Underland City

Underland City is the subterranean capital at the center of Lucy Hammond’s new life with Alvar. Its immaculate streets, regulated movement, royal gates, ceremonial spaces, and dangerous surrounding depths make the city more than a backdrop: it is the visible machinery of Underland’s political order, the site where Lucy becomes Queen Lucy, and the enclosed world she ultimately chooses to defend and share with Alvar.

Definition and First Arrival

Underland City lies beyond a guarded entrance reached during Lucy Hammond’s crossing into Underland. Alvar presents a glowing gem at the gate, which opens to admit them, turning the object into both a practical key and a sign that access to the city is controlled. The entrance is approached at speed across open fields, yet the journey ends in an unexpectedly smooth halt at the gate, emphasizing the abrupt passage from an exposed landscape into a protected civic space.

Inside, the city is organized, quiet, and visually uniform. Blue street lamps cast an unusual sheen over the streets, while white cobblestones run between buildings made of pristine white rock and topped with dark slate roofs. Circular windows glow from within, suggesting residents behind the otherwise closed facades. The silence is striking: apart from the click of the mytonir’s hooves, no ordinary public activity is visible. The absence is explained by the city’s curfew, which makes Underland City a governed space even before Lucy has learned its customs.

Civic Order and Royal Center

The city’s architecture becomes grander toward its center. At the end of the street stands a magnificent gate flanked by giant gold columns, with ornate angelic carvings illuminated by large lamps. The route therefore operates as a visual hierarchy, moving from standardized domestic buildings toward increasingly monumental royal architecture. Watchtowers stand on either side of the central columns, and guards admit Alvar and Lucy through a door at the base of one tower.

This entrance leads toward the royal household and introduces Fletch, Alvar’s chief of the house. Alvar identifies Fletch as a gobli, a powerful friend who serves as regent whenever Alvar is away. Underland City is consequently not only a population center but also the seat of delegated authority: the king’s absence does not suspend rule, because the city’s courtly structure is organized around offices, guards, gates, and ceremonial access.

Ceremony, Marriage, and Social Identity

Underland City is the setting in which Lucy’s political identity is publicly established. At very short notice, hundreds of people gather in a chapel-like space for the wedding. Lucy’s mother carries the train of her wedding dress while Fletch leads her down stairs into the waiting congregation, linking the private Earth family to the public institution of Underland’s court. The crowd’s whispering and muttering creates a collective audience for a marriage that began as an agreement between Hannah Delaney and King Alvar of Underland before Lucy was born.

The ceremony also makes the city a threshold between identities. A human priestly figure blesses Alvar and Lucy, and a gold goblet passes first to Alvar and then to Lucy, who drinks the remainder when Alvar instructs her to do so. The ritual converts the diplomatic arrangement into a visible royal union, even though Lucy initially experiences the event through shock, grief, and emotional numbness. The city’s ceremonial space thus imposes public meaning on a relationship whose personal meaning develops only gradually.

Depths, Boundaries, and Hidden Power

The ordered appearance of Underland City contrasts sharply with the surrounding subterranean geography. Near Goblia, Lucy approaches an enormous pit whose staircases descend along the inner walls toward a dimly lit city of rock and mud, centered on a giant pool of water. The narrow stone stairs have no railings; a slip could mean a fall of hundreds of feet. This dangerous descent reveals that the broader urban world beneath the surface is not uniformly safe or controlled. Underland’s political center exists within a vertical landscape of exposure, confinement, and peril.

The city also contains spaces where visible order gives way to supernatural truth. In the circular room called the circle of truth, white marble floors surround three concentric rings of water, while mirrors cover the walls and Sola stands in the center with her sapphire-blue-and-white wings raised. The reflections do not simply reproduce ordinary appearances. Lucy’s reflection is veiled in mist, whereas Alvar’s appears dark with blood, particularly around his mouth and hands; he is also shown wearing a black collar set with a red gem and an eerie chain. The room makes concealed identity spatially legible, revealing that the polished royal city rests on histories and powers that its ordinary streets do not disclose.

Lucy’s Chosen Home

Underland City initially confines Lucy through abrupt transport, curfew, ceremony, and the obligations attached to her marriage. Her arrival follows a promise made by her mother to Alvar, who had saved Lucy’s life in the womb through healing abilities and the infusion of Cursed blood. The city is therefore the destination of an agreement that treated Lucy as a future bride and diplomatic resource before she could consent.

Yet Lucy’s relation to the city changes as her understanding of herself changes. She rejects the earlier version of herself shaped by embarrassment and other people’s demands and identifies herself as Queen Lucy of Underland, a woman determined to live on her own terms. Her acceptance of Alvar as her husband develops alongside her acceptance of the city and its people, even when Alvar fears that his Cursed nature makes him unfit to rule. After violence, captivity, and the upheavals surrounding Saul, Lucy remains in Underland by choice rather than mere obligation. She tells Alvar that she cannot return to Earth because he is not there, because she loves Axus and Underland, and because she wants to see them prosper and have his children.

Underland City consequently becomes the clearest measure of Lucy’s transformation. It begins as an alien capital reached through a guarded threshold and ends as the home of a queen who claims both its future and her place within it. The city’s gates, curfew, ceremonies, mirrors, and perilous depths give physical form to the novel’s central tension between imposed identity and chosen belonging: Underland is the world that first takes Lucy in, but it becomes hers only when she decides to remain.