The Emperor's Enemy

The flashback to the dragon attack on Zora’s Commune six years prior structurally grounds her present-day motivations in trauma and obligation, while establishing the paradox at the heart of Duty Competing with Freedom. The chapter opens with 17-year-old Zora snowboarding, a moment of pure, exhilarating liberty where the “crisp air smelled like freedom” (106). This sensory imagery associates the wilderness with independence, contrasting sharply with the destructive arrival of the Empire’s dragons. When Aleksander threatens to destroy the Commune unless Zora surrenders, she resists by holding a dagger to her own throat, creating a strategic stalemate. Her resistance is encapsulated by her declaration of “I WILL FIGHT FOR ME” (114), emphasizing that she refuses to surrender her autonomy even when she is faced with overwhelming power. Ironically, her eventual escape depends upon another form of constraint: lifetime enlistment in the Crimson Army. The apparent rescue from Ella and Axel becomes a binding commitment, underscoring how survival requires Zora to sacrifice the freedom she is paradoxically fighting to preserve. The chapter closes with further metaphorical emphasis, as Zora recalls her mother’s chess lessons and declare, “[r]ule of survival: Always win” (121) before rolling three ones with her father’s mysterious platinum dice. This combination of strategic determination and apparent luck suggests that Zora’s future may depend on forces beyond either personal skill or conscious choice alone.

The chapter headings from this section—“Stage of Grief: (Seductive) Bargaining,” “Depression,” and “Rage”—provide a structural framework for Zora’s psychological deterioration, presenting her interactions with Tarantula as inseparable from her mounting unresolved grief. Instead of depicting mourning as a straightforward progression, the novel repeatedly interrupts the present narrative with flashbacks that expose the traumatic origins of her behavior. The revelation of Aurora’s death in Chapter 9, for example, immediately follows the disturbing intimacy of Zora and Tarantula’s parachute encounter, forcing readers to reconsider their attraction through the knowledge of his involvement in her trauma. Similarly, the parenthetical “(Seductive)” in the title for Chapter 8 is particularly significant, as it links the “bargaining” stage of grief directly to the dangerous romantic and sexual tension between Zora and Tarantula. Her attempts to taunt and control him have become entangled with unwanted desire. Ultimately, Zora’s military duty have become both a coping mechanism and an additional source of psychological pressure. The chapter titles establish grief as an underlying narrative structure, showing how Zora’s anger, attraction, and determination are shaped by losses she has never been allowed to fully process.

The volatile power struggle between Zora and Tarantula is explored through recurring symbols of control, particularly the shock collar and chessboard, which represent two competing forms of domination. The tandem parachute jump assigned as a “trust exercise” becomes a demonstration of their mutual hostility when Tarantula kisses Zora during their fall and she refuses to deploy his parachute. His survival highlights his true power and the limitations of her own, while his he subsequently destabilizes her confidence in her own experiences by denying the kiss. At the same time, this failure is mirrored by the shock collar. For weeks, the collar provides Zora a tangible, technological means of control, but its deactivation by the Mist removes her leverage, leaving her with only physical threats. This shift reinforces Violence as the Currency of Power in a world where physical strength and magical ability routinely override institutional restraints. Their rivalry is furthered developed on an intellectual level through chess. Zora observes that “the game slowly progressed, day by day, as we outsmarted each other on the board, into a dead tie. Equal numbers of pieces were removed from both sides as we each hunted down the other’s king without success” (185). The chessboard is a miniature representation of their larger conflict, as their struggle for dominance becomes a contest of patience, strategy, and anticipation. Even with the absence of open violence, their apparent stalemates merely conceal deeper forms of psychological warfare.

These chapters highlight a foundational conflict between the Commonwealth’s professed commitment to democratic institutions and the Empire’s openly hierarchical understanding of power. In the initial dragon attack, Ella saves Zora by invoking Article II of the “Storm Wars Peace Accords” (117), a legalistic solution that relies on treaties and statutes which defines the Commonwealth’s approach to war. However, this protection comes at the cost of Zora’s lifelong military obligation, showing how even systems designed to preserve freedom can impose restrictive demands. However, Tarantula and the Royal Mages consistently demonstrate that their power operates outside these constraints. The Empire’s contrasting worldview is expressed through Tarantula’s insistence that Zora’s status as a Knight Mage makes her subordinate to him. He explains, “one of us is bred with magic in their veins, and the other is… made” (130), distinguishing inherited magical privilege from abilities acquired through the Iron Ritual. Tarantula represents a concept of personal servitude and inherited hierarchy that is antithetical to the Commonwealth’s democratic ideals. The clash is therefore philosophical, pitting a society built on law against one built on the absolute power of a magically endowed ruling class.

Despite this ideological clash, Zora’s experiences repeatedly foreshadow that the distinction between the two societies is not absolute. The Commonwealth’s willingness to torture prisoners, conceal information, and manipulate its soldiers shows how its democratic ideals coexist with authoritarian practices. Meanwhile, the Empire’s apparent disregard for human life is complicated by Tarantula’s decision to protect Zora from his fellow Royal Mages at the end of this section of the text. This moral ambiguity prevents the political conflict from becoming a simplistic opposition between freedom and tyranny. Instead, the novel questions whether institutional legitimacy depends on professed principles, actual conduct, or the power to enforce obedience, as both factions seem willing to compromise their ideals when survival and victory are at stake.