Opium Symbol Analysis

“But once he [trusts you]? You start plying him with opium—just a little bit at first, though I doubt he’s never smoked before. Then you give him more and more every day. Do it at night right after he’s finished with you, so he always associates it with pleasure and power.

“Give him more and more until he is fully dependent on it, and on you. Let it destroy his body and mind. You’ll be more or less married to a breathing corpse, yes, but you will have his riches, his estates, and his power.”

“The Keju doesn’t mean anything,” Rin said scathingly. “The Keju is a ruse to keep uneducated peasants right where they’ve always been. You slip past the Keju, they’ll find a way to expel you anyway. The Keju keeps the lower classes sedated. It keeps us dreaming. It’s not a ladder for mobility; it’s a way to keep people like me exactly where they were born. The Keju is a drug.”

She adored praise—craved it, needed it, and realized she found relief only when she finally had it.

She realized, too, that she felt about praise the way that addicts felt about opium. Each time she received a fresh infusion of flattery, she could think only about how to get more of it. Achievement was a high. Failure was worse than withdrawal. Good test scores brought only momentary relief and temporary pride—she basked in her grace period of several hours before she began to panic about her next test.

She craved praise so deeply that she felt it in her bones. And just like an addict, she did whatever she could to get it.

“You’ve seen what poppy does to the common man. And given what you know of addiction, your conclusions are reasonable. Opium makes wise men stupid. It destroys local economies and weakens entire countries.”

He weighed another handful of poppy seeds in his palm. “But something so destructive inherently and simultaneously has marvelous potential. The poppy flower, more than anything, displays the duality of hallucinogens. You know poppy by three names. In its most common form, as opium nuggets smoked from a pipe, poppy makes you useless. It numbs you and closes you off to the world. Then there is the madly addictive heroin, which is extracted as a powder from the sap of the flower. But the seeds? These seeds are a shaman’s dream. These seeds, used with the proper mental preparation, give you access to the entire universe contained within your mind.”

“You must conflate these concepts. The god outside you. The god within. Once you understand that these are one and the same, once you can hold both concepts in your head and know them to be true, you’ll be a shaman.”

She had just killed Altan.

What was that supposed to mean? What did it say that the chimei had thought she wouldn’t be able to kill Altan, and that she had killed him anyway?

If she could do this, what couldn’t she do?

Who couldn’t she kill?

Maybe that was the kind of anger it took to call the Phoenix easily and regularly the way Altan did. Not just rage, not just fear, but a deep, burning resentment, fanned by a particularly cruel kind of abuse.

“He’s not human,” she said, recalling the horrible anger behind Altan’s power. She’d thought she understood Altan. She’d thought she had reached the man behind the command title. But she realized now that she didn’t know him at all. The Altan she’d known—at least, the Altan in her mind—would have done anything for his troops. He wouldn’t have left someone in the gas to die. “He—I don’t know what he is.”

“But Altan was never allowed to be human,” Chaghan said, and his voice was uncharacteristically gentle. “Since childhood, he’s been regarded as a militia asset. Your masters at the Academy fed him opium for attacking his classmates and trained him like a dog for this war.”

She had never understood how horrendously difficult it was to be Altan Trengsin, to live under the strain of a furious god constantly screaming for destruction in the back of his mind, while an indifferent narcotic deity whispered promises in his blood.

That’s why the Speerlies became addicted to opium so easily, she realized. Not because they needed it for their fire. Because for some of them, it was the only time they could get away from their horrible god.