Raven of the Inner Palace

Episode 12

Once upon a time the owl and the raven were siblings. The owl was the executioner of the gods, and the raven was the goddess of the dead. His job was to slay, and hers was to guide the souls of the departed into the afterlife. But one day, the raven decided to send a soul back to the human realm, and for this she was punished with banishment. Eventually she was imprisoned within the body of a woman who became known as the Raven Consort, and there she has remained to this day, moving bodies every time the title was transferred to a new owner.

It is a testament to the worldbuilding of Raven of the Inner Palace that the above paragraph sounds like it could have been lifted from any world mythology you care to name. Instead, it is unique to this particular story, and it reveals just how twisted the links between lore and reality have become within the tale's world. It certainly suggests that the goddess known as Niao Lian was not involved in the whole Summer/Winter King debacle; she didn't really become a factor in the life of the court until that one king a thousand years ago decided that he was going to change the narrative. He didn't just abolish his co-ruler, he helped to create an entirely different position, one that functioned not so much as a spiritual service for the emperor but rather as a prison for a banished deity.

Now it appears that every time Shouxue has attempted to use her powers to help someone, she has slowly been chipping away at her own life. Clearly this has something to do with that “eight years remaining” lifespan issue that we learned about in a previous episode; Liao Nian presumably chooses a new vessel when she recognizes that her current human host only has eight years of life remaining to them. When this happens appears to be largely dependent upon how much the host uses the goddess' power, and the words of the owl this week imply that Shouxue may be getting her eight years' notice sooner than later. Whether it is the way that she's been using the power or simply because it has been so long since the Raven Consort was established as a host body for the goddess is unclear, but it was Shouxue's tenure as host body that allowed the owl to find the raven in the first place. That, I have to think, is not a good sign.

The owl himself has clearly been playing with Shouxue since his arrival at the palace. He does not appear to have offered to resurrect the Magpie Consort's brother out of any motivation other than to lure Shouxue out. He doesn't care about the Magpie Consort or her brother, and while there is perhaps an argument to be made that he did offer the woman an alternative to feeding her ghoul brother with her own blood, he also does not seem all that broken up that she eventually decided to nourish him with her own fluid. His capture of Wen Yi seems less due to him attempting to find an alternative source of human blood for the ghoul and more a bigger piece of bait to dangle in front of the person he was truly trying to attract. The Magpie Consort's story is tragic, and entirely out of the Raven Consort's hands. The owl seems to have seen to that with a callousness that indicates that he is telling the truth about his position as executioner. Death is no big deal to him. He knows that that is not the case for his target.

Perhaps the one complication that the owl did not count on was Gaojun. The lore of the Raven Consort says that she does not belong to the emperor in the way that the other women of the inner palace do, and the owl must have assumed without checking whether this continued to be the case. But the current emperor is not playing by the rules on this front, and his feelings for Shouxue may be the key to both saving her life and to ending the notion of Winter Kings and Raven Consorts as synonymous. Many myths and fairy tales allow for true love to break the curse or banish the evil. With one episode left, we will soon learn if that is to be the case here as well.

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Raven of the Inner Palace is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.