What This Theme Explores
Identity and Monstrosity asks whether a monster is born from blood and power or fashioned by wound, duty, and choice. The book insists that selfhood isn’t a clean split between good and evil; it’s a shifting negotiation between who someone was, what they’ve done, and what they must pretend to be. Through Dianna and Liam (Samkiel), the story probes how love and grief can tether or unmake the self—and how titles like “Bloodthirsty Queen” and “World Ender” can flatten complicated people into cautionary myths. Ultimately, the theme measures monstrosity not by form but by the presence—or loss—of empathy, restraint, and the will to protect.
How It Develops
At the outset, Dianna’s struggle is intimate and interior. She manages her Ig’Morruthen nature by partitioning it—performing the “Bloodthirsty Queen” for survival while privately clinging to the sliver of a “damn human heart” that still beats for Kaden and, above all, for her sister, Gabby (Gabriella Martinez). These early chapters map a survival strategy: she wields fear like armor, using a persona to keep her core self from drowning in the violence she must commit (Chapter 1-5 Summary).
Midway, the lens widens with Liam’s arrival, refracting the theme through another haunted identity. Branded “World Ender,” he exiles himself to contain a power he cannot trust, convinced that isolation is the only moral choice after the Gods War. His arc mirrors Dianna’s: both are overdetermined by names they did not choose, burdened with power that makes tenderness feel dangerous, and drawn—reluctantly—toward a shared, painful recognition that their supposed monstrosity may coexist with their capacity to love (Chapter 36-40 Summary).
By the end, the personal war detonates into catastrophe. Gabby’s murder snaps Dianna’s final tether to humanity, and grief accelerates what fear and violence had only threatened: a total surrender to the Ig’Morruthen within. Her protector identity is inverted into annihilation, and the myth of the “monster” becomes real in the worst way—forcing Liam to confront his own feared transformation in order to reach the person buried beneath the scales and fire (Chapter 51 Summary).
Key Examples
The novel punctuates its argument with moments where identity strains against monstrous necessity.
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Dianna’s internal reckoning
I hadn’t started my life as an Ig’Morruthens, but it is what I had become, and my eyes would always give me away. When I was mad, hungry, or when I was anything but human, they burned like two fiery embers. One identifier among many that reminded me I was no longer human. Dianna separates origin from becoming, insisting that monstrosity was acquired, not innate. The image of ember-bright eyes externalizes an inner fracture: she can read her nonhuman state in her own reflection, making self-surveillance a constant part of survival.
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The “Bloodthirsty Queen” as a coping persona
Without breaking stride, I donned the face of The Bloodthirsty Queen. It was who they were expecting, who they feared, and rightly so. She had earned her reputation over the centuries. The persona functions as moral insulation—an identity she can put on and take off to enact necessary brutality without surrendering everything else. The earned reputation is both shield and trap, protecting her body while endangering her soul.
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Gabby’s accusation and the line in the sand
"If the price of my freedom is to watch my sister become a—" She stopped, and I felt my heart break further. ... Her lips formed into a thin line, but her voice was steady as she said, "If I have to watch you become a monster." (Chapter 16-20 Summary) Gabby names the fear Dianna can’t: that survival tactics calcify into identity. The interruption—her refusal to finish the word until she must—captures the cost of love that both grounds and judges Dianna.
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Liam’s burden condensed into a title
"You will get the fame you so desperately crave, Samkiel. That title you love so much. They will know you now as what you truly are. World Ender." The taunt reduces Liam to catastrophe personified, collapsing nuanced guilt and complicated history into a single epithet. His recoil from the title clarifies how public narratives can imprison a person in their worst moment.
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The catastrophic transformation
Wings and scales replaced skin and limbs as the Ig’Morruthen beneath her skin ripped its way into the world in a matter of seconds. The flames that erupted from her were so hot and bright they blinded me. The body literalizes grief: identity burns away, and the monstrous form manifests what the mind can no longer contain. The blinding flames underscore how loss can erase sight—others can no longer see the woman inside, and she cannot see past her pain.
Character Connections
Dianna embodies the theme’s central paradox: love is both her anchor and the accelerant of her monstrosity. Her devotion to Gabby makes her ruthless, and her allegiance to duty under Kaden twists care into coercion. She survives by compartmentalizing—Queen, sister, monster, protector—but the novel shows that such partitions are porous. Her story tests whether Love and Sacrifice preserve the self or justify its dissolution.
Liam reflects the other face of the dilemma: when immense power meets remorse, self-erasure can masquerade as virtue. He chooses distance to avoid repeating harm, but distance also denies him the relationships that could humanize his power. With Dianna, he learns that containment without connection is a slow death—and that choosing to love may be the braver, riskier antidote to becoming the “World Ender” again.
Kaden personifies monstrosity in a civilized mask. He manufactures horrors like the Irvikuva and engineers Dianna’s persona to weaponize her grief, revealing that the most dangerous monsters are not the scaled and winged but the calculating. By making monstrosity a management strategy, he blurs the line between leadership and predation.
Gabby is the human mirror the others rely on. As Dianna’s conscience and memory, she insists on the difference between necessary violence and becoming violent as a way of being. Her death doesn’t just wound Dianna; it removes the witness who could still recognize—and call forth—the woman within, triggering the tragic completion of the monstrous arc.
Symbolic Elements
Eyes: Vision becomes truth-telling. Dianna’s ember-red gaze betrays when her nonhuman nature surfaces, while Liam’s silver glow signals divinity braided with devastation. Eyes render interior states visible, forcing characters to confront what they’d rather keep hidden.
Shapeshifting: Dianna’s changes of form—human, wyvern, panther, and the staged “Bloodthirsty Queen”—embody identity as fluid, adaptive, and fractured. The ability to switch shapes dramatizes the cost of role-playing for survival and the danger of losing the original self in the performance (Chapter 11-15 Summary).
The Irvikuva: These mindless, gargoyle-like constructs represent monstrosity stripped of conscience. They are the nightmare future Dianna fears: power without personhood, appetite without ethics.
Masks and personas: The novel’s metaphorical masks—Dianna’s fearsome alter ego, Kaden’s regal composure—underscore the gap between appearance and intent. Masks provide protection but also become prisons, hardening the face to match the facade.
Contemporary Relevance
The push-and-pull between authenticity and the roles we perform resonates in a world that rewards curated selves—online personas, workplace armor, social scripts. The book’s careful line between necessary hardness and dehumanization mirrors how trauma and systemic pressure can compel people to act “monstrous” to endure. It also challenges quick labels: calling someone a monster often avoids reckoning with the history and hurt that shaped their choices, even as it warns that justification can become transformation if empathy is abandoned.
Essential Quote
"If I have to watch you become a monster."
Gabby’s sentence crystallizes the theme’s moral fulcrum: monstrosity isn’t fixed—it’s a becoming, accelerated by repeated compromises and unbearable loss. Spoken by the person who most believes in Dianna, the line functions as both plea and prophecy, naming the threshold that love alone may not be able to hold once grief breaks the self wide open.