63 pages • 2-hour read
Silverborn: The Mystery of Morrigan Crow
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Symbols & Motifs
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death.
Wunder
Wunder is a magical force in the series—“a mysterious energy source that powered the realm and had a mind of its own unless you knew how to wield it” (13). As a representation of Morrigan’s unique talents, Wunder demonstrates that Morrigan is capable of both creative and destructive acts.
For instance, when she creates the luminous net that keeps Barty from falling into the grasp of the Guiltghast, Morrigan saves him from harm and manages to soothe the creature for a while. When Aunt Margot asks her to perform some “splendid bit of magic” for the guests at Dario’s memorial (257), Morrigan creates a cloak of red and gold—the Rinaldi team colors—to please Aunt Modestine. Though she enjoys the admiration that these demonstrations of Weaving garner, Morrigan’s primary motivation is the desire to use her abilities in helpful, productive, or protective ways.
In fact, when Ezra Squall warns her that exercising her powers as Wundersmith might require her to engage in acts of destruction now and again, Morrigan rebels. She doesn’t yet understand that destruction can sometimes be necessary to protect or to make way for something better. This indicates that her worldview is transitioning from a childlike understanding of good and evil as clearly delineated to a more mature recognition that actions can be complicated. It also demonstrates that while Wunder feels like a part of her—something that she has special access to and is learning to control and channel—it also is an untapped potential that she doesn’t yet entirely understand. In this way, Wunder is a motif that supports the theme of Honing One’s Abilities as a Young Adult, signifying the new aspects of self that a young person might discover during this formative phase of development.
The Guiltghast
The creature known as the Guiltghast develops over the course of the novel into a multidimensional symbol that represents the great things that Wundersmiths can create as well as the dangers such magical creations can pose. Hani Nakamura created the Guiltghast to extract confessions from those guilty of criminal acts. However, the Guiltghast no longer serves the purpose for which it was designed, which represents how certain Wundersmith creations have gone haywire in Nevermoor after their makers were killed or exiled. Now, by extracting guilt, the Guiltghast leaves its subject dead, injured, comatose, or free of any sense of guilt or remorse. Morrigan’s teacher, Conall O’Leary, suggests that a human without a moral compass might be more monstrous than the Guiltghast itself, hinting at the moral repercussions of unfettered use of Wunder (or, symbolically, any kind of technology). These unintended consequences leave Morrigan wondering about the nature of Wunder and of her own power. When she fully sees the creature, Morrigan thinks that it is “[t]errifying, but beautiful” (315), a dichotomy that captures the conflicts around its existence. By the end of the book, the Guiltghast has been temporarily satisfied but not tamed, a symbol of the looming threat that Morrigan will eventually have to face.
In another respect, the Guiltghast represents the innocent creatures that Morrigan feels it is her duty to protect. She objects to the suggestion of simply killing it because she feels that the Guiltghast has done nothing to deserve being put to death; it simply wants to eat and sleep, following the instincts of any animal. At the same time, she recognizes its destructive potential and works to mitigate it, affirming her own moral instincts. When Morrigan stops the Guiltghast from destroying the guests at her birthday ball and opts to erase her summoning spell by turning back time, Morrigan shows her reluctance to use harmful means to achieve her purpose. Instead, she uses plain logic, cunning, and the skills of her friends to expose Tobias Darling as the murderer of Dario Rinaldi.
The Silverborn Saga
The novels of the Silverborn Saga are a plot device and motif that gently satirizes the genre once called pulp fiction—books that make use of sensationalism and melodrama to shock and excite readers. The Silverborn books also serve as celebrity fiction in that they promise a peek into the lives of the wealthy and privileged, showing their misdeeds and making moral judgments about their characters.
Through this, the Silverborn books support the theme of Understanding Class Difference and Prejudice. In one respect, the books represent interest in and curiosity about the lives of the ultra-rich. However, the books also attract readers because they purport to share scandalous secrets about the lives of their lightly fictionalized subjects, selling themselves on the basis of schadenfreude, the pleasure one can take in the misery, pain, or downfall of others. The circumstances surrounding the books’ publication themselves further the critique, as they’re published under a pen name due to the Silver District’s bias against paid labor. Moreover, the Silverborn books—which began as one sister entertaining another—were initially published by Margot as a kind of revenge, and ultimately became a source of hidden income for the family—offer a metafictional commentary on the varied power and purposes of literature, even as they serve as a plot device to structure Morrigan and Cadence’s murder investigation.
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