Heavenly Bodies breaks down the familiar fantasy divide between light and darkness by showing how Helios builds these concepts to justify its own domination. The novel creates this shift by presenting Helios as a regime built on propaganda and Asteria as its target. King Idris’s public image and Enzo’s struggles reveal a world where morality comes from choices rather than elemental alignment. Evil grows out of political decisions that strip humanity from an entire people.

The D’Oro dynasty maintains its power by endorsing a myth of Helion purity that supports its attacks on Asteria. King Idris brands his expansion as a “War on Darkness” (4), and this slogan shapes common language and storytelling. Helion citizens repeat slurs like “darkwitch” when they talk about Elara (35, 47). The kingdom’s version of “The Nightwolf and the Silver” even turns the dark-aligned wolf into a traitor and transforms the “Lightmaiden” into a celebrated killer. Elara notes that this twist “sounds just like Helios to vilify the Dark” (26). The altered tale shows how deeply Idris embeds his ideology in Helion culture.

The novel exposes this hypocrisy by contrasting Idris’s public heroism with private cruelty. He funds murals that show him with a crown of light (15), a false image that hides years of abuse toward Enzo. Enzo remembers the pain of his father’s whippings with light. Idris also manipulates Elara’s entire childhood to build a weapon against the Stars. His public alignment with Light masks a relentless pursuit of control.

Enzo’s life brings this political divide into sharper focus. Citizens of Helios know him as the “Lion of Helios” (17), a warrior linked to the Borderland Fires that devastated an Asterian village. Yet Enzo later confesses to Elara that he warned the villagers before the attack and hid them on the Helion side of the border. His choice shows a private moral compass that contradicts his kingdom’s claims about good and evil. His acts of mercy grow out of conscience rather than allegiance.

This manipulation reaches its most extreme form in Ariete’s rule, where violence becomes spectacle and narrative control. The opera house performance, where Elara’s life is reenacted and real people are murdered onstage, turns propaganda into literal theater, demonstrating how those in power reshape truth into performance to maintain dominance. By forcing Elara to watch her own story rewritten as entertainment, Ariete asserts control over meaning, revealing that the ultimate form of political power in the novel is the ability to define reality.

By the novel’s conclusion, this entire system collapses under the weight of its own contradictions. The revelation that the Stars themselves are usurpers mirrors Helios’s false moral authority, exposing a hierarchy built on deception at every level. Elara’s final transformation and vow to make the Stars fall reframes the conflict as a rejection of imposed narratives altogether. Good and evil are no longer dictated by kingdoms or gods, but redefined through individual choice, memory, and truth reclaimed from those who sought to control it.