Deltora Quest: The books reflect their stones

As I was doing my reviews for the book of the first series of Deltora, I couldn’t help notice that each book reflected in its own way the notion represented by each gem. I did a small analysis on each of the review of each book, but here is the compilation of all of them together (plus I rewrote them and added one or two things)

In the first book, The Forests of Silence, the stone is the Topaze, the symbol of Faithfulness (translated in French as Loyalty). That’s what the main characters in the book have to show towards each other. They have to learn to trust and have faith in each other: Lief keeps believing Barda thinks of him as a burden, and a kid to babysit, while Barda tries to keep Lief out of the danger and the action because he thinks he is not ready yet or strong enough. And of course, Jasmine has to trust these two strangers, just like they have to show faith into the little savage girl living all alone in the woods. Everyone here has to get out of their comfort zone and learn to rely on other people, and to see the world through their point of view.

Something Gorl actually never did. His greed led him to betray his own brothers, and he keeps killing everyone who trespasses. He doesn’t trust or believe people when they enter in his realm by accident, or when they went to search something else than the Lilies. Fear and greed have eaten him up, destroying him and turned him into a delusional maniac, the complete opposite of a faithful and loyal man. It’s to the point that the prison he built around his treasure is the exact reason they can’t bloom or appear, in a very twisted irony.

It also was a notion that was extremely present in the first part of the book: Endon had to learn to not put his faith and trust into the Rule and Prandine, he had to learn to put his faith into his friend, into his country, into what he felt right. The kings have failed because they lost the faith of their people, because they have no loyalty around them anymore. It’s this quality of faithfulness/loyalty that lacked, and that brought down the fall of all of Deltora.


Book two, The Lake of Tears, is the book of the Ruby, the symbol of Happiness. Of course, as a result, the villain Thaegan is all about despair. Her purpose is to make people miserable, destroy everything beautiful and make sure there is no good in her country. She brings sadness and pain everywhere and to everyone. The Lake of Tears itself is a place oozing with despair and sadness (hence its name), where Soldeen is perpetually suffering of loneliness and depression. And that’s opposed to the music of the Ralads, the tribe of the Ruby, a music able to conjure up the most happy and joyous times, the good memories. Thaegan could rob them of their voice, so that they wouldn’t rebel against injustice, but she couldn’t take away their music from them – she destroyed outside happiness, and its cause, but the Ralads kept an inner happiness she couldn’t destroy, and they still had their memory of the times of good and beauty, something she couldn’t rob.

In another way, Jin and Jod trap is also a grotesque parody of the idea of happiness. The illusion they create is that of a sweet home in which lives a kind old couple. It evokes to their victims kind grandparents, warm parents, shelter and hospitality – when the truth is that this is an ugly place of suffering, death and despair. The needlework “Live no evil” and “Live on evil” is the most direct jab at the notion of happiness that they soil by their very own existence.

Interestingly, some people have interpreted the whole fight against the Shadow Lord and its creatures in the Deltora Quest series as a fight against depression and anxiety, the two main opposites of happiness.



In the third book now, City of Rats, we are presented to the Opal, the stone of Hope. And this idea of hope is many times represented – mostly in a twisted and defied form, like in the previous books. False hopes, lost hopes, deceiving hopes.

Tom, for example, represent a deceived hope, this seller of wonderful artifacts and ally of the Resistance revealing himself to play both sides and supply the Grey Guards. The confrontation with Jasmine about the role of the kings of Deltora in the country’s fate is also bringing up the notion that the people of Deltora had lost all hope in their living condition, in their country, in their kings and queens, and that’s what brought the country under the Shadow Lord’s rule. The Noradz people have also lost any kind of hope, or dream, or creativity – they lived so long under a strict, sterile, smothering society that now they are mindless puppets held by fear and submission, without any trace of hope or courage in them. And, in parallel, the City of the Rats itself is a beacon of hopelessness, a symbol of ruin and destruction, of an inevitable pestilence, a proof that the plans of the Shadow Lord worked with a perfect precision and a twisted cruelty.

But at the same time, when the characters don’t have any hope left, there’s always a twist of fate. They think they are doomed in the Noradz city, but they are saved by Tira. At the Plain of the Rats they think they are without any food or resource, but it turns out Tom’s objects are more useful than they seemed at first. Tom himself, despite presenting himself as a crook and a collaborator, is a helpful man, and still part of the Resistance.

The fourth book, “The Shifting Sands”, all about the Lapis-Lazuli and what it represents: luck and fortune. But of course, since the stone is supposed to bring good luck and good fortune, our heroes will encounter just the opposite of that.

Rithmere offer luck-based games that are all rigged, all cheats and scams. The Rithmere Games themselves seem like a wonderful opportunity and bringing good fortune – only to reveal that it was a trick, putting people in the slavery of the Shadow Arena. On the opposite side, what seems to be bad luck and bad omens – here mostly the presence of Doom, seen as a threat that will bring misfortune on them – is in fact merely an attempt to save them and go them good, without them realizing. In this book we also see of the idea of a good fortune as “prosperity, wealth and fame” are twisted into a disgusting and cruel greed, plus our heroes now have rumors going around them, ringing both to the Resistance’s ears and to those of the Shadow Lord.


The fifth book is the Dread Mountains, centered around the Emerald, the stone of honor.

The most obvious presence of honor here is with the Dread Gnomes situation. They are a proud tribe, but their proudness once turned into arrogance, and to gain more power they became cruel and sold their own freedom. It’s only too late they realized they had sold their honor away, the proud warriors now reduced to the role of toad feeder, having lost their own treasure, squirming like worms in front of an ugly and tyrannical beast, having to live along with mounts of corpses just to breed flies… And that’s how the heroes in the book gain their sympathy, by promising them to get back their honor, and during the fight they don’t just get rid of Gellick, but also of the cowards and traitors (represented by Ri-Nan).

Gellick also represents the bad side of honor: arrogant and self-centered pride. Just look at how he bosses the Gnomes around, claim to be superior to everything and kills Ri-Nan just for apparently giving him orders.

Outside of that there are other cases throughout the book where honor seems to appear. The Dreaming Spring only spare the honorable people. Lief’s parents resist to Fallow interrogation and torture. Lief refuse to run away from the Vraal and decides to fight it with all of his strength. The Kin debates during the whole book if they should stay hidden and safe, but dying, or get back courage and honor and go back to their homeland at the risk of sparking a new war. Prin herself gains honor in this book, going from a spoiled and air-headed child to a brave young Kin. And of course, here is the beginning of the backstory of Doom, which just oozes out with the idea of “honor” and what’s “honorable”.

The sixth book, The Maze of the Beast, is the book of the Amethyst, the stone of Truth, and of course, the book is filled with the idea of “what is true? What is not?”. This book introduces the deceiving and shape-shifting Ols, which put a doubt on everything and everyone you see. The Resistance itself lives in the constant fear of some treachery. The Ol-Barda plan was to lead the heroes to a dead end and make them believe lies. Jasmine disguises herself for the first time here – another way of deceiving. Discussions about Doom real identity appear. The heroes also have to hide the true subject of their quest, and lie to Dain… In this book, truth and lies mingle into one painful maze, as the giant at the bridge foreshadowed in The Lake of Tears.



As for the Valley of the Lost, the seventh book, it is the book of the Diamond. Stone of strength, purity and innocence. Many notions that, here again, are all present in the book.

First of all, the stone notions are tied to its powers: you can’t take the stone with ill intent, or by wicked means, else you’ll be cursed and meet a terrible end. The stone has to be win fairly by somebody pure at heart. The Guardian also represents and defy the notion of “purity” and “innocence” given that he is surrounded by the embodiment of his vices, which at first you think are out of his body and separated from him… before it turns out that they’re not. The city of Tora is also a reflection and mirror of the Diamond: beautiful, perfect and pure, but sucking out the evil in everyone’s heart, and now cold and empty because it doesn’t accept oath-breaker and traitors in itself. The Torans lived in perfection and purity for so long they became selfish and self-centered, prideful and arrogant, they lost their empathy and disdained the rest of the world – which brought their own fall. They lost their power, their purity, their strength, to become shadows of themselves, mute and cold half-deads. And of course, the Valley of the Lost is the opposite of everything pure and innocent: a sad and grim place of despair and death where everything is rotten. Finally, this book reminds us that the true evil, the true corruption, isn’t so much found into monsters and supernatural creatures that in the heart of every human: the Guardian was a simple hermit without magical powers before succumbing to the Shadow Lord. Pirates and bandits are still roaming in Deltora. And even members of the Resistance like Neridah reveal themselves to be greedy and rotten.

It is also interesting that the idea of “strength” of the Diamond is here subverted: it’s not the strength of body, as we could have guessed. It’s here a question of mental strength, of wit, intelligence and spirit. You have to stay noble, you have to see clear through the Guardian tricks, you don’t have to rush to judgement and fall into despair when you learn the Guardian’s true name. A parallel as to how, as Fardeep explains, the Rithmere Games used to be a competition of enigmas, questions, intelligence – but the Shadow Lord replaced it by bloody and deadly physical combat. The true strength isn’t the one of muscles – it’s the one of the soul.


As for the final book, Return to Del, it doesn’t have any specific stone attached to it, it’s the entire Belt here, and if I dare, I may see all of the stones notion reunited into one in this book.

The heroes have to show faith in their allies if they want to win over the Shadow Lord: they have to open their heart, to reveal their project, to trust; and the seven tribes must pledge their loyalty and allegiance to the new hair. They all fight with the hope to win over the Shadow Lord, and try to not fall into the despair he is trying to put into their heart with fake bones, or caused by other dreadful accident, like Barda eaten by the Grippers. Lief also realizes here that stronger forces are at play here, ominous and mysterious powers that guided his way and influenced his journey – forces of luck and fortune. Everyone must show here honor, bravery and strength in this fight to the death, where they must sacrifice what’s dear to them, put themselves in danger and resist to all tortures for the sake and freedom of the entire country. Only the purest at heart can be trusted, because here we are in a game of treachery and lie, and the whole point of this book is to uncover the truth – and it’s not only the hero who want to know the truth of who the heir is, the villain also tries to discover the truth about the heroes’ identity and plans.

And, in the end, we have a happy ending: the Shadow Lord is banished, the monsters are dead, the country is free, and happiness prevails.