Magic and the occult
She features a dark magician named Ayesha whom the surrounding tribes have worshipped as a goddess for many generations. She doesn't age, and she doesn't die (until she accidentally does at the end of the novel). She is a clairvoyant magician who can manipulate people's minds and emotions with magic. She can read their minds, and she can even kill with magic. Not only that, she is also a necromancer who can raise the dead. In other words, she's a bit of a black magician, which is ironic, given that she is a white witch. The strange magic lady dies on accident by proving that the volcano lava is safe. The point of the magic is its mystery. The thematic value of magic is that it demands that the reader re-analyze their own assumptions about the nature of reality.
The value of love
Love is a strange currency in this story. Once the story goes to Africa, love means something different in their culture. Ustane's love for Leo is sudden and strangely unwarranted, but she felt connected to him from the first moment they met. Leo really likes her too, actually. But the novel features a super-human villain named Ayesha who is either a goddess or a witch (depending on which characters you ask), and Ayesha is so beautiful that Leo is perplexed by her. When Ustane refuses to relinquish her husband to Ayesha, Ayesha kills her. Why? Because Leo is the reincarnation of her lover, whom she murdered and has been waiting for. In this novel, love is the subject of much analysis, but none of the pictures of love are really substantial except for one: Ustane's sacrificial love for Leo is good and noble, although it seems random, given that they don't even understand each other.
Immortality and death
This book's climax features an immortal character facing her death. This happens through a simple mistake: the witch has entered the volcano's lava before, once, to gain her immortality, so she does it again to prove to Leo that it magic will work, but the spell is accidentally reversed upon her second immersion in lava. After she exits the lava, she is suddenly aged to her full age—2,000 years old. She withers and dies. The point of this thematically would be that no one is immortal, even an Egyptian goddess who has been alive for 2,000 years doing magic and stuff. If Ayesha dies, every person certainly dies, because she was technically immortal. The book ends up being about this very aspect. Of course death comes up in many other ways too: Ustane sacrifices her life for Leo in various ways, ultimately dying for her. Job dies from terror. Leo is almost dead, and Mohamed dies from an accidentally bullet wound that was intended to save him.
