Alvar’s Enslavement by the Fe Collar

Alvar’s Enslavement by the Fe Collar is the event that converts Alvar from an isolated Cursed survivor seeking acceptance into Saul’s magically controlled instrument. The collar is presented as a possible cure for his transformations, but its forged bond gives Saul command over Alvar’s body and choices. Its consequences reach far beyond captivity: villages burn, innocent people die, Alvar’s loved ones suffer, and the shame of compelled violence becomes central to his later confession and attempt to free Underland.

The Promise of a Cure

The enslavement begins with Alvar’s longing for a home. After his family rejected him for carrying the Curse, he was vulnerable to anyone who offered belonging. Saul exploited that need by allowing Ysta to pose as a wife and by presenting the collar as a way for Alvar to control his own life. Ysta explained that the silver collar would draw the Curse from him whenever it tried to manifest, and Saul promised that Alvar would eventually inherit everything he possessed. The proposed remedy therefore carries two promises at once: mastery over a frightening body and acceptance into a family.

Ysta’s workshop makes the supposed cure visibly sinister. Beneath the manor house, she works in a candlelit room marked with sorceress symbols, blood-smeared drawings, bottles, cages, and preserved human and animal parts. She requires Alvar’s blood to be poured into liquid silver so that the finished object will be bound to him. The blood is not merely an ingredient in treatment; it is the material through which ownership is established. Saul’s blood is also added before Alvar’s, creating the hidden link that will allow Saul to control the collar’s wearer.

Forging and Binding

Ysta produces a beautiful silver collar set with rare gems, together with a key. Alvar places the cold metal around his neck himself, expecting its magic to work immediately. When nothing happens, disappointment replaces hope. Saul then gives him the key and instructs him to lock the collar, claiming that it must recognize itself as bound to Alvar. The instruction is the trap’s final mechanical step.

When Alvar turns the key, the collar produces a burning sensation unlike anything he has known, despite his immunity to flames. His body changes without his consent: he transforms from man to Cursed and then back to man. The apparent treatment has become a mechanism of command. Alvar realizes that his body is no longer his own and that he has become a slave to Saul’s will. Freedom, which the collar had promised, changes in an instant into bodily dispossession.

Saul then reveals that Ysta was never his wife and that the marriage was a ruse designed to make Alvar trust him. Saul wanted a weapon capable of killing or terrorizing others because ordinary means could not kill a Cursed, and he understood that Alvar’s refusal to harm human beings could be manipulated through coercion. Saul admits that Alvar’s ancient bloodline, once revered as godlike in Axus, made him especially valuable. The collar’s key remains with Saul, and no one except Saul can remove it. The object therefore combines magical limitation with political power: one small key determines whether Alvar can inhabit his own body freely.

The Weapon and Its Human Cost

Once bound, Alvar is forced to participate in Saul’s conquest. In one devastated town, he cannot rid himself of the taste of innocent blood; every man there is dead except one. Saul orders the survivor to spread news of the massacre and to tell other villages that submission will spare their lives. Burning homes and bodies in the streets turn Alvar’s enslavement into an instrument of public terror. Saul uses the violence not only to destroy communities but also to recruit through fear, making Alvar’s Cursed form part of a campaign of domination.

The collar also deepens the tragedy of Alvar’s personal relationships. Alvar later explains that Saul made him perform acts he would never have chosen, including sexual acts, and that Saul used him in ways Alvar could not bear to remember. Alvar erased those memories from the Mystar so he would never have to see them again, while retaining other memories of evil committed by Saul’s command as a form of self-punishment. This distinction is crucial to the event’s moral structure. Alvar was the visible instrument of violence, but Saul controlled the instrument; Alvar nevertheless continues to assign himself blame for having trusted Saul and for failing to prevent the harm.

The collar’s consequences also intersect with Alvar’s earlier life. His Cursed blood had once saved Lucy Hammond before her birth, after her mother promised that Lucy would become Alvar’s Earth-human bride in exchange for the healing. Yet Alvar’s relationship with Cursed blood is not only restorative. He believes that Triss died because he caused her pregnancy without understanding the dangers of a Cursed pregnancy, and a physician later identifies the condition as a magical problem brought on by a dark Curse. The same blood that can heal Lucy can endanger pregnancies, mark Alvar as monstrous, and become valuable to sorcerers and tyrants. The collar weaponizes this already conflicted bodily inheritance.

Recognition and Public Confession

The event is eventually reframed when Alvar tells the people of Underland that he is the monster Saul used to enslave them. He states that he was himself enslaved by Saul and that, although he was the instrument of Saul’s death-dealing, he had no choice. He explains that his family cast him out as a young boy after discovering the Curse, that Saul found him and saw an opportunity, and that Saul placed the Fe collar around his neck. He identifies the collar as dark, evil magic: whoever holds its key can control whoever wears it.

This confession does not erase the deaths committed through Alvar. Instead, it separates responsibility without making the suffering disappear. Some listeners rise and insult him, while others restrain the angered people and remain silent. The divided response reflects the unresolved ethics of coerced violence: Alvar is both victim and the face through which the victims remember Saul’s rule. His public disclosure therefore risks the acceptance he has always wanted, but it also becomes the basis for a new political purpose—the use of his Curse to free Underland from the system that enslaved him.

Significance and Aftermath

Alvar’s Enslavement by the Fe Collar is a reversal built on failed recognition. Alvar mistakes manipulation for kinship, a weapon for a cure, and a promise of inheritance for belonging. Saul, meanwhile, turns family language into a technology of control, exploiting Alvar’s hunger for acceptance before revealing that the promised relationship never existed. The collar’s magic is frightening precisely because its operation is concrete: blood binds the object, the key activates it, and the keyholder commands the body.

The event also explains why Alvar’s later morality cannot be reduced to either innocence or guilt. He caused deaths while under magical compulsion, but he remembers those deaths, suffers shame, and tries to punish himself for his earlier naivety. His confession makes that contradiction explicit rather than resolving it cheaply. The collar remains the physical symbol of Saul’s power, while Alvar’s later decision to reveal its history transforms the meaning of the same body from hidden weapon to testimony. Its decisive aftermath is therefore not only liberation from a device, but the difficult recovery of agency through truth, accountability, and action against the order that made his captivity possible.