There are a few shamans left, unegen and lianhua and changhan and nezha, but they’re in no position to challenge the hesperians and revive the shamanic arts. unegen had been burned by rin’s  power and if he’s still alive, would be too paranoid and fearful of repercussion. changhan told rin he wasn’t getting involved in nikara’s affairs and had the hundred clans to lead; he can’t afford for the hesperians to turn their wrath on his people instead. nezha already gave up his powers and submitted to the hesperians long ago. lianhua, personally trained by rin, might be the only one willing to defy the hesperians (but it would be incredibly dangerous) but she doesn’t have the knowledge or the training to pass on the the arts like her predecessors did.

 not only that, but the hesperians would’ve destroyed any knowledge of shamanism, burned all the books (as nezha had warned rin about), banned talk, and done their best to snuff out all traces of it and hunt the remaining shamans to extinction. And they would have history to prove their point: they, and their Maker had destroyed the Trifecta, the most legendary of Nikan’s shamans; they had killed Rin, the Phoenix’s vessel and the strongest shaman alive. And the last publicly known one, Nezha, had submitted and renounced his powers to them. Slowly but steadily, they’d erase Nikan’s history, two thousand years of the shamanic arts, intertwined with the very fabric of nikan itself, and the legacy of every shaman since then, from the textbooks and rewrite their own version. Those entombed in the Chuluu Korikh would be forever forgotten, with no one left alive to remember them or even know that they had once existed at all. The Cike wouldn’t even be a footnote. The Pantheon would fade. 

The Hesperians were never able to take rin’s powers away from her, but what they did was worse. They didn’t just take her country, they’d erase her culture, her gods, the very truth. Nezha may have killed rin, but the hesperians destroyed her legacy.

Do we know if it's actually possible to kill Nezha? If so, how? Would destroying the dragon do it? Is that even possible given what happened in the grotto? I know he believed Rin could've killed him, but we all know how their encounters in TBG play out, so there isn't actually any evidence of that as far as I remember. Is he for all intents and purposes immortal, then? Thanks in advance! 💗

Hi! Personally, I don't believe it's possible to kill Nezha through any conventional 'natural' means. He's survived throwing himself off the cliffs of Arlong, the Federation's gas which should have shredded his insides, being impaled, etc, and all of this was when he was actively restraining himself from using the Dragon's powers. When he actually started using his shamanism, he healed even quicker, such as when Rin burned the flesh off his face and he recovered within minutes. He (and by extension the Dragon) have only shown to have been significantly weakened on three occasions: in tdf when he states hesperian experiments greatly weakened him in addition to the stress of the war, in the Grotto, when Hesperian technology scares off the Dragon, and on Speer, when the effects of the hesperian cuffs have weakened his body, allowing rin to knock him out.

The man-made Federation gas didn't affect him much aside from the scars, but it was designed for the average human, not a shaman. Hesperian technology, however, is specifically designed to subdue shamans, and they constantly experimented on him and adapted their technology to make it more potent against shamans. when he fights rin on speer, he's been wearing the cuffs for less than a year, yet they weaken him enough for her to knock him out. now that she's gone, the hesperians will only continue to adapt and advance their tech (using him as their guinea pig). at some point, it's likely they'll find a way to completely block his powers and suppress the dragon, seeing how far they'd already advanced in such a short time span.

years of experimentation and the toll of ruling a broken nation will take its physical toll on him though, and without the dragon’s powers there to heal him anymore, there would be nothing to stop him from succumbing to death eventually (stress, exhaustion, a successful assassination attempt, who knows).

i think it's also possible the Dragon reclaims him at some point. he states in tdr that he'll never escape it and that he can run, but it's only a matter of time, because it will have him for its collection. the dragon will not wait forever. if the hesperians are driven out, leave, or for some reason are otherwise unable to continue controlling nezha with their tech, i believe the dragon will inevitably reclaim him.

but unlike his other markings, (the scars on his face, the dragon’s brand on his back), he welcomes these, a permanent reminder of what he’s done, another memory of his sins, a tangible remnant of her when she herself can no longer be there. a punishment. (a blessing?)

he will never escape her (does he want to?)

he emphasizes that, first and foremost, his father wouldn’t let that happen, wouldn’t give her up. because she is useful to his father. because his father is unwilling to lose her as a weapon. he doesn’t say ‘we’re not going to let them hurt you’ or even ‘you’re one of us’ but simply that his father will not ‘give [her] up’, like she’s a tool to be traded for with the hesperians (which Vaisra does, in fact, later do).

nezha doesn’t start by saying that he won’t allow rin to be hurt, but that his father won’t. that his father will not allow it. he puts his father’s will first, because his father, always, is in control. and then he follows up with his promise not to let her be hurt.

because if his father wants rin protected, then nezha will protect her. but if his father wants her dead? then he’ll slide a blade in her back.

rin once defied her commander, her idol, for nezha, to try and save him, the life of a single friend outweighing all strategic advantages. but in return, nezha will not defy his father, will not hold her life above that of his country, his ‘duty’, even for the one he loves most.

even when he’s at his most fervent and most passionate for her with his declaration, his loyalty has been decided from the start; he will only promise something that he is sure his father will support because he knows his father doesn’t want her harmed right now.

everyone else in the vision makes sense-kitay, jiang, ramsa, tutor feyrik, etc,  all the people that have ever helped and supported and loved her-

but jima lain? the headmaster of sinegard? the same master who looked directly at rin on her first day when she spoke of how at the end of the year, unworthy apprentices would be eliminated because they didn’t deserve to be there, were unworthy of the academy’s time irregardless of what the keju may have proved? the same headmaster who refused to intervene when jun kicked rin out of combat, despite knowing that was virtually a death sentence for her stay at sinegard, even after rin personally went to see jima herself for help, even when irjah suggested that jima wouldn’t allow it because she had the power to override jun?

we know that rin had a soft spot for jima because she craved her praise whenever she excelled on her linguistics exams and because few of the other professors would praise her.  after a lifetime of abuse and being told that she was worthless, rin would be sentimental for the few mentors who ever told her she could be worth anything and praise her- at that point, tutor feyrik, irjah, and jima.

but  maybe it went deeper than that. maybe, unconsciously, rin remembered jima in her vision, in spite of all she’d done not to help rin during her time at sinegard, because she saw in jima what she so desperately wanted to be.

because jima, who was described to be so tiny that she was shorter than even the smallest first years, who was a woman, had defied the heavenly order of things. she was the grand master of the sinegard imperial reserve forces. she was one of the most highly ranked military officers in nikan, the most highly ranked female officer next to daji herself. she was the headmaster of the most prestigious and respected academy in the empire. she commanded the respect of all the other masters, of every citizen in nikan by virtue of her position, had risen through the ranks to achieve it all despite being a woman in a patriarchal and misogynistic world.

rin, at that point, has never seen a woman in that position before. all her life, she’s been told, and has seen over and over, how women are ‘inferior’ and consigned to their fates and can never, ever rise above what society ordains them to. (daji is an exception, the empress, someone who called the gods and was born for greatness, according to the tales, someone rin could never become through hard work alone).

and then there’s jima; short and small and a woman, just like rin, but unlike rin, she is someone who commands the respect of everyone around her and has control over her own fate, who fights and leads and commands and is rewarded, not condemned for it. not only that, but as headmaster of Sinegard, rin probably saw her as someone almost sacrosanct, the figure who presided over the pearly gates of sinegard, the physical embodiment of the institution that had let her escape her miserable fate.

but rin might have been so blinded by jima’s accomplishments, so in awe of all she achieved, that perhaps she forgot that in the end, jima had not been on her side.

(full credit to @rinezhabot on twitter for the original tweet and gathering the screenshots!)

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but their differences outweighed their similarities. Riga willingly called upon the gods and entered the pantheon while nezha never wanted his powers, had it forced upon him. Riga had always fought for survival while nezha wanted only to die. Nezha saw leadership as his duty, his obligation, that he owed it to the people as someone of his ability and position to help. Riga saw leadership as his right, something he deserved and was owed because he was the most powerful and could take what he wanted. Nezha genuinely believed in ‘democracy’, at least his family’s version of it, while Riga unabashedly ruled as the supreme emperor of nikan; power belonged to him and him alone. Riga grew up presumably indifferent to the Speerlies, the Federation was his main concern, but he grew to hate them, to destroy them, after Hanelai supposedly ‘betrayed’ him. Nezha grew up with active prejudice for the Speerlies, was hateful and racist to Rin, but eventually grew to love her and continued to do so even after her ‘betrayal’. Nezha manipulated and schemed to achieve his goals, but Riga utilized sheer power and fear. Riga hated the Hesperians, had destroyed them without mercy, while Nezha was their greatest ally. How would Riga have felt, meeting his descendant and knowing this was the man who had helped fell his and daji’s empire and ruined his legacy, had bowed to their foreign enemies, had turned his authoritarian empire into a democracy?

How would Nezha, someone who cares so deeply about bloodlines, family, and the Yin name, have felt, meeting Riga and knowing his ancestor was the antithesis of everything he believed in, the man who had put Daji (who nezha so vehemently hates) on the throne, who was the type of leader who represented everything nezha feared becoming? 

and then, against all odds, they won. cholang and venka conquered the north, rin defeated nezha at arlong, and the hesperians fled across the sea, with dog province’s minerals the last thing on their mind. cholang thought he had won, and that his people were safe.