Saul’s Conquest and Tyranny of Axus

Saul’s Conquest and Tyranny of Axus is the period in which Saul converts military authority into personal absolutism, using Alvar as a controlled weapon and presenting himself as the only power that matters. The conquest leaves villages burned, civilians dead, and survivors instructed to spread Saul’s name, while the later exposure of the Fe collar reveals how thoroughly his regime depended on stolen agency. His tyranny is therefore both a campaign of territorial domination and a struggle over who can be held responsible for violence committed through another person’s body.

Origins of Saul’s Power

Saul’s earlier career gives his conquest a military foundation. He recalled serving as a young knight under Umar, king of Underland, and receiving a title and enough money to live after saving Umar’s son during a battle against Ferar. Saul described the incident with pride: when a gobli sentry charged the prince and the prince froze in fear, Saul killed the sentry before it could take the prince’s head. The story exposes the racialized contempt already embedded in Saul’s worldview: he presented the gobli as vile creatures and treated the killing as proof of his own usefulness and courage.

That older martial identity becomes the basis for a later rule that no longer claims to protect a legitimate sovereign. Saul’s authority expands through fear, while his contempt for other peoples allows violence to be represented as order. The contrast is crucial: the soldier who once served a king becomes a ruler who treats kingship as a personal possession and converts military skill into domination.

The Machinery of Conquest

Saul’s regime operates through direct command, political manipulation, and the forced use of Alvar. In one of its most consequential schemes, Saul orders Alvar, Fletch, and Hyphus to obtain a powerful Memori from a Sylph temple. Because Saul does not want the theft interpreted as grounds for an attack on Ferar, Hyphus explains that the gobli will be framed for the deed. The plan turns a cultural and religious theft into a manufactured pretext for wider conflict, making scapegoating part of the conquest’s method rather than an accidental consequence.

The palace itself reflects Saul’s fusion of political and religious power. The priests of Hedomas surround the king, and Alvar regards them as corrupt figures who invent prophecies to satisfy their hunger for wealth and influence. Saul gives Hyphus a key with a ruby embedded in its handle as a reward for carrying out the operation, allowing material privilege and sacred authority to reinforce one another. His government thus governs not only through soldiers but through controlled explanations of events: the regime decides who is guilty, which prophecy counts, and what violence will be called necessary.

Saul also regulates bodies and spaces through humiliation. He orders Fletch to be given a bedchamber while sending Alvar to his “hole,” the confinement in which Alvar feels most alone yet paradoxically most at peace. The arrangement places the compliant or useful subject within the palace’s comforts while returning the dangerous subject to a space of isolation. Alvar’s confinement is not merely imprisonment; it is preparation for use, keeping the person who can become a weapon separate from the social world he might otherwise protect.

Atrocity and Forced Agency

The most devastating evidence of Saul’s tyranny appears in the destruction of a town. Alvar cannot escape the taste of innocent blood, and every man there is dead except one. Saul deliberately leaves the survivor alive and instructs him to tell other villages about the horrors he witnessed, to repeat Saul’s name, and to announce that submission will spare their lives. The massacre therefore has two functions: it destroys the immediate community and becomes a message designed to govern communities that have not yet been attacked. Terror travels ahead of the army as a calculated form of administration.

Saul then grabs a living woman by the hair and drags her toward an empty house, ordering Alvar to keep watch while he speaks with her. Alvar turns away and cries only when Saul is not observing him. His private remorse cannot interrupt the public violence because Saul has made Alvar’s body serve as both weapon and guard. Alvar understands the political consequence with bleak clarity: if Saul succeeds, nothing will remain of Axus when the killing is finished.

The Fe collar makes this arrangement physically enforceable. Saul uses it to restrain Alvar from attacking him or shifting into his more dangerous form, and he can compel Alvar to remain present while atrocities occur. The collar’s power turns coercion into a condition that others may mistake for consent. Later, Lord Calbir recounts what happened to his daughter after Saul placed a Fe collar on her: when she was recovered from Saul’s harem after his banishment, there was nothing left of her soul, and she killed herself three months later. Her fate establishes that the collar destroys more than freedom in the moment; its effects persist after formal captivity ends.

Religion, Monstrosity, and Responsibility

Saul’s political theology is the direct opposite of Alvar’s. When Alvar invokes Elias and calls for Saul’s destruction by fire, Saul answers that there are no gods and declares himself the new god of Axus. This claim makes his tyranny openly theological: political obedience is no longer owed to a king within a sacred order but to Saul as a self-authorized object of worship.

Alvar’s resistance to Saul is also religious and ethical. He secretly worships the God of the Light, whose teaching calls on men to love and respect women and treat them as equals. When a girl begs Alvar to kill her because she believes he wants to eat her, her touch awakens his sexuality, but Alvar withdraws his hands rather than imitate Saul’s lust. He distinguishes himself from Saul by refusing to make desire another form of enslavement. The scene places private restraint against public predation and shows that Alvar’s moral identity survives even when his actions are being commandeered.

Saul’s rule also exploits the category of the Cursed. Alvar later admits that his first wife, Triss, died because he impregnated her without understanding how Cursed pregnancies worked; he accepts responsibility for that death and researches the condition afterward. He learns from multiple record keepers, including Father Ryland, that a woman possessing Cursed blood would not necessarily die bearing his children, although not all of his children would necessarily be Cursed. These facts complicate the regime’s language of monstrosity by distinguishing inherited bodily risk from moral corruption. Saul, however, uses fear of Alvar’s form and blood to make the body itself evidence of political illegitimacy.

Collapse and Aftermath

After Saul’s reign, the revelation of the Fe collar becomes central to the question of responsibility. Lord Calbir acknowledges that Saul’s device destroyed his daughter’s capacity for choice, yet another nobleman insists that Alvar has no right to rule because he is Cursed. Alvar does not deny the terror associated with his transformed body. Instead, he warns the population that Saul has remained on Earth and grants Calbir permission to destroy him if necessary, handing over his weapon as a symbol of transferred command. He tells Calbir to lead the army against him and to prepare a place of safety without revealing its location.

This surrender of command marks a sharp reversal of Saul’s politics. Saul concentrates authority in himself and hides coercion behind Alvar’s enforced actions; Alvar responds to the possibility of renewed tyranny by making his own destruction an authorized public option. The gesture does not erase the suffering caused while Saul controlled him, but it refuses to preserve power through secrecy. It begins the movement from personal vengeance toward collective protection and institutional accountability.

The final defeat confirms the end of Saul’s regime. After a damaged-room confrontation, Lucy Hammond sees the burnt remains of a body and identifies Saul as dead. Alvar’s immediate response is relief, and Lucy declares that it is over forever. Yet the aftermath is not simple liberation. Saul’s guards must remove Lord Vessin to a dungeon after his later assaultive conduct, while Alvar uses his own blood to treat Lucy’s wounds. The contrast places the end of one form of coercive power beside the continuing need to repair bodies and confront abuse.

Saul’s conquest therefore remains present after Saul himself disappears. It survives in the wounds of those subjected to the Fe collar, in the public suspicion directed at Alvar, in the political memory of massacres, and in the religious language used to justify domination. Its decisive narrative function is to force the story to separate appearance from agency: Alvar looks like the monster associated with the violence, but Saul is the will that engineered and exploited it. The destruction of Saul ends the tyrant’s command, while the work of restoring trust, naming responsibility, and deciding who may rule begins only afterward.