In these novellas, heat symbolizes passion and positive emotions while cold represents numbness and negativity. Grim describes the frigid winter palace, such as the “frost-glazed window” of the young Grim’s room, to show how Grim feels trapped in a hopeless situation. Similarly, Oro uses temperature to express the unrelenting bleakness that Oro feels in the centuries after the curses are cast: “My world has become one of night and darkness and cold” (386).

Much of the novellas’ heat imagery centers around Isla, who rekindles both of her love interests’ feelings after ages of emotional blunting. For example, Grim observes, “I’ve always felt cold, as if my emotions and heart had been frozen solid, but around her, I feel alive. I feel everything” (222). Similarly, Oro frequently imagines Isla on his favorite beach, which becomes, in his dreams, a place of sexual passion and physical warmth. Through the duality of heat and cold, Aster offers insight into Grim and Oro’s emotions and develops their romances with Isla.

In Oro, the saying, “Find your fire” signifies autonomy (345). When Oro is a young child, his mother says this to encourage him to look within for peace and strength: “Find your fire. It doesn’t just apply to flames. It means finding the light in the darkness. Finding the calm in the chaos” (345). Centuries after his mother’s death, Isla’s entrance into Oro’s life reminds Oro of his mother’s advice.

The saying’s meaning shifts over the course of the story, such as when Oro links fire to his selfless devotion to Isla, his friends and family, and all the people who depend upon him for their survival: “For them—for them I will find my fire. Every time. Until I am all but extinguished” (472). During the novella’s resolution, he reflects that he’s fulfilled his mother’s wishes for him and found his fire because, with Isla, he’s “burning with every single want and dream [he] long believed could never belong to [him]” (545). Oro’s mother lends a personal nuance to the story’s duality between heat and cold and underscores Isla’s importance as a source of hope for Oro.