Three Dark Crowns

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussions of animal cruelty and death.

The narrator describes Breccia Domain as a “deep chasm in the ground that [the islanders] call ‘the heart of the island.’ It is a sacred place. They say it has no bottom” (298). This abyss is a motif that points to The Moral Complexities of Fighting for Survival and The Dual Nature of Gifts. Genevieve says that generations past would throw “the bodies of the queens who did not survive their Ascension Years” into the chasm (299), and those bodies lie in shattered piles at the bottom of Breccia Domain. This practice indicates that the successful queens who murdered their sisters did not want to acknowledge their dark deeds, so they sought to erase their guilt by hiding the evidence. In this way, the Domain highlights the moral cost of fighting for power since the queens must kill to survive. As the “heart” of Fennbirn, the Breccia Domain symbolizes the brutality at the center of its monarchy, political structure, and social classes.

Further, when Pietyr takes Katharine to see the gorge, it strikes him as “morbid” and frightening, while she finds it “vast and deep” (299), even peaceful and serene.