gosh, matthias is so weird to me.
because he spends all of soc living inside painful memories and then spends all of ck living inside shameful ones. his thoughts are constantly pulling him back toward everything he has lost, everything he has “done” and everything he once believed himself to be. he mourns his time on the ice with nina. he mourns brum while he believes he’s dead. he mourns his old life with the drüskelle and the person he thought he was supposed to become.
then once he understands what the drüskelle actually made him into, he begins mourning that too. he mourns the way hatred shaped his entire life. he mourns the person he could have been if he had been raised differently. he mourns the loss of his old sense of self, even though that sense of self was built around something cruel. he mourns the life he never got to have, the relationship he and nina could have had and even the better life he wants nina to have.
he has no problem making himself uncomfortable and returning to discomfort. he revisits it over and over again until he’s living inside it all the time. he goes back to every painful memory he owns until he can wear the discomfort like a second skin.
but the one thing he never properly revisits is the day his family died. and that’s so strange to me. throughout two entire books, with 14 chapters inside his own head, he mentions their deaths maybe three or four times. most of those mentions happen through dialogue and even the way he defines the event seems to shift.
in soc he says, “Inferni soldiers, your precious, persecuted Grisha, burned our village to the ground.” soc, ch19
and, “Your friends slaughtered my family in a Grisha raid.” soc, ch20
but in ck it becomes, “He’d grown comfortable with Kuwei, and yet it had been Inferni fire that consumed his family’s village in a border skirmish.” ck, ch20
and i have two things to say about this,
one. the way matthias describes the biggest traumatic event of his life, the event that changed the course of everything that came after it, shifts within the span of three months. those descriptions don’t necessarily refer to two different events. the grisha raid could have happened as part of the border skirmish but the framing is still different. grisha raid makes the village itself sound like the intended target. consumed by inferni fire in a border skirmish leaves open the possibility that the village was caught inside a larger conflict or that the attack on the village happened during that conflict or both.
two. matthias never actually revisits the day itself. all we know is that his family died because of inferni fire and that brum found him afterward and took him in. that’s basically the entire story we’re given.
how did matthias, who could not have been older than 11, become separated from his family during the attack? where was he when the village caught fire? how did a fire that consumed his home and killed his family leave him alive? was he hiding somewhere? how long was he alone? how did brum find him? did brum save him while the village was still burning? did he arrive later and discover matthias among the ruins?
none of it’s clear. there are entire pieces missing between inferni fire killed my family and brum took me in. and matthias does remember his family. he remembers hunting with his father. he remembers his mother becoming tired and muddled while she was pregnant with his baby sister. he has ordinary, affectionate, specific memories of the people they were before they died. but whenever the subject comes up, and it happens during an already overwhelming moment. when he’s alone with a grisha for the first time. when he sees the pyre. when he watches kuwei summon fire up close. these are moments that should pull the memory out of him and every time his mind gives us one short statement,
inferni fire killed his family, his village burned and brum found him. then his thoughts move on. maybe the changing perspective only reflects matthias understanding the event differently after spending time with grisha and beginning to question everything the drüskelle taught him.
but i cannot stop thinking about another possibility. maybe he never revisits this particular memory because he genuinely cannot. maybe he remembers his family before the fire and he remembers brum taking him in afterward but the days between those two parts of his life exists only in scattered facts. maybe the reason the books never give us the full memory is because matthias doesn’t have the full memory either.
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