In Part 1, Rin oscillates between holding onto her youth and humanity and becoming hardened by The Dehumanizing Effects of War. When she sees civilians torturing Nikara collaborators with the Mugenese, she protests that their torture is “a bit much” (113), showing that she still has some moral framework for what types of wartime violence are inappropriate. When Venka tells her that Nezha isn’t doing well, she feels a “stupid, instinctive stab of worry” for him (118), and later when they face each other on the battlefield, she feels “a sudden pang of nostalgia, that complicated mix of longing and regret” (171). Rin wants to think of Nezha as the enemy so it’s easier to defeat him, but she can’t help but feel emotionally attached to him due to their shared history. When they enter Tikany, Rin “clung to [Tutor Feyrik’s] memory” and goes to his old house to see if she can find any remnants of the man who helped her get into Sinegard (126), reverting back the vulnerable young war orphan she’d been when she’d known him. Though Rin wants to banish her humanity and empathy, these moments emphasize her youth and vulnerability.

Perhaps because of her vulnerability, Rin has a soft spot for other vulnerable people. She sees herself in Pipaji, the young girl she rescues from forced sex work who “spent her entire life shielding her sister from other people” (121), and in Dulin, whom she found buried alive in the killing fields. When Dulin tells Rin about his survivor’s guilt, she wants “to comfort this boy, this stranger” because “she wished someone had told her the same thing months before” (158). Rin recognizes how the civil war is stealing away the childhoods of people like Pipaji and Dulin, even while justifying her wartime violence and causing situations that create more people like them.

Venka and Rin differ in how they think about their relationship to the violence they’ve lived through. Rin purposefully relives traumatic memories as penance—an effort to mitigate The Corrupting Influence of Power. Venka unwillingly relives the atrocities she’s lived through in her dreams, where “there’s no escape from them because they’re living in your own mind” (131). Because Venka sees trauma as something unwillingly foisted upon her, she believes that people must harden their hearts against violence rather than express sympathy or comfort one another. Venka physically assaults a girl who was forced into sex work and raped, like Venka was. She tells Rin that the girls with whom she survived Golyn Niis all died by suicide, and she was trying to help these girls by being harsh because they “have no space to be weak […] That can’t be an option. That’s how they die” (132). Unlike Rin, who comforts Dulin and helps him through his survivor’s guilt, Venka thinks that lingering in hurt will get people killed.

Both Rin and Venka’s approaches are informed by their reactions to the atrocities they lived through, showing how trauma can be passed between generations. Each commit violence because of the violence she has endured. As such, each act as a microcosm of The Multifaceted Nature of Empire and Colonialism. Nations that suffer colonial violence in the novel also enact colonial violence against their weaker neighbors, in the same way that Venka assaults a more vulnerable girl because of the violence she herself has suffered. Venka and Rin contrast with Kitay, who is the most clearly moral of Rin’s allies. Rin tries to comfort the survivors of her own acts of mass violence, and Venka thinks she needs to harden people to trauma rather than sympathize with them, but Kitay wants to find strategies to mitigate the casualties of war altogether. He protests when Rin contemplates Daji’s proposal to turn people into shamans, given that the life of a shaman in the book’s fictional world is inevitably short and painful. He thinks Rin is “[a]astonishingly careless with human life” (155) to contemplate subjecting people to the same powers that stole her youth from her. In moments like these, Kitay is a foil to Rin, reminding her of her humanity despite the dehumanizing effects of war. He also connects her to humanity literally through his role as anchor bond, preventing her from being able to call enough power to commit another genocide. Kitay’s metaphorical and literal role as the Gatekeeper to Rin’s humanity also shows that her connection to humanity is her greatest weakness, when Kitay’s kidnapping leaves Rin vulnerable at the end of Part 1.