“This wasn’t her first kill. But this was her first deliberate, premeditated murder. This was the first person she’d killed not out of desperation but with cool, malicious intent.

It felt—

It felt good.”

This quotation marks a turning point in Rin’s character, as The Corrupting Influence of Power starts to change her approach to violence. Rather than regretting her violent acts, she revels in them because they amass more power.

“‘You’re like ants swarming an injured rat. You whittle it down with little bites. You never engage in a full-fledged battlefield encounter, you just fucking exhaust them. Sinegard’s problem was that it was teaching you to fight an ancient enemy. They saw everything through the Red Emperor’s eyes. But that method of warfare doesn’t work anymore.’”

Souji coaches Rin on the difference between the traditional wars she was trained to fight and the type of strategic warfare needed now. She uses a simile, comparing the Southerners to “ants swarming an injured rat,” to emphasize that the South relies on numbers to make up for what they lack in strategy and military technology. The idea that Nikara strategies are old-fashioned or outdated crops up multiple times in the novel, though usually in the context of Hesperia and The Multifaceted Nature of Empire and Colonialism.

“They would take back the south with sheer numbers. The Mugenese and the Republic were strong, but the south was many. And if southerners were dirt like all the legends said, then they would crush their enemies with the overwhelming force of the earth until they could only dream of breathing. They would bury them with their bodies. They would drown them in their blood.”

This quotation characterizes Rin’s main motivation, which is to take back Southern Nikan no matter how many of her own people die in the process. It also establishes the symbol of dirt and mud representing the identity of the South. These metaphors have long been used to denigrate Southerners, but they are here repurposed as images of elemental strength.

“What if he had told you? Altan—Rin’s hallucination of Altan—had asked her once. What if he’d made you fully complicit? Would you have switched your allegiance?

Rin didn’t know. She had despised the southerners back then. She’d hated her own people, had hated them the moment she saw them in the camps. She’d hated their darkness, their flat-tongued rural accents and fearful, dull-eyed stares. It was so easy to mistake sheer terror for stupidity, and she’d been desperate to think of them as stupid because she knew she wasn’t stupid, and she needed any reason to set herself apart.”

The specter of Altan symbolizes Rin’s guilt. He asks her if knowing Vaisra’s intention to use the Southerners as tools would have changed her allegiance to him. Altan points out Rin’s hypocrisy: while she criticized Vaisra for his treatment of Southerners, she also used to hold prejudice against them and continues to treat them as tools just as Vaisra did.

“They had fought like this before. Not so frequently after the Battle of the Red Cliffs, but every few weeks the same argument bubbled up between them, a chasm they couldn’t bridge. It always boiled down to the same fundamental impasse, with a hundred different manifestations. Kitay found her callous. Astonishingly careless with human life, he’d once put it. And she found him weak, too hesitant to take decisive action. She’d always been convinced that he didn’t quite grasp the stakes at hand, that he clung still to some bizarre, pacifist hope of diplomacy.”

This quotation points out the differences that characterize Rin and Kitay, who are foils to each other. Kitay is strategic and wants to mitigate loss of life, while Rin is ruthless with life and will sacrifice anything for victory. Though they fight on the same side, with Kitay always capitulating, this divide continues to plague them.

“They regarded each other for a moment in a silence that seemed to stretch on for an eternity, the weight of their shared past hanging heavy between them. Rin felt a sudden pang of nostalgia, that complicated mix of longing and regret, and couldn’t make it go away. She’d spent so long fighting by his side, she had to make herself remember how to hate him.”

When Rin meets Nezha, her former ally and potential love interest, on the battlefield as an enemy, it shows the interpersonal aspects of the theme of the calculations and human cost of war. Rin mourns the unexpected cost of the war, which is the comfort she found in his company and friendship.

“Open trade in the Nikara territories continues to reveal assets justifying the Consortium’s investment, and efforts to acquire these assets proceed smoothly as anticipated. The Consortium has secured the rights to several critical mining deposits with surprisingly little struggle (in truth, I imagine the Nikara are ignorant to the riches beneath their feet).”

These lines from the Hesperian missive about Nikan influence the theme of the multifaceted nature of empire and colonialism: Ultimately, Hesperia wants to extract raw materials from Nikan. This is one of the reasons they enable the civil war: so Nikara factions will weaken each other enough for Hesperia to establish itself.

“Why was it so hard to make the argument? ‘They don’t deserve that. It’d be one thing if they were Republican officers, but they’re fighting for the south. It’s wrong to just—’

‘Dear girl.’ Daji sighed heavily. ‘Stop pretending to care about ethics, it’s embarrassing. At some point, you’ll have to convince yourself that you’re above right and wrong. Morality doesn’t apply to you.’”

Daji coaches Rin on a form of leadership built around ambition, ruthlessness, and authoritarianism. Though the novel does not use this phrase, Daji describes a Machiavellian character archetype. Early in the book, Rin often claims to act for moral reasons, though her actions betray her selfishness and her lack of ethics.

“Whole villages, townships, and cities had thrived here once. Then the dam broke with no warning, and hundreds of thousands of villagers had either drowned or fled down south toward Arlong. When the survivors returned, they found their villages submerged still under floodwaters, ancestral lands that had housed generations lost to the river.

The region still hadn’t recovered. The fields where once sorghum and barley crops grew lay under a sheet of water three inches thick, now rank from decomposing corpses.”

This quotation shows the human cost of war. It references an event that occurred during The Poppy War. This shows that wartime events have lasting effects: the flood that Qara and Chaghan caused to kill Mugenese on the mainland contributes to death and famine for years to come.

“Until now she had perceived the Hesperian threat in terms of hard power—through memories of airship fleets, smoking arquebuses, and exploding missiles. She’d seen them as an enemy on the battlefield.

She’d never considered that this alternate form of soft erasure might be far worse.

But what if the Nikara wanted this future?”

Rin contemplates the multifaceted nature of empire and colonialism, realizing that the erasure of a people can occur even while the people themselves survive. She thinks the “soft erasure” of Nikara language, religion, clothing, and other cultural aspects is even worse than Nikara dying at Hesperian hands.

“‘It’s a tragedy we’re on different sides, Kitay. You know that. We would have been so good united, all three of us.’

‘We were united. And we were good. Your father had other plans.’

‘We can come back from this,’ Nezha insisted.”

This quotation characterizes Nezha’s naivety and desperation. Rin’s ideologies are black and white, while Nezha’s are grey. He doesn’t think his former decision to betray Rin to his father precludes their future cooperation for the betterment of the country. In this, he underestimates Rin’s ambition and vengefulness: She wants victory over him more than she wants what’s best for the Nikara people.

“Everywhere I looked I saw things that I never dreamed could exist.’

She folded her arms against her chest. ‘So what?’

‘So how did they build them? How did they create objects that defy every known law of the natural world? Their knowledge of so many fields—mathematics, physics, mechanics, engineering—eclipses outs to a terrifying degree. Everything we’re discovering at Yuelu Mountain, they must have known already for centuries.’ His fingers twisted in his lap. ‘Why? What do they have that we don’t have?’”

This quotation characterizes the internal conflict felt by Kitay, formerly the most calculating, rational, and reasonable character. After seeing Hesperian technology, Kitay starts to believe that the Hesperian claims to fundamental superiority may be true. This shows how insidious the multifaceted nature of empire and colonialism can be, when colonial ideologies are internalized by colonized and oppressed people.

“In a sense, this massacre wasn’t about Souji at all. This was about demonstrating a change in loyalty, a gruesome apology by anyone who had ever spoken against her before. This was a blood sacrifice to a new figurehead.

And if anyone still doubted her leadership, then the screaming would at least strike fear deep into their hearts. Anyone on the fringes now understood the cost of opposition. Through love or hate, adoration or fear, she would have them one way or another.

Daji, standing at the far end of the crowd, caught Rin’s eye and smiled.”

This quotation demonstrates Rin’s character as she changes into the Machiavellian leader Daji wants her to be. The corrupting influence of power is shown as Rin abandons the trappings of an ethical framework to amass authority.

“She suspected her relation to Hanelai. She’d suspected it for a long time. Now, staring at that face, she knew it was undeniable. She knew the word for it, a word she’d never used with anyone before. She dared not say it out loud.”

This plot twist reveals that Hanalei, the Speerly general that Jiang had a romantic relationship with, is Rin’s mother. Rin’s identity is bound up in being a war orphan, without love, care, or family ties, and so she finds the idea of knowing her mother’s identity overwhelming. This quotation also introduces the possibility that Jiang may be Rin’s father in addition to her father-figure, as his relationship with Hanelai would have coincided with the time of Rin’s birth, just prior to the genocide in Speer.

“Because you know that when the Hesperians are done with us, they’ll come for you. You know about their Maker and how they look at the world. And you know their vision for the future of this continent does not include you. Your territories will shrink smaller and smaller, until the day the Hesperians decide they want you off the map, too. And you need me for that fight.”

Rin criticizes Chaghan’s perspective on the multifaceted nature of empire and colonialism. Chaghan, from a tribal community persecuted by Nikan, doesn’t imagine the Nikara and Hesperians as that different. By contrast, Rin thinks that by not standing up to Hesperia alongside her he is dooming his own clan.

“She should have learned, many times over, that everyone she pledged her faith to would inevitably use and abuse her.

But she’d wanted to follow the Trifecta. She wanted someone else to fight her battles for her, because she was so, so exhausted. She wanted Jiang back, and she wanted to believe Daji was the woman she hoped she’d be. She’d wanted to believe she could foist this war onto someone else. And she’d always clung far too hard to her illusions.”

Rin tends to fully commit to the ideologies of the influential people around her. She repeated this pattern with Altan, Vaisra, Gurubai, and Souji before doing the same with the Trifecta. Though Rin is stubborn and ruthless, these moments show her youth and vulnerability.

“‘The west does not conceive of this war as a material struggle,’ she said. ‘This is about contesting interpretations of divinity. They imagine that because they obey the Divine Architect, they can crush us like ants.’”

Rin draws out the theme of the multifaceted nature of empire and colonialism when she explains why the Hesperians are so invested in the fate of Nikan. She points out how religion emboldens colonialism: The Hesperians see their colonization of Nikara as part of a divine plan that conveniently justifies any degree of violence. Ironically, Rin’s vision of a grand future for Nikara serves the same function in her own mind.

“‘I know you haven’t thought it through,’ Kitay said. ‘But you’ve got to put your head back on straight. Just because you can alter the world on a ridiculous scale doesn’t mean the normal calculations no longer apply. If anything, you must now be doubly careful.’”

This quotation characterizes Kitay’s characteristic level-headedness. While he literally binds Rin to reality with his anchor bond, he also metaphorically binds her to reality, serving as her conscience when she’s training the shamans.

“The Heavenly Temple was a palace of lightness, clarity, and air. This place bore a heavier history. This place was tainted with a mortal stain, was suffused with pain and sorrow, was a testament to what happened when mortals dared to wrestle with the gods.

She’d felt divinity like this only once before, an eternity ago, on the worst day of her life.

Right then, she could have been standing in the temple on Speer.”

There are several important settings in the novel where the veil between the material and spiritual world is thin. Such locations fall into two categories depending on the history of those places. Rin compares the dragon’s grotto in Arlong, where he has collected members of the House of Yin for centuries, to the abandoned temple in Speer after the genocide. Both places bear the imprint of human suffering and stand as reminders of human weakness and vulnerability in comparison to the gods.

“Rin’s glance darted between the Dragon and the dirigible.

She knew she had one chance to attack—but which target? Nezha had saved her from the dirigible; the dirigible was saving her from the Dragon. Who was her enemy now?”

This quotation introduces one of the largest existential questions Rin faces in the novel, as she renegotiates her idea of who her true enemy is. At this moment, she must decide whether Nezha or Hesperia is her most significant enemy. Nezha represents a personal threat for Rin, as she wants revenge for his betrayal of her, but Hesperia represents a large cultural threat to all Nikara.

“‘I am the force of creation,’ Rin murmured as she stared at the ceiling and watched it spin. Vaisra’s sorghum wine burned sweet and sour on her tongue; she wanted to swig more of it, just to feel her insides blaze. ‘I am the end and the beginning. The world is a painting and I hold the brush. I am a god.’”

This quotation characterizes Rin as she slides into a frame of mind characterized by inflated self-importance and delusion. Rin thinks she is a god, and thus any action she commits, no matter how morally objectionable, is divinely sanctioned. This is one of the book’s clearest demonstrations of the corrupting influence of power.

“No wonder Petra thought the Nikara were inferior. Rin saw it now. No wonder the Trifecta had ruled like they did, with abundant blood and ruthless iron. How else did you stoke the masses, except through fear?

How could the Nikara be so short sighted? Their stomachs weren’t the only things at stake. They were on the edge of something so much greater than a full dinner if they’d just think, if they’d just rally for one more push. But they didn’t understand. How could she make them understand?

‘They’re not sheep. They’re ordinary people, Rin, and they’re tired of suffering. They just want this to be over.’”

The reader is asked to contemplate the intersection between the themes of the calculations and human cost of war and power and its corrupting influence: particularly whether Rin cares more about the Nikara people or amassing power for power’s sake. Here, Rin reiterates Hesperian beliefs about the Nikara as “sheep” who cannot think for themselves. Kitay’s objection to this fact puts them in opposition to one another as foils.

“And if she did this, if she broke Kitay like Riga would have broken Jiang, she would only recreate those patterns—because there would be resistance, there would be blood, and the only way she could eliminate that possibility was by burning down the world.

Yet a single decision could escape the current, could push history off its course.”

Rin conjures up the symbolism of the Trifecta to illustrate how her torture of Kitay is a cyclical reenactment of the type of torture Riga inflicted on Jiang. Realizing her similarity to Riga is the event that makes Rin decide that she is too destructive to live, as Riga was. Unlike Riga, however, she ultimately recognizes the corrupting influence of power and decides to die by suicide, sacrificing her life for the chance of a more peaceful future.