In On Wings of Blood, author Briar Boleyn shows the central role that official history, myths, and narratives play in perpetuating a rigid, cruel class system. The very basis of the division between highblood vampires and mortal blightborns is a history that establishes the weakness of mortals and the nobility of vampires. Since the official origin myths of Sangratha position blightborns as helpless victims and highbloods as saviors, the blightborns stop questioning the “natural” superiority of the ruling order. It takes the outsider protagonist, Medra, to expose the interdependence of official history and injustice. Her clear-eyed perspective unpacks how a hierarchy is sustained through manufactured ideologies and institutionalized violence.

The highblood-dominated society of Sangratha is built on a foundational myth that recasts predation as a benevolent order. This ideology is most clearly articulated by Professor Hassan when he recounts sagas like the Great Famine and the Blight of Shadows, in which highbloods are positioned as saviors who rescued mortals from extinction. Hassan’s narrative frames the blightborns’ subservience as a debt owed for their survival. By accepting the label of “blightborn,” mortals internalize their inferiority, making them complicit in a system that thrives on their exploitation. This state-sanctioned history provides the moral framework for the highbloods’ predatory entitlement. However, Medra immediately sees the many gaps and logical fallacies in Hassan’s version of history, such as a convenient danger arising every hundred years to threaten the mortals, requiring them to be saved by the highbloods. Medra senses that the story is one-sided, noting to herself that “it [i]s all propaganda […] that most of Sangratha accept[s] as truth” (81).

The twisted, one-sided version of history provides cover for institutions that formally commodify blightborn bodies. The most extreme example is the Adoration Rite, a secret ceremony where a blightborn woman is ritually sacrificed, her lifeblood used as magical fuel to power the coercive spell that keeps Veilmar’s mortal population compliant. The narrative suggests that the Rite is possible because of the cover of the story of the Bloodmaiden. Because the Bloodmaiden supposedly spilled her blood to save her family, the notion that blood is a precious commodity is reinforced. The “sacrifice” of the young woman who was the Bloodmaiden is seen as “noble,” and the official version masks the problematic history lurking behind the myth. The myth of sacrifice normalizes cruelty in other ways as well, such as the acceptance of thralls—mortals blood-bonded into servitude—and sellbloods, who sell their blood in brothels like The Drained Rose. The novel suggests that official histories and myths make it easy to believe that violence is sacrifice, thus enabling the use of the mortal body as a disposable resource for highblood superiors. To dismantle the cruel social structure of Sangrathan society, the text suggests that characters must see the hidden histories lying beyond official narratives.