“Time grows short, my love. Let’s end with the beginning of the world, shall we? Yes. We shall.”

This opening line is an inversion of how the first novel in the series, begins: “Let’s start with the end of the world, why don’t we?” While Hoa is literally talking about going back to his beginning—and the chain of events that led to the Shattering, and eventually, everything Essun has experienced—it also signals that thematically, this is going to be a novel about hope and figuring out how to move on from the past, even when the world is so broken it may not deserve that chance.

“It’s strange, though. My memories are like insects fossilized in amber. They are rarely intact, these frozen, long-lost lives. Usually there’s just a leg, some wing-scales, a bit of lower thorax—a whole that can only be inferred from fragments, and everything blurred together through jagged, dirty cracks. When I narrow my gaze and squint into memory, I see faces and events that should hold meaning for me, and they do, but…they don’t. The person who witnessed these things firsthand is me, and yet not.”

Hoa’s metaphor illustrates the way memories erode and change with time, partly because the process of memory is inherently faulty, but also because in the moment of remembering, we are rarely the same person we were when the memory happened. This is especially true for Hoa, who has lived for 40,000 years and has changed his identity. Hoa also bends his memories to fit his current desires. For example, he remembers Kelenli looking like Essun, because on some level he wants Essun to fill the void Kelenli left when he lost her.