The Songbird and the Heart of Stone

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Parts 6-7

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Themes

Self-Destruction in Pursuit of Redemption

Content Warning: The section contains mentions of self-harm.

Asar and Mische both seek redemption for past failures or perceived wrongs they’ve committed in the past. This desperate need for redemption has led to self-destructive actions and long-lasting habits that put themselves and others at risk.

Asar’s desperation to right the wrong he committed when he failed to resurrect Ophelia has led him to serve as the Warden of Morthryn. In this role, he has traversed the Underworld so often that he’s lost pieces of himself to it. It has also motivated him to undertake this dangerous quest from Nyaxia and to bring several other individuals—Elias, Chandra, Luce, and Mische—into the fray as well. Elias explicitly criticizes Asar’s desperate search for redemption, saying, “We don’t have to die because you’re still chasing after her. You’re looking for power, bastard prince? You’re looking to redeem yourself after your exile?” (211). As Asar tells Mische, the chance to right a wrong is a powerful gift. However, throughout the novel, both characters come to realize that sometimes redemption is not worth the cost.

Mische’s desperation for redemption in Atroxus’s eyes is the primary reason for her hatred and her self-harm. While she doesn’t create the burns on her arms herself, she knowingly uses Atroxus’s magic, aware that it will harm her. In her mind, “a few burns were such a small price to pay to drag [her]self that much closer to [her] humanity” (168). Mische looks back with regret and yearning on the young, pure, untouched child she used to be—”a perfect offering to a perfect god. Nothing but potential” (40). Mische has long since lost this innocence and believes she has nothing left to offer Atroxus. However, her hope and her faith drive her to beg for his continued blessings even when they no longer provide much benefit to her.

Her pursuit of redemption has caused her to live a life of self-neglect, one in which she deprives herself of her wants, needs, and desires. The pain of the burn wounds makes it “easier to ignore that [she] had to reach deeper and deeper over the years to find those remaining pieces of faith,” and prioritizing others over herself has made it easier for Mische “to ignore the spread of the vampire in [her], a necrotic infection in a slow march to the surface” (168). Mische consistently represses her desires—first for Eomin in childhood, then for her vampire magic after she was turned, and most recently, for Asar—to prove her faith and convince Atroxus that she is worthy of redemption.

The Dangers of Unquestioning Loyalty

Mische has such intense loyalty to Atroxus, even after losing his favor once turned into a vampire, that she experiences emotional strain, self-neglect, unhealthy relationship dynamics, ethical dilemmas, and an enabling of harmful behavior.

Mische is so devoted to Atroxus that even when his fire burns and scars her arms, she overlooks the pain in favor of giddiness and relief. Mische views the simple possibility of accessing that magic as a vampire as if “[she] was that little girl all over again, saved by her god” (41). Her unquestioning loyalty to Atroxus, born more out of desperation for love and purpose than because he has earned of it, is harmful in ways that Mische prefers not to see. After all, “did it matter? What was a single scar compared to [his power]?” (41). At the start of the novel, Mische has been ignored by Atroxus for over a year. In the first two installments of the series, she mourns the loss of his favor. She weeps and sulks the longer she is ignored. While this grief might have eventually festered and turned into anger, she quickly forgives Atroxus as soon as he answers her pleas in the Shadowborn court’s ballroom.

Mische’s loyalty to Atroxus places her in an ethical dilemma when she must betray Asar, the man she’s coming to love, at the end of their journey. As her feelings grow for Asar, Mische remembers the vows she made to Atroxus. She “promised him [her] body, [her] love, [her] loyalty. [She] had promised him both [her] life and [her] death. And [she] had promised him that [she] would devote [her] eternal soul to bringing the light to the edges of the horizon, no matter what it took” (84). Loving Asar is an affront to these vows. As a vampire, a Shadowborn Heir, a necromancer, and a frequent traveler of the Underworld, he is the literal embodiment of everything Mische swore to fight against. Mische’s loyalty to Asar thus comes to stand in direct opposition to her personal desires.

Mische’s loyalty also diminishes her sense of self. She doesn’t believe she was born special, but rather that she was made special by Atroxus’s favor. She was a nobody before Atroxus chose her, giving her the gifts that provided her purpose and importance. Her self-worth is so dependent on Atroxus that she is willing to overlook his cruel indifference to the pain he causes her. When she first meets Asar, Mische wonders what his encounters with his goddess, Nyaxia, had been like:

Did Nyaxia come to Asar in his cluttered office back at the surface? Did he fall to his knees in prostration before her, just like I’d done for Atroxus? I found it hard to imagine Asar prostrating in general. He didn’t seem like the type who went to his knees easily, goddess or no. Even his deference to the king had been so palpably resentful (103).

While love and faith have become conflated in her mind to the point where she believes they’re the same thing in regard to her devotion to Atroxus, Asar provides her a different perspective. She witnesses his love for others—Luce, Ophelia, and eventually Mische herself—which occurs separately yet simultaneously to his faith in Nyaxia. Through this, Mische also learns a vital lesson about their differences and recognizes that love is not about self-sacrifice.

The Importance of Reciprocity in Love

The romance that develops between Asar and Mische teaches Mische valuable lessons about love. Love must be a balance of give and take—a union of compromise. It must not be a one-sided affair where one partner only takes and another always sacrifices. Asar is the driving force behind the development of this theme, often voicing his concerns about the unhealthy, destructive nature of Mische and Atroxus’s relationship. As he says to her in Chapter 9, “Your god doesn’t love you half as much as you think he does […] You burned yourself to the bone. It’s beyond me why Atroxus still allows you to use his magic, but be careful of the price you pay for it” (113). Asar implies that love should not hurt and that if Atroxus truly loved her, he would not allow the magic to burn her as it does.

When Asar pries into Mische’s life during one of their first interactions, he notes that she’s had to sacrifice to keep Atroxus’s gifts. In response, Mische thinks:

He had no idea the things I’d done to keep Atroxus’s love. And was any of it enough? Sure, Atroxus let me keep the flame—for a while. But it was hard to put any other word but abandonment to that night in the Moon Palace, when the demons had closed in on me and I’d heard nothing but my god’s silence as I begged him for help (60).

Even early in the novel, it is clear Mische carries resentment and a healthy degree of doubt in her sun god, who abandoned her once she turned. Mische’s claim that she has sacrificed to keep Atroxus’s “love,” not his blessing, suggests that Mische has conflated the concepts of faith and love. Her understanding of love is thus of a one-sided devotion in which she sacrifices her desires and her physical well-being while receiving little in return.

This conflation of romantic love with religious faith is built into the structure of Atroxus’s church. As an acolyte of Atroxus, Mische was “married” to the god while still a child. While their binding ceremony was more about faith than love, and their consummation night was more of a physical offering than lovemaking, these matrimonial practices further explain why Mische believes love and faith are one and the same. Even whilst believing these two concepts are the same in terms of her relationship with Atroxus, Mische knows on some level that there is a healthier form of love out there. She longs for the kind of mutually supportive love that her friends Oraya and Raihn share, but she knows she cannot have that for herself as long as she’s bound to Atroxus: “[O]ne couldn’t expect a god to love you like a mortal did. A greater gift, still, to have that love at all. And Atroxus’s, [she] knew, was very much conditional” (86). The love story at the heart of the novel, and the Shadowborn Duet, hinges upon Mische’s character growth and her development in terms of this theme. Once she separates the concepts of faith and love, and eventually realizes that Atroxus deserves neither, she is free to pursue her desires—including her feelings for Asar.