the concept of villainy between turisha isenia and hammari is sooooo heartbreaking to me bc it becomes a role that they pass down to each other. turisha kills isenia's family and in that she becomes the personification of evil to isenia. a truer villain there never was. the lines are clear between good and bad, with isenia stood across from turisha and delivering her death as justice. but when the war continues and drags isenia along with it, she changes. all that death and violence over years and years and years mutilates her until suddenly it is not turisha killing nathairan, but isenia killing rhys. she stands in the exact shadow of a woman she once thought to be the epitome of evil. she doesn't recognise herself anymore. she doesn't know where the harasaeons end and she begins, and then we have hammari, looking at the woman who murdered her parents, the personification of evil. a truer villain there never was. hammari is good and isenia is bad. she doesn't even know that this is a story already told once already. and in her desperate hunt to bring isenia to justice, hammari becomes cruel, and she sheds so much blood that she cannot see her own hands beneath it all, and it is only as she stands on that podium and sees shock and an ounce of fear in isenia's eyes - not arrogance, or cruelty, or the smooth indifference of a death god, but shock, fear, such mortifyingly human things - that hammari thinks for the first time that isenia is a lot more like her than she realised. she cuts her head off regardless. in this, she villainises herself to a divine degree, and the wisers rally against hammari, for she must be the personification of evil to have done such a thing. surely, a truer villain there never was...
