Lightlark

“Beauty was a Wildling’s gift—and curse.”

While this phrase initially seems like a metaphor, Isla’s beauty—an inheritance from her Wildling mother—is part of the actual curse that haunts the Wildling race. They are cursed to be seductive and ruthless, making people fall in love with them and then eating the hearts of their victims. Isla has escaped the part of the curse that mandates heart eating, but she often resents the unwanted attention her beauty attracts, even as she knows how to deploy her good looks to maximum effect. Part of Isla’s journey is learning to reconcile her beauty and sexuality with her desire for freedom and power.

“The sun had fallen. It was just a yolky thing, halfway consumed by the horizon, when Isla opened the double doors and stared up at the incoming moon.”

Isla notices the sun’s resemblance to an egg yolk a few times in the book. At the end, when the heart of Lightlark is revealed to be a glowing yellow ball inside an egg, this metaphor gains new significance: Like the heart, the sun represents rebirth and the promise of the future. In this moment, the sun and the moon are both in the sky, indicating a tension between day and night, or the forces of light and dark. This opposition hints obliquely at the love triangle soon to commence between Isla, Oro, and Grim.

“Isla was prepared, petals hidden between her fingers. When her blood finally dripped down her palm, it held a miniature rose.”

Isla was born without magical powers—a vulnerability she must hide from the other rulers at the Centennial. When the others offer their blood to the fire—producing various dazzling effects—Isla uses skillful sleight of hand to make it appear as if her blood is magical too. This incident illustrates a key aspect of Isla’s character—though she views herself as powerless, the non-magical skills she has developed through hard work make her a formidable competitor.

“How many times had she been left abandoned in the middle of the woods, or in the center of a rain forest storm, with fifty pounds of chain mail and armor on her?”

During several challenges, Isla recalls different moments of extreme training from her guardians. While she calls on these memories for strength, they also underscore the abuse and neglect she suffered as an orphaned child with only two self-serving politicians as companions. Isla has been “abandoned” in real and figurative ways by many people in her life, and her duties as ruler of the Wildlings weigh on her like armor throughout the novel. In keeping with the conventions of the bildungsroman, she must overcome these challenges in order to fully come of age, casting off the burdens of other people’s expectations and accepting a love that doesn’t abandon her.

“Her blade became a serpent, the one on her crown come to life, striking for the kill, fangs and all.”

Serpents are an important symbol for the Wildlings and for Isla herself. While Isla has not killed anyone at this point in the novel, she has spent her entire life preparing to participate in and win the deadly Centennial contest. Her skill with the sword, like her crown, represents her commitment to the Wildling people, who rely on her victory. The serpent metaphor may also represent the deception she practices in this demonstration when she lets Oro win the duel despite being capable of beating him.

“I’m not sure what I enjoy more. Seeing the way you grip a sword…or the way your dress grips you.”

Grim, Isla’s dark, mysterious love interest, is unabashed in his admiration of her body and takes every opportunity to tease and flirt with her. These suggestive comments reveal his worldly, bad-boy character, but they also foreshadow the long-standing sexual relationship between Grim and Isla. The innuendo in this particular comment shows that Grim appreciates both sides of Isla: her beauty and her skill.

“Dread danced in her bones and Isla had the feeling there was something everyone else knew that she didn’t.”

The alliteration and metaphor at the beginning of this sentence signal the importance of this moment. Feeling unsettled “in her bones” indicates that Isla’s self-knowledge is growing, even if many things remain hidden from her, including her own nature and history.

“She might have claimed she hated it. But she didn’t hate it. She hated herself for not thinking his words were repulsive.”

One of Isla’s challenges in the novel is to understand her true desires and to reconcile herself with them when they seem threatening. Isla can’t understand why she enjoys Grim’s attention: Her attraction to him is a threat because the Wildling curse promises that if she falls in love, it will end in the death of her beloved. Grim himself is dangerous, a representative of the powers of darkness and death—the opposite of Wildling power, which nurtures and is nurtured by the fertility of the natural world. When the reader learns what Isla does not yet know—that Grim erased Isla’s memory of their year-long romantic relationship—the resultant dramatic irony heightens this conflict. Her feelings of desire arise from a past history she is not consciously aware of, and her desire to see him as “repulsive” may also be rooted in his deception.

“Lightlark became more powerful than either founder could have anticipated. It made both men greedy. Turned friend against friend.”

Oro shares the backstory of the creation and fracturing of Lightlark with Isla. While he is among the only characters who know this history, he is ironically unaware that it holds the key to present-day conflict. The island’s unique magical properties come from friends uniting their powers. Abandonment and Betrayal originally created the curses, a part of Lightlark history that the rulers seem destined to repeat. To break the curses, Isla must learn the opposite values: trust and collaboration.

“For worse than desiring something above the good of one’s realm is not being sure of what you want at all.”

Among the many trials the rulers undergo during the Centennial, they must navigate a maze by swimming through icy water, guided only by the desire in their heart. Isla’s guardians have drilled into her that her body and her life belong to the Wildling realm and that desiring anything else is selfish. This trial is the first time that she learns that she’s allowed to have desires of her own. Perhaps ironically, the character delivering this wisdom is Cleo, the ruler who seems the most ruthlessly focused on her own realm’s success.

“She wanted all life had to offer. The long life of a ruler with powers, exploring all Lightlark, a lifetime of friendship with Celeste, perhaps even…love.”

When Isla allows herself to interrogate her own desires, she finds that she wants many things her guardians have denied her: power, adventure, and relationships with others. This discovery represents a change in perspective for her, as well as a shift in her motivations. The most surprising desire is love—an experience she’s been warned against her entire life. This line also foreshadows the tragedy that Isla will experience when she loses not only her romance with Grim but also her friendship with Celeste, who betrays her.

“Only joined can the curses be undone

Only after one of the six has won

When the original offense

Has been committed again

And a ruling line has come to an end

Only then can history amend.”

This is the prophecy that guides Isla and her fellow rulers as they attempt to break the curses on their realms. Like many prophecies in fantasy literature, this one rhymes, with the first and last two lines forming couplets. Like other such prophecies, this prophecy is also very enigmatic. The rulers have conflicting ideas about what it means to be “joined.” While Lightlark’s history suggests that collaboration and unity lead to more magical power, that history is largely a secret. Thanks to their long-standing animosities, the rulers struggle to work together. This has led to hidden alliances and mandatory—but reluctant—public pairings. Even more confusing, no one knows what the “original offense” was. This part of the prophecy is revealed almost by accident at the end of the novel when Isla kills Aurora, the ancient ruler masquerading as Isla’s best friend, Celeste. Killing a friend is the original offense Aurora committed 500 years ago; Isla’s killing of Aurora not only fulfills the prophecy but also delivers karmic justice to the woman who created the curses in the first place.

“Oro’s eyebrows were slightly raised as he took her in. She supposed she looked like a completely different person—makeup off, hair in a bun atop her head, shirt five sizes too large. She might have been worried that the king had seen her like this, without her Wildling temptress mask on, if she wasn’t so annoyed.”

This is the first time Oro sees Isla without her Wildling attire—a bevy of sumptuous, revealing gowns. She now appears in clothing that wouldn’t be out of place on a dressed-down contemporary romance heroine. This interaction provides Oro a chance to reevaluate his impression of Isla. He has been wary of her Wildling reputation, but now he can see that she is more than a woman trying to seduce him to gain his powers. He will come to find out that his initial assumption was wrong, as Isla’s “Wildling temptress mask” hides her lack of experience and interest in the seductive arts native to her people.

“In Wildling lands, the wind whispered. It sang songs and passed along gossip and whistled melodies high-pitched as clock chimes. […] The wind spoke of heartbreak, from Wildlings who had made the mistake of falling in love. Of hearts, eaten and torn apart by nails sharp as knives. It told her stories that seemed old as the trees themselves, born of seeds that were rumored to come straight from Lightlark.”

While Isla can’t use any of the traditional Wildling powers, including the ones associated with nature, she has a deep connection to and love of nature. Her ability to hear the wind is part of her own personality, not a Wildling trait. The wind’s stories, “old as the trees themselves, born of seeds that were rumored to come straight from Lightlark” also suggest that Isla’s spiritual connection to nature connects her back to the magic of her homeland, a relationship she longs to nurture and understand.

“The heart of Lightlark blooms every hundred years, attached to a living thing.”

While the characters search for multiple ancient relics and artifacts, the most important and helpful one is the heart of Lightlark, which Oro correctly intuits is necessary for breaking the curses. It is a source of immense power, created along with Lightlark itself from the combined magic of three different realms. Isla learns that her own realm is responsible for part of its creation. Perhaps this affinity with Wildling magic, the magic of plants and nature, is why the heart is attracted to living things. Regardless, it is Isla who ultimately discovers where it is and how to wield it.

“All of our realms are connected. You can’t begin to understand the consequences of losing one of them.”

The prophecy suggests that a ruler must die. Due to the strict rules of inheritance surrounding the Centennial, a ruler’s death means the death of an entire realm. Thus, one of the challenges of the Centennial is deciding which ruler to kill. Isla thinks it should be Cleo, the sarcastic and secretive ruler of Moonling, but Oro cautions her against a hasty judgment. The realms are named after natural forces in part to indicate that they interact in complicated, interdependent relationships. As such, there is no easy way to predict what will happen if one of the realms is removed. The end of the book leaves this a conundrum, as the fate of Starling, Celeste’s realm, is unclear after her death.

“You are a rose with thorns, she said. A pretty thing capable of protecting itself.”

Many characters remark on Isla’s beauty and ferocity; they assume, because of her Wildling heritage, that she is a savage, cannibalistic warrior. Isla’s great secret is that she does not have either the powers or the curses of her people. In essence, she is a regular young person, in stark opposition to the other rulers, who are ancient, magical, and crafty. But her childhood training has given her the ability to protect herself with swords like a rose uses thorns. Her emotional conditioning, bordering on abusive, also leaves her with a suspicious attitude toward others—one that both hinders and protects her in the deceitful environment of the Centennial.

“The Place of Mirrors looked fragile, like a strong wind could shatter it. But it had survived when everything else on Wild Isle hadn’t.”

The Place of Mirrors is the Wildling palace, hidden on Wild Isle and surrounded by dead trees and vines. When Isla encounters it, she is shocked and disappointed at the condition of her ancestral home, bereft of all the life she associates with Wildling. But like Isla herself, the place has hidden properties; no other realm’s powers will work there. As such, it becomes a refuge for Isla. The fact that the palace is made of mirrors also indicates the importance of self-knowledge for Isla’s journey.

“Isla didn’t breathe. His breath was against her cheek. He smelled like stone and storms and something spiced, like cinnamon.”

Grim and Isla share several sexually charged moments throughout the Centennial. For Isla, these usually come with a flood of sensations that she either rejects or is confused by. Here, Isla is surrounded by Grim’s scent. The lyrical description of the love interest’s scent is a common trope in romance novels. However, Isla refuses to breathe it in, indicating that she has not given into Grim’s attraction yet. The “stone” and “storms” suggest his tough masculinity and warrior nature, while the cinnamon hints at sensuality and eroticism.

“The heart blooms somewhere new every time. I have seen it. I know not where it is now…but it seems to always choose a place where darkness meets light.”

The heart of Lightlark was created centuries ago out of a union of Sunling, Nightshade, and Wildling powers; in essence, it blends the energies of light, dark, and life itself. The novel’s earlier revelation that the heart chooses to attach itself to a living thing is now expanded, as Oro and Isla learn that it also resides “where darkness meets light.” These two facts not only help them narrow down where the heart is but also represent the three powers that formed it. The heart represents Isla herself. In tune with the energies of life, she is caught in a love triangle between Oro, aligned with light, and Grim, aligned with dark.

“Fool. The word was an old friend, or maybe an enemy, waving hello. Though she had done foolish things, Isla was not a fool.”

Here, Isla considers Cleo’s insult and rejects it. Her self-knowledge and self-confidence are growing, as well as her ability to accept nuance in people. She can criticize her own actions without taking on the label of “fool.” The ambiguity about the relationship to the word is suggestive of Cleo herself, as Isla is not sure of Cleo’s real intentions toward her. This also foreshadows the later revelation that Celeste is not the “old friend” she pretends to be but in fact an enemy.

“She had always thought freedom, or even power, would change everything, fix her. But they wouldn’t…she knew that now that she had begun to fix herself.”

Isla’s journey has taken her from not knowing what she wanted to a deep self-knowledge and capability. Along the way, she has identified specific desires—adventure, magical power, love—but at the climax of the novel, she acknowledges that even these things are mutable and that attaining them won’t solve all her problems. Instead of relying on the goodwill, knowledge, or protection of others, Isla decides to solve the problem of Aurora’s betrayal the way she knows best, eschewing magical ability and using the sword. Isla once thought of herself as powerless, but now she sees that self-knowledge is the ultimate source of power.

“But she was as fast as the arrow that had pierced her heart. Quiet as a hummingbird. Before, she had cut her cheek and arms in this same forest. Today, she jumped over all the right vines. Ducked under all the trees. Until she saw her own self, reflected back at her.”

The climax takes Isla back to the Place of Mirrors on Wild Isle, and now she is a master of its environment, channeling the abilities of nature. Her ancestral home has become her territory in reality, and no one can beat her here. Even weapons used against her, such as the arrow, metaphorically gift her with their power. The final image of Isla seeing herself reflected in the Place of Mirrors suggests that this newfound confidence and mastery comes as a result of Isla’s self-knowledge.