This article tries to answer the question of what is Nathan Byrne’s power in The Bastard Son & the Devil Himself, and the explanation contains lots of spoilers. You have been warned.
From the very beginning of The Bastard Son & the Devil Himself, it is abundantly obvious that Nathan Byrne is very important. Taken away to live with his maternal grandmother by the Fairborn Council when he was a baby, Nathan was rigorously studied as he grew into adolescence, with the same questions being asked of him every month: Is he having trouble sleeping? Is he quick to anger? Does he have violent thoughts about other witches? Can he hear heartbeats?
Initially, Nathan’s answer to all of these questions is, simply, “no”. But as the series progresses he begins to grow into his destiny as a Blood Witch, the son of his notorious father Marcus Edge. The Fairborn Council fears Nathan because he might follow the same path as his father, but what is Nathan’s actual power? Why is he so important? We attempt to answer these questions below,
Who is Nathan Byrne?
Nathan is the son of Marcus Edge and a Fairborn Witch named Cora. Marcus is a Blood Witch and a particularly notorious and feared one at that, since, at a peace summit on the neutral ground of Wolfhagen, he turned into a wolf and ate the entire Fairborn delegation.
The Fairborn Council are scared that Nathan might inherit his father’s temperament and penchant for eating hearts, so they monitor him relentlessly until he’s eventually taken away for “training”, since the Council believes that he’s the key to fulfilling a prophecy that reads, “His own blood will kill the wolf.”
Who plays Nathan?
In the show, Nathan is played by young British actor Jay Lycurgo, who you might recognize from The Batman and Titans, in which he plays Tim Drake.
What is Nathan Byrne’s power in The Bastard Son & the Devil Himself?
So, this is the crux of the matter. The short answer is: We don’t know. But here’s a longer answer.
In this universe, witches only have one power, and they develop it when they turn 17. At that age, every witch has what’s called a Giving Ceremony, in which they ingest their family blood, receive three gifts, and discover their power shortly after that. Nathan is actually one of the youngest characters in the show, and we don’t actually reach his Giving Day until the finale — it actually functions as a dramatic ticking-clock device for several episodes.
The peril comes from the fact that if witches don’t receive their family blood on their Giving Day, they’ll die — we see this in the twins Max and Odette. Nathan is cutting things very fine by the end of the show, since even though Gabriel was able to retrieve his family blood from Mercury, the vial was destroyed before he was able to ingest it.
That means that Nathan only receives his blood (from his father) and thus his power with a few minutes left in the season. While it would have presumably made sense to have him discover it in his final battle with Soul, that’s not what happens. Instead, Annalise intervenes and destroys Soul using her own ability, decimation, or “the undoing”, which reduces him to his constituent parts. The final shot of the series is Nathan staring rather hungrily at Soul’s heart, implying that he might well be thinking about eating it.
Does Nathan eat Soul’s heart?
Well, we don’t know. But it’s likely.
Perhaps the better question is what it might mean if he did. Soul, thanks to the Witch’s Bottle spell, had already contracted all of Marcus’s powers. (That should include his ability to see his own death, yet apparently, he couldn’t, so I’m still undecided on whether that constitutes a plot hole). From what we know about heart eating in this universe, is transfers all of the powers of the heart’s previous owner into the eater. If Nathan ate it, he would presumably inherit all of his father’s powers, Soul’s botanical one, and on top of that manifest his own, which at this point could be anything.
If Nathan ate Soul’s heart, there’s a case to be made that he’s the most powerful witch in the story.
Do you have any theories about Nathan’s power in The Bastard Son & the Devil Himself? Let us know in the comments.
RELATED: Who is Jessica in The Bastard Son & the Devil Himself?
