treacherous.”

Tella’s whole life has been shaped by other people’s efforts to protect her: her sister’s sacrifices, her mother’s secrets, and her father’s control. Now, with the Fates awakening, fear once again threatens to dictate her path, but Tella refuses to surrender to it. Rather than fleeing the danger, she follows the trail and chooses action over paralysis.

“This wasn’t how it was supposed to be.”

In a book filled with illusions and long-lost dreams, Paloma’s death shatters Tella’s expectations and obliterates the entire trajectory she had hoped their story would follow. With her mother’s reappearance, Tella hoped to heal the wounds left by years of abandonment, but instead, her mother drugs her, reunites with Gavriel, and dies right in front of her. Paradise’s final actions therefore mark the end of Tella’s last illusion about her mother, her family, and what it means to be safe.

“The pain and the sorrow and the hurt were gone. But so was all of her strength.”

On the surface, Jacks’s magical removal of Tella’s grief is a relief, but she soon realizes that it isn’t a victory. In the process of escaping from her pain, Tella also loses part of her agency. The blood-sharing ritual between her and Jacks is simultaneously a violation and a seduction that she consents to because she is too broken to do otherwise. Tella’s strength has always come from her willingness to face horrors for the people she loves, so when she hands her suffering to someone else, she also gives away part of what made her powerful.

“Legend possessed a fallen angel’s beauty that commanded attention. He was tailored suits over inked tattoos, and lies that people wanted to believe. His palace would be breathtaking in the way that only powerful things could be.”

Tella’s description of Legend summarizes the duality that defines him. He is simultaneously elegance and danger, truth and deception. Stephanie Garber’s comparison of him to a “fallen angel” also forces him to straddle the realms of the sublime and the damned. As a quintessentially divine yet fundamentally flawed being, he defies categorization and embodies the shapeshifting elements of the archetypal Trickster figure.

“I thought I’d lost my mother a long time ago. I was furious with her. I didn’t trust her. I didn’t want her back in our lives, I didn’t want her…I didn’t want her at all.”

Scarlett’s words show her struggles with the complexity of grief, which often stretches far beyond loss to encompass feelings of guilt, anger, and conflict. Her attempts to mourn her mother’s death are fraught with her discordant knowledge that the very person she now misses is the same woman who caused her years of anguish and resentment. In fact, Scarlett rejected her mother long before death made the separation final. Her current struggle is not just her attempt to deal with emotional pain, for she must also reckon with the misguided shame of not being able to grieve in the “right” way.

“Love and immortality cannot coexist. If an immortal feels true love for even a minute, they become human for that minute. If the feeling lasts too long, their mortality becomes permanent. And most immortals would kill the object of their affection rather than become human.”

The novel’s climactic events hinge upon the idea that love is both a threat and an undoing to immortality. Although Legend spends most of the novel insisting that he cannot love Tella, but his position is not indicative of a lack of caring; he takes this stance because he knows that if he does choose to succumb to his love for her, he would lose his immortality. Given this dynamic, Garber suggests that being loved by an immortal is a death sentence for someone no matter what.

“Nicolas might have been the safer choice, but Julian was whom Scarlett wanted to choose. There was no competition between Julian and Nicolas. Julian had won Scarlett’s heart a long time ago.”

Throughout the Caraval trilogy, Garber shows that Scarlett is shaped by the need for safety and control: an emotional relic of her traumatic past with her father and of her mother’s decision to abandon her. Scarlett’s hesitance to fully embrace Julian has long stemmed from the uncertainty and risk that comes with loving someone who is so unpredictable, passionate, and intertwined with the magical chaos of Caraval. Nicolas, by contrast, represents predictability and security. However, Scarlett has grown up enough to understand that to make a life with Nicolas would be to live the worst kind of lie. Thus, when she chooses Julian, her action reflects her decision to honor the person she has become.

“But I don’t want your immortality, Legend. I want your love.”

Up to this point, Legend has maintained emotional distance under the guise of invincibility, but love requires surrender. And as Tella realizes in this moment, he isn’t offering to become vulnerable with her. Instead, he’s offering to change her so that he won’t have to be vulnerable at all. Tella refuses and chooses to prioritize love, even if it means enduring heartbreak and living without love’s presence.

“Everything that hurt was everything she cared about—Legend, her mother, Scarlett, the Fates taking over the empire […] She didn’t need to erase her pain; she needed it to propel her into action. Just because it was a negative emotion didn’t mean it wasn’t a valuable one.”

Earlier, Tella accepted Jacks’s offer to blunt her emotional pain when heartbreak or fear overwhelmed her. Now, she understands that this same pain is her strength because it connects her to the people she loves and the stakes she’s fighting for. Her refusal is also a subtle rejection of Jacks’s worldview, in which emotion is a weakness or a means to manipulate. To feel the full range of emotion is what makes Tella human.

“Right now you think that if you can conquer your powers, you can control the Fallen Star, but your magic might end up controlling you instead.”

Here, Julian isn’t just afraid Scarlett won’t come back; he fears that when she does, she may no longer be herself. Scarlett’s powers have been growing steadily throughout the novel, and while they’ve been helpful, they’re also connected to the manipulative and monstrous legacy of the Fates. Julian’s fears therefore serve as an ominous form of foreshadowing about the struggle that Scarlett will undergo in the novel’s climax, when her Fated powers threaten to overwhelm her sense of who she really is. In the end, she must reckon with the reality that if defeating the monster requires becoming like him, it might not truly be a victory.

“No one wants to spend an eternity in a cage.”

When speaking on why many of the Fates are unwilling to act against Gavriel, Anissa—the Lady Prisoner—references the punishment he inflicted upon her: imprisoning her head in a cage of pearls to ensure that no one else could touch her. Her words emphasize the nature of immortality as a curse, not a gift. To exist forever without the ability to choose, love, or die on one’s own terms is incarceration, not life.

“He’s bragged to me that his Fates will continue to torment the city. When he makes his first public appearance, he wants the people of Valenda to beg him to claim the throne and replace the Fates who killed Legend.”

By allowing the Fates to wreak havoc on Valenda, Gavriel is crafting a scenario where he will be welcomed as a savior. Notably, his plan is a dark twist on the kind of spectacle that Legend used to create with his games, but Gavriel’s actions have irreversible, real-world consequences. This parallel further complicates the moral lines between villain and hero.

“She never would have died without your magic […] She didn’t and doesn’t need you to save her. She needs to save you.”

Here, Julian cuts through Legend’s illusions, both literal and emotional, about his relationship with Tella. What she offers is more dangerous than his power: the ability to change and be redeemed. Julian’s words show what The Power of Love looks like, echoing an earlier statement made by Paradise. In Garber’s world, magic may be able to alter reality, but love can alter people.

“Love was such a fundamental part of what drove her, she didn’t even know who she’d be without love.”

If Scarlett chooses to master her ability to influence emotion, she risks becoming a Fate and, therefore, becoming incapable of love. Unlike Gavriel, whose immortality has severed him from compassion, Scarlett’s strength is rooted in her ability to feel. The question becomes not whether she can defeat the villain, but whether she can do it without losing herself.

“I think the most magnificent things are worth living for.”

Tella, like many other characters in the story, has long been enamored with the idea of something so magical and meaningful that it would be worth dying for. Now, however, Tella reframes that ideal and acknowledges that love and devotion are proven by choosing life rather than some grand, tragic sacrifice. She doesn’t want to die for Legend; she wants to live with him, fight beside him, and build something permanent.

“Love is the one weakness I’ve never been able to defeat. Humans try to make it sound as if it’s a gift. But once they find love, it never lasts, it only destroys, and for us it brings eternal death.”

Gavriel’s disdain for love stems from the betrayal he experienced with Paradise, and that trauma has become a twisted logic guiding all of his actions. He wants Scarlett to conquer her power so that she can eliminate his vulnerability forever. His view is in direct contrast to the emotional core of the novel, in which the love between sisters (or lovers) is the only form of power and agency that truly matters.

“She wasn’t their princess or their savior; she was their failure.”

Gavriel manipulates public perception by rewriting history, painting himself as both grieving husband and legitimate ruler. Scarlett, knowing the truth of his violence and her mother’s tragic fate, cannot see herself as anything but a symbol of defeat. She is a daughter who has not yet avenged her mother, and a sister who hasn’t saved her family.

“She tried to find a spark of love for him again. She hadn’t wanted to love her mother, either, but Paradise was more deserving. Or maybe no one deserved love. Maybe love was always a gift, but it was so much harder to give it to the Fallen Star because he’d spent his entire existence battling against it. He saw it as a disease rather than a cure.”

When trying to defeat Gavriel with love, Scarlett is forced to have a reckon with what love actually is, and whether it can, or should, be given to someone who has done nothing to earn it. Paradise, for all her failures, at least tried to love. Gavriel never has. And yet, Scarlett still chooses to show him love for the sake of everyone, Using Empathy to Gain Understanding and Resolve Conflicts.

“Jacks was right. She would be much safer if she went with him. He would never let anything happen to her. Jacks would protect Tella until the end of time.

But Tella could not leave her sister to fight the Fallen Star on her own.”

Tella’s relationships with both Jacks and Legend have defined much of her struggle throughout the novel, but, critically, what breaks through the spell is her love for her sister. She recognizes that she cannot leave Scarlett behind, even when every instinct, along with Jacks’s magic, urges her to choose her own safety. Scarlett inadvertently saves Tella, and now it is Tella’s turn to save her.

“This is my choice, and I choose you, Donatella. I don’t need immortality. You’re my forever.”

Legend explicitly chooses mortality in exchange for love, reversing everything that he has stood for and everything that Tella believed he was incapable of. In addition to romance, he offers partnership, vulnerability, and equality. By rejecting his need to remain the immortal who possesses or protects her from afar, he frees himself from invisible shackles and finally becomes human.