Fanfic / Shadows over Meridian

Shadows over Meridian is a Jackie Chan Adventures and W.I.T.C.H. crossover fanfic by D_rissing and nightmaster000, acting as a Recursive Fanfiction to Kage by chaotic9.

Years after Kage became a Dead Fic, D-rissing and nightmaster000, fans of the original fic, decided to pick up and continue its abandoned story. Though rather than a direct continuation, they decided to begin their take on things later on from where Kage left off, starting at the end of the W.I.T.C.H. episode "J is for Jewel", based on the new authors' assumptions for how chaotic9 would have had events play out up to that point. Thus, the new story begins right after the Knights of Vengeance have freed Phobos only for them to be defeated and re-imprisoned by Elyon and the Guardians, with only Jade escaping; with no other choice, Jade responds by finally accepting her Queen of the Shadowkhan persona, and the power that comes with it.

With the full might of the nine tribes of the Shadowkhan now at her disposal, Jade sets out to repay her debts and redress her grievances, by again freeing Phobos and the Knights, and striking an alliance. Now Meridian's Queen and the Guardians will pay for their actions...

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Tropes

• Abandoned Mine: There's one in the Stone Nest that was used to excavate Meridian's largest deposit of light crystals before Phobos returned to the Mogriffs the mountain his great-grandmother conquered from them. While fleeing from the Frostbiter, Vera and three of her friends end up in the mines through a ventilation tunnel. A squad of Phobos loyalists and Shadowkhan led by Jade chase them through the tunnels as they get nearer the Mogriffs' nest. At one point, the intruders are able to escape from Tyrian by weaponizing the explosive coal dust. Vera later does the same with Jade to bring a tunnel down on her (though it only ends up pissing her off) while she flees in a minecart that brings her to the Mogriffs' nest.
• Accidental Hero: To his own surprise, Phobos realizes that the Lurdens and Mogriffs venerate him with Undying Loyalty because the actions he took to get them on his side during his reign (mostly done to spite the same cultural traditions that denied him the throne) ended up giving them better standards of living than they'd had in centuries, allowing them to regain ancestral lands that had been stolen from them.
• Accidental Pervert:
  • After falling down into the abandoned light crystal mines to escape the Frostbiter, Amelia lands on top of Alan. When she realizes she's sitting with her crotch on his face, she calls him a pervert and kicks his side.
  • While the Shadowkhan are neutralizing escaped prisoners in Chapter 31, a Ninja Khan literally kicks one of them from the behind, causing him to try to regain his balance and touch the behinds of the two women walking in front of him. Failing to notice the ninja that slinks away, the women proceed to slap and groin the man before more ninjas subdue them.
• Accidental Public Confession: Taranee and Caleb's public argument over everything they've learned about Jade/Kage and Nerissa ends up exposing those details to all the rebels and guards.
• Achievements in Ignorance: When Jade reshapes the Shadow Realm to give it a physical form instead of just being an endless void, she unknowingly causes Kandrakar to be hit with a massive earthquake as a portal doorway is formed between the two worlds.
• Action Girl: In addition to the canon examples, there's also several Original Characters who fit this role:
  • Yoruichi, a Rebellion soldier who proves herself to be one of the most capable fighters in the battle inside Cavigor.
  • Vera Bexley, leader of the Sky Hunters, whose skill as a Master Archer makes her The Dreaded to the Mogriffs.
  • Amelia Emmony, a highly-skilled swordswoman in the same army that the Sky Hunters are part of.
  • Rotha Vathib, a captain in the Rebellion's northern army, is noted to be one of their best spear users.
  • Flora can easily navigate her way in the Swamplands and go against dangerous predators and grown men.
• Adaptational Diversity: Aside from Cedric and the Knights of Vengeance, Lurdens were the only willing minions of Phobos in Season 2. In this story, there are members of other species still loyal to him, such as the Mogriffs and members of the royal guard.
• Adaptational Sympathy: Lurdens and Mogriffs were portrayed in canon as mere beastly mooks loyal to Phobos. This fic establishes that they've had to fight with humans and other Meridianites who wanted them gone just for existing or to take the riches of their territories, and because Phobos is the first ruler in Meridian's history who gave them the right to live in their ancestral lands, they're ready to fight and die for him if needed.
• Adaptation Expansion: Like the original fic, this story continues exploring the world of Meridian and its inhabitants.
• Adjective Animal Alehouse: Kur arranges for Aldarn and his soldiers to spend their stay at Everdeen in an inn called the Singing Frog.
• Admiring the Abomination: As Jade's Oni wrath towards Vera reaches its peak in the Stone Nest, she summons a tornado of shadows and opens massive portals to the Shadow Realm with the intention of burying Vera in its deepest debths. Everyone present is scared – except for Tyrian who's practically swooning over the sight of his goddess' might and realm.
• Affably Evil:
  • While Jade has taken back the title of the Queen of the Shadowkhan and decided to get retribution by helping Phobos take back Meridian's throne and ruining the heroes' daily lives, she remains amiable with her comrades in the Knights of Vengeance, especially Raythor, allows them to continue addressing her simply as Kage, bargains Miranda and Cedric out of Phobos' service to give them a fresh start out of sympathy, is a Benevolent Boss to the Phobos loyalists under her command, shows leniency to enemies who understand to surrender before angering her too much, and convinces Phobos to take the throne back by winning his people's support through Pragmatic Villainy instead of going on a wanton rampage.
  • Tyrian, for all of his insanity and bloodthirstiness, is very amusing, sincere in his worship of Jade, reciprocating of Rosetta's interest in him, and can be friendly, if mischievously and exasperatingly so, most of the time.
• Air Quotes:
  • Elyon makes this gesture in Chapter 7 while telling her friends about the reason Kandrakar "helped" Meridian in the first place.
  • Idina Bexley does this with the word betrayal when she tells her fellow nobles in Chapter 32 about the terms of surrender issued against Castwell's Peak.
• Ain't Too Proud to Beg:
  • When Jade catches Vera's team in Chapter 27, the teary-eyed Tinsley begs her to show mercy so that the badly wounded Alan would get medical treatment, showing how much the upbeat girl has been pushed to her breaking point by everything they've endured, and her crush's condition further convinces her that surrendering is the only option left.
  • When Metalbeak had Jesekiel Bexley at his mercy, the old man remained defiant in his conviction that his cruelties to the Mogriffs were justified, but when Vera appeared, he swallowed his pride and begged Metalbeak to spare his granddaughter.
  • Most of the participants of Snowpoint's Prison Riot, earlier eager to fight before getting captured again, try in vain to beg for mercy when Jade sentences them.
• All for Nothing:
  • Nerissa spent years manipulating the Rebellion and Phobos to get the Heart of Meridian. But Jade defeats her, putting her in a coma by means of a Leech Khan, and reveals her plans to everyone, meaning all of her years of manipulation and sacrifice have become meaningless.
    "What... what is this!?" Nerissa demanded outrage and dumbly holding herself up by her hands before whirling head around to stare in shock at the form behind seemingly devouring her shadow and growing bigger. She put aside any questions and need for answers as she felt rage engulf her "No…NO I REFUSE TO LET IT ALL GO TO WASTE." She howled turning her hand on the form to blast it...."How...how could…how can this be happening?!" She stared at Kage with utter contempt and hatred, "What...who...are you really?" As now more than ever those questions came to the forefront who was Kage really? How could she render all of years of machinations and work useless so easily?!
  • The Rebellion itself is beginning to feel this way as events unfold, although its members are split on the why following Phobos' escape and alliance with Kage. One camp believes that all their work has been rendered moot, as little has improved under Elyon's rule and now they are back to fighting the tyrant again; this gets deconstructed, as they are the more extremist faction of the Rebellion and believe that only extreme measures (such as summary execution of suspected Phobos loyalists) can ensure a lasting peace. This leaves the more reasonable and heroic members dismayed, as they watch everything they've achieved become a Full-Circle Revolution as they face opposition from both their enemies and now their allies.
  • Upon learning that the army she's part of has not only been repulsed from claiming Snowpoint by Jade and Phobos' forces, but is being pulled back to the capital by Elyon as part of a consolidation to deal with the new threat, Vera views it all as an utter failure of all the years of training and fighting she put towards her goal of revenge on the Mogriffs, putting her into a Heroic BSoD and driving her to go rogue to get her revenge regardless. Not only does her attempt to find and assassinate Metalbeak fail, but it leads to her and five other heirs of prestigious northern families (who she lied to in order to get them to agree to join her by saying it was an official mission, costing her any friendship she had with them when the truth comes out) being taken captive, which is advantageous in securing the north for Phobos, while she herself loses the functionality of one of her arms after she angers Jade one too many times.
• All Girls Want Bad Boys: Lampshaded. When Quinn expresses disbelief at Rosetta being romantically interested in Tyrian and another soldier complains that the madman has better luck with women than him, a third soldier guesses that a dangerous man is loved by women.
• All Your Base Are Belong to Us: The story opens with Jade attacking Elyon's castle with the full might of the nine tribes as a distraction while breaking into the Infinite City prison to free Phobos and his minions. However, once she has done that, she pulls the Shadowkhan back so that the heroes are left to lick their wounds and give her time to set in motion her plan to put Phobos back on the throne in a more secure way.
• Almost Kiss: After the plan to bury the Frostbiter under rocks succeeds, Tinsley and Alan find themselves on the ground, but as their faces move closer, Amelia tells them not to proceed to anything until it's confirmed the danger is truly over.
• Animal Motifs:
  • Jade invokes this when she has Cedric wear a snake wristband and Miranda a spider choker due to their respective beast forms.
  • Aspen Emmony, Amelia's ambitious mother who's not above misdirection to get her way, is known as "the Viper of the North", and her cold and calculating gaze is described to be like that of a snake ready to strike.
• Ankle Drag: When the Shadowkhan are clearing out the Infinite City's dungeons of guards in the first chapter, one Ninja Khan emerges from a guard's shadow, grabs his ankles and pulls him into his shadow.
• Anti-Climax: The Phobos loyalists at Snowpoint feel this way about the situation when they discover that Elyon's forces have suddenly withdrawn without a showdown.
• Anti-Villain:
  • Though Jade has taken up her role as the Queen of the Shadowkhan, finding her way back home remains as her primary goal, and her sense of gratitude towards Raythor is the only reason she remains involved in Meridian's affairs. She makes it clear to Phobos that she'll help him only for as long as he has Raythor's support, and she attempts to have the prince embrace Pragmatic Villainy instead of simply continuing in his old Card-Carrying Villain style. Though she wants to get even with the Guardians, Elyon and the Rebellion for all the torment they put her through, she prefers limiting the destruction she's capable of inflicting with her Shadowkhan armies, and will show mercy to enemy soldiers who surrender. She's also compassionate towards Meridian's discriminated races such as the shapeshifters and Mogriffs.
  • Several fleshed-out Phobos loyalists qualify as villains only because they're on his side either out of loyalty or having nowhere else to go because of the Fantastic Racism stirred up by the corrupt fanatics of the Rebellion.
• Anything but That!: The rebels who were detained for taking part in the Prison Riot at Snowpoint have this reaction when Jade sentences them to be taken to her palace's dungeons in the Shadow Realm, as ending up in the Land of Eternal Shadows is believed to be akin to being Dragged Off to Hell.
• Arbitrary Skepticism: Caleb refuses to budge in his obstinate beliefs that the Land of Eternal Shadows (the Shadow Realm) and the Shadow People (the Shadowkhan) could be anything other than a myth, or that Jade is their ruler instead of Phobos' creation.
• An Arm and a Leg:
  • Jade cuts off a soldier's hand during the battle at Snowpoint.
  • Downplayed with Vera; when a Leech Khan eats one of the arms of her shadow, her limb becomes paralyzed.
• Armor-Piercing Question:
  • When Tynar tells the Guardians and Elyon the truth about Jade/Kage, Elyon blames herself, and when the others tell her it's not her fault, Tynar disagrees to their shock. He then tells them that Kage said they attacked her without letting her explain herself and asks if it's not true that Elyon acted like her brother. All the girls can do is stay silent in shame.
    "Your Highness" he started "Queen Kage mentioned that you and the Guardians attacked her first without provocation the moment she arrived at this kingdom" his gaze harden "that you don't give her even a chance to talk before almost mortally wounded her and then ship her out to a cell in the infinity city without judgment or cause" he looked directly at the queen "could you please tell me these accusations are false and that you didn't act in a way your brother would and have done in the past?"
  • When Elyon tells the Guards that she's planning to make up for her blunders and be the queen that Meridian deserves, Erec tells her to be careful with her words and asks how much she really knows about the kingdom to know what's best for it. This question makes Elyon decide to do active research in order to become a real ruler instead of a figurehead.
  • The captured Vathek attempts to invoke this as he tries to reason with Jade in Chapter 24; while he concedes that his side has made mistakes and hurt innocents, he asks if she can call herself any better while she's helping Phobos take the throne back. They get interrupted by the alarm warning about the Frostbiter attacking Vera's team, and Jade decides their conversation is deferred for now. Before leaving though, she answers Vathek's question by stating that she's aware her decision has consequences, but she has made effort to minimize the damages by taking precautions. She then asks if he and his friends did the same when they put Elyon on the throne. As she leaves, Vathek is the one who's left with a more shaken resolve.
  • Phobos convinces Ilitia to help keeping her superiors ignorant about his presence in Riverdeen by asking that since they were willing to lock up Lily, what they'd be ready to do to the entire town that's taken the prince's side.
• Armor-Piercing Response:
  • As Jade leaves with the freed Phobos, Tynar begs her not to ally with him. When she scoffs and asks if she should join Elyon and the Guardians instead, and he responds by admitting they were unfair to her, she flies into a rage, pointing out how she was on Meridian for only five minutes before they had decided that she was a threat and nearly killed her. Tynar has nothing he can say in response to that after she's done.
  • Caleb sneakily tries to justify his actions by saying the person who disobeyed Elyon's orders regarding imprisoning Jade had good intentions. Elyon rebuffs him by stating that whatever their motives, that person disobeyed her orders, and they are all paying for his mistake.
    "Maybe…" Caleb's voice broke the silence "Maybe someone thought it was for the best?" he said "after all we just got rid of the usurper…and that girl looked too suspicious…" he fixed his tone. "People was still too fearful of him returning so keeping anyone that could be in cahoots with him locked was a good way to give security to the people"
    "It doesn't matter if they thought it was for the best." Her hands began to clench the armrests of her throne in slight anger "What matters is whoever did this, did it not only behind my back." She sent Caleb a slight glare with the rebel leader giving a nervous shift as he unconsciously began to see the family resemblance between the Queen and her tyrant of a brother in her rage, "But also went against my own orders for Kage." She lightly snapped as she stood from the throne giving Caleb a hard stare, "And now..." She trailed off with a sigh the rage in her tone dropping to exhaustion as she dropped back into the throne, "Now we're all paying the price for it." Elyon than gave Caleb a hard look "Which is why I want this looked into. I want to know who gave orders in my name."
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: When the Shadowkhan start making themselves at home in the palace Jade created, she sees members of the Samurai Khan acting as patrolling guards, the Bat Khan nesting in towers, the Sumo Khan working as gatekeepers, the Ninja Khan trailing her as personal servants/bodyguards... and some of the Leech Khan splashing in the royal garden's pond.
• Ascended Extra:
  • In the original story, Caleb had three unnamed Guards take Jade to be locked up in the Infinite City when she first came to Meridian. One of those Guards turns out to be Jax who eagerly takes part in executing Cavigor's prisoners under the Warden's orders and reveals to Vathek and Drake of what Caleb did to Jade against Elyon's orders.
  • The main Mogriff, named Windblade, turns out to be one of the Mogriffs who impersonated the Guardians to fool Elyon on Phobos' orders, more specifically the one who assumed Will's appearance.
  • The Mogriffs as a whole qualify for this status, as canonically they only appeared in one episode.
• Asshole Victim:
  • Jade uses a Leech Khan to steal Nerissa's shadow, leaving her comatose. Considering everything Nerissa's done and was planning to do, no tears should be shed for her in this.
  • The Warden of Cavigor is killed by a Razor Khan shortly after ordering all the prisoners killed to prevent Frost's forces from freeing them for Phobos, regardless of the possibility Vathek uncovered that some of them might actually be innocent.
  • Jax, one of the Warden's lieutenants who agrees wholeheartedly with his plan to kill the prisoners, is killed by a spear thrown by Frost as he tries to kill Drake for daring to stand in his way. And before that, there's one nameless Cavigor soldier whom Vathek intentionally locks in a cell and leaves behind for the Razor Khan to finish off, for unrepentantly following the Warden's orders.
• The Atoner: Following his Heel Realization, Vathek resolves that once he has helped stop Phobos and Kage (the latter peacefully if possible), he'll ensure the mistake with the blue girl's persecution won't get repeated and that Elyon's reign won't turn into a continuation of her brother's, whether by his old comrades or anyone else. When it becomes clear he's unlikely to survive the four Razor Khan during the battle of Cavigor, his (believed to be) last act is to ask the warriors to relay a message to their queen that Elyon has seen the error of her ways and wants peace with Kage. The Razor Khan opt to take him to Kage herself so he can deliver the message himself and have judgment rendered.
• Ax-Crazy: Tyrian starts out as a mere Cloudcuckoolander, but as he gets more focus, it's revealed that he's a psychotic religious fundamentalist obsessed with service to Jade, whom he views as his religion's prophesied goddess.
• Bare-Handed Blade Block: Jade uses her Super-Strength to block a rebel soldier's sword while battling at Snowpoint.
• Batman Gambit:
  • Jade's plan for destroying the Guardians' lives on Earth is to have Cedric and Miranda nudge their family and friends who aren't in the know about their powers to become more suspicious of them simply by making them notice how secretive the girls have been acting, driving a wedge between the Guardians and their loved ones.
  • When Frost is sent to assault Cavigor, he holds back his forces until Vathek's relief force shows up to protect the prison, then ambushes them from behind while they're still tired from the forced march they undertook to get there in time.
• Battle Couple: Windblade and her mate Metalbeak are the joint leaders of the Mogriffs and fight side-by-side to repel the rebel siege on Snowpoint. They're also revealed to have an infant son in the Stone Nest.
• Battle Trophy: The Mogriffs discover to their horror and wrath that Vera has been collecting skulls of their slayed conspecifics, effectively following her grandfather's footsteps as a butcher of their kind.
• Beast of Battle: Jade and some of Phobos' soldiers use giant shadow snakes as mounts when they take part in the skirmish in the northern mountains.
• Because You Were Nice to Me: Jade makes it clear that the only reason she's freeing Phobos is because that's what Raythor wants, and Raythor was the only one to treat her with any kindness after she arrived on Meridian.
• Berserk Button:
  • After realizing how much she's been kept Locked Out of the Loop, Elyon quickly develops a hatred of information being kept from her.
  • Following his Heel Realization, Vathek develops a loathing for anyone whose actions risk making Elyon's reign no different from Phobos'.
  • The "Nest Butcher" having living kin fills the Mogriffs in general with dread and wrath. When Metalbeak learns there's one following his hated enemy's footsteps, he nearly embarks on a reckless hunt for them, and Jade has to violently force him to think things through.
  • Though Tyrian is already Ax-Crazy, insulting Jade is a sure-fire way to make him seriously consider killing you.
  • Bastian Bromwood is a Reasonable Authority Figure, but he won't tolerate insubordination committed against his or Elyon's orders for egotistical reasons.
  • You'd better not compare Sofia to Cedric or any other snake shapeshifter, even if she's able to take it with Tranquil Fury.
  • Jade doesn't take to being dismissed as Just a Kid very well, as shown by her reaction to a rebel prisoner calling her a mere demon child in Chapter 31.
  • Don't interrupt Flora's meal if you don't want to make her grouchy.
• Big "NO!":
  • Cornelia has one in Chapter 8, when awakening from a Catapult Nightmare.
  • Caleb gives one at the start of a rant in Chapter 10, when he's refusing to believe that the Oracle has confirmed Jade/Kage's story.
  • Vera gives two when she rejects her team's consensus that surrendering is their only hope to survive and keeps fighting to the point of abandoning them to get her long-desired revenge.
  • One of the detained participants of Chapter 31's Prison Riot has this reaction when Jade sentences them to be sent to her palace's dungeons in the Shadow Realm.
  • One of the rebels who're being slaughtered by Tracker and Sniffer cries this out.
• Big "SHUT UP!": Jade delivers this twice to the detained participants of Chapter 31's Prison Riot when they try to beg for mercy and object to being sent to the Shadow Realm.
• Big "WHAT?!":
  • The Guardians exclaim this when Elyon informs them that Kage has released Phobos.
  • The Guardians (other than Will, who along with Elyon is giving them the news) react this way twice in Chapter 7, first when told that the Oracle is ordering them back to Earth, and then upon learning that Nerissa used to be a Guardian.
  • Caleb gives one in Chapter 10, upon learning that the Guardians have been banned from returning to Meridian by the Oracle.
  • Vathek and Drake have a simultaneous one when Yoruichi informs them about the soldiers who've decided to slaughter all of Cavigor's inmates.
  • Vera's reaction in Chapter 19 when the northern army captains learn of Phobos' escape from the Infinite City.
  • Jade has this in Chapter 20 when she's informed that contrary to her expectations, the rebel army has withdrawn from the mountains.
  • Amelia has a couple in Chapter 22, when Vera plans to continue on their mission despite the possible presence of a highly dangerous predator in their path.
  • This is Metalbeak's reaction in Chapter 27 when he learns from Windblade that their son is among the hatchlings that went to play in the northern tunnels, close to where an explosion just shook the mountain.
  • Amelia and Vathek have a simultaneous one when Tinsley tells them in Chapter 31 that Vera has initiated the Prison Riot in an effort to assassinate Kage.
  • When Albel and Idina Bexley inform her fellow noble figureheads of Castwell's Peak about the recent events, they have this reaction twice, first when they learn of Phobos' escape from the Infinite City and then upon being told that Vera has taken their children on her fugitive mission.
  • Amelia has this reaction in Chapter 32 upon learning that Vera tried to kill Caroline in the previous chapter.
  • In Chapter 34, Zekiel has this reaction to being informed that his prisoners include an 8-year-old human girl. He has another when Raythor reveals he's recently been in Riverdeen.
  • Kur lets out two of these in Chapter 36 when Aldarn informs him about Phobos' escape and Kage's Shadowkhan army.
• Black Swords Are Better: Jade provides Phobos' troops with dark-colored Shadowkhan weapons that prove to be strong enough to shatter the regular steel weapons used by Elyon's forces.
• Blasting It Out of Their Hands: When confronted by prison rioters in Chapter 31, the guard accompanying Caroline and Maya attempts to sound the alarm, but he drops his horn when Vera throws a knife in his hand.
• Blinded by Rage: When the enraged Metalbeak wants to immediately hunt down the Nest Butcher's kin, Jade makes a point of letting him do that only if he manages to knock her out of the circle she draws in snow. When his increasingly furious attempts to do so fail, she specifically tells him that he must keep his head cool to avoid falling into any possible trap of the rebels.
• Blind Seer: Tyrian tells Rosetta that the founder of his religion was Blinded by the Light of one of Meridian's past queens as punishment, but he felt instead that he was able to truly see the world in darkness and had a vision foretelling of the dark goddess who'll bring forth a new era of darkness and free everyone from the blinding light of Meridian's queens.
• Blood Knight:
  • Jade finds that now being a full Shadowkhan gives her an Oni's bloodlust in battle, as during the battle at Snowpoint she gets so caught up in it that she starts going after the rebel soldiers in a vicious fury that only fades once the fighting is over.
  • Frost is bloodthirsty and loves the thrill of battle, as is evident at Cavigor.
  • Tyrian becomes this when it comes to fighting in Jade's name, due to his religious obsession with her. He likes it when his opponents can give him a challenge.
  • Tracker loves the thrill of a good hunt.
• Blow You Away: The authors interpret several incidents in canon as Jade having a wind element motif. So as a fully embraced Shadowkhan, this translates into her now having the ability to summon and attack with intense storm winds (which are also filled with paralyzing shadow energy).
• Bonfire Dance: As the Phobos loyalists celebrate their victory over the rebel army at Snowpoint, Jade dances around one of the bonfires and summons several Shadowkhan along, much to the surprise of the soldiers before many of them join them, including Tyrian who's asked by Rosetta to dance with her.
• Both Sides Have a Point:
  • When Jade and a captive Vathek debate her plans and goals in Chapter 24, she admits that he's right that Phobos is a self-serving tyrant who can't be completely trusted, but counters that it doesn't change the fact that Elyon was never properly prepared to rule, something that Vathek reluctantly concedes.
  • In Chapter 34, Phobos and the rebel Ilitia argue the merits of his reign vs Elyon's; he admits many of the more aggressive actions he either ordered or allowed to happen under his rule, but points out that the rebellion hasn't been that much better since ousting him, something she can't deny.
• Bows Versus Crossbows: When Vera fails to get a rope up the mountainside with her bow, Alan whips out a crossbow that gets the job done (before falling apart), though Vera thinks a machine cannot compare to a true archer's talent.
• Brain Bleach: When Amelia ask Ymir if Phobos hasn't gone so far as to propose to Kage to forge their alliance, Ymir has to make an effort not to feel sick at the idea. Kur is similarly disgusted by the implications of that scenario in Chapter 36.
• Break the Cutie: Tinsley, The Pollyanna of the Sky Hunters, is gradually brought to her emotional breaking point by the consequences of the extreme actions Vera undertakes to get her revenge, one of which is Vera betraying her and the rest of their friends' trust.
• Bring News Back:
  • The reason Arthur, Manny and Torgo are incarcerated in Cavigor is because they tried to deliver to the capital one of Mayor Asta's letters so that Elyon would do something about the corrupt rebels making life difficult in Riverdeen, only to get caught by them.
  • After Mayor Asta told Lily that his latest missive to Elyon should make everyone in Riverdeen happier, she took it upon herself to relay it with the help of the Whisperers she'd befriended. She was captured by Kur's men who also burned almost all the Whisperers, but the letter was left behind in her pack to be found later by the Shadowkhan and delivered to Jade. Learning from it about the misery of the Swamplands' citizens makes her and Phobos decide to fix the situation by themselves as a part of their PR campaign.
• Broken Pedestal:
  • The first stepping stone of Jade's plan to put Phobos back on the throne is having Meridian's general population to become disillusioned with Elyon, the Rebellion and the Guardians.
  • The guards' view of the Rebellion has been consistently chipped away at due to the distrust and outright hostility they've been treated with by the rebels ever since Phobos was overthrown, despite having turned on him to help that victory.
  • Tynar's view on the Guardians, already damaged by learning how they framed Raythor, takes another serious hit when he learns what they did to Jade/Kage when they first met her.
  • Elyon's faith in Kandrakar is shattered when Luba states that if it weren't for Nerissa (disguised as the Mage) insisting that Phobos was a threat to other worlds, they wouldn't have bothered interfering with events on Meridian.
  • Tynar's respect among the guards collapses when they come to blame him for their treatment by the rebels, as he was the one who convinced them all to turn on Phobos in the first place.
  • Vera is the first rebel leader shown to lose faith in Elyon, when the latter orders the northern army to abandon the siege of Snowpoint (and by extension, Vera's lifelong pursuit of revenge on the Mogriffs).
  • Vera in turn slowly becomes this to her friends when her obsession with her renegade mission against Metalbeak increasingly drives her to take risks that nearly get them all killed repeatedly. Amelia in particular is stunned and enraged to realize that Vera lied about the mission being sanctioned, specifically calling Vera a former friend after learning this.
  • Vathek starts becoming disillusioned with many of his fellow rebels as he discovers how the Full-Circle Revolution is tarnishing everything they were supposed to fight for.
• Brutal Honesty: Played for laughs in Chapter 37; when Flora tries to protest to Arkana's criticism of her, she stops when the entire swamp patrol and even Edmund give her a look and complains that they're all mean. Arkana deadpans in response that while they're mean, they're not liars.
• Bullying a Dragon: Even after witnessing Jade's might in the face of her wrath, Vera Bexley won't stop insulting her and Metalbeak in the face despite being weaponless, injured and captured. After Metalbeak soundly beats her yet decides along with Jade to spare her from a Fate Worse than Death sentence out of pity, she still thinks it's a smart idea to initiate a Prison Riot so that she can kill Jade in her sleep before going after Metalbeak again, even when her former friends argue that would risk the Shadowkhan enacting a Roaring Rampage of Revenge upon the entire Meridian. When the awakened Jade shows up and effortlessly restrains about two dozen prisoners, Vera gets cold feet and tries to escape, only to be caught again, but she returns to her disrespectful demeanor when her original sentence is reinstated until she actually gets to experience its effects.
• The Bus Came Back: The Swamp arc brings back Kur, a bigoted and fanatic rebel leader who played a supporting role in Kage but has been absent in this story until this point.
• The Butcher: Jesekiel Bexley, Vera's grandfather, was known among the Mogriffs as the "Nest Butcher" for the sheer brutality he showed when he took part in driving them out of their nesting ground.
• Call-Back:
  • Jade reveals she took over Cedric's old bookstore in Heatherfield to use as a base on Earth.
  • Upon learning the truth about Kage, Will remembers how Jade called her out of framing Raythor in the original story and feels guilty enough to say that Jade may have been right when she said back then that the Guardians' aren't true heroes.
  • In both canon and Kage, Miranda presented herself to Alchemy as a friend of Elyon named "Melinda" who pretended to be concerned for Elyon's disappearance in order to frame the Guardians for it. Here, she uses that same persona to get closer to Alchemy and slowly turn her against the Guardians.
  • Windblade is the Mogriff who impersonated Will in the first season, and she continues taking on the Keeper's appearance in order to communicate with others.
  • Elyon recalls the giant map of Meridian Phobos showed her in the first season as she reflects on how she never before realized how vast Meridian truly is.
  • When Metalbeak tells Jade of his past vengeance against the human whom he witnessed torture and slaughter numerous of his kind, she reflects on her killing of Shendu in the Season 1 finale of JCA canon to prevent him from coming after her family for revenge. And when Metalbeak tells her that in such a situation she was justified to do so, she notes that Raythor said something similar when she told him about it in Kage.
  • Upon learning that she matches the description of the deity worshipped by Tyrian's religion, Jade flashes back to the time that an animated Quetzalcoatl statue mistook her for an Aztec goddess and nearly flew her into the sun, and decides she doesn't want to deal with that kind of nonsense again.
  • It was mentioned in the original story that Phobos wiped out the rest of Meridian's nobility to get rid of any possible competition to the throne. It's revealed here that almost all the noble families from the capital's immediate area were extinguished while some were left intact in the northern cities.
  • In Chapter 30, Metalbeak challenges the captive Vera to knock him out of a circle drawn on the ground, deliberately calling back to Jade issuing him a similar challenge in Chapter 22.
  • In Chapter 32, Jade remembers several instances when she defied her past enemies despite the odds being against her, and berates herself for failing to realize that someone like Vera wouldn't accept defeat just like that.
• Can't Kill You, Still Need You: With Vera subdued in Chapter 28, Jade is content to let Metalbeak decide her fate until Ymir points out that as the daughter of the governor of one of the most influential northern cities, she has irreplaceable hostage value in securing the north under Phobos' control. The Mogriffs don't give a darn and want to extinguish the Nest Butcher's line once and for all, but Jade, tired from the long day, decrees that after having some rest, she will come up with Ymir and Metalbeak a compromise that will satisfy them all regarding Vera. They ultimately decide to keep her alive but locked away where she'll never be a threat to anyone ever again, but when Vera throws their mercy in their faces by trying to assassinate Jade, the latter has a Leech Khan eat the shadow of one of her arms. Crippled and broken by the ordeal, Vera is neutralized as a threat, and the Mogriffs are satisfied by her suffering.
• Cassandra Truth:
  • Even when Tynar points out evidence to the contrary, and Jade/Kage herself denies it, Vathek refuses to accept that she's not a monster created by Phobos as a minion. It's only after seeing them interact, and seeing Nerissa's comatose body as proof of what Jade was saying, that he begrudgingly starts to believe.
  • Caleb takes it even further, refusing to believe that the Mage was an impostor even when seeing Nerissa.
• Catapult Nightmare: Cornelia has one in Chapter 8, of Jade/Kage attacking her in her home.
• The Cavalry: A villainous example; the army Jade leads to the northern mountains arrives just in time to reinforce the garrison of Snowpoint who, after weeks of constant attacks, are about to be crushed by the rebel army.
• Children Are Innocent: Lily, an 8-year-old girl from the swamp village of Riverdeen, befriends the Whisperers due to not knowing or caring about most people's view of them as monsters. And after he saves her from the rebels, she actually hugs Phobos and views him as a hero, to his shock.
• Childhood Friends: The Sky Hunters grew up together as they trained for the day they could help fight Phobos' followers.
• City of Canals: As the Swamplands' melting pot of merchandise in the middle of a lake, Everdeen is this.
• City on the Water: Everdeen, the capital of commerce in the Swamplands, has been built in the middle of a lake over platforms that are rooted to the bottom and connected by bridges, leaving between them canals for traveling by boat.
• Closest Thing We Got:
  • While Jade isn't an Oni by birth, her merger with her Queen persona makes her enough of one that, due to all the actual Oni still being sealed, she becomes the Shadowkhan's ruler by default.
  • Bastian Bromwood, the commander in chief of Elyon's forces in the north despite his young age, likes to tell himself that he got the job because of his loyalty and aptitude for combat, but is aware that it's mostly because the former rebels have too few people actually qualified for such positions.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Tyrian, a soldier in the army Jade leads to Snowpoint, is incredibly eccentric, as shown with his obsession with giving his shadow snake a fearsome name and titles, even in the middle of an intense battle. Also, he doesn't mind nearly getting eaten by it himself. And as it turns out, at least part of this is due to being part of a long-banned religious sect, the teachings of which he fervently keeps to even to everyone else's discomfort.
• Combat Hand Fan: Jade starts carrying a pair of these as part of her new outfit, and uses them as both shields and a focus for magical attacks.
• Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are:
  • When Jade realizes that whoever the Frostbiter chased to the rocky maze is still around, she orders her troops to find them while also calling out loud to give the trespassers a chance to show themselves. She ends up finding Caroline and the wounded Philip when the former speaks too loudly in her worry over the latter.
  • After dispatching a group of escaped prisoners in Chapter 31, Jade senses that Vera is hiding nearby and tells the madwoman to show up before she counts to three. When she gets to three, Vera pulls a Super Window Jump in an ultimately futile effort to escape.
• Comically Missing the Point: When some of Phobos' loyalists loot a noble's tent in the abandoned camp of the rebels' northern army, Tyrian tries to make them hand over the valuables as tribute to Jade despite not being ordered to do so. When Captain Ymir, aware Jade doesn't want to be worshipped as a goddess by Tyrian, tells the crazy fanatic that Jade is not the type to covet after jewels, Tyrian facepalms, says it was stupid of him to think that material riches would interest a goddess and decides he must show his devotion through other means like a Human Sacrifice.
• Commonality Connection:
  • Jade and Metalbeak connect in the 20th chapter when she compares her act of killing Shendu to end his threat over the world once and for all to Metalbeak's quest to kill Vera's grandfather for all he did to the Mogriffs.
  • In Chapter 29, Vathek sadly reflects on the fact that he and Amelia both share the tragedy of a close friend (Caleb and Vera, respectively) going rogue out of obsession.
  • Caroline starts befriending Sofia and Maya when the two healers recognize her medical skills and ask her help in Snowpoint's healing wing.
• Conspiracy Theorist: Caleb is very much coming across as this, with him refusing to believe the truth about Jade/Kage or Nerissa, no matter how many holes anyone pokes in the logic of his beliefs.
• Continuation: To Kage.
• Continuity Nod:
  • Jade, unimpressed at Nerissa for trying to underrate her act of making the girl a menace on Meridian, mutters that Valmont never tried to use any "I was actually on your side all the time and was just playing my part" excuse when Shendu possessed him.
  • Jade refers to Shendu using the Book of Ages to rewrite reality when she explains to Phobos and the others why they can't simply crush their enemies immediately.
  • In Kage, Jade ate a giant rat's brain while starving and enjoyed it. It seems to have become one of her favorite foods by now.
  • When Jade learns that the rest of Meridian's greed for the crystals inside the Stone Nest are part of the reason the Mogriffs have been forced to fight for it, she remembers how her family's adventures started when Valmont worked for Shendu in the hope of getting his hands on the lost treasure of Ching Xi Hung.
  • Jade refers to Shendu returning as a ghost following his death at her hands and getting resurrected by Daolon Wong when she jokingly remarks that the Mogriffs didn't have the same problem with the "Nest Butcher".
• Costume Evolution: To symbolize her fully claiming the title of Queen, Jade ditches her ninja robes for a battle kimono over black biker shorts, with an indigo crown shaped like dragon horns.
• Create Your Own Hero: Taranee lampshades the irony of how Nerissa invoked this with the Guardians; had she not convinced Kandrakar that Phobos was a threat to the realms outside Meridian, they wouldn't have raised the Veil and given the Heart to the new generation of the Guardians.
• Create Your Own Villain:
  • The gradual process of Jade's Face–Heel Turn that started from Kage has come to a full circle by the start of this fic. While the heroes finally realize they've been antagonizing Jade on poor grounds, it's likely too late to make peace with her now that she has officially allied herself with Phobos and promised to return him to power.
  • Though this is more of a case of a Well-Intentioned Extremist creating a Knight Templar through a Cycle of Revenge, Metalbeak eventually admits that by killing Jesekiel Bexley in front of his granddaughter Vera ten years earlier to avenge all the Mogriffs the Nest Butcher had killed, he's responsible for turning Vera into the vengeful new Butcher who'll sacrifice even her friends and own life to exterminate every single member of his species.
• Crush Blush: Rosetta and Tinsley often do this around Tyrian and Alan, respectively. Edmund also does that around Flora.
• Cry into Chest: Tinsley ends up crying in Caroline's arms twice, first when they learn that Vera deceived them and secondly when they witness the punishment Jade inflicts on Vera.
• Crystal Landscape: There's beneath the Stone Nest, which is a dormant/extinct volcano, Meridian's largest deposit of invaluable light crystals that fill the tunnels leading to the mountain.
• Cult: Tyrian is a member of a religious sect that was long banned in Meridian for worshiping the Shadow Realm and prophesying that a goddess would emerge from it to engulf the Infinite Realms in darkness.
• Cult of Personality: Discussed. When Jade reveals that she plans to have the people of Meridian want Phobos back on the throne, Raythor and Miranda point out that Phobos is not loved by the people, with Phobos bitterly admitting that Elyon had that even before she set foot on Meridian. But as Jade retorts, the people don't love Elyon, they love the idea of her; they were not used to the idea of a man on the throne, and believed that once she was crowned, Elyon would take things back to normal or bring a utopia. Jade then explains how for all of Phobos' faults, he was trained as a noble and brought peace (if a fragile one) to the realm between the different races. The Rebellion then destroyed that peace, while Elyon is a normal Earth girl with no training to rule, allowing the Rebellion to cause problems for the commoners with their obsessive rooting out of any suspected Phobos loyalists. In light of that all, Jade believes that all they have to do is reveal Elyon's failings to the public, and her reign will fall apart.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • Tyrian effortlessly defeats Quinn and two of her fellow soldiers in Chapter 21 to prove that he's a dangerous oddball.
  • When Jade challenges the enraged Metalbeak to single combat in order to stop him from embarking on a reckless hunt for Vera, she defeats him with four precise strikes without him managing to push her out of the circle she draws in the ground.
  • When Tyrian intercepts Vera's team in Chapter 26, he dominates the entire fight against the four nobles, and they're able to escape only when Vera traps him in the middle of exploding coal dust.
  • Metalbeak inflicts one similar to the one Jade gave him on Vera who refuses to give up despite being unarmed and injured.
• Cycle of Revenge: Metalbeak killed a man who had killed numerous Mogriffs in the past while clearly enjoying it as he tortured them to death, even killing eggs and hatchlings. This man was Vera Bexley's beloved grandfather, and she has spent the ten years since that day plotting revenge against the Mogriffs in general, and Metalbeak in particular, for his death.
• Dance-Off: When Jade jokes to Tyrian that he's challenging the Ninja Khan he just bumped into while dancing with Rosetta to a dance duel to impress the girl, he takes it seriously and engages with the ninja in a dance modeled after the Mamushka.
• Dark Is Not Evil:
  • Downplayed with Jade; though her Split-Personality Merge with the Queen has turned her into the Queen of the Shadowkhan willing to ally with Phobos to have revenge on the heroes, she intends to remain an Anti-Villain rather than embrace full-hearted villainy like the demons in her own universe.
  • Tyrian's religious sect firmly believes that their prophesied goddess from the Shadow Realm will snuff out the blinding light of Meridian's queens and allow everyone to truly see again in the protective darkness.
• Defiant Captive:
  • After being captured, Vera Bexley won't stop throwing around insults and threats in her rage at having her revenge denied, much to the exasperation of Jade, Phobos loyalists, and even the more sensible prisoners. After failing to kill Metalbeak in single combat, she stops resisting just so that she can trick her captors into lowering their guard and escape. After being captured again, she still refuses to admit defeat until the punishment Jade inflicts on her finally gets through her madness.
  • When the participants of Snowpoint's Prison Riot are sentenced by Jade, only a few of them refuse to cow before her.
• Description Cut: When Rosetta tries to explain to Quinn her romantic interest in Tyrian during Chapter 24, Quinn snarks that even as they speak, the madman is likely doing something that's either stupid, dangerous or both. As Rosetta asks if that's not exaggeration, the scene briefly cuts to Tyrian who's planning to bathe Jade's sleeping shadow snake Onyx before Quinn deadpans in response to Rosetta that if anything, she's underestimating Tyrian.
• Desert Warfare: To prevent Frost from taking over Cavigor, Vathek and Drake march their relief force through the southern desert, only to be ambushed by Frost's army when they reach the prison. In their hurry to reach Cavigor in one day, they fail to spot Frost's troops who're hiding in the shades of canyons and rocks, leading to the exhausted rebel army being surrounded. Though Frost's army is lesser in numbers, the Sand Dwellers in their ranks are accustomed to fighting under the scorching sun, and with the offensive power of their Shadowkhan weapons added to the mix, the rebels are forced to withdraw to Cavigor that becomes besieged.
• Detrimental Determination: Vera Bexley embodies this trope; she's so dead-set on killing Metalbeak to avenge her grandfather's death by any means that she resorts to deceiving her friends into deserting the army with her and continuously endangering their lives before throwing them under the bus when they refuse to continue her mad quest anymore. Not even imprisonment, threat of losing her soul by a Leech Khan eating a part of her shadow, or her body literally pushed to its limits can get her to accept defeat or reconsider her strong opinions. In the end, all she achieves with her ruthlessness is herself and her fellow nobles captured as political hostages, her friendship with them ruined by her actions, and her psyche badly damaged and arm rendered unusable due to her losing a part of her shadow.
• Didn't See That Coming: Jade is utterly shocked to find that Elyon has ordered her northern army to withdraw from besieging Snowpoint, having expected them to keep trying to assault the fortress.
• Didn't Think This Through: Vera realizes in Chapter 23 that she was in such a rush to carry out her renegade mission before her superiors discovered it that she didn't account for how to get into Snowpoint to find Metalbeak, or whether he'd even still be there rather than elsewhere.
• Disappointed in You:
  • While Tynar does not outright say it, it's clear that he is disappointed in the Guardians and Elyon's actions regarding Jade/Kage.
  • When Idina Bexley learns that Vera has endangered herself and the other noble heirs of Castwell's Peak with her reckless actions, she's clearly disappointed that contrary to what she believed while letting Vera participate in Snowpoint's siege, her daughter didn't have enough control over her vengeful desires.
• Divide and Conquer: The first active stage of Jade's plan on the Meridian side of things is to split up Phobos' forces and travel to different regions in order to both distract Elyon and gather more supporters for Phobos.
• Divided We Fall: When Vathek learns from Amelia that Vera led her and the rest of their friends to danger just to get her personal revenge, he laments on the actions of Cavigor's Warden, Caleb and the conspirators situated in the Swamplands and how those extremists can't seem to understand that they shouldn't be going rogue now that the entire Meridian is being threatened by Phobos and Kage.
• The Dog Bites Back:
  • After all the abuse she took from the heroes since arriving on Meridian, Jade is determined to go on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge, achieved by aiding Phobos in one of his own.
  • She also takes great glee in overpowering Vathek and having him tossed into an Infinite City prison cell, after he was one of her most aggressive antagonists on Meridian.
• Domain Holder: Jade finds that she can reshape the contents of the Shadow Realm to her will, crafting part of the void into a Floating Continent with a palace on it.
• Don't Create a Martyr: Jade refuses to immediately crush Elyon and the Rebellion with her armies because that would only motivate their friends to rally against Phobos more fiercely than before. She instead decides to destroy the common people's faith in Elyon so that they'd have no choice but to accept Phobos as their ruler.
• Dope Slap:
  • When Quinn comments in Chapter 26 about the invaluable crystals they're seeing in mine walls, Jade responds by striking the soldier's forehead with her fingers to "channel Uncle from across reality" and forbids her from touching the Mogriffs' crystals.
  • When Alan attempts to move in his injured condition in Chapter 29, Sofia smacks his head and tells him not to re-open his wound.
  • Barnabas smacks the head of his fellow prisoner when he disapproves of the latter threatening Maya in Chapter 31.
• Dramatic Irony:
  • Elyon ordering Caleb to find the person who went against her orders and imprisoned Jade when she first arrived on Meridian, unaware that he's the guilty party.
  • Caleb and Vera are quick to propose taking out Jade under the belief that will get them rid of the Shadowkhan and enable them to defeat Phobos and his loyalists, but many people on both sides disapprove that idea since they fear the Shadow Realm would retaliate by declaring war on absolutely everyone on Meridian. What none of them know is that the Shadowkhan are a Keystone Army that acts at all only when someone is controlling them.
• The Dreaded: It takes only the first fight against the Shadowkhan to give them a feared reputation across Meridian. One of the soldiers marching to Cavigor under Vathek admits he'd rather face even Phobos himself than the "shadow demons". Even most of Phobos' soldiers are wary of them and admit feeling relieved they're on their side.
• Entertainingly Wrong: When the Guardians learn that Kage is the queen of another dimension, they question why she ended up on Meridian in shambles, and come to the conclusion that she must have been chased by something more powerful, a prospect which terrifies them. Of course, the readers know that Jade ended up on Meridian by accident after Drago banished her from her own universe, and nothing is chasing her.
• Equal-Opportunity Evil: Jade lampshades that Phobos' reign allowed all of Meridian's races to coexist in peace, even if in a fragile one, while Elyon's reign has given new opportunities for ancient interracial conflicts such as the persecution of shapeshifters. Arthur and Manny also express their opinion that while Phobos may have been a tyrant, the racism their Lurden friend Torgo and others have suffered since the prince's downfall makes the rebels worse than Phobos.
• Et Tu, Brute?: After learning that Vera deceived her fellow Sky Hunters for her own selfish ends, Amelia is utterly dismayed because for all her differences with Vera, she never believed the latter would be capable of stabbing her friends in the back like this (with the others feeling similar when they later learn about it). Her feelings are empathized by Vathek who's still reeling over the revelation that it was Caleb of all people who played a vital role in making Kage an enemy by countermanding Elyon's orders and refused to come clean about it.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • Phobos, while amused by how the Rebellion mistook Jade for an enemy and overreacted in such a way as to end up actually making her one, is insulted when Vathek accuses him of lying about Kage not being his minion.
  • While Jade plans to mess with the Guardians' lives as retribution, she's not planning to kill them.
  • While Raythor views Elyon as the usurper to Phobos' rightful ruler, he's absolutely outraged to learn that the rebels have been throwing their weight around behind Elyon's back despite having sworn to serve her.
  • When Jade gives Frost the Razor Khan as backup for his mission at Cavigor, she's disturbed by his obvious excitement to test their destructive capabilities and tells him not to go overboard.
  • Jade is angered to learn that Kandrakar has ordered the Guardians to stay away from Meridian while hoping to find a peaceful way to deal with her; though she has no fondness of Meridian in general, she's unimpressed that the protectors and overseers of the Infinite Dimensions seem to be using Meridian as a meat shield to give them time to protect themselves against her.
  • Jade, Captain Ymir and Rosetta all make it clear to Vera that they disapprove of her willingness to resort to dishonorable methods to fulfill her vendetta against the Mogriffs, including abandoning without remorse her team for refusing to continue on her senseless quest and taking an innocent hatchling hostage.
  • When Kage's Jade and Queen halves discuss in Chapter 30, the Queen concedes that even though they're full Oni now, they don't want to become like Tarakudo who'd engulf Meridian into the Shadow Realm, or Shendu and Drago who enjoy causing destruction For the Evulz.
  • The rebels admit that the one line Phobos would never cross was harming children. In fact, he once sentenced a Serial Killer who targeted children to being Flayed Alive in public as a demonstration of how he wouldn't tolerate such things.
  • The rebel captain Zekiel diligently follows Kur's orders by sending alleged Phobos loyalists from the Swamplands to Cavigor, and he would have already killed Lily if she were a shapeshifter. However, he's utterly displeased to learn that she's a normal human kid who was imprisoned simply for associating with Whisperers (though it's also because of the repercussions should Elyon's inner circle learn about the unlawful arrests), and he's just as angry as Abigor and Ilitia when one of his men suggests killing her to cover their tracks.
  • Phobos and Raythor both view Elyon as a usurper and a naive fool unfit to rule, but they're both willing to admit that she'd never knowingly ignore the problems that are plaguing the Swamplands.
• Everyone Has Standards: Despite having Fantastic Racism towards Changelings and Lurdens, Aldarn doesn't extend that to every "monster" race in Meridian, and is disgusted by how Kur is treating all the non-humans in Everdeen.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: When Jade explains that she insisted on helping Cedric and Miranda just because she wanted to help, they just stare back at her, unable to believe she has no ulterior motives.
• Evil Minions: Some of the Ninja Khan, instead of fighting, serve as record keepers to the Shadow Realm's ruler and are distinguished from their brethren by their red robes. The authors explain that they're basically linked to Kage more directly; they have access to her memories while she meditates and write things down for her to use later.
• Evil Versus Evil: Jade and Phobos' forces engage in this with the more Knight Templarish factions of Elyon loyalists, such as Cavigor's Warden, Vera Bexley and Kur.
• Exactly What I Aimed At: While fighting a Ninja Khan in Chapter 27, Tinsley throws one of his shuriken which he easily ducks before it cuts through a door latch behind him and releases barrels onto him.
• Exact Words: When Vathek surrenders to Frost and the Razor Khan in Cavigor, it's on condition that his men fighting a losing battle against Frost's forces on the upper levels will be spared. Frost agrees... and then orders that Vathek's men on the level they're actually on to be killed, as he only agreed to spare the ones further up.
• Expecting Someone Taller: When first meeting Phobos, Flora blurts out that she always thought him to be taller.
• Expy:
  • One of the original characters is a purple-haired female soldier named Yoruichi.
  • Tyrian is based on a similarly insane and religious character with the same name from RWBY.
• Eye Scream:
  • At one point during the fighting at Snowpoint, Jade throws a shuriken into a rebel soldier's eye.
  • Vera Bexley dissolves a Mantis Khan by stabbing it in the eyes with her knives.
  • When Vera ignites coal dust as a weapon against Tyrian, he gets burned around his eyes. It leaves him with some sight problems for the rest of the day.
  • Phobos and his team go for the eyes of the swamp eels that attack them in Chapter 37.
• Facepalm:
  • Jade massages the bridge of her nose when Nerissa tries to dismiss the severity of framing her, and when Nerissa declares her to be the only Knight worthy of helping the sorceress' world domination plans, Jade facepalms.
  • When Jade asks Cedric and Miranda if they could believe she helped them just because she wanted to, she facepalms as they respond only by giving a blank look and glaring, respectively.
  • In Chapter 8, Irma's father rubs the bridge of his nose when he thinks Irma's not giving Cedric a fair chance.
  • Elyon, displeased with her poor results in learning more about Meridian, drags her palms down her face in Chapter 10. She later pinches her forehead while she rips into Caleb about the foolishness of his idea to assassinate Jade, while Drake rubs his face in his worry about Caleb's mental state.
  • Captain Ymir has this reaction when Tyrian first gets himself in a shadow serpent's mouth. He does it again in response to Tyrian's further antics in Chapter 21 and has to refrain from doing it yet again in front of his troops.
  • Jade, already anticipating a headache, places a hand on her forehead in response to learning that Tyrian views her as a goddess.
  • When Ymir tells Tyrian that Jade in unlikely to want gold and jewels as tribute, Tyrian facepalms and chastises himself for thinking his goddess would care about material riches.
  • Amelia pinches the bridge of her nose in Chapter 22 in her frustration at Vera refusing to give straight answers. She later does it again in Chapter 30 when she anticipates what the outcome of Vera's reckless actions might spell for their team.
  • In Chapter 24, Jade resists the urge to facepalm at Vathek's claim that the nonhuman races would be given a chance to live peacefully under Elyon's reign. She later pinches the bridge of her nose and massages her forehead when Onyx spits out Tyrian.
  • Jade facepalms when she tells Tyrian that she wants Vera's band alive so that she'll have a greater chance of getting answers out of them and he thinks she means she intends to torture one of them to make the others talk.
  • Idina Bexley pinches and rubs her forehead in Chapter 30 as she relays to her fellow nobles what Albel told her about Vera going rogue with the other heirs.
  • Ilitia, Abigor and Zekiel rub their faces several times in Chapter 34 as they lament on the difficult position Lily's capture has put them in.
• Faint in Shock: When Jade uses shadow chains to subdue a group of escaped rebel soldiers in Chapter 31, she leaves behind the one who angered her by assuming her to be "just a demon child". He faints by the force of her glare.
• False Flag Operation: Shortly after Kur was put in charge of Everdeen, the city was mysteriously attacked by unidentified figures, which gave Kur the opening to declare martial law and flood the city with his soldiers. Kali, who is telling the story of this to Aldarn, dryly notes how convenient the timing of all this was.
• Fantastic Racism:
  • As in Kage, this is a pretty big problem on the Rebellion's side, with them repressing the more "monstrous" races of Meridian for being allegedly loyal to Phobos or just for existing.
  • Shapeshifters seem to be capable of this among themselves as well; the kindly spider shapeshifter Sofia appears to have her own strong opinions about serpentine shapeshifters like Cedric and doesn't like them to be mixed up with each other. Cedric's reputation not helping the general view on changelings may have something to do with it, but Maya suspects her mother may have had a bad relationship with another snake shapeshifter.
• Fate Worse than Death: Discussed as a solution to the dilemma involving Vera in Chapter 30; Jade decides that since the Bexley heir is too valuable to be killed, but also needs to be punished in a way that'll satisfy the Mogriffs, a Leech Khan will partially eat her shadow, leaving her living in a state which Jade describes as losing one's soul and is alluded to be similar to having a lobotomy. Said sentence is ultimately not carried out after Metalbeak decides that it'll be enough to imprison the girl whose life has already been ruined by her desire for revenge which he ignited in her... only for Vera to respond to this by starting a Prison Riot to create a distraction so that she can try to kill Jade. Infuriated by this, Jade reinstates the sentence, but in a downplayed version — the Leech Khan only partially eats her shadow, which paralyzes her arm (rendering her unable to fight) and causes enough intense pain it actually snaps Vera out of her madness, leaving her to live with the horror of all that she's done.
• Foil:
  • Caleb and Vathek are this to a certain extent. Both of them abuse Jade, thinking that she was a minion of Phobos, and when they learn the truth, they go deep into denial about their actions. The difference is that Caleb doubles down on his cruel actions and denial about Jade, while Vathek accepts the truth, feels guilty about his actions, and tries to move past his cruel behavior to redeem himself.
  • Though both Jade and Nerissa are cunning Fallen Heroines who use elemental magic, Nerissa is an old woman who's entirely reliant on her Quintessence powers in a fight and prefers operating from the shadows, while Jade is a more hands-on little girl capable of physical action as well as shadow magic. Nerissa is a double-crossing Manipulative Bitch who uses absolutely everyone as tools, while the more anti-villainous Jade is capable of genuine camaraderie with her allies. Nerissa has deluded herself into thinking her machinations will save the universe in the long run, but Jade fully acknowledges the moral ambiguity of her current actions.
  • Vera Bexley and Metalbeak are leaders and determinators with strong feelings of Revenge Before Reason regarding Vera's late grandfather, Jesekiel Bexley. Vera views her beloved grandfather as a hero, and ever since she saw his mutilated remains as a child, she has for ten years wanted to avenge him by killing all the Mogriffs and Metalbeak in particular. Metalbeak in turn was only a hatchling when he first witnessed the "Nest Butcher" Jesekiel killing indiscriminately other Mogriffs with glee before killing him after three decades of waiting to avenge his slaughtered conspecifics. Metalbeak almost embarks on a reckless hunt for Vera upon learning of her existence until Jade beats sense into him so that he won't risk everything he holds dear. No-one manages to do the same to Vera as her quest to assassinate Metalbeak leads her to sacrificing her conscience and friendship with her fellow Sky Hunters. Metalbeak shows he has taken Jade's point to heart when he prevents her from dealing with Vera (who just threatened his son) in a way that endangers the whole Stone Nest and remarks that ending up like Vera isn't worth acting in reckless rage. He even beats the maddened Vera in a duel that mirrors the Curb-Stomp Battle Jade subjected him to in order to make him see reason, but while he realized his folly back then and admits his responsibility over the start of Vera's vendetta, Vera continues refusing to let go of her grudge or own up to her own actions. The contrast is further emphasized by the fact that Metalbeak has chosen to shapeshift into Jesekiel.
  • Like Elyon before they met, Jade is now a magically empowered royal girl fighting the Guardians and the Rebellion due to feeling wronged by them and has sided with Phobos who plans to find a way to harness her powers through manipulative means, while the heroes, aware of their share of culpability in the situation, are trying to find ways to reason with her. The light-themed Elyon's life was uneventful until Phobos and Cedric manipulated her into thinking her friends kept the truth of her being the heir to Meridian's throne from her because they were evil. She mainly acted against the heroes when they showed up to cause trouble like she believed they were doing, and she naively remained fooled by her brother's benevolent facade up until he outright revealed his true colors to her, leading her to reconciling with her true friends and replacing Phobos as Meridian's ruler. Jade in turn was an adventurer long before gaining her shadow powers and coming to Meridian by chance, and she made herself the Shadow Realm's ruler only after enduring months of persecution from the heroes who assumed her to be evil. She's the one who first approaches Phobos to offer her help in taking back Meridian's throne, but she's well aware he can't be completely trusted and is prepared to stop supporting him the moment Raythor, the main reason she's helping Phobos at all, decides so. Instead of being fooled by Cedric and Miranda like Elyon was, she enlists them for a plan to mess with the Guardians' lives on Earth.
  • Tyrian and Vera are both bloodthirsty Badass Normal soldiers with an affinity for knives, fanatic devotion to an individual they idealize, and mental illness affecting their interpersonal relationships. Vera starts out as the hardheaded and yet respected leader of the Sky Hunters, but in her single-minded determination to avenge her beloved grandfather (whom she refuses to see as anything but a hero for killing numerous Mogriffs), she succumbs to severe delusions and increasingly extreme actions until she ends up becoming a raving maniac who's lost everyone's respect for deserting Elyon's army and being willing to sacrifice even her closest friends to achieve her goals. Tyrian is an Ax-Crazy Cloudcuckoolander right from the start, but while he irritates and creeps out everyone with his antics and unasked worship of Jade, he's tolerated for making himself useful, and he reciprocates Rosetta's romantic interest in him. He's also much more jovial than Vera whose dedication to revenge makes her a stick-in-the-mud. Though she views Jade and other denizens of the Shadow Realm as freaks of nature, he's much more welcoming of them than anyone else. While Vera stops listening to absolutely anyone's pleas to stop her folly, Tyrian concedes to Jade, Rosetta and (to a lesser extent) Captain Ymir's requests he disagrees with, showing that he's ultimately the more reasonable of them two.
• Foreshadowing: When Caleb and Aldarn discuss in Chapter 7 about garrisons dealing with some problems in the eastern territories they haven't told Elyon about, Caleb considers it good that they haven't received any worrisome messages and fails to notice the conspiratorial look Aldarn gets on his face. In Chapter 9, Jade shows Phobos a half-burned letter addressed to Elyon that reveals that the rebels in the Swamplands have been persecuting any locals they accuse of being Phobos' servants and monsters.
• Frame-Up: When a young girl from Riverdeen is caught trying to secretly get a message to the capital about how the local rebels in the Swamplands have been abusing their authority, they abduct her and plant her cloak in the home of some local Lurdens, not just framing them for her apparent death but also whipping up the local Fantastic Racism they've been supporting.
• Freudian Excuse: Chapter 11 provides two reasons for Caleb's Irrational Hatred of anyone he believes to be connected to Phobos, and thus the increasingly aggressive attitude he's taken throughout the story. He falsely believes that his Missing Mom was killed by Phobos' regime (having drawn that conclusion from his father's refusal to talk about her) and can't forgive them for it, and on top of that, he's just so tired and frustrated from the constant fighting that having what was supposed to be their ultimate victory (and a chance at a normal life, settled down with Cornelia) snatched away by the Knights and Kage has been pushing him towards the breaking point.
• Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse:
  • When Jade confronts Nerissa who gets angry at having all her years of waiting and sacrifice mocked, she tells the sorceress not to bother telling any tragic origin story and dismisses her to be just like the number of baddies she faced in her own universe; an egomaniac who feels entitled to ruling everyone with unlimited power.
  • Amelia makes it clear in her first appearance that she's sick of hearing how Vera's driven to wipe out the Mogriffs to avenge her grandfather and remarks it's not like Vera's the only one who's lost a loved one during Phobos' tyranny. Albel tries to defend Vera by noting that with so many others with similar experiences, her feelings should be understandable, but Amelia in return asks how many of said people dedicate their whole lives solely to revenge. Before Vera's sentence is carried out in Chapter 32, Amelia tells her former friend that she's started thinking Vera has been using her grandfather's death as an excuse for chasing a twisted dream of purging Meridian of what she calls monsters, only to have turned into one of her own right.
  • Ilitia tells Phobos that he could have chosen to become a good ruler and proven the Rebellion wrong about the slander people have directed at him since childhood, but instead, he proved their assumptions right by choosing to pursue power at the expense of everything else.
• Freudian Slip: Caleb sneakily tries to justify his actions by saying the person who disobeyed Elyon's orders had good intentions.
• Friendly Address Privileges: After Jade introduces herself as a queen, she makes it clear to Raythor that he can call her just Kage.
• Fully-Clothed Nudity: Both Tyrian and Rosetta are embarrassed when she sees him in his underwear in Chapter 31.
• Generation Xerox: When six of the parents of the six noble heirs of Castwell's Peak are introduced in Chapter 32, their dynamics have noticeable similarities with those of their children. For instance, both generations have a carefree Ascelot hunter who likes to tease the serious and military-minded Wildstorm and is a Sitcom Arch-Nemesis with the snooty Emmony lady.
• Give Me a Reason: When Vera's holding Bladebeak hostage and asks the surrounding Phobos loyalists what they could do against her, Tyrian makes a threat which the Mogriffs agree with.
  Tyrian: Wellll... Odds are if you harmed that little chick, I’ll be given free rein to draw out your torture and make it as long and painful as possible. [smirks dangerously as the Mogriffs growl and glare at Vera] So by all means... Make our night.
• Glad He's On Our Side: Many Phobos loyalists share this sentiment about Jade and the Shadowkhan, acknowledging that they could suffer the wrath of the Shadow Realm along with the rest of Meridian if something happened to their Queen, which gives them every reason to follow Raythor and Phobos' orders to protect her at all costs.
• Good Is Not Soft:
  • Elyon makes it clear to Caleb that even if whoever disobeyed her orders by having Kage immediately imprisoned was acting with the best of intentions, she will have them punished for their role in making an enemy out of the Shadow Realm. When she later starts seeing how unhelpful Caleb is becoming due to his Irrational Hatred towards Kage, she declares that while she still values him as a friend, she will remove him from command if he doesn't get his act together soon enough.
  • Though Vathek has his Heel Realization about Kage and becomes The Atoner, he concludes she has nonetheless allied herself with Phobos and must be stopped violently if she's beyond reasoning. Furthermore, he resolves himself to putting a stop to Elyon's reign becoming a Full-Circle Revolution, even if he must go up against his old comrades.
• Graceful in Their Element: Exploited, as Jade plans to use Miranda and Cedric's abilities and skills at deception to full use for her plans to destroy the Guardians' civilian lives on Earth. As she puts it to Phobos, he has kept using the spider and the snake as attack dogs when they'd better serve as a spider and a snake.
• Graying Morality: This continues further on from the original story by introducing on the rebels' side Knight Templars who are professing loyalty to Elyon to excuse their extreme actions and/or self-serving goals, and on Phobos' side otherwise good people who have their reasons (such as the Fantastic Racism directed at their species) for taking the tyrannical prince's side.
• The Great Serpent: Jade summons several giant serpents of the Shadow Realm to be used as flying steeds by herself and Phobos' soldiers. She calls her mount Onyx, while Tyrian (who has a knack for getting almost eaten by one of the serpents) names as Shadow Striker the one he claims as his own.
• Greed: Lampshaded. When Jade learns that the Stone Nest is filled with crystals that are part of the reason for the rest of Meridian's desire to claim the mountain from the Mogriffs, she recalls how Valmont first came into conflict with her family by trying to claim a lost treasure and remarks that no matter the dimension, people will always cause problems in their greed, including destroying beautiful things like the Mogriffs' crystal-adorned home.
• Ground Punch: When the Sumo Khan first appear at Elyon's castle, six of them do this to collapse a section of the wall.
• HA HA HA—No: After Tyrian momentarily pauses in his fight against Vera's team to ask for romantic advice, Tinsley tries to ask him to let them go while grinning nervously. He laughs for a few moments before replying "no" in the flattest tone he has used until now.
• Hair Flip: When Alan challenges Amelia to find a way to get their group up the mountain in Chapter 22, she whips her hair at his face as she walks past him.
• Hand-or-Object Underwear: When Rosetta sees Tyrian in his underpants in Chapter 31, he tries to cover himself with a pillow.
• Harmful to Minors: Goes two ways in the Cycle of Revenge plot at Snowpoint; when the Mogriffs were being driven out of their nesting grounds by the likes of Jesekiel Bexley, Metalbeak was only a hatchling when he first witnessed the Nest Butcher murdering his conspecifics regardless of age or gender. When he finally had Jesekiel at his mercy, the Butcher's little granddaughter Vera had the misfortune of being at the wrong place at the wrong time to witness her beloved grandfather having his heart torn out by Metalbeak and body mangled by the other Mogriffs. Metalbeak eventually admits that by forcing the girl to this traumatizing experience, he played a part in her becoming the new revenge-driven version of the Butcher.
• Heel Realization:
  • Elyon and the Guardians have this when they realize that Kage was all along innocent of serving Phobos. Will especially has this when she remembers how Kage confronted her for her actions regarding Raythor.
    Before Will finished her tone filled with despair and regret while her mind flashed back to Kage accusations against her for her actions against Raythor.
    "Innocent…she was innocent." She shook her head in disbelief, "She was never with Phobos!"
  • After Vathek has been dealt a massive reality check by Kage and reflected on everything he's learned, he becomes ashamed of the way he treated the girl in his hatred of Phobos and blind faith in the false Mage and thus contributed to the Shadow Realm allying with Phobos. It also makes him realize that the Rebellion as a whole is turning out to be not that different from Phobos' government, so he resolves to redeem himself by both thwarting Phobos and Kage (the latter peacefully if possible at all) as well as putting a stop to the corruption of Elyon's government.
  • Caleb has a small one in Chapter 11 when his father calls him out for losing his temper during his argument with Elyon in the previous chapter, feeling shame for snapping at his Queen like that.
  • In Chapter 38, seeing how Kur is treating all the non-humans of Everdeen while allegedly acting in Elyon's name makes Aldarn start to realize that by aiding and abetting such actions is making him no better than Phobos and Cedric.
• Heroic Self-Deprecation:
  • After being hit with a series of revelations in rapid succession, Elyon realizes just how much she's failed at being Queen, berating herself for it and becoming determined to do better.
  • Caroline Hart, despite being a skilled healer and potion-maker, feels she's inadequate in everything else when compared to her fellow Sky Hunters and utterly incapable of following her mother's footsteps as a supreme seamstress.
• He Who Fights Monsters:
  • As the original story hinted would happen, many of the rebels have turned to Knight Templarhood and are exacting single-minded revenge on anyone they believe to be Phobos' servants or monsters. Several characters, including the more reasonable rebels, lampshade that their inability to let go of the past grudges is making them act no better than Phobos and his minions.
  • Vera Bexley is so utterly convinced the Mogriffs are monsters and has dedicated herself to avenging her grandfather's death at their claws that she ends up defying her military superiors and Elyon's direct orders, lying to and endangering her closest friends, abandoning them when they refuse to continue her senseless campaign anymore, and threatening an innocent hatchling's life while losing her conscience in the process. By the end of the Snowpoint arc, multiple characters on both sides of the war have told her off for her Moral Myopia.
  • When Jade prevents Metalbeak from recklessly hunting down the Nest Butcher's descendant at the cost of leaving his clan (his mate and infant son included) unprotected, she warns him not to let his anger and thirst for revenge risk him losing them. He later reminds her of those words when she's furious enough with Vera to risk the entire Stone Nest being pulled to the Shadow Realm. When she restrains herself and apologizes, he remarks that letting one's wrath, no matter how righteous, dictate one's actions isn't worth becoming just like Vera. Taking the Nest Butcher's appearance while saying that adds to the irony, not that Vera appreciates it.
• Hidden Depths:
  • In Chapter 9, it is revealed that Phobos tried to find a way to shorten the distance between east and west to improve the transport of goods and enhance the trading routes, showing that he had an interest in actually ruling his kingdom and was more than just a tyrant.
  • Though Frost is considered The Brute not capable of strategizing like Raythor, he proves himself capable of engaging in cunning warfare when he's put in charge of assaulting Cavigor. Not only he's wise enough not to immediately take over the subterranean prison that's harder to defend than besiege, but he deals such a devastating surprise attack on Vathek's greater relief force that he forces them to be trapped in the prison themselves. He soon successfully takes over the prison by having the Razor Khan open the gates for the main army while a reserve force enters through a Secret Underground Tunnel at the same time.
• Horse of a Different Color:
  • Jade summons from the Shadow Realm several giant serpents that she and some of Phobos' soldiers can use as flying steeds. She calls her mount Onyx, while Tyrian names his as Shadow Striker.
  • Donoban Ascelot, a large hunter, rides on a big tundra goat.
• A House Divided:
  • Tensions between the rebels and guards are very close to completely boiling over, due to the latter's resentment of how the former are continuing to treat them with contempt despite proving their loyalty, especially with Caleb's stubborn refusal to accept the truth about Jade/Kage only fanning the flames. Meanwhile, Caleb is also growing frustrated with the Guardians for not likewise denying the truth.
  • During Frost's attack on Cavigor, the Warden and his more fanatical soldiers decide to kill all the prisoners in order to deny Frost the victory of freeing them for Phobos. Vathek, Drake, and other more levelheaded soldiers are horrified by this dishonorable act, and only avoid coming to blows due to the more pressing need of preventing Frost's forces from overwhelming the prison. Even then, they still have to fight a few of the extremists in order to force them to focus on the bigger issue.
• Humble Pie: Vathek starts out smug that Phobos and the Knights of Vengeance are behind bars and so trusting of "the Mage" that he refuses to question her story that Jade, whom he disdains, is a shapeshifting monster of Phobos. However, after he gets subdued by the Shadowkhan and Jade exposes "the Mage" as a backstabbing fraud while revealing herself to be the Shadow Realm's ruler who has decided to ally with Phobos due to all the mistreatment she and her friend Raythor have suffered from the heroes' part, he can only watch as Jade frees all the prisoners and places him in a cell instead, and his attempt to get free and stop her only leads to him getting himself incapacitated by the electric bars. After doing some self-reflection following this humiliation, he concludes that he's deserving of Jade's ire and resolves to redeem himself by ensuring the behavior he displayed won't corrupt everything the Rebellion fought for.
• Hypocrite:
  • Jade has started calling Elyon a brat despite being slightly younger than her.
  • When Vera's grandfather was killed by the Mogriffs, he begged them to spare Vera by saying she's just a child who hasn't done anything to them. They weren't happy to hear the "Nest Butcher", who happily killed many innocent hatchlings and crushed eggs, using such a justification.
  • Raythor declares in Chapter 35 that with his insidious plans for starting a purge of nonhuman races like changelings, Kur has no right to call them monsters.
• Hypocritical Humor:
  • When Tyrian calls Metalbeak a "bloodthirsty fool", everyone listening in gives him a flat look while sharing the thought that he of all people has no right to complain about someone else being bloodthirsty.
  • While traveling through a tundra in Chapter 23, Amelia tells Tinsley, who just objected to Alan's suggestion to bring down one of the elks they saw for food, that their survival is more important than the cute animals. However, when Alan thinks about finding some Snowpuffs to eat a moment later, Amelia immediately joins Tinsley and Caroline in forbidding it.
• I Am X, Son of Y: When Ymir demands Vera, who's surrounded by him and the Mogriffs, to identify herself, she proudly introduces herself as the heir of House Bexley, daughter of Idina Bexley and granddaughter of Jesekiel Bexley. Against her expectations though, her grandfather's name earns no reaction from the Mogriffs because they know him only as the "Nest Butcher", and Ymir only recognizes her mother who's the governor of Castwell's Peak. It's only when Metalbeak shapeshifts into Jesekiel to question Vera and she rages at him for taking her grandfather's appearance that the Mogriffs connect the dots.
• I Can't Dance: Though Tyrian doesn't say this, he's nervous when Rosetta asks him to dance with her since he never thought any girl would do that. She advises him to relax, and he gets over his nervousness as he starts impressing her with his agile tricks and even ends up engaging in a dance duel with a Ninja Khan.
• I Did What I Had to Do:
  • Discussed and deconstructed in the eighth chapter. Will brings up to Taranee their act of framing Raythor and argues that though they saved Vathek from being thrown to the Abyss of Shadows, it doesn't make condemning Raythor to that fate a morally right thing. Taranee tries to use this justification, only for Will to rant that she feels they should have found another solution, because the longer-term consequence of framing Raythor is him having returned from the Abyss with vengeance, and since he's loyal to Phobos, and unlike the Guardians befriended Jade instead of attacking her under the unproven assumption of her being an enemy, she's now lending them her Shadowkhan armies against Elyon and the Rebellion.
  • Vera tries to use this justification when the other noble heirs learn that she lied to them so that they'd desert Elyon's army and help her assassinate Metalbeak. The others, hurt by Vera's abuse of their trust, and seeing how mad she's been driven by vengeance, don't buy it for one second.
  • Aldarn and Kur discuss in Chapter 36 that they consider themselves necessary executioners who must ensure the stability of Elyon's reign while she's still learning to be an efficient queen, even if it includes using extreme measures to root out any possible Phobos loyalists in the Swamplands without her knowledge.
• If Only You Knew: Irma, overwhelmed by all the bombshells they've been given in just one day, demands to know in Chapter 7 if there's more coming, like Cornelia's little sister turning out to be magical as well... which is the case as it canonically turns out later.
• I Have You Now, My Pretty: When Altaria is overwhelmed by escaped rebel soldiers during the Prison Riot of Chapter 31, one of them expresses lustful intentions towards her, but he's ordered to help finish Snowpoint's takeover first before deciding what to do with her.
• Ignored Epiphany: Downplayed with several characters:
  • While Irma and Cornelia are horrified and feel guilty for their actions when they learn the truth, at the same time they try to justify their actions and state that Kage chose to be their enemy, ignoring their actions that caused her to become their enemy in the first place.
  • Before Jade reunites with Phobos in the ninth chapter, she hesitates with the acknowledgement that her plan to help him back to power will start a new war on Meridian, no matter how she chooses to look at it. However, she remains set on her course because she already promised Raythor her help, and learning about the rebels' shady activities that can be used against Elyon gives her hope there could be some justice achieved along the way.
• Impromptu Tracheotomy:
  • During the battle at Snowpoint, Jade leaps behind a rebel soldier from his shadow and impales his throat with her katana.
  • Some of the Ninja Khan incapacitate several escaped prisoners in Chapter 31 by throwing shuriken at their necks.
• Indignant Slap: When Vera yells at her fellow captives who've chosen not to follow her example as Defiant Captives that they don't deserve to call themselves Meridian's protectors in Chapter 30, Amelia slaps her longtime rival and tells her off for daring to say that when she was the one who betrayed them all by using them as pawns of her personal revenge.
• I Never Got Any Letters: Riverdeen's mayor has been trying to report to Elyon about Kur's men who're abusing their authority, but they've intercepted all his missives before they could reach the capital.
• Instantly Proven Wrong: When Jade and Metalbeak are talking in Chapter 20, Jade suggests that the soldiers by the Mogriff nest will try and do something stupid soon. Cue a Mantis Khan revealing to its Queen that the soldiers have retreated. Of course, they don't yet know about Vera, who's gone rogue and convinced her friends that they've been ordered to try and assassinate Metalbeak.
• Insult Backfire: When Jade is called a monster by a rebel soldier during the battle at Snowpoint, she chuckles in her bloodlust and replies that flattery will get him nowhere.
• Internal Reveal:
  • Chapter 2 sees Jade finally confirm for Vathek and Tynar that she's not a creation of Phobos, and tell them along with Phobos and the other Knights about Nerissa's manipulations.
  • Chapter 5 has Vathek and Tynar share all this with Elyon, Caleb, and the Guardians. Also, Elyon learns someone went against her orders and sent Kage to the dungeon.
  • In Chapter 6, Will and Elyon learn who Nerissa is, and about the prophecy related to Kage, from the Council of Kandrakar, while the Council learns about everything involving Kage on Meridian.
  • In Chapter 7, word of the truth about Nerissa/the Mage spreads among the guards and rebels, while Elyon and Will share everything they learned from the Council with the other Guardians.
  • In Chapter 8, Hay Lin tells her grandmother about everything that's happened so far, and in turn learns from her about Nerissa and the history of the previous Guardians.
  • In Chapter 10, Elyon informs her inner circle how the Oracle has ordered the Guardians to stay on Earth.
  • In Chapter 15, Vathek and Drake learn that Caleb was the one who overrode Elyon's orders and sent Jade/Kage to the Infinite City dungeon in the first place.
  • In Chapter 24, Jade learns from a captive Vathek about Caleb being responsible for what was done to her, while he learns the full extent of her plans for Meridian.
  • In Chapter 29, Caroline and Amelia learn about the nature of Phobos' alliance with the Shadow Realm, and Amelia also finds out from Vathek about the northern army being ordered to retreat, making her realize that Vera lied to her and the others. The rest of their friends find out in the following chapter.
  • Chapter 36 has Aldarn tell Kur everything he learned about the current situation before leaving the capital in Chapter 7.
• Interrupted Declaration of Love: Tinsley attempts to confess to the wounded Alan her love for him before Amelia interrupts them in Chapter 27.
• In the Back:
  • Aldarn saves Drake from a Bat Khan by stabbing its back.
  • A Razor Khan uses its clawed hands to impale the Warden of Cavigor from behind when the latter is busy arguing with Vathek about executing the prisoners.
• I Reject Your Reality: Caleb's Irrational Hatred of anyone he even suspects of being connected to Phobos means that he refuses to believe the truth about Jade/Kage and "the Mage" regardless of all the evidence and all the holes in the theories he tries to use to defend his beliefs. The authors have explained in the reviews that after using practically all of his short life fighting a war to bring down a tyrant, accepting that all the losses and sacrifices of his comrades and himself were all part of another villain's masterplan is simply too much for Caleb, so he resorts to Theory Tunnel Vision to hold on to the reality he has always taken for granted.
• Irony:
  • Caleb admits to his father in Chapter 11 that he is sick of all the fighting and wants to lead a peaceful life with Cornelia. Not only in the show's official canon and Kage did Caleb reject life with Cornelia because of his duties to Meridian, but Caleb's actions may have left his dream of a peaceful life impossible because of him making an enemy out of Kage by assuming she is a minion of Phobos, to the point of counteracting his queen's orders and sending her to prison.
  • In Kage, Yan Lin was the one who was most willing to give Kage the benefit of the doubt despite never meeting her in person, and became suspicious of Caleb and the Rebellion that they may have mishandled the situation and Caleb may have done something. While everyone else is convinced by "the Mage" that Kage is a loyal servant of Phobos, Yan Lin remains skeptical, and Nerissa realizes that Yan Lin will not be fooled forever. But in this story, when the full story of Kage being framed is revealed, Yan Lin is against making peace with her because of what she thought of the Shadowkhan, in contrast to her previous characteristics of giving Kage the benefit of the doubt.
• Irrational Hatred:
  • Vathek initially has this for Kage, refusing to see her as anything other than a monster created by Phobos, ignoring evidence to the contrary and insulting her immediately and repeatedly when seeing her again. The story's authors have addressed this, pointing out that he's blinded by his hatred of Phobos and belief in allies like "the Mage", and as such will not readily stop believing the story that she's a monster Phobos created, which makes her an easy target for his anger. However, by the next chapter after this encounter, Vathek has had time to think over everything that was said without the heat of the moment, and has seemingly let go of his hate of Kage — while he still fears her, he does feel guilty and is willing to acknowledge she was telling the truth.
  • Caleb also has this for Kage. He refuses to believe that she's not Phobos' minion or that she's telling the truth about "the Mage" (even when presented with the comatose Nerissa), even going so far as to abandon the Guards during the attack on the castle because some of them questioned the likelihood of her connection to Phobos, and making it clear that he intends to execute her if he gets the chance.
• Is That the Best You Can Do?:
  • After trading three evenly matched strikes with each other in Chapter 12, Frost asks Vathek if that's all. Despite sweating and his mace having visible slashes from Frost's Shadowkhan sword, Vathek replies it's not even close. Frost is happy to hear that because lack of struggle would spoil his fun.
  • Jade throws this taunt at rebel soldiers during the battle at Snowpoint and adds that even the Dark Hand Enforcers could put up a better fight.
  • As Tyrian effortlessly evades Quinn's attacks in Chapter 21, he mockingly says a soldier under Phobos and Jade can't be this unskilled.
• It Can Think: Though mute and unquestionably loyal to Jade, the Shadowkhan turn out to be capable of wordlessly conversing with each other and internal disagreements. When the fight over Cavigor is at its end and Vathek is surrounded by the Razor Khan, he asks them to tell Jade that Elyon wants to bury the hatchet and make amends with her. The Shadowkhan actually take the time to hear him out and silently debate on whether to just follow the orders of Frost, who's able to summon them only because Jade allows it, or take Vathek to their Queen and let her decide if his words are worth her time; they choose the latter option when it becomes clear that Frost having his way with the rebels would clash with Jade's desires. When the Razor Khan bring Vathek to Snowpoint, the Ninja Khan angrily demand to know their reasoning and suspect Vathek's surrender could be a ploy to lure their queen into a trap. The two Shadowkhan tribes nearly come to blows before Jade arrives to hear Vathek out.
• It's All My Fault:
  • Elyon and Will have this when they realize that Kage was innocent and they hurt her for no reason. Elyon especially has this, being the most remorseful and taking responsibility when Tynar confronts her, saying it's her fault. While she's furious to learn someone countermanded her orders about Kage, she also acknowledges even without it that her own treatment of Kage was just as bad.
  • Albel, feeling he's failed to keep Vera safe from herself, blames himself when he learns she secretly went rogue and took five other nobles with her on a suicide-mission to have her revenge.
  • Metalbeak ends up feeling ashamed that he savagely killed Vera's grandfather in front of her eyes instead of just finishing him off out of the girl's sight because that put her on her path of becoming the revenge-driven young woman who'll gladly throw away her entire life to have her revenge on him and all the Mogriffs. He wanted to make the Butcher pay for all the lives he claimed, and he ended up creating a new Butcher of his kind.
  • Following the Prison Riot of Chapter 31, Jade's resulting anger is partially tied to her feeling responsible over the casualties since she didn't consider Vera would refuse to submit to being imprisoned despite being spared of a Fate Worse than Death.
• It's Probably Nothing: When the Shadowkhan are infiltrating the Infinite City's dungeons, one guard catches the sound of another one screaming as he's dragged into his own shadow through an Ankle Drag. His fellows, tired and eager for the change of shift, tell him he's probably hearing things either out of tiredness or from the numerous prisoners. They all end up being stealthily snatched away by the Shadowkhan one by one.
• I Will Only Slow You Down: After the Frostbiter injures Philip whom Caroline manages to drag to a space between rocks, he tells her to survive without him and even plans on distracting Jade and her troops after she makes the Frostbiter leave, but Caroline adamantly refuses to abandon him. They're found in the midst of their argument, though, and taken captive.
• Jaw Drop:
  • This is Hay Lin's reaction to Taranee's Precision F-Strike is Chapter 7.
  • Caroline's jaw drops in Chapter 29 as she learns from Sofia and Maya details about Phobos' jailbreak and alliance with the Shadow Realm.
• Jerkass Has a Point:
  • While Luba is very harsh about how she words it, she's not wrong to be mad about how Elyon and the Guardians' actions created an enemy out of Jade/Kage, and the fact that it may be too late to undo the damage.
  • While Erec is very gruff and aggressive about it, he's not wrong to be skeptical of Elyon's declaration that she'll work to be a better Queen, pointing out that she knows nothing about her kingdom. This motivates her to actually do her homework about her birth world so that she can live up to her promises.
  • Vathek admits that while Caleb was very rude in how he presented his argument, he's also probably right that Elyon's plan to make amends with Kage is likely too late to do any good.
  • Amelia is condescending to Albel and unmoved by Vera's desire to avenge her grandfather, but when she remarks that Vera's too overly obsessed with revenge to be a levelheaded leader and acting like she's the only one who's lost a loved one to Phobos' tyranny, Albel cannot argue back.
  • Sult, angered by the noble kids of Castwell's Peak going rogue, comments in Chapter 23 that many noble houses Phobos rooted out exploited the commoners during the reigns of the prince's mother and grandmother, and Phobos at least didn't curry favor with them. Oskar admits the times before Phobos' tyranny weren't as perfect as people make them out to be, though he still states Phobos took things too far by wiping out all the noble houses around the capital.
• Karmic Death: Lampshaded. Vera's grandfather killed and tortured many Mogriffs, including hatchlings and eggs, before retiring from military service. He was ultimately killed and mutilated by several Mogriffs he had wronged, including Metalbeak who was only a hatchling when he first witnessed the "Nest Butcher" in his brutality. Jade considers the man's brutal death overdue justice when she's told about him.
• Karmic Nod: When Vathek is cornered by the Razor Khan at the end of Cavigor's siege, he admits out loud it feels like him getting continuously faced by the Shadowkhan is karma for his abuse of Jade.
• Kick the Dog:
  • Caleb accuses the guards of being loyal to Phobos because they suspect Kage is not a minion of his, abandons them during the Shadowkhan attack on the castle, and along with Aldarn, hope they die, to Drake and Elyon's horror.
  • When Vera Bexley's grandfather was killed before her eyes by the Mogriffs, one of them teared in half the dress her grandfather was planning to give her as a gift, just to make a warning not to mess with them.
  • After falling out with her friends, Vera sinks low enough to jab at Caroline's fear of being a disappointment to her mother when the timid girl refuses to tell her where to find Kage so that Vera can assassinate her.
• Kick Them While They Are Down: When Jade unleashes a storm wind during the battle at Snowpoint, it leaves three-hundred rebel soldiers paralyzed with dark electricity. They're finished off by the Mantis Khan as the remaining rebels retreat.
• Knight Templar:
  • Caleb was already showing signs of becoming extreme in his hunt for any suspected Phobos loyalists in the original story, but following the Time Skip of the events leading to the start of this fic, he has all but reached this point. He has become as mistrustful and contemptuous of the old guard as most of his rebels are, to the point of thinking them to still be loyal to Phobos and wishing for them to be imprisoned or dead. He's so taken in by the charade of "the Mage" that he absolutely refuses to believe Nerissa was impersonating her all along and lying about Jade having any prior connection to Phobos even as most of his friends are accepting the truth. He grows to hate Jade so extremely that he refuses to consider his actions led to her becoming the enemy he always assumed her to be and is open about his desire to kill her under a delusional belief that it will end the crisis he helped to create.
  • The Warden of Cavigor, and at least some of his soldiers, are of the belief that anyone sent to the prison was loyal to Phobos, and that they're therefore justified in unilaterally deciding to kill all the prisoners to prevent Frost from freeing them.
  • Vera Bexley views herself as a righteous crusader who'll finally put an end to the Mogriffs' threat over innocent people, but even her closest allies can see that she really just wants to wipe out all the Mogriffs because some of them killed her grandfather. Her obsession with this goal makes her willing to renounce her faith in Elyon when she ceases the siege of Snowpoint, manipulate her closest friends into embarking on an ultimately futile suicide mission against the orders of her military superiors, and abandon them when they surrender in the face of the impossible odds — all the while dismissing all aforementioned people as cowards and weaklings. When she's holding Bladebeak hostage and told that Metalbeak killed her grandfather because he killed numerous Mogriffs with glee and that the past queens' attempts to take their ancestral lands has led to them attacking people, she still refuses to change her views.
  • Vera's late grandfather Jesekiel Bexley was also convinced that he was protecting innocents from the Mogriffs when he hunted them down under the service of Meridian's past queens, but he took his convictions to needlessly sadistic levels by killing hatchlings and crushing unhatched eggs in front of their mothers before killing them as well.
• Knockout Gas: In Chapter 37, Flora knocks a swamp eel unconscious with a Fair-sect bomb that releases purple smoke upon exploding.
• Know When to Fold 'Em:
  • When Frost's forces overwhelm the defenders at Cavigor, Vathek surrenders to the Razor Khan, on condition that his men shall be spared, in hopes that he'll be delivered to Jade/Kage and able to pass along Elyon's peace offer.
  • The arrival of a Shadowkhan and Phobos loyalist army at the besieged Snowpoint catches the attacking Rebellion soldiers off guard and starts to overwhelm them. Reluctantly, but recognizing the situation for what it is, the rebels fall back and retreat; they try to regroup at a fallback position, but realize they have to abandon that too when they find their backup being overwhelmed as well.
  • When Jade offers the Frostbiter meat in exchange for returning home, the Super-Persistent Predator that has chased Vera's team outside its territory still wants a taste of Caroline's blood. However, conceding that it's been driven hungry and tired as well as sensing that Jade and the shadow serpents are a credible threat, the Frostbiter gives up on its hunt and leaves with the offered meat.
  • With Caroline and Philip captured and the rest of Vera's team having lost most of their weapons and exhausted from all the running and fighting as the enemy closes in on them, Amelia concludes their best option is to surrender. Alan and Tinsley accept this, especially after Alan gets wounded and Vera abandons them to get her revenge.
  • When the squad led by Phobos takes control of the End Frontier fortress, the smarter members of the overwhelmed rebel garrison surrender rather than be killed. This is especially true in the cases of Abigor and Ilitia, both of whom find themselves facing Phobos one-on-one and quickly yield, knowing they don't stand a chance against him.
• Knuckle Cracking:
  • Jade cracks her neck when she's about to face rebel soldiers at Snowpoint.
  • Tyrian cracks his neck during his Curb-Stomp Battle against Quinn in Chapter 21.
• Laser-Guided Karma:
  • Vathek framed Raythor without remorse and made it clear that he would have done it again. During the jailbreak, Jade (who had befriended Raythor and also been abused by Vathek) locks him in a prison cell and forces him to watch as she frees Raythor and Phobos. And for some extra karma after all the abuse he put Jade through, he knocks himself out when he tries to get free. Jade even tells him to consider it overdue justice in Raythor's name.
  • While the heroes were the ones who assumed that Jade was a minion of Phobos, and they did hurt her, Nerissa was the one, in her Mage disguise, who confirmed their fears, thus solidifying Jade's status as a fugitive on Meridian. Ultimately, Jade is the one who ends up defeating her and revealing her plans to everyone, ruining her decades-long scheme.
  • Caleb abandoning the guards to fight the Shadowkhan by themselves leads to one of the guards later attacking him, and an enraged Elyon chewing him out and reassigning him away from the castle.
• Lesser of Two Evils: In order to protect Riverdeen from possibly being burned by Kur's men for supporting Phobos, Ilitia reluctantly goes along with helping Phobos keep his presence a secret.
• Levitating Lotus Position: Kage meditates in this position in Chapter 30 while her Jade and Queen halves debate on what to do with the dilemma involving Vera.
• Lingering Social Tensions: As in Kage, there is a growing amount of tension between the victorious rebels and Phobos' former forces who switched sides near the end of the rebellion. Jade freeing Phobos only makes things worse, as the rebels suspect the Guards of still being loyal to him, and the Guards are growing increasingly sick of being scapegoated.
• Locked Out of the Loop: At least some of the rebels are purposefully keeping Elyon in the dark about problems occurring in various parts of Meridian, most of which appear to be fueled by their Fantastic Racism and being Drunk with Power, which is something that Jade is quick to take advantage of.
• Make Way for the New Villains: One of the first things Jade does after embracing her Face–Heel Turn is to eliminate Nerissa for having manipulated everyone and to prevent the sorceress from interfering with her own plans.
• Man Bites Man: During Metalbeak's Curb-Stomp Battle against a captive Vera who's already injured and weaponless, the former's foolishly defiant opponent gets desperate enough to attempt to bite the Mogriff alpha's hind leg. Both he and Jade consider it just sad.
• Mask of Sanity: It's eventually speculated that Vera Bexley has been wearing one for years, hiding the extent of her psychotic hatred for the Mogriffs behind a facade of duty towards the Rebellion's cause. Her mother makes it clear that she would have never allowed Vera to participate in Snowpoint's siege had the overwhelmingness of the latter's vengeful desires been that obvious.
• Master Archer: The Sky Hunters are a squad of rebels from the town of Castwell's Peak who've been trained in archery from young age and are so skilled they rarely miss their target, making them dreaded to the Mogriffs.
• Meaningful Rename: To symbolize her Split-Personality Merge, Jade takes as her full name "Hisuikage no oni", which means in Japanese "demon of jade shadow".
• The Medic:
  • Caroline Hart's skill at first aid and brewing Healing Potions makes her the main healer of the Sky Hunters.
  • Sofia is Snowpoint's head healer, and her daughter Maya is following in her footsteps. Sofia used to own a clinic in Endfield, and with her likely being the only one with real medical skill in the north, she and Maya were tolerated until they were forced to take refuge in Snowpoint following Elyon's ascension.
• Missing Child: When the Swamp arc starts, an eight-year-old girl named Lily has gone missing, with the rebels trying to pin the blame on the local Lurdens, and her mother is desperate enough to plead for Phobos' help. Deciding to start his campaign to gather supporters by rescuing the child, Phobos discovers that the rebels captured her for trying to pass to the capital a message about their abuse of authority with the help of the Whisperers she'd befriended.
• Mix-and-Match Critters: Meridian's original wildlife include Snowpuffs that are pigeon-sized combinations of owls and cats, while the Frostbiter that chases Vera's team is depicted as a giant lizard with white fur and a beak-like snout filled with fangs.
• Mook Lieutenant:
  • Windblade and her mate Metalbeak are the joint leaders of the Mogriffs loyal to Phobos.
  • The Phobos loyalist soldiers that Jade leads in attacking Snowpoint are headed by a captain named Ymir.
  • In Frost's army's assault on Cavigor, a rhino-rider named Curbag leads the reserve force that breaks into Cavigor through a secret underground tunnel, while Bulcro, the head of the Sand Dweller settlement named Shallowsands, is in charge of breaking down the tunnel's sealed entrance.
• Morphic Resonance: Sofia and her daughter Maya are both spider changelings like Miranda, but their human forms are white-haired, and they have white fur in their beast forms in contrast to the raven-haired Miranda whose fur is black.
• Mountain Warfare: Jade leads an army of Phobos loyalists and Mantis Khan to the northern mountains to thwart just in time the rebel army that's on the verge of claiming victory over the Lurdens and Mogriffs at Snowpoint. The narration acknowledges that warring in snowy mountains is difficult; it's taken the rebels weeks to gradually surround the fortress and wear down the hardened natives. It's thanks to the flying skills of the shadow serpents and the Mantis Khan's Wall Crawl ability that Jade's army is able to reach Snowpoint in just a day and a half.
• Mundane Solution: When Jade meets face-to-face the Frostbiter that resisted all the efforts Vera's team and the Mogriffs took to get rid of it, she makes the hungry Super-Persistent Predator go home by giving it free meat.
• Must Make Amends: Discussed. When talking about what they can do to atone for what they did to Kage, Tibor suggests offering compensation, noting that if Kage really is a royal, diplomacy may not be off the table. However, the only idea they can think of is Will suggesting they offer to help her with whatever drove her to Meridian, which they assume is a conflict of some kind. Luba scoffs at this, being skeptical of possibly getting involved in a conflict they know nothing about.
• My God, What Have I Done?:
  • The Guardians and Elyon's reaction when they realize that Jade/Kage was innocent all along. Taranee has a particularly prolonged reaction, still kicking herself later on when telling Hay Lin how they should have noticed the holes in "the Mage's" story.
  • Vathek himself has an internal one as he rides out towards Cavigor and swears to become The Atoner.
  • When Metalbeak thanks Jade for saving his son from Vera, she's mortified to realize she endangered the hatchling whom she didn't even notice was Vera's hostage because she was focused on hurting Vera in her rage.
  • Metalbeak himself has his realization when he admits he's responsible for turning Vera into the unfettered avenger she's today.
  • Vera herself has this reaction when the pain of having her shadow partially devoured by a Leech Khan is actually enough to snap her out of her madness and realize all the horrible things she's done.
• My Grandma Can Do Better Than You: While evading a Ninja Khan's shuriken in Chapter 27, Tinsley attempts to lure him into a trap by shouting that he throws like her grandmother. She leaves it unmentioned she's actually scared by the notion since her grandmother has a very good throwing arm.
• My Significance Sense Is Tingling: The Oracle is hit with a sudden pain in his head in response to Jade beginning to reshape the Shadow Realm, right before Kandrakar is hit with an earthquake seemingly caused by those same actions.
• Named After Somebody Famous: The Mogriff leader Windblade is named after a great Mogriff hero who led the defense of their home nest-fortress centuries ago when the Queens of Meridian ordered them to be forced out and was one of those who sacrificed their lives to give their children time to escape.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: The Frostbiter, the fierce apex predator of Meridian's northern mountains, is strong enough to crush a squad of fully armed soldiers and known by the Mogriffs as "the White Death".
• Naval Blockade: Kur is revealed to have ordered every available watercraft to patrol the lake that surrounds Everdeen in order to completely isolate the city.
• Never My Fault:
  • Defied by Elyon who completely takes responsibility for the Kage situation. Even when she learns that someone went against her orders about Kage, she does not use that to deflate responsibility for herself, admitting that even without that, her own actions against Kage were not any better.
  • While Irma and Cornelia are horrified and feel guilty for their actions, they still try to justify themselves by insisting that Kage chose to be their enemy, ignoring their actions that caused her to become their enemy in the first place.
  • Caleb is completely unwilling to admit that he was wrong about Kage, and sneakily tries to justify sending her to the dungeon against Elyon's orders, and when Elyon makes it clear that she plans to punish that person, it's implied that he will cover up his crime. He eventually starts blaming Kage and her appearance on Meridian on all of his world's current problems, but Elyon and even most of his fellow rebel leaders can see that his increasing deterioration is causing damage as much as Kage's alliance with Phobos.
  • When Vera's team is ready to throw in the towel when half of them are captured and wounded, she abandons without remorse the friends she deceived to follow her on her selfish suicide mission and blames them for being too weak to get the job done and Elyon for ordering the northern army to abandon the siege of Snowpoint and by extension, Vera's quest for revenge. And when this quest ultimately fails with all the rebels being captured and taken hostage due to their noble status, Vera blames the others for letting themselves be caught.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Vera's obsession with revenge on the Mogriffs leads to her tricking her friends into undertaking an ultimately futile mission to assassinate Metalbeak, which ends with all six of them being captured — and since they're the heirs of the most prominent noble families in Castwell's Peak, this gives Phobos' forces the best hostages they could possibly ask for.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: When several Mogriff hatchlings come across a wounded Vera, they decide to help her despite her being an intruder, because it's the right thing to do. She promptly tries to kill them without hesitation, and briefly takes Metalbeak's son Bladebeak hostage when the adults show up.
• Nostalgia Filter: The Guards are so miserable being mistreated by the rebels and being afraid that they'll be imprisoned for their past loyalties that they wonder if they did the right thing turning against Phobos. When a reviewer asked the authors how they could think that when Tynar said they were miserable under Phobos' rule, the authors responded that while they might have been miserable before, they now have to sleep with one eye open while living under the threat of rumors that they'll be replaced and imprisoned, which makes them wonder if things were really so bad beforehand.
• Nothing Personal: Nerissa says this about framing Jade as Phobos' monster.
• Not in This for Your Revolution:
  • While Jade might be helping Phobos, it's only to repay Raythor for his kindness to her by aiding the man he's sworn his loyalty to, as indicated by her conditions to Phobos for her aid. Her ultimate goal is still finding a way home to her family.
  • By the time of Chapter 31, Vathek has started having his doubts if an uncomfortably large percentage of the rebels truly were fighting for a just cause or just serving their own egotistic goals.
• Not So Above It All:
  • Tracker, the feared and taciturn hunter, takes a liking to sweet rolls and fights with Frost over them following their escape from the Infinite City. When Frost accuses Tracker of hogging all the sweet rolls, Tracker says they're not all for him while giving Sniffer one, which Frost calls cheating.
  • The Ninja Khan Tyrian challenges to a dance duel somehow gets into it as much as he does.
• "Not So Different" Remark:
  • Caleb mentally notes that when Elyon is angry, he can see the resemblance between her and Phobos.
  • Tynar, meanwhile, outright tells Elyon that her actions regarding Kage are no different from her brother's own acts.
  • Jade sympathizes with Miranda and Cedric because she herself was also mistreated both in the story and in her past due to being different.
  • When Tynar tries to talk Jade out of allying with Phobos, she tells him that he's like Raythor, except that he professes Undying Loyalty towards Elyon and the Guardians instead of Phobos. Tynar later admits she may be right.
  • Jade, upon witnessing Vera's descent into the madness of her vengeance, wonders if she could be becoming just as insane with her own vendetta against Elyon and the Guardians. After Vera starts the Prison Riot of Chapter 31 despite Jade deciding to spare her from a Fate Worse than Death, Jade berates herself for failing to see this coming despite her own history of refusing to give up in the face of impossible odds.
  • Some of Kur's allies comment that he puts them on edge much like Phobos. Ilitia even suspects Phobos' acceptance of shapeshifters is the only reason Kur isn't sided with him.
  • Though he justifies it with the kingdom's well-being, Aldarn is not proud of deceiving Elyon as it makes himself feel too uncomfortably similar to Cedric.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • Caleb's reaction when Elyon makes it clear that she's going to punish whoever countermanded her orders back when Jade/Kage was first captured and threw her into the dungeons, because he's the one that did that.
  • The heroes collectively have one when they conclude that if Jade/Kage really is a Queen of another dimension, something worse than her is responsible for her ending up in Meridian.
  • Metalbeak has this reaction to learning from Windblade in Chapter 27 that their son is one of the hatchlings who went to play in the northern tunnels, close to where an explosion just shook the mountain.
  • This is the collective reaction of the rebels whom Jade has locked up in the Shadow Realm as punishment for participating in the previous chapter's Prison Riot.
  • When Phobos shows up in Riverdeen to interrupt the corrupt rebels' attempt to publicly lynch some Lurdens, everyone, especially said rebels, are shocked to see him walking free.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Phobos is surprisingly polite and kind when meeting with Jade/Kage for the first time. And later, he makes a point of publicly apologizing to Raythor for throwing him in the Abyss before promoting him to second-in-command, which takes all the onlookers (except for Jade, who demanded it as part of their deal) by surprise with his kindness. Frost even wonders if he's seeing dreams.
• Our Orcs Are Different: While there's canonically two different appearances to the Lurdens, they're divided into three different types in this story. The green ones with ogre-like appearance are native to the eastern Swamplands, while the brown ones with beast-like appearance come from the northern mountains. The third type known as Sand Dwellers, who were only seen in the first season episode "Escape from Cavigor", are the original inhabitants of the southern desert where Cavigor is situated.
• Parental Obliviousness: Averted. Will's mother Susan suspects her daughter of hiding things from her, she's just not confronting her about it for fear of being overbearing.
• Pass the Popcorn: Jade helps herself to a cup of tea while watching the very one-sided duel between Vera and Metalbeak.
• Pet the Dog:
  • While Phobos is being practical, he does genuinely treat Kage/Jade well when he meets her. And when one of the conditions of their alliance would be for him to reward Raythor, Phobos acknowledges his loyalty and promises to reward him, even considering making him his new right hand man to replace Cedric (which he does later on). And even before that, Phobos complimented Raythor for making an ally out of Kage/Jade.
  • Jade tries to repay the kindness Raythor showed her by putting Phobos back on the throne and making sure that he is rewarded for his loyalty.
  • Jade plans to do this for Miranda and Cedric as well, promising them that after they complete her mission of destroying the Guardians' home lives, she'll set them free to choose how they want to live, whether on Earth, Meridian or anywhere else.
  • As in Kage, Jade does this literally with Sniffer.
  • Frost admits to himself that while he initially assumed Jade to be The Load when the Knights were founded, she grew on him a little as she proved his assumptions wrong even before revealing herself to be the Shadow Realm's ruler.
  • When encountering the Frostbiter, Jade determines that its aggression is just because it's hungry, so she provides it food and allows it to run off instead of fighting it.
  • Though Aldarn is already established to have taken a level in jerkass, he refuses to tell Kur that it was Mirta who ratted the old man out about locking Everdeen down; as rude as she was about it, he doesn't want her to suffer for voicing her understandably low opinion on Kur's activities.
• Pinned to the Wall: Tyrian throws one of his knives through Quinn's sleeve in Chapter 21, pinning her to the ground.
• Point of Divergence: Though the events until "J is for Jewel" are canonical in practice, Jade takes out Nerissa before the sorceress can steal Elyon's power and imprison her in a jewel. Jade taking over the main antagonist role by freeing Phobos and allying with him also changes the entire course of the remainder of the second season of the W.I.T.C.H. cartoon.
• Pragmatic Villainy:
  • Once Phobos figures out that Jade is royalty, he decides to act civil with her and accept her terms as a means to regain his throne.
  • Even though the Shadowkhan come close to taking down Elyon's castle by themselves, Jade has them pull back immediately after Phobos and his minions are freed. She justifies this by reasoning that crushing Elyon now would only rally the rest of her supporters and the Guardians to defeat Phobos once again. She then convinces Phobos to instead work to dispel the people's faith in Elyon and make them accept that despite his vices, he's overall their less problematic option for a ruler.
  • Phobos decides to give all the guards who turned on him a chance to reaffirm their loyalties and serve him again in retaking the throne... and then he'll punish them for betraying him in the first place.
  • Jade prefers using the Leech Khan as minimally as possible since their taste for living creatures' shadows makes them too dangerous to be left to their own devices for extended periods of time.
• Precision F-Strike:
  • As Taranee argues with Caleb about his refusal to accept the truth about Jade/Kage and Nerissa in Chapter 7, she exclaims "bull crap" in her frustration, resulting in a Jaw Drop from Hay Lin.
  • Elyon calls Nerissa a bitch during her argument with Caleb in Chapter 10. Her adoptive parents are startled, but say nothing due to her foul mood and sharing her opinion of the sorceress.
• Prison Riot: In Chapter 31, after escaping her cell in Snowpoint's dungeon, Vera frees all the other prisoners so that they'll fight against the Phobos loyalist guards, creating a distraction so she can go after the sleeping Jade. Maya manages to raise the alarm, however, rousing the entire garrison and the accompanying Shadowkhan, quickly overwhelming the prisoners and ending the fight.
• Properly Paranoid:
  • When Julian tries to make Caleb see reason in Chapter 11 and argues that Jade appears to be more reasonable than Phobos, Caleb questions if that's truly the case or if Jade is simply more cunning than Phobos and having a secret long-term plan of her own which they won't be able to figure out before it's too late. Though he's saying this in his paranoia and Irrational Hatred, Jade indeed has a plan to steer the public favor towards Phobos and away from Elyon and the Rebellion.
  • Amelia is quick to note several glaring holes in Vera's story about their team's "secret mission" which Vera is using as a cover for her renegade actions, but the fact that she's always been a Commander Contrarian to Vera means that the others mostly brush off her concerns. Vera's increasing Sanity Slippage gets them to realize Amelia has a point as they get closer to their destination, though.
• The Prophecy: The prophecy of N'ghala the first Oracle that seemingly forewarns Jade/Kage destroying Kandrakar, first mentioned in Kage, is referenced again here, though with more details added to reflect this story's events.
• Punctuated Pounding:
  • Erec does this when he attacks Caleb in his fury over the death of his commander, Captain Granik.
    Erec: You miserable [punch] worthless [punch] cowardly traitor [punch] the captain is gone because of you!!! [punch]
  • Vera subjects Caroline to this in Chapter 31 while ranting that she won't let her former friend get in her way.
• The Purge:
  • Phobos' act of mass murdering the rest of Meridian's nobility to eliminate any rival claimants to the throne, first mentioned in Kage, is brought up again here. However, while all the noble houses were stated to be extinguished in that story, there's revealed to be several left in the far north, while the immediate area around the capital suffered the worst of the purge. Kur, who already appeared in Kage, is revealed to be a survivor of said massacre.
  • The religious sect Tyrian is loyal to was ordered to be completely wiped out by one of the past queens for worshipping the Shadow Realm. Several of their members, including Tyrian's ancestor, were able to escape death and hide among Meridian's general population.
  • As in Kage, Lord Kur is obsessed with wiping out all "monster" races in Meridian. When reintroduced into the story in the Swamp arc, he is currently focused on preparing to do so in the Swamplands by using control of food rationing in the local capital of Everdeen to starve the local nonhumans until they lash out, giving him a pretext to start getting rid of them.
• Purple Is Powerful: The banners of Queen Jade/Kage are purple, and her new outfit includes purple flame patterns in her battle kimono, a black and purple sash, and an amethyst tiara shaped like dragon/demon horns.
• Rage Breaking Point:
  • Elyon finally blows up on Caleb in Chapter 10 for his refusal to accept his responsibility for the entire situation, and how he keeps making things worse, especially with his determination to kill Jade/Kage no matter what.
  • In Chapter 28, Jade's mounting frustration and anger from having to deal with Vera's infiltration attack on Snowpoint finally boils over after Vera tries to kill her with a cave-in. She proceeds to go full Oni and threatens to unleash the full might of the Shadow Realm, risking the entire mountain and everyone in it before being talked down.
• Reasonable Authority Figure:
  • The Oracle. While not happy about the situation with Jade/Kage, he does not hound the girls for their mistakes, saying that they cannot change the past, only learn from their mistakes. He believes that the prophecy about Kage destroying Kandrakar can be averted, tries to calm everyone down and listen to potential solutions brought up to fix the situation, and is open to diplomatic solutions with Kage rather than resorting to fighting her.
  • Roderick Asta, the mayor of Riverdeen, has the best interests of his city's inhabitants at heart and is willing to cooperate with Phobos, especially after the prince offers respite to the recent problems stirred up by the fanatical rebel soldiers who're preventing him from informing Elyon about their harassment of his citizens.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech:
  • In Chapter 8, Cornelia has a nightmare in which Kage calls her a spoiled attention seeker who can't stand the idea of Elyon no longer relying on her for support.
  • Arthur and Manny, fishermen from the Swamplands who've been incarcerated in Cavigor along with their Lurden friend Torgo by zealotic rebels, give Vathek and Drake a piece of their mind that the Rebellion as a whole is worse than Phobos because for all of his faults, Phobos hasn't really tried to excuse his evil deeds with noble intentions or persecuted anyone because of their species, while the rebels are clinging to the old traditions and preaching loyalty to the naïve new Queen to cover their own bigotry and desire for revenge.
  • Though Ilitia surrenders to Phobos in Chapter 34, she nonetheless rips into him about living up to the preconceptions surrounding him by seeking power at his subjects' expense and giving his lackeys free rein to deal with traitors however they pleased. However, she's forced to acknowledge his retort that rebellion members like Kur are corrupting everything they stood for.
• Reassigned to Antarctica:
  • Downplayed. In Chapter 7, Elyon essentially banishes Caleb and the other rebels from the castle by assigning them to patrolling the city and surrounding area instead, both to express her anger at his recent actions and to try and deescalate tensions between the rebels and guards.
  • Sult, one of the commanders of Elyon's northern army, is a former Phobos loyalist who switched sides shortly before the end of the war. As such, it's speculated that part of the reason he was shipped up north was to get him out of the capital.
• Recursive Fanfiction: To Kage.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni:
  • Among the Sky Hunters, Vera Bexley is the hardheaded and vindictive Red Oni against the calculating and dignified Blue Oni of her most vocal rival, Amelia Emmony. Alan Ascelot in turn is the carefree and thrill-loving Red Oni to the disciplined and thoughtful Blue Oni of his best friend Philip Wildstorm.
  • Between the two swamp guides Mayor Asta assigns to Phobos, Flora is the irreverent and adventurous Red Oni to Edmund's more careful and mature Blue Oni.
• Rejected Apology: Metalbeak ends up apologizing to Vera for causing her to take up her vendetta against his kind, but she's too wrapped up in her obsession to avenge her grandfather to give it any value.
• Renegade Splinter Faction:
  • The Snowpoint arc has an interesting example wherein most of the faction doesn't know that they're renegade: when Elyon orders her northern army to end the siege of Snowpoint and withdraw to the capital to regroup, Vera Bexley refuses to abandon her quest for revenge on the Mogriffs and goes rogue, tricking her friends into believing that they've been ordered to go on a covert mission to assassinate the Mogriff leader Metalbeak (the main target of Vera's vendetta).
  • The Swamplands arc features a more clearcut example with the rebel forces in the titular region. Under the command of Lord Kur, these rebels have cut off communication between the region and the capital (with help from Aldarn, who agrees with their aims but not their motives) so that they can act without oversight from Elyon or any more reasonable rebel leaders who would be opposed to them unilaterally rounding up suspected Phobos loyalists without trial, or their intentions of purging all nonhumans from the area. It says something that the locals are actually happy to have Phobos swoop in and defeat the rebels, as his rule of the area was at least more peaceable by comparison.
• Retcon: The original story implied that Gargoyle is possibly the Last of His Kind due to Phobos ordering them to be wiped out so that Elyon wouldn't learn about their allegiance to him, and that all the noble houses were extinguished in Phobos' purge. However, it's established here that neither is true. It's possibly justified because the former was stated to be Caleb's belief, while Blunk heard the latter from his mother.
• The Reveal: In Chapter 6, Luba reveals that Kandrakar only raised the Veil and allowed the Guardians to fight on Meridian because "the Mage" had them convinced that Phobos was a threat to the Infinite Dimensions. She makes it clear that if not for this, they wouldn't have interfered with events that were Meridian's own internal affairs.
• Revenge:
  • Downplayed. When Jade frees Phobos, she says that she is not after revenge, all she wants is to repay Raythor for the kindness he showed her. However, when Jade is later discussing her plans with Miranda and Cedric, she thinks to herself that while she does not want revenge, she does want to get even with the girls for all they've done to her.
  • The Snowpoint arc ends up deconstructing revenge in general, including Revenge Before Reason and Cycle of Revenge.
    • Vera Bexley has for ten years wanted to avenge her grandfather's death at the hands of the Mogriff leader Metalbeak by killing him, but she's willing to extend that goal to wiping out all the Mogriffs from the face of Meridian and ignore common sense. The unhealthiness of this obsession hasn't gone unnoticed by her comrades, especially when Vera proves herself willing to defy Elyon's direct orders to abandon the fight against the Shadowkhan and trick her friends into embarking on a suicide mission to assassinate Metalbeak. Not only she ends up having her vengeance denied, but all her efforts to have it lead to her losing the respect of her peers and becoming an emotionally broken cripple by the time the arc ends. Jade herself starts becoming afraid of what she might turn into if she allowed her own vengeful thoughts rule her like Vera has. Both Ymir and Sofia end up remarking that Vera is a perfect cautionary tale against letting revenge rule one's entire life.
    • Metalbeak himself killed Vera's grandfather as retribution for all the Mogriffs the man had slaughtered during his days as the "Nest Butcher" – a revenge Metalbeak spent three decades preparing for since first witnessing the Butcher's cruelties as a hatchling. Ironically, claiming said revenge in front of Vera started her own vendetta towards Metalbeak, which he ends up owning up to after seeing how much the girl has destroyed her own life just to kill him.
    • Sofia knows that if she'd sought revenge over the deaths of her mother and husband in shapeshifter purges instead of continuing her life with her daughter, they'd have both ended up much unhappier.
• Revenge Before Reason:
  • Vera is obsessed with wiping out the Mogriffs and avenging her grandfather, even if it means launching a hopeless fight against the Shadowkhan and going rogue from Elyon's army to do it. It eventually culminates in her abandoning her wounded friends whom she lied to in order to get their help when they refuse to accommodate her whims anymore and running off alone to find Metalbeak and kill him. She's even willing to get killed herself if killing Bladebeak (whom she doesn't know to be Metalbeak's son) before Metalbeak's eyes can give him pain. After both Jade and Metalkbeak decide to show her mercy by simply imprisoning her when they originally planned to subject her to a terrifying punishment, she makes Jade change her mind by trying to assassinate her before going after Metalbeak again without caring about risking everyone on Meridian, her own mother included, to the Roaring Rampage of Revenge of the Shadowkhan.
  • Metalbeak goes into a blind fury when he realizes that a descendant of the Nest Butcher is among Elyon's army, and nearly charges off without a second thought to hunt her down. Jade has to beat him into submission to get him to think through how he'd be leaving the Stone Nest undermanned to defend itself against a potential sneak attack if he did that. He proves that in contrast to Vera, he's learned his lesson when he prevents Jade from dealing with her in a way that'd risk the entire Stone Nest and gives up on trying to make Vera suffer for her actions when he realizes that by savouring his revenge on her grandfather when she was there to witness it, he's responsible for Vera growing up into a vengeful wreck.
• Revenge Is Not Justice:
  • Vera insists that she's seeking justice for her grandfather's death by trying to kill Metalbeak, but she's criticized by multiple people on both sides for her willingness to cross any line to succeed and indifference to the Mogriffs' justified grievances against her grandfather.
  • Zig-zagged with Metalbeak's past deed of killing Vera's grandfather Jesekiel Bexley to avenge all the Mogriffs the latter had killed as the Nest Butcher; it's considered murder by Vera and many other people who're prejudiced towards Mogriffs, but Jade views it as justice. While initially content with the way he killed Jesekiel, Metalbeak ends up having his doubts after he fights Vera; while he still thinks the Butcher earned his fate, he regrets the way he killed him before Vera's eyes and turned her into the new vengeful Butcher of his kind.
• Right Behind Me: When Vera's team reaches a rock maze after running for their lives from the Frostbiter, she ends up in yet another argument with Amelia. As she rants, she fails several times to get that the others have noticed something she hasn't. Only after hearing a growling sound does she turn around to find the Frostbiter gazing on them on top of a cliff.
• Rightful King Returns: Deconstructed; as Jade helps Phobos realize, Elyon was assumed to be a better ruler than him simply because she is the Heart of Meridian and preferred in the matrilineal monarchy, but she's mentally a normal Earth girl without political training or much knowledge about her kingdom. Meridian hasn't become a paradise since her ascension; if anything, her reign has fallen short in some ways, like in the renewal of Fantastic Racism. To Elyon's credit, she soon realizes her failings and attempts to have this trope reconstructed, but it remains to be seen if her efforts to improve as a ruler are too little too late.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge:
  • After the failure of her renegade quest to assassinate Metalbeak breaks Vera's already fragile sanity, she resorts to starting a Prison Riot in Snowpoint with the intention of assassinating Jade before going after Metalbeak again, and she even tries to kill Caroline for trying to stop her from killing Maya, no longer caring who she has to sacrifice to avenge her grandfather.
  • Both the Phobos loyalists and the saner Elyon loyalists are against killing Jade because they're afraid that if anything happens to her, the Shadowkhan will slaughter absolutely everyone on Meridian to avenge their queen.
• Royals Who Actually Do Something:
  • Elyon refuses to sit back and do nothing during the Shadowkhan attack on her castle, leading the defenses personally.
  • Jade, as Queen of the Shadowkhan, leads from the front.
  • Jade tells Phobos to invoke this trope by actively taking part in helping the commoners against the rebels' misconduct so that his PR can improve.
  • The Sky Hunters are led by six heirs to the prestigious families of the town of Castwell's Peak.
• Running Gag: Tyrian has a thing for ending up in the mouth of a shadow serpent (usually his own).
• Sarcastic Clapping:
  • After their team first evades the Frostbiter for a while, Amelia objects to Vera's idea to run into the rocky maze and demands they turn back now. When Vera sarcastically tells Amelia how returning to the apex predator's territory where it has a better chance of catching them is not a good idea, she finishes by clapping slowly.
  • During Chapter 30, Vera and her captured team end up arguing about if Elyon is a coward or simply out of her depth in the face of the Shadowkhan threat, Jade interjects by clapping and commenting that she's finally hearing Vera say something intelligent.
• Savage Wolves: The dangerous wildlife of Meridian's northern mountains is mentioned to include Schleich Wolves that are capable of hunting even in the worst of storms.
• Secret Identity: As in the original story, Jade publicly goes by the name Kage, but now she's taken as her full name "Hisuikage no oni".
• Secret Underground Passage: The Sand Dweller settlement of Shallowsands is revealed to have been built around the entrance of an underground tunnel leading to Cavigor. Originally a maintenance tunnel used to make the construction of the subterranean prison easier, it was magically sealed by the contemporary queen and forgotten once the prison was completed. As Frost's army besieges Cavigor, a reserve force digs the tunnel open and enters the prison while the main army launches the final assault, ending the siege in Frost's favor.
• Screaming Warrior: Deconstructed in Chapter 15 when a rebel soldier tries to attack Arthur from behind; his battle cry alerts Arthur just in time for the latter to dodge and kill him. Arthur then comments on how foolish it is to throw away the element of surprise by bellowing in battle.
• Shadow Archetype:
  • After seeing how far Vera falls in her desire for revenge, ruining her own life by deserting and tricking her friends into doing likewise (destroying their friendship when it's revealed), Jade starts to worry that she'll end up exactly the same if she lets her own quest for revenge on Elyon and the Guardians overwhelm her.
  • As a Knight Templar who has a black-and-white view on his prisoners who're supposedly Phobos' loyalists, the Warden of Cavigor is a reflection of the Wardens Are Evil behavior Vathek has started moving past since his Heel Realization, especially when he orders all his prisoners to be murdered and Vathek tries to stop him.
• Shapeshifter Guilt Trip: Subverted. When Metalbeak takes Jesekiel Bexley's appearance, Vera's furious that her beloved grandfather's killer is using his form. However, Metalbeak shapeshifts only when he needs to communicate with non-Mogriffs and isn't trying to gain a psychological advantage over Vera. He uses his own form during his entire Curb-Stomp Battle against Vera and is in fact the one who ends up feeling guilty about filling her with vengeance. He even apologizes to Vera with her grandfather's voice, but that's rejected by the too deranged girl.
• Shooting Lessons From Your Parents: Chapter 19 has a flashback of Vera's childhood when her grandfather reassured her that even though she has failed to get a single shot on her target, she'll become even better at archery than him with practice and determination.
• Shovel Strike: After Amelia loses her sword in the crystal mines, she ends up using a shovel to fight off a Ninja Khan.
• Shout-Out:
  • When Vera's team enters a mighty tundra, they spot a mother elk and her fawn grazing in the snowy terrain.
  • The music playing during the Bonfire Dance of Chapter 23 is "Evening in the Tavern".
  • Tyrian's dance fight with a Ninja Khan in Chapter 23 seems to be modeled on the Mamushka.
• Sick Captive Scam: In Chapter 31, the captive Vera Bexley pretends to have fallen unconscious so that the guard checking her cell will enter to examine her. This allows her to get the jump on the guard and escape.
• The Siege:
  • After Frost's forces overwhelm Vathek's at Cavigor, the latter retreat into the prison, which Frost then lays siege to, the defenders now being trapped with limited supplies and prisoners whom a considerable number of the troops want to execute to deny Phobos potential recruits. After Frost's offer of unconditional surrender is rejected, he has the Razor Khan infiltrate the prison and force the doors open for his main troops while a reserve force breaks in through a secret underground tunnel, ending the siege in Frost's victory.
  • Rebellion forces have been besieging Snowpoint since Elyon came to power, intent to wear down and eventually overwhelm the Lurdens and Mogriffs stationed there. By the time Chapter 17 reveals this, they're on the verge of claiming victory, only for a relief force of Shadowkhan and Phobos loyalists led by Jade to arrive and launch a counterattack, driving the attackers back.
• Silence, You Fool!: Jade delivers this to the rebels whom she's sending to the Shadow Realm for their role in Snowpoint's Prison Riot as they try to beg for mercy (or in the case of a few of them, curse her).
• Silk Hiding Steel: Lampshaded; Sofia establishes in her debut chapter that while a kindly healer, she's willing to assert herself to soldiers to ensure her patients' well-being. When Caroline asks if healers aren't supposed to be patient and gentle, Sofia answers that while it is so, tough love is sometimes required when dealing with more hardheaded patients.
• Simultaneous Arcs: After Jade splits up Phobos' forces for her Divide and Conquer plan in Chapter 10, the story takes turns at focusing on the following days on different fronts for the duration of several chapters.
  • Chapters 12-15 deal with Vathek and Drake's effort to prevent Frost from taking over Cavigor in Southern Meridian.
  • The Snowpoint arc of Chapters 16-32 revolves around Jade starting the conquest of Northern Meridian and having to deal with Vera Bexley and her vendetta against the Mogriffs.
  • Starting from Chapter 33, Phobos enters the eastern Swamplands under the cover of Jade and Frost's marching armies to win the locals on his side by investigating the corrupt rebels' shady activities.
• Single Tear:
  • Caleb sheds one in Chapter 11 while he's ranting about his belief that his Missing Mom wouldn't want all the sacrifices the rebels committed to free Meridian of Phobos' tyranny to be rendered naught by Kage.
  • This happens with Amelia twice in Chapter 32, first when she gives Vera a piece of her mind and secondly when her former friend 's awful sentence is carried out.
• Slain in Their Sleep: Vera initiates a Prison Riot in the middle of the night in an effort to quickly take over Snowpoint and assassinate a sleeping Jade. The plan fails and the rioters are quickly subdued after Maya manages to wake up the entire fortress by using an alarm horn.
• Slut-Shaming:
  • When Yoruichi tries to talk the Warden's followers out of killing the prisoners just as Frost's army is about to breach Cavigor, their leader dares to call her a whore and accuses her of consorting with Phobos' followers.
  • While fighting Altaria during Snowpoint's Prison Riot, Vera angers the Phobos loyalist by accusing her of sharing her bed with Lurdens and other "freaks".
• Sneeze Cut: After Jade has beaten sense into Metalbeak in Chapter 22 and reassures she'll protect the Mogriffs from the Nest Butcher's kin, the scene cuts to Vera sneezing. When she says she's kept sneezing for unknown reasons, Tinsley teasingly suggests someone's talking about Vera and wonders if it's Albel.
• Sorting Algorithm of Evil: Played with like in the W.I.T.C.H. cartoon. Jade takes Nerissa out of the game before the sorceress can gain her first canon power-up, and it's only thanks to her help that Phobos is able to threaten Meridian again. She's personally less vile than either of them (though certainly terrifying when enraged), and her currently worst intentions boil down to fulfilling Raythor's wish to put Phobos back on Meridian's throne and getting even with the people who declared her their enemy on sight. Regardless, she becomes the heroes' most challenging enemy until now thanks to her vast Shadowkhan armies that are an Outside-Context Problem in the W.I.T.C.H. universe, resources that enable Phobos' troops to seriously step up in the game, her plan that aims to emotionally bring the heroes down by destroying their very esteem in everyone's eyes, and their own awareness of it being their fault she's become their enemy.
• Split-Personality Merge: Part of the backstory for this story is that Jade and her Enemy Within, the Queen, eventually decided they needed each other to survive, so they merged together to form a new personality with aspects of both. The main side effect of this is Jade gaining total control over the Shadowkhan tribes.
• Spotting the Thread:
  • Tynar figures out on his own that Jade was never a minion of Phobos due to piecing together clues like the fact that despite being accused of being a shapeshifter, she never took any other form, and how she was far kinder than any of the Knights, never being rude or threatening to him and Vathek when they were the Knights’ prisoners (except when Vathek insulted her first).
  • During the Shadowkhan attack on the castle, everyone quickly figures out that Jade is responsible due to their physical similarities. But Drake and Granik take it further by questioning why Phobos never used this power during the rebellion or even his recent escape attempt if he'd really created Jade as they'd been told.
• Starfish Language: The Lurdens and Mogriffs' respective natural languages are composed of growls, roars and shrieks.
• Stop Worshipping Me: Jade is not pleased when she realizes that she matches the description of the prophesied goddess worshipped by the cult that Tyrian is a member of.
• Suddenly Shouting: Jade does this in Chapter 28 to get everyone to shut up. It helps that she also unleashes a gust of her power.
  Jade: That is… ENOUGH!
• Summoning Artifact:
  • In Chapter 10, Jade gives Frost a gauntlet that can summon Razor Khan, to provide him aid during his raid on Cavigor.
  • When Tracker sets out with Phobos to the Swamplands, Jade gives him a hunt horn that can summon the Bat Khan.
  • Also as part of the Swamplands mission, Jade gives Raythor a gem for his sword pommel that summons Samurai Khan.
• Super-Persistent Predator: After Caroline's bleeding hand inadvertently draws the attention of a Frostbiter, the apex predator of the northern mountains while her team travels through its territory, it chases them all the way into a rocky maze, with nothing able to dissuade it from its hunt. It's only when Jade gives it two carcasses to eat that she peacefully gets it to return home.
• Superpowered Evil Side: Despite having merged with the Queen, Jade still somewhat has one of these — when she enters the bloodlust that comes with her new Oni biology, signified by her eyes glowing brighter and fangs sprouting in her mouth, she slips into a mindset much more like purely the Queen.
• Super Window Jump: In Chapter 31, after getting a taste of Jade's full power when she easily dispatches an entire group of rebel soldiers, a crazed Vera decides to flee by leaping out a window. She doesn't get far, however, being surrounded by Samurai Khan almost as soon as she hits the ground.
• Symbolic Mutilation: Vera getting the shadow of her left arm eaten by a Leech Khan renders the limb immobile, which Jade considers fitting since now the extremely stubborn Master Archer can't possibly keep fighting back as a political prisoner. This is what finally gets through Vera's madness enough so that she admits for once that she rather than someone else messed up.
• Swamp Monster: Gargoyle's race known as Swamp Giants are rock giants capable of breathing underwater and navigating their native Swamplands like no other race can.
• Sword Sparks:
  • When Tyrian and the Ninja Khan he's dance-dueling with whip out knives, they use them to make sparks.
  • With her team outmatched against Tyrian, Vera unintentionally scrapes Amelia's sword with her daggers, and the sparks result in a small explosion among the coal dust scattered across the mine's floor. Inspired by this, she traps Tyrian between explosions by causing more sparks with her sharpening stone and arrowhead.
• Sympathy for the Devil:
  • Jade goes out of her way to bargain Miranda and Cedric out of Phobos' service due to feeling similar in having faced persecution for being different, and plans to give them a new start after their mission is over.
  • Despite Vera's actions, Jade and Metalbeak both end up feeling sorry for the girl who has ruined her own life in her obsession to avenge her grandfather. Metalbeak in particular admits that by killing Vera's grandfather in front of her eyes, he set her on this path.
• Taking the Bullet: When the maddened Vera tries to slice Caroline for foiling her assassination attempt on Kage, Maya shields her and ends up with a bleeding back. Fortunately, she survives thanks to her mother and Caroline's treatment.
• Taking You with Me: As Frost's army is about to breach Cavigor, the Warden, convinced all of his prisoners are as vile as Phobos, orders his men to murder them before they can be freed and join Phobos' army. When Vathek and Drake catch up with Jax in the prison's third level just as Frost's army enters the prison through the forgotten maintenance tunnel leading to that very level, Jax has a Villainous Breakdown under the belief that none of this would be happening if Phobos, his minions and Kage had all been killed in the first place and decides to kill Vathek and Drake (who are among those he blames) before going down himself. He gets killed before he can kill either.
• Talk to the Fist: While trying to deescalate a budding fight between the guards and rebels in Chapter 7, Tynar gets punched out by another guard who blames him for their bad situation in the new regime.
• Tastes Like Chicken: When Jade reluctantly tastes a roasted Snowpuff, she tries to pretend it's a roasted chicken and discovers that its taste does resemble chicken.
• Taught by Experience: Jade uses her experience in defeating villains in her world to come up with a solid plan to defeat Elyon, the Guardians, and the Rebellion by destroying their reputation with the people.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork:
  • The six nobles leading the Sky Hunters are divided between their leader Vera Bexley and her most vocal rival Amelia Emmony. The tensions between them grow increasingly worse after Vera deceives them into embarking on an unsanctioned assassination attempt on Metalbeak and Amelia's misgivings rub off on the others as Vera stubbornly presses on despite all the hardships. Everyone has finally had enough inside the crystal mines where the odds have pushed them to their limits and when they decide to surrender, Vera spitefully abandons her friends to achieve her vendetta alone.
  • Amelia's relationship with another Sky Hunter named Alan Ascelot is almost as volatile as the one she has with Vera. Alan distrusts Amelia because he blames her family for the arrest and death of his grandfather, but he still promises to the others that he won't let his personal feelings affect their mission. When it comes down to it, they're both ready to jump to each other's aid, though.
  • Aldarn is collaborating with Kur to deal with the "monstrous" races of the Swamplands, but he makes it clear he doesn't like the old man at all or fully trust him.
• Tempting Fate:
  • When we get to Elyon in Chapter 5, her thoughts reveal that she hadn't believed things could get worse after the Shadowkhan stopped their devastating assault, only to learn she was tempting fate.
  • Following the tense meeting with Kandrakar's council, Will hopes things can't get worse as she returns with Elyon to Meridian and realizes she was wrong when they find the rebels ready to clash with the Guard.
  • As Irma makes her way home in Chapter 8, she mutters that things can't get worse before finding to her horror Cedric having tea in her living room with her father.
  • As Vathek and Drake leave Yoruichi behind to hold the line during the storming of Cavigor, she reassures that the heavy stone blocking the entrance to the upper level will prevent Frost's troops from entering for a long while. The narration remarks how wrong she turns out to be.
  • After barely surviving the encounter with Tyrian in Chapter 26, Amelia remarks she'd like to find an exit before something else happens. Cue to the Ninja Khan announcing their arrival by a thrown shuriken, and Alan snarks at Amelia for tempting fate.
• That's What I Would Do: Following the retreat of Elyon's army from Snowpoint, Jade discusses with the fortress' commanders about the possibility of the army trying to launch a new attack from the north. The terrain is so difficult to cross they find it unlikely, but Jade decides to keep an eye out in that direction in case a small group tried to sneak up on them. She states from her experience that if she were in the rebels' position, she'd choose the path the enemy would least expect them to use. Vera's team is indeed trying to reach the Stone Nest from the north in an effort to find and assassinate Metalbeak, though this mission was not sanctioned by her superiors.
• Then Let Me Be Evil:
  • ZigZagged a bit. After having been unjustly treated as a monstrous underling of Phobos by the heroes, forced to join the Knights of Vengeance for survival, and failing in her attempts to return home, Jade has finally snapped, accepted her Superpowered Evil Side through a Split-Personality Merge, taken up the mantle of the Queen of the Shadowkhan and officially allied herself with Phobos to get some payback for all the mistreatment she has suffered. However, she makes it clear that Raythor is the only reason she's helping Phobos at all, and she intends to make the prince a Villain with Good Publicity through Pragmatic Villainy instead of simply crushing all resistance with her Shadowkhan armies. Returning to her home universe remains as her main goal, and she's willing to show she's not heartless when it comes to enemies or bystanders who haven't incited her wrath.
  • Phobos reveals that he's been treated as a bad omen ever since he was born, and being given a name that means fear didn't help the matter, so he chose to live up to that name with pride. He actually intended to become a good king as a child to prove wrong the whispers circling around him, but Elyon's birth crushed those ambitions and convinced him that even his parents were against him. In fact, he's considering making a reality of Kandrakar's original belief (which Nerissa ignited) of him becoming a Multiversal Conqueror to show how wrong people were to spurn him.
• Theory Tunnel Vision: Caleb is so convinced of Nerissa's lie that Kage is a minion of Phobos that he refuses to acknowledge any evidence to the contrary, relying on increasingly convoluted theories to justify his viewpoint.
• This Is Gonna Suck:
  • Bastian's reaction when he has to deliver the news to his captains (especially Vera) that Elyon has ordered them to abandon the siege of Snowpoint and withdraw to the capital.
  • Jade can only mutter "bad day" before Vera brings a mine tunnel down on her.
• This Is Unforgivable!: When Vera makes it clear she has no regrets about trying to force her friends – who were ready to surrender as one of them was bleeding from the side – to finish their doomed mission, Jade is so disgusted that she states she's going to really hurt Vera.
• Thou Shalt Not Kill: Zig Zagged. When Jade explains how she plans to use Miranda and Cedric's skills to destroy the Guardians' lives, she clarifies that she does not want to kill them, but to ruin their credibility both as Guardians and as normal Earth girls. She has no problem killing rebel soldiers in combat, though, especially when driven to Oni bloodlust.
• Took a Level in Jerkass:
  • Caleb and Aldarn, compared to the original story. While there they were willing to take extreme and cruel actions against anyone suspected of being loyal to Phobos, they still showed no sign of distrust towards the Guards. Here, however, they share the other rebels' disdain for the Guards, even being willing to abandon them during the Shadowkhan attack on the castle just because they doubted Caleb's conviction that Jade/Kage is a monster created by Phobos. Aldarn is actually conspiring with Kur behind Elyon's back under a misguided belief that they must take a more forceful approach to root out Phobos' influence from the Swamplands.
  • Vera Bexley doesn't start off as the most pleasant of characters, but her Sanity Slippage puts a strain on her friendship with her fellow Sky Hunters until she disowns them for refusing to help her with her unhealthy vendetta anymore, loses any guilt she had about taking advantage of their trust in her and even tries to kill Caroline for defending Maya from her.
• Tragic Keepsake: The black ribbon Vera Bexley wears in her hair was part of the dress her grandfather intended to gift her with on the day he was killed.
• Twitchy Eye:
  • Jade seems to be developing this habit when dealing with Tyrian.
  • Phobos has this while dealing with Lily's childish admiration and Flora's disregard towards his royal status.
• Two Girls to a Team: Inverted; the team of noble heirs from Castwell's Peak is composed of four women and two men.
• Tyrant Takes the Helm: Kur is revealed to have been put in charge of the Swamplands' capital Everdeen with a duty of cleansing the area of Phobos' remaining supporters. With the fact that he's a genocidal fanatic who's put the entire city on lockdown and under strict food rationing (a decision that hasn't made him popular in the city) as a part of his plan to eliminate the shapeshifters and other "monstrous" races, he's a definite step down from whoever used to run the city that thrived as a melting pot of commerce and interspecies relations during Phobos' reign.
• Villain Ball: After Vera repays Jade's mercy by starting a Prison Riot and attempting to assassinate her, Jade wonders if she's been embracing the evil queen persona too much to the point of repeating her past enemies' mistake of not properly dealing with the extremely Defiant Captive and assuming she would give up just like that.
• Villainous Breakdown:
  • When Jax is defending the Warden's decision to mass murder all the prisoners to Vathek and Drake, seeing Frost's troops breaching Cavigor through a Secret Underground Passage causes him to snap and decide that if he must die, he'll take the two "weak" rebel heroes with him first.
  • Vera's singleminded quest to have her revenge on Metalbeak causes her to gradually lose it from the combined pressure of lying to her friends about the true nature of her renegade mission, struggling to keep her team in control in the face of Amelia's suspicions and facing one obstacle after another in a rapid succession. When she finally reaches her target after abandoning her friends for throwing in the towel, only to be restrained by Jade, she's reduced to screaming about her hatred at Metalbeak and Jade both and badmouthing her former friends for not living up to her expectations before she manages to break free and makes one last effort to attack Metalbeak in her injured state. Everyone is disturbed at seeing how she's desperate enough to try to bite the Mogriff alpha who effortlessly throws her around, so after she's taken away, Jade and Metalbeak decide to simply leave her imprisoned since her obsession with revenge has already led her to ruining her life. And then, upon escaping her cell, she psychotically decides to go after Jade in the belief that killing her will enable her attempts on Metalbeak, completely ignoring that for all anyone knows, doing so may cause the Shadow Realm to invade Meridian. Actually seeing Jade in action, however, drives her to a mad panic and leads to her leaping out a window in a desperate attempt to escape, which fails. She remains defiant when Jade punishes her afterwards, but the pain from a Leech Khan tearing out a part of her shadow and rendering her arm useless in the process finally elicits remorse in her and brings her to a Villainous BSoD.
• Villainous Medical Care: When Vera's team surrenders, Jade agrees to allow Philip and Alan to be treated of their wounds to show she's not utterly merciless. Snowpoint's head healer Sofia and her daughter Maya are kind enough to ask Caroline to help them with the patients after she treats a wounded Mogriff's wing simply because it's the right thing to do. They even opt to tag along when the prisoners are taken to be interrogated to ensure Philip and Alan's condition won't get worse.
• Villainous Rescue: Phobos arrives in Riverdeen just in time to stop the public lynching of some Lurdens by the local rebellion forces, who have framed them for the murder of a young girl in order to cover up their own abuses of power.
• Villain with Good Publicity:
  • Jade reasons that the best way to secure Phobos' new reign is to convince everyone that for all his faults, Elyon is less competent as a ruler since she has no real experience in rulership, has allowed the Rebellion's members to cause trouble with their prejudices towards anyone they believe still supports Phobos, and inadvertently brought upon Meridian the wrath of another world by antagonizing its queen. By contrast, Phobos managed to maintain a real (if admittedly fragile) peace among Meridian's various races, and it's arguable that most of the problems of his original reign were caused by the Rebellion (egged on by Nerissa's manipulations) refusing to accept him as a ruler just because he's a man.
  • On Earth, Cedric and Miranda pose as a father and daughter who befriend the Guardians' loved ones under the pretense that "Melinda" is trying to make amends for getting the girls suspected of Elyon's disappearance. This enables them to make those same loved ones grow suspicious of the Guardians' secret lives.
  • Phobos earns his first PR victory in the village of Riverdeen in the Swamplands, which he saves from corrupt local rebel forces who have been provoking tensions with the local nonhuman races as an excuse to purge them, and as a diversion from their summary arrests of anyone suspected of being a Phobos loyalist. When Phobos defeats and arrests them, the locals cheer him, especially since in the process he saved a young girl who was detained for trying to get a message to the capital about what the rebels have been doing.
• Volcano Lair: The Stone Nest, the Mogriffs' sacred nesting ground in the northern mountains of Meridian, turns out to be a volcano that's either extinct or sleeping. The caldera has vegetation and water coming from the snow and ice that's melting outside thanks to the warm air and the sunlight filtering from the open crater. It's here that the Mogriffs make their nests and adorn them with crystals found inside the volcano. The other races' greed for those crystals is part of the reason they've had to fight for their ancestral home over the centuries.
• Wall Crawl: The Mantis Khan are revealed to be capable of easily crossing mountainous terrain by using their insectoid legs to climb even vertical mountainsides.
• Wardens Are Evil: The Warden of Cavigor, while loyal to Elyon, is a Knight Templar who views all his prisoners as irredeemable loyalists of Phobos, and decides to kill them all to prevent Frost from freeing them.
• War Is Hell: The fic doesn't shy away from the brutality of warfare and how losing to Phobos' loyalists and their Shadowkhan allies feels despairing to Elyon's troops.
• Was It Really Worth It?: After Vera is captured following the failure of her self-appointed suicide mission and taken to Snowpoint's dungeons, Amelia asks from her cell if getting her personal revenge was worth lying to the rest of their team as well as getting them all captured and nearly killed. Vera refuses to own up to anything and shifts the blame for the failure on her former friends.
• We ARE Struggling Together: As in the original story, there is tension between the Guards and the Rebels, with some of the latter outright stating that all the Guards should be locked up with Phobos for having served him in the past. Unsurprisingly, many of the Guards are now wondering if maybe they shouldn't have switched sides in the first place.
• We Can Rule Together: Nerissa has deemed Jade to be the only Knight of Vengeance who hasn't outlived her usefulness, and when the girl reveals she figured out the sorceress impersonated the Mage all along, the impressed Nerissa offers her a place by her side as her true plans unfold. After Jade refuses, Nerissa resigns to forcing her into submission before she's rendered comatose by a Leech Khan eating her shadow.
• We Used to Be Friends: Vera's friendship with her fellow noble heirs comes to a bitter end after they learn she lied to them and nearly got them all killed just so she could kill Metalbeak and she blames in her madness everyone around her except for herself.
• What the Hell, Hero?:
  • When Caleb realizes the Shadowkhan have reached Elyon's bedchamber, he orders all the troops back to the castle to protect her even when Granik objects that abandoning their defenses will only aid the enemy. He even willingly leaves all the Guards who stay with Granik to face possible death. Elyon herself calls out Caleb on his impulsive decision and callous attitude over the Guards' lives, later chewing him out and reassigning him away from the castle as punishment.
  • Tynar calls out the Guardians and Elyon for their treatment of Kage and assuming she was an enemy.
  • Luba is furious at Will and Elyon for attacking Jade/Kage, as she fears this will cause the prophecy of Kandrakar's downfall to come true.
  • Elyon is pissed when she finds the rebels and guards coming to blows over their rising tensions, especially at Caleb, whose denial about the truth about Jade/Kage and "the Mage" is only enflaming the problem.
  • The above-mentioned coming to blows is a result of the guards angrily attacking Caleb for his abandoning of them during the Shadowkhan attack, which got Granik killed.
  • Elyon blows up on Caleb when he declares his intent to kill Jade/Kage, literally seconds after Elyon has stated she's trying to make peace with her.
  • Amelia calls out Vera for how her obsession with getting revenge on the Mogriffs is compromising her ability to be an effective leader in fighting them. After Vera takes her noble friends on an unsanctioned suicide mission to assassinate Metalbeak, Amelia calls Vera out several times more as the haphazardly planned mission gets the group nearly killed several times.
  • Vera is furious when she learns that Elyon has ordered the northern army to abandon the siege of Snowpoint (and thus Vera's quest for revenge) and withdraw to the capital. Bastian in return has some choice words for her when she suggests disobeying those orders, pointing out that regardless of how they feel about it, they are still loyal to Elyon, and refuting her commands is treason.
  • When Jade finally confronts Vera face-to-face, she makes it clear she's disgusted with how the vengeful girl just endangered her friends (one of whom was bleeding and in no condition to escape) just as they were surrendering before abandoning them for refusing to continue her singleminded quest for "justice".
  • When Vera's friends find out about her lying to them to make them join her suicide mission, they're all understandably horrified with her, with Amelia in particular chewing her out over it.
• White Flag: After having Cavigor under siege, Frost approaches the prison's entrance with a white flag and one of his captains as a witness to give Vathek and Drake a chance to surrender. Though he has the clear advantage and would love to simply slaughter the rebels, he's trying to make it look like he's honoring Jade's wish to give the enemy a chance to surrender without excessive bloodshed. The Warden considers shooting Frost, but Vathek says they'd be arrested for a war crime. After Frost's offer is turned down, he throws the flag into the fire protecting Cavigor and brings forth the Razor Khan that force the gates open for his main troops, satisfied he has a pretext to use them.
• Why Won't You Die?: Alan exclaims this after the Frostbiter survives being buried under rocks.
• Won the War, Lost the Peace: Defied. Jade explains to Phobos and his followers that if they just overpower Elyon, the Rebellion and Guardians will rally the people against them, so they need to destroy the people's faith in Elyon to win the war.
• Would Hurt a Child:
  • To the Guardians' and Elyon's shock, Caleb fully intends to execute Jade/Kage if he gets a chance.
  • Vera's grandfather Jesekiel Bexley brutally killed even Mogriff hatchlings and eggs. When Metalbeak confronted him about it, he justified himself by saying that he wouldn't let them grow into adults that could harm innocents.
  • Vera herself is not against smashing any Mogriff eggs coming her way, and she nearly manages to shoot Jade when she first sees the latter on the enemy's side. She ends up holding Metalbeak and Windblade's son hostage after trying to kill him and his two hatchling friends.
  • Zig-zagged with Zekiel; he's outraged that Lily is among the prisoners who're to be sent to Cavigor, but makes it clear that if she were a changeling, he'd have ended her on sight.
  • During Phobos' reign, there was a Serial Killer who targeted children in the capital until he was captured and sentenced to be flayed by Phobos.
• Wouldn't Hurt a Child:
  • Though Tinsley's been taught to view the Mogriffs as monsters, Vera's willingness to smash their eggs horrifies her.
  • Amelia is repulsed by the Mogriffs, but harming defenseless hatchlings and eggs feels like an overstep to her.
  • When Metalbeak killed Jesekiel Bexley, he ordered his clanmates not to harm Vera who was a child at the time because he didn't want to be a killer of children like the Nest Butcher.
  • Abigor, Ilitia and Zekiel are dismayed with Lily being among their captives, and they're utterly outraged when one of their comrades suggests killing her as damage control.
  • The rebels admit that Phobos has never sunk so low as to harm children. He even once made a statement against it by publicly executing a child-targeting Serial Killer.
• Would Not Shoot a Civilian: Barnabas and Rolf, two of the rebel soldiers taking part in the Prison Riot of Chapter 31, tell their comrades not to hurt Sofia and Maya because they see no honor in killing who they believe to be defenseless healers.
• Wrecked Weapon:
  • The rebels getting their weapons damaged by the Shadowkhan weapons of Phobos' loyalists does its work in making them realize how out of their depth they are against Queen Kage and her army.
  • After Jade's army turns the tide of the battle at Snowpoint and she brings an avalanche down on to the Sky Hunters, Vera finds her bow trashed, symbolizing the truth Albel forces her to face; they've lost the battle that was supposed to end the siege of Snowpoint and must regroup.
  • When Vera – injured and consumed by vengeance to the point of having given up on her friends – finally reaches the Mogriffs' nest, her new bow is charred from the explosion she caused, and all she has left is one dagger. All she can do anymore is to hold Bladebeak hostage when she's surrounded by the Mogriffs and Phobos' soldiers before Jade arrives to restrain her. Things keep getting worse for her afterwards as her insane actions prove beyond a shadow of doubt that she's Her Own Worst Enemy.
• The Wrongful Heir to the Throne: The cornerstone of Jade's plan to get Phobos back on the throne is to paint Elyon's reign in as negative a light as possible, citing how she was until recently a normal Earth teenager with no training for ruling a kingdom, and as such has no idea what she's doing, allowing corrupt and fanatical rebellion members nominally loyal to her to act however they want in her name.
• You Are Better Than You Think You Are: When Caroline confides to Tinsley in Chapter 23 that she feels like a failure for not being naturally skilled in the art of sewing her noble family is famous for, Tinsley gives her a pep talk by saying that joining them on their dangerous mission and being the best potion maker in Meridian gives her family a reason to be proud of her.
• You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!:
  • Jade has this reaction to learning from Ymir that Tyrian is worshipping her as the goddess his religious sect has prophesied to emerge from the Shadow Realm to engulf the Infinite Dimension in eternal darkness.
  • Snowpoint soldier Quinn has this reaction when her friend Rosetta shows romantic interest in Tyrian, of all people.
• You Have to Believe Me!: During Snowpoint's Prison Riot, Tinsley and Caroline try to warn the escaped rebel soldiers that it's suicide trying to take over the fortress while the Shadowkhan and their queen are present. Taking advantage of the prisoners' ignorance and her own charisma, Vera quickly lies that Tinsley and Caroline have been driven hysterical by enemy propaganda.
• You Killed My Father:
  • Vera Bexley hates Mogriffs with a passion because her grandfather was killed by them.
  • Caleb's strong hatred of Phobos and his loyalists is partially tied to his assumption that his Missing Mom was another casualty of their tyranny.
  • One of the Warden's followers who argues with Yoruichi about killing Cavigor's prisoners says that he's been fighting for the Rebellion since he lost his father to Phobos' servants as a boy.
  • Ilitia's grandfather, who was a Phobos loyalist, was killed when Cedric ordered her village to be burned to the ground because several rebels stayed at the inn, making her bitter both at Cedric and Phobos.
• You Monster!:
  • Phobos, his followers (both real and alleged), Jade and the Shadowkhan are continuously called monsters, abominations and other such pejoratives by the more Knight Templarish rebels, while the saner heroes use them more prudently, mainly with Phobos.
  • Vathek tells one of the soldiers who're mass murdering Cavigor's prisoners (whom they've labeled as Phobos' monsters) that they're the only monsters he's seeing.
  • While listening to Metalbeak's story about Jesekiel Bexley, Jade makes her opinion on the man clear by asking what became of the monster whose face Metalbeak is now using.
  • When Amelia and Vera have a last talk before the latter's sentence is carried out in Chapter 32, the ever-defiant Vera keeps insisting that she's only been trying to get justice for her grandfather's death and protect Meridian from monsters (which she's kept calling the Mogriffs and Jade), but Amelia calls her out of her BS by remarking that she allowed her desire for revenge to turn herself into a monster.
  • When deducing Kur's plans to start a purge of nonhumans in Chapter 35, Raythor disdainfully says he's a hypocrite for calling changelings monsters.
• You're Insane!:
  • Elyon has this reaction in Chapter 10 when Caleb declares that Kage must be killed to stop Phobos, especially since he's making this statement literally right after she just said that she's trying to make amends and peace with Kage.
  • As the incensed Vera and her fellow nobles argue about her act of using them to fulfill her own vendetta in Chapter 30, Alan tells her that before he would have said her grandfather would be ashamed of her, but given everything they've learned about his actions against the Mogriffs, he might have been completely mad, just like Vera herself. Vera replies that they're the only ones mad for not even trying to fight before she breaks free from her Samurai Khan escorts in a final attempt to attack Metalbeak.
  • Vera is again on the receiving end of this during Chapter 31, not only from her ex-friends, but also Altaria and Maya when they learn that she initiated the Prison Riot just so she could assassinate Kage without caring about risking a war between the Shadow Realm and all of Meridian.

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