What does King Benji’s character arc reveal about the sustainability of power built on spectacle alone? What specific mechanisms bring about the unraveling of this power?

How does Rory’s limited third-person narration, including his lost and restored memories, shape the reader’s experience of the narrative?

How do Rory and Benji, as hero and villain, complicate traditional notions of chivalry, duty, and the responsibility that comes with power?

Beyond personal bonds, to what extent does love function as a viable political strategy against Benji’s regime?

How does Sybil’s understanding of justice evolve, and what does her final handling of Benji reveal about the line between retribution and reconstruction?

How does the recurring motif of armor and weapons challenge or reinforce traditional gender roles associated with knighthood and power in the Stonewater Kingdom?

How does Gillig use the narrative frame, beginning with a myth told to Bartholomew and ending with him as a historian, to shape the novel’s argument about storytelling?

If you have read Gillig’s One Dark Window (2022), how does the nature-based magic in this novel compare to that found in The Knave and the Moon?