Saul's tyranny

Saul's tyranny is the oppressive order that once placed Axus under Saul's personal domination and made violence the foundation of public life. It operates through military force, religious manipulation, enslavement by the Fe collar, punishment of whole families, and the terror associated with the Cursed. Even after Saul's apparent death, the order remains politically active: Maggort invokes its old ways, Remora revives comparable structures in Goblia, and Alvar must publicly confront his own coerced participation before Underland can decide whether his rule can be restored.

Foundations in Fear

The system is remembered as an order built on slavery and sustained by selfish, ruthless, and immoral methods. Fletch describes Saul's rule as a period in which Alvar saved Underland and most of Axus, yet disorder continued because people who wanted power still appealed to the old ways. Maggort is identified as one such challenger. His politics are not merely personal opposition to Alvar; they represent an attempt to recover a social arrangement whose power rested on enslaved labor and the normalization of cruelty.

Saul also used religion to give violence an ideological structure. The priests who served Hedomas filled the palace, while Alvar regarded them as wicked figures who manufactured prophecies to increase their wealth and power. In this order, religious authority does not restrain the king. It helps translate his desires into apparently sacred commands, making political obedience seem like submission to a god rather than submission to a tyrant.

The Cursed and the Fe Collar

The most terrifying instrument of Saul's tyranny is the Cursed, whose power Saul used to hold Axus in his grasp. Leeza recalls that the creature once flew over the city, watched its inhabitants, and burned families alive inside their homes when Saul suspected rebellion or offense. The Star Wheel provides a parallel image of the regime's punitive imagination: criminals are dismembered one limb at a time before decapitation. These practices make the body itself the site on which sovereignty is displayed, with punishment designed not only to kill but to terrify everyone who witnesses or remembers it.

Alvar's later confession reveals that the Cursed was not simply a willing monster serving Saul. Alvar carried the Curse, was expelled by his family while still young, and was then captured by Saul, who placed a Fe collar around his neck. The collar is a device of dark magic whose wearer can be controlled by whoever possesses its key. Saul therefore converted Alvar's stigmatized identity into a weapon, compelling him to carry out the king's death-dealing while depriving him of meaningful choice.

The consequences were not limited to Alvar. Lord Calbir remembers that Saul placed a Fe collar on his daughter and that, after she was recovered from Saul's harem, her soul seemed destroyed by acts committed without choice. She died by suicide three months after returning home. This testimony expands the meaning of the collar from a device of individual control into a technology of social devastation: Saul could seize bodies, commandeer actions, and return survivors to families burdened with trauma that the regime itself had created.

Everyday Violence and Social Destruction

Saul's tyranny reaches beyond formal punishment into the ordinary conduct of conquest. In one town, Alvar is left with the memory and physical taste of innocent blood after every man there is killed except one. Saul then orders him to silence a child while Saul drags a living woman toward an empty house, announcing his intention to abuse her. The scene shows how the regime collapses distinctions between battlefield violence, sexual predation, domestic terror, and royal privilege. Saul treats the population as material for his appetite, while Alvar is forced to stand inside the machinery that makes such acts possible.

Saul also asserts ownership over the people around him through sexual possession. When he sees Arena looking at Alvar, he seizes Alvar by the Fe collar and accuses him of sleeping with Saul's favorite concubine. He then draws a dagger made by the Sorceress, threatening to mark Alvar's body so that his outward appearance will display the evil Saul claims to see within him. The threatened scar is a miniature version of the entire regime: the ruler creates the injury, names its victim monstrous, and uses the victim's altered body as proof of his own moral narrative.

The tyranny damages reproduction and family continuity as well. Alvar's mother is burned for carrying Cursed blood, even after Alvar has fled from his family. Her execution demonstrates that Saul's order treats inherited identity as a prosecutable offense and makes kinship dangerous. The Stog likewise remain hidden for decades because Saul's religion demanded them as sacrifices. Under this system, an entire people can be forced into concealment, and survival requires withdrawal from public life rather than protection by law.

Political and Religious Reproductions

Saul's order does not remain unique to Saul. Fletch reports that Queen Remora has restored the old ways in Goblia after appointing herself queen. Her hive system is organized around the Great Matriarch goddess: most male drones die in infancy, female hatchlings are destroyed unless Remora selects one as a future princess, and Remora lays roughly ten eggs each week as the source of the hive's future. Though its social logic differs from Saul's human monarchy, the parallel lies in the ruler's power to define which lives may survive and which reproductive bodies exist for the continuity of the regime.

The same politics appears in the plan to steal the Memori from a Sylph temple. Hyphus explains that the theft is to be blamed on the gobli people so that Ferar will not treat the crime as grounds for attack. This deliberate framing uses an already vulnerable population as a disposable explanation, preserving the interests of more powerful actors by directing suspicion toward a group with limited ability to answer for itself. It recalls Saul's broader method of ruling through sacrifice, fabricated moral authority, and the controlled circulation of blame.

The threat also crosses worlds. Fletch warns that Remora plans to attack Earth through the Bridge and that spies have already assessed Earth's defenses. If the attack succeeds, Saul could return once his prison sentence ends. Alvar therefore understands the struggle against Saul's legacy as a danger to both Axus and Earth, not as a finished local conflict.

Confession, Resistance, and Aftermath

When Alvar learns that Saul is returning, he summons his people and announces that the tyrant will again try to oppress them. He admits that he was enslaved just as they were, acknowledges that he had been the instrument of Saul's killings, and explains the operation of the Fe collar. He also confesses that he concealed his origins because he feared rejection and believed disclosure might end his mission to use the Curse to free Underland. His confession does not erase the harm done through his body; instead, it makes the hidden structure of that harm available for public judgment.

Alvar then refuses to preserve power by pretending innocence. He offers Lord Calbir his weapon as a symbol of transferred command and asks him to lead the army against him, while warning that Saul may have lost some skill during his time on Earth. Alvar tells Calbir to prepare a safe place without revealing its location. This act turns the instruments of kingship against the logic of absolute kingship: command becomes provisional, public safety takes precedence over personal authority, and the ruler accepts the possibility that his people may need to resist him to defeat the threat inside him.

Saul is eventually found dead amid the remains of a burned body, and guards later take Lord Vessin to a dungeon after the political crisis. Yet the aftermath is not presented as a simple return to innocence. The council must determine whether Alvar can resume his duties, and Sola explains that an heir will traditionally be judged at the age of twenty-five. She argues that Alvar has ruled for years without using his Cursed state against his people and that restoration would be better than exile. The decision places succession, memory, and institutional judgment against the old assumption that royal power is justified merely because it can command.

Saul's tyranny thus survives as a contested inheritance rather than a defeated villain's closed chapter. Its visible instruments include the Fe collar, the Star Wheel, executions, sexual violence, sacrificial religion, and the Cursed used as a weapon. Its deeper persistence lies in the temptation to revive the old ways, to disguise domination as prophecy or tradition, and to treat vulnerable bodies as tools of state survival. Against that inheritance, Alvar's confession and the council's deliberation propose a fragile alternative: authority must be exposed to testimony, shared scrutiny, and the possibility of removal rather than secured by fear alone.