For many of Victoria Aveyard’s characters, their family legacies often designate their life’s purpose, and they must then make a conscious choice to either accept or reject that burden. For Andry, his appointed purpose is noble, and he willingly becomes a squire in the hopes of gaining knighthood and following in his father’s footsteps. For a character like Erida, however, her appointed purpose as the monarch of her realm becomes tainted by her tendency toward self-aggrandizement, greed, and violence as she seeks to dominate all of Allward and rebuild the old Cor empire. In both cases, history dictates the paths that each character must follow, but Aveyard suggests that those who bear a heavy weight of family legacy are significantly impacted by the expectations that such a history carries; the more overbearing that legacy is, the more these characters’ own personal patterns and decisions become predictable and inescapable.

Aveyard demonstrates this dynamic within Corayne, for although she is allegedly abandoned by her father and raised by her mother and her guardian Kastio, her personality is heavily influenced by her father’s lineage. As Dom reflects:

Cortael was the same [as Corayne], in his youth […]. Such was the way of Old Cor: humans born of travel and crossing, conquest and voyage from one realm to the next.