In Rites of the Starling, accepted history is presented as a fragile and often deliberately manipulated construct, designed to legitimize power rather than preserve truth. The novel systematically dismantles the foundational myths of its world, arguing that what society accepts as fact is frequently a curated narrative. Through characters who uncover suppressed knowledge in ancient journals, forbidden languages, and forgotten oral traditions, the book suggests that both personal and political liberation depend on the courage to question the official story and seek out the fragmented truths that have been intentionally erased.

Caspia’s journey to Calandra leads to the deconstruction of Calandra’s entire religious cosmology. The society worships the Six as benevolent gods who defeated an evil pythoness. However, through conversations with the Voster dissident Hain, Caspia discovers that this history is inverted. The revered Six were actually six evil magicians who drew power from demons and cursed the land. The pythoness who defeated them was, in fact, a heroic Starling ancestor. Over centuries, believers in the religion of the Six twisted the story until the villains were deified and the savior was vilified and forgotten. Calandra’s history, presented as a divinely inspired chronicle of truth, is instead the product of a successful propaganda campaign, proving that the most fundamental “truths” can be the most profound lies, preserved to obscure a dark origin of power.

Personal history is likewise shown to be a site of hidden and dangerous knowledge, accessible only to those who actively seek it. Odessa’s journey of self-discovery is driven by her mother’s and Luella’s journals. These texts contain revolutionary truths about her Starling heritage, the nature of magic, and the origins of the Lyssa infection. Written in a nearly dead language or filled with risky alchemical formulas, the journals represent a counter-narrative to the public record. For Odessa, deciphering these books is the only way to understand her identity and her place in the world. Almost from the beginning, she understands the journals as dangerous: As she begins deciphering her mother’s journal, written in an ancient language, she feels “reluctant to plow through the journal, almost afraid of what I might learn. But I forced myself to read at least one story every day, only sharing them with Evie once I’d deemed them safe” (82). At this point, she understands little of what she finds in the journal, but she recognizes that the knowledge contained inside will put her on a collision course with those who have sought to suppress such knowledge. Her quest suggests that reclaiming one’s own story often requires excavating a past that others have tried to bury.

The novel also explores how truth is shaped by cultural context, particularly through the opposing perceptions of a single creature: the swift, or crux. In Caspia’s homeland, the swift are revered, majestic animals integral to Starling identity. Upon arriving in Calandra, she is horrified to learn they are known as crux—monstrous beasts of slaughter. When Andreas tells her, “What you call a swift, we call a crux” (214), he exposes how the peoples of both continents have been operating with limited knowledge. They have been seeing only part of the picture, giving rise to harmful distortions. By recovering lost or suppressed knowledge, Caspia and Andreas dispel these distortions and achieve a more accurate understanding of the world around them.