Sorrow and Starlight: Zodiac Academy 8

“Your soul is bound to mine […] And I won’t rest until I make every star in the heavens fall for trying to cleave us apart.”

The stars are not just passive observers in this world; they are active forces shaping the lives of the characters. By vowing vengeance upon them, Tory directly challenges the idea that fate is immutable. She refuses to be a victim of circumstances and instead positions herself as a force unbound by fate or morality, engaging in The Struggle Between Fate and Free Will.

“That door was impenetrable, both the metal itself and the spells I had used to seal it in place. But as my heart raced in fierce denial of what I was seeing before me, I realized what she had done, how she had bypassed the magic by destroying the center of the door and how very easily she had managed this act of horror.”

Lionel’s vault is a symbol of his dominance, greed, and security. That it has been violated so easily by Tory’s fire causes a deep, visceral fear that he is unaccustomed to feeling. His certainty in his own invincibility has been fractured. Tory specifically stole his horde. As a dragon, it is the source of his power. The theft isn’t just an attack on Lionel’s material possessions; it is a symbolic castration and a challenge to his claim as the most powerful person in Solaria.

“I loved you when your soul shone with all the starlight in the night sky, and I’ll love you now when your soul is the blackest you’ve ever known. I will love you whole and I’ll love you in pieces. It doesn’t matter, light or dark, I am here.”

Darcy is drowning in guilt, believing herself to be a monster unworthy of love because of the destruction she has caused under the Shadow Beast’s control. Yet Orion refuses to let her believe that her curse defines her. His love is not conditional on her being light, powerful, or even whole. His words challenge the ideas that identity is fixed or that suffering and mistakes erase who someone truly is.

“I saw infinite outcomes, all of them drenched in blood and housed in agony.”

Gabriel’s visions, once a tool meant to guide and protect, have become an inescapable nightmare for him in Lionel’s captivity, where pain and death are the only constants. There is no escape from the war’s devastation and no vision offering solace or certainty of peace. Instead, he is caught in a cycle of watching those he loves suffer, powerless to intervene in any meaningful way. Gabriel spent his life trying to use his Sight to steer events in a better direction, but now he feels like a prisoner to fate.

“I’d thought grief would be louder than this. It felt like there should have been people screaming, thousands of fists hammering at the walls, thunder cracking through the sky. But if anything, things were quieter. More still.”

Xavier, reeling from the loss of Darius, their mother, and countless others, reflects on the slow, insidious ache of his grief. Though he doesn’t outright say it, his sense of injustice is deeply embedded in this passage. The absence of a cosmic reaction through storms or celestial protests makes it feel to him as if the universe itself fails to acknowledge his loss. This fuels his bitterness and despair, reinforcing the idea that suffering is endured alone.

“I wouldn’t have called myself the master of dramatic arrivals by any means, but I had to admit that the sight of me on my knees covered in lake water, blood, and gore, panting through my exhaustion and clinging to a sword as if it was the only thing capable of keeping me upright in this world, was likely an all-time low.”

Tory’s self-deprecating humor is a defense mechanism and an attempt to mask how truly drained she is. However, beneath it, she remains defiant. Even at her lowest, she stands back up, leaning on her sword for support—an action that symbolizes the degree to which she relies on fighting to make her way through the world. She’s broken, grieving, and exhausted, but she still refuses to stay down.

“‘I made a promise to the stars to end them for this failure,’ she said in a low voice, the cold certainty in her words making the hairs along the back of my neck stand on end. ‘And I intend to keep it.’”

Even Caleb, a Vampire accustomed to bloodshed and death, recognizes the power in Tory’s words. Hers is no empty threat. It is a cosmic challenge, and Tory fully intends to follow through. It ties back to the Vega twins’ overarching battle against destiny itself, a theme that has persisted throughout the series. From the beginning, the stars have dictated their paths, shaping their hardships and losses, but now, Tory is declaring outright rebellion.

“My mind was hollow and dark, all good thoughts lost to a river of blackness that washed them away to an even blacker sea. I was a man adrift, searching for something I couldn’t find in this colourless land of desolation.”

Orion descends into darkness, both physically and emotionally, as Lavinia’s torment erodes his sense of self. His identity as a warrior, as a protector, and even as Darcy’s mate is slipping away as the darkness takes hold. Yet, within this darkness, there is a faint hope as his subconscious searches for her. The contrast between the black void and the eventual light that Darcy represents is one of many such dualities in Sorrow and Starlight, such as despair and hope, destruction and love.

“The next time I met with the rebels, I would not leave a single one of them to breathe another breath. I would eradicate them, every man, woman, and child, burned to ash so that they could never rise against me again.”

This quote encapsulates Lionel Acrux’s unrelenting cruelty and his obsessive need for absolute power. His rhetoric is not just about dominance; it is about complete annihilation. There is no room for mercy and no space for negotiation. He sees the rebels not as individuals but as a disease that must be burned away entirely. In the novel’s political allegory, he represents authoritarianism, while the rebels represent the hope of a democratic resurgence.

“This was the twist of fate that had stolen Darius from me and delivered him into the conniving arms of the Vega whore. I would kill her for his death. For corrupting him beyond all point of reason and forcing my king to deal with him as a traitor instead of a son.”

Mildred is a Dragon woman whose obsession with purity, bloodlines, and her so-called destiny has shaped her into a figure of both grotesque humor and genuine menace. She has rewritten history in her mind to cast herself as the rightful partner of Darius, while blaming Tory for his downfall. The way she frames her revenge is also telling, as she doesn’t seek it because she mourns him as a person but because she sees him as a possession she was robbed of.

“I was living in a torturous paradox, where on the one hand, I couldn’t bear the emotional pain it caused me after we’d pushed the boundaries of our relationship into friends with benefits, but on the other, I wanted Caleb to use me in any way he saw fit and feast on the scraps of his attention whenever he tossed them my way.”

This passage provides insight into Seth’s character. Beneath his sharp tongue, he is someone who feels deeply. The way he views himself in relation to Caleb, being caught between dominance and submission, adds another layer of complexity to his character. He is trapped in a toxic cycle and unable to walk away, and his emotions scare him to the point that they threaten to unravel his identity.

“I had never put any love of mine above my love of her and never would have either. It broke something in me as I took in the decision she’d made, the last piece of the girl I’d been shattering as I found myself utterly alone in the world with no one to hold on to at all.”

For so long, the Vega twins have been each other’s constant in a world that has sought to destroy them at every turn. They have been each other’s chief means of Overcoming Grief Through Love and Community. Now, for the first time, Tory is forced to face the truth that Darcy has chosen someone else over her. Through countless losses, Tory’s sister was the one thing she could count on. Now, even that certainty has been taken from her, and with it, her identity as the strong twin.

“I knew this day was done. In all honesty, I’d known it the moment Gabriel had spoken his truth. He had already seen how this would play out. Fate had changed, our one chance was lost. And now all we could do was retreat with as many of the people we loved as we could.”

Throughout the war, the rebels have placed immense faith in the idea that fate was leading them toward victory. However, Gabriel’s warning forces Dante to come to a crushing realization: It’s over. The attack was their best chance, and it failed. To accept this and retreat is an inversion of what the rebellion has always stood for. They have fought against the idea of Lionel’s dominance being absolute and against the notion that fate could be controlled by one man’s will. Yet now, as the battle unfolds in real time, it becomes clear that some things are beyond even their power to fight.

“Once, me and the other Heirs might have seen her death as a blessing in disguise, but now, it was hard to think of many worse fates for ourselves, or Solaria as a whole, than to see one of the Vegas die while Lionel Acrux reigned.”

This quote highlights the transformation that the Heirs have undergone throughout the Zodiac Academy series. They have gone from the enemies of the Vegas to their fiercest protectors. Caleb recognizes that if Tory were to die, it wouldn’t just be a loss to their rebellion; it would be a personal, irreparable loss to him and to all of them.

“It was a commiseration in group form, our grief and fear and sorrow combining beneath the light of the cold moon and stars as we were offered this brief respite from all of it, a way to process and move on before the woes of tomorrow rose their ugly snouts once more.”

This passage is an example of the novel’s theme of overcoming grief through love and community. The shared grief of the rebels, along with their collective exhaustion and despair, is transformed into a ritualistic sexual release. It isn’t just about physical indulgence; it is an act of defiance and a refusal to allow despair to consume them.

“This here, was the reason I’d inked a clock on my back with no hands. I wanted time to stop whenever I was with him like this, no tick, tick, tick of the unavoidable passage of time that would lead to us parting.”

The imagery of the clock with no hands is a metaphor for Seth’s feelings toward Caleb. Time itself is the enemy. Because they are both Heirs, they are obligated to continue their bloodlines separately, meaning that they cannot be together outside this frozen moment. When Caleb brushes him off to their mothers, time starts moving again.

“Am I really trying to look on the bright side? There is no star damned bright side. There’s just a shit fate or an even shitter one.”

Orion is a realist and has lived long enough in Solaria to know that there is no escape from fate, only suffering and death. His raw, blunt language here strips away any illusion of hope and reinforces his disillusionment. Despite this, he still instinctively grasps at whatever resilience he can muster, not for himself but for Darcy.

“I would damn well live up to the reputation of the Vega name today, and prove why I was a queen of fire and ruler of death. The shadows had haunted me too long, kept me subdued when I should have been rising like the Phoenix I was. I may have been deep in the ashes now with no magic or Order to claim, but the embers were catching in my soul.”

Here is Darcy’s symbolic rebirth, where she realizes that her strength was never about magic but about who she is. Even without magic, she is still a Vega Queen and still a warrior.

“You’d better be watching, sir. Because this fight is for the Vegas.”

During Orion’s fight against Tharix, he takes up the sword of Hail Vega, the twins’ father and the deceased Savage King. By wielding his sword, Orion is deliberately showing that he is fighting for Darcy, her sister, and the future of Solaria. For the first time in the novel, they have a real shot at freedom, but that freedom must still be fought for.

“Confusion raced through my head, and I moved forward, ready to finish the Beast once and for all, but as that light caressed my skin, I gasped. The touch of it was so familiar that it made me hurt inside, a noise of pain falling from my lips as I reached for it in desperation. Magic. And not just any magic. It was mine.”

Darcy’s fight with the Shadow Beast represents her reclamation of self. By fighting the creature, she literally battles the darkness within her. She must fight it without magic at first, surviving only through her will. When Darcy finally defeats the Shadow Beast and her magic is returned to her, it is a total reclamation of her identity.

“Love makes a monster of me.”

Here, Tory fully embraces the duality of her nature. She recognizes that love is not only soft and tender but also a force of destruction. Throughout her journey, she has been forced to choose between love and power and between embracing her emotions or suppressing them in the name of survival. In this moment, she refuses to be bound by the false dichotomy. She claims both. Her love is the very thing that made her powerful and ruthless. Instead of being ashamed, she accepts it.

“I had come here to see him, and I refused to let death have me before I did.”

The phrasing of this quote is crucial, as Darcy doesn’t say she refuses to die. Instead, she “refuse[s] to let death have [her].” Death, to her, is not a state of being but an entity with a will of its own. As such, it is something she can defeat.

“I don’t think that you’re my hero, Roxy […] I think you’re my villain too.”

Darius has never been one of the more morally upright characters in the Zodiac Academy series. He has killed, manipulated, and ruled with an iron fist because he believed that it was the only way to survive, and he never thought he deserved love. Tory, despite being one of the protagonists, is also not a hero. His line acknowledges that they are both monsters, but they are monsters together, whatever that brings.