Clythia

Clythia, Amarantha’s younger sister, is remembered as a vicious and formidable participant in the War, but also as the figure whose love for Jurian exposed the intimate weakness beneath Amarantha’s brutality. Her betrayal and death transformed a family tragedy into a political hatred that ultimately threatened the mortal world.

Identity and Background

Clythia fought beside Amarantha as one of the most lethal forces serving the King of Hybern. She was described as being as vicious and wretched as her sister, placing her within the violent machinery of the War against mortals and the High Fae and faeries who defended them. Her importance, however, does not rest only on her military identity. She was also Amarantha’s younger sister, and that familial bond became the one force capable of restraining Amarantha’s instinct for torture and killing.

The War had already established the larger history surrounding Clythia. For millennia, humans had been enslaved by High Fae overlords, and the rebellion that followed produced such devastation that six mortal queens eventually forged the Treaty and divided the world between the immortal realm and the mortal territories. Clythia’s story belongs to this history of conquest, enslavement, and revenge: she was both an agent of the anti-mortal war effort and the center of the grievance that later allowed Amarantha to recast humans as an enemy deserving annihilation.

Love and Betrayal

Clythia fell in love with Jurian, a mortal warrior who commanded powerful human armies. Despite fighting on opposing sides, she secretly sought him out and continued to love him with what was described as an unrelenting madness. Her attachment blinded her to the possibility that Jurian was exploiting the relationship to obtain information about Amarantha’s forces.

Amarantha suspected Jurian’s purpose but could not persuade Clythia to abandon him. Nor could she bring herself to kill him, because doing so would inflict pain on her sister. This hesitation is one of the clearest indications that Clythia occupied an exceptional place in Amarantha’s emotional world. A woman famed for delighting in torture and killing stayed her hand for Clythia’s sake, allowing the mortal commander continued access to information.

Jurian eventually betrayed Clythia. After enduring months as her lover, he extracted the intelligence he wanted, then tortured and butchered her. He crucified her with ash wood so that she could not move while he killed her, and left the pieces of her body for Amarantha to discover. The method of the murder made the betrayal not merely a military defeat but a deliberate desecration of the bond Clythia had believed in.

Death and Its Consequences

Clythia’s death provoked a rage in Amarantha so extreme that it was said it could have brought down the skies. The King of Hybern had to order Amarantha to stand down, showing that even her own ruler recognized the danger of the reaction. Amarantha and Jurian later had a final confrontation, but Clythia’s murder remained the emotional source of Amarantha’s enduring hatred of humans.

The consequence extended far beyond the original conflict. After the Treaty, Amarantha’s hostility did not soften. She later butchered her own slaves rather than free them, and centuries afterward she used apparent diplomacy to gain access to Prythian. Her remembered grief over Clythia became inseparable from a broader program of conquest: she infiltrated the courts, gathered power, and eventually sought to break the Treaty and seize the mortal lands. Clythia’s death therefore functions as the private wound through which Amarantha’s public ideology of vengeance is intensified.

Memory, Possession, and Narrative Role

Clythia never appears directly in the main action; her life and death are disclosed through Alis’s account to Feyre Archeron. The story reaches Feyre as history, legend, and nightmare, preserving Clythia less as an independently developed speaker than as a memory held within Amarantha’s political mythology. Even so, the account complicates Amarantha. It reveals that the conqueror’s cruelty coexisted with genuine attachment, and that her violence was not detached from feeling but sharpened by bereavement and revenge.

Clythia’s fate also prepares the reader for the later revelation that Amarantha keeps Jurian’s eye and finger bone as part of a supernatural object associated with his consciousness. When Amarantha invokes Jurian while confronting Feyre, the old triangle of Clythia, Jurian, and Amarantha is brought into the present. Clythia is absent, but her death still governs the scene: Jurian’s betrayal explains Amarantha’s hatred, while the remnants of Jurian’s body demonstrate how completely she has converted grief into possession and punishment.

As a narrative figure, Clythia embodies the collision of forbidden love, wartime espionage, familial devotion, and retaliatory empire. Her relationship with Jurian crosses the boundary between mortal and immortal enemies, yet it does not overcome the political violence surrounding them. Instead, the relationship becomes another weapon in the War’s aftermath. Clythia’s death gives Amarantha a personal justification for actions that expand from revenge against one man to domination of entire courts and the threatened destruction of the human world.