“‘You will learn, Serapio,’ she said, voice gentle but firm. ‘And once you have, you must go home to Tova. There you will open your eyes again and become a god. Do you understand?’”

In this scene, Serapio’s mother blinds him so that he can become the human vessel for the old crow god. As she does so, she tells him the prophecy of the god’s return. This is the inciting incident for the rest of the book. An inciting incident acts as the catalyst for the rest of the story.

“‘A child in a foreign place to a foreign man,’ she murmured, and Serapio knew she was talking to herself. ‘I’ve done everything required. Even this.’”

Serapio’s mother fulfills her part of the prophecy for the Carrion Crow clan. She views it as fulfilling an obligation for the greater good, regardless of what she wants for herself—it comes at the expense of her son’s ability to freely choose what he wants for his life, as well as her own ability to choose. This moment where she talks to herself foreshadows major events which will come later in the text. However, because it’s focused through a close third person point-of-view on Serapio, the reader is not given all of the information to understand what it might mean.

“Some Teek had eyes the crystal blue of the brightest waters, some the storm gray of gales, but the rarest of Teek had eyes like hers: a kaleidoscope of jewel colors, shifting like sunlight in shallow water. A man in a port she couldn’t remember now once told her the nobles of Tova collected Teek eyes like hers to wear around their fingers like jewels.”

Xiala is from the Teek culture. The Teek have unique eyes that differentiate them from everyone else. Kaleidoscopic eyes are rare even among the Teek, but they are only found among Teek. Because of the discrimination the Teek face, Xiala’s eyes are one of the ways that she will never be able to pass as a non-Teek.