Justice vs. Vengeance Theme Analysis

Terrorism, anarchy, bloodlust, those are the words the broadcasts use when describing the Guard. They show the children dead in the Sun Shooting, the flooded wreckage of the Archeon Bridge, everything to convince the country of our supposed evil. All the while, the real enemy sits on his throne and smiles.

I’m the lightning girl, and now I have too many ideals to count. Freedom, revenge, liberty, everything that fuels the sparks within me, and the resolve that keeps me going.

But there are friends I would trade, lives I would forsake, for my own victories. I’ve done it before. It isn’t hard to let people die when their deaths gives life to something else.

I am a weapon made of flesh, a sword covered in skin. I was born to kill a king, to end a reign of terror before it can truly begin. Fire and lightning raised Maven up, and fire and lightning will bring him down.

[…]

I cling to Cal, Kilorn, Shade, to saving all the newbloods I can, because I am afraid of waking up to emptiness, to a place where my friends and family are gone and I am nothing but a single bolt of lightning in the blackness of a lonely storm.

If I am a sword, I am a sword made of glass, and I feel myself beginning to shatter.

Their laws, their conscription, their doom for every single one of us. They did this. They have brought this ending upon themselves. Even now, when it is Cameron and me destroying them, they beg for Cal’s mercy. They beg to a Silver king, and spit upon Red queens.

“But still, you feel no remorse for the dead. You do whatever you can to forget them…Half the time you run away from leadership, and the other half you act like some untouchable martyr, crowned in guilt, the only person who’s really giving herself to the cause. Look around you, Mare Barrow. Shade’s not the only one who died in Corros. You are not the only one to make sacrifices.”

When my fingers knot in her frayed hair, holding her head up to face the decrepit, sputtering camera, I’m fighting tears. As much as I hate her, I hate this more. It feels against nature, against anything good I might have left inside myself. I’ve already lost Cal—thrown him away—but now I feel I’m losing my soul. And yet I speak the words I must.

“No one is born evil, just like no one is born alone. They become that way, through choice and circumstance. The latter you cannot control, but the former…Mare, I am very afraid for you. Things have been done to you, things no person should suffer. You’ve seen horrible things, done horrible things, and they will change you. I’m so afraid for what you could be, if given the wrong chance.”