Ysta

Ysta, also known as the Sorceress, is the last of the pure sorceresses and one of the story’s clearest embodiments of dark magic as a system that feeds on suffering. She enters Alvar’s life as a possible healer and later appears before Lucy as an agent of deliberate disorder. Her significance lies in that reversal: the same magical expertise that seems capable of freeing Alvar from the Curse becomes the instrument of his enslavement, while Ysta’s own weakening power makes her increasingly dependent on chaos and betrayal.

Identity and Introduction

Ysta is introduced through Saul’s wife, who identifies her as a sorceress knowledgeable about magical ailments. Saul tells Alvar that his wife understands the Curse and may be able to remove it. Alvar is uncertain because his childhood teachings described sorceresses as drawing power from darkness, pain, anger, hatred, and chaos, yet he also recognizes that his parents’ judgments were not necessarily reliable. The possibility of liberation is therefore powerful enough to overcome his suspicion.

Ysta’s identity is closely associated with secrecy and forbidden knowledge. She has sensed that Alvar is Cursed for some time, but she did not tell Saul until the day Saul decided to act. Her silence initially appears protective: Alvar has been accepted into Saul’s household despite his condition, and he briefly imagines that he might remain there without inheriting a royal burden. The apparent refuge is instead the threshold to a carefully concealed betrayal.

The Fe Collar and Alvar’s Enslavement

Ysta tells Alvar that she will need blood before beginning the treatment. She leads him beneath Saul’s manor into a candlelit room covered with white chalk drawings and sorceress symbols. Blood has been smeared across some of the designs, and the room contains jars and cages holding eyeballs, tongues, and human and animal parts. The setting turns the promised cure into a ritual of bodily violation before the collar itself is even revealed.

When Ysta finishes her work, she approaches Saul and Alvar with a beautiful gem embedded in a silver collar and a key. Saul presents the object as a means of giving Alvar control over his own life, and Alvar hopes that it will restore a future with a loving family. The collar’s beauty conceals its function. When Alvar turns the key, he feels a burning sensation despite his immunity to flames. His body ceases to belong to him, and he is forced to change from man to Cursed and back again while losing control of his actions.

Ysta’s role in the scene is not that of an ignorant practitioner whose experiment has failed. Saul reveals that he commissioned the Fe collar and mocks Alvar while it takes effect; Ysta stands beside him and reminds him that Saul promised to pay her. Her knowledge and labor have been converted into a device of domination. The collar does not remove the Curse. It makes Alvar’s transformations and identity subject to Saul’s will, turning a hoped-for cure into enslavement and giving Ysta a direct place in the violence that defines Alvar’s later shame.

Connection to Dark Magic and Chaos

Ysta’s later explanation to Lucy clarifies the larger logic behind her actions. She calls Alvar the king of Underland and the salvation of Axus while mocking him as a Cursed who pretends to be human. Although she does not intend to expose him, her reason is not compassion. She says that she is tired of the lack of chaos in the world and that her power grows weaker each day because there is little left for her to feed on.

Ysta identifies Emily as her last hope of causing chaos after Remora fell. She also invokes the Dark Lord, presenting her conduct as obedience to a power that requires disorder rather than as a private act of revenge. In her account, dark magical beings survive by feeding on chaos and pain, betrayal and malice, greed, and perversion. If those forces wither in Axus, the beings who depend on them wither as well. Ysta is therefore not merely malicious within an otherwise stable magical system; she is a representative of an order whose existence requires the continued production of suffering.

Her claim that she is the last of the pure sorceresses gives the confrontation an additional historical dimension. Ysta is powerful enough to recognize Alvar’s hidden nature and to manipulate magical ailments, yet she is also diminished, unable to harm Lucy in her weakened state. The fall of Remora has reduced the available chaos, leaving Ysta isolated and desperate. Her threat comes from what she knows, what she has already made, and what she is willing to provoke through Emily, even when her direct strength is failing.

Relationships and Conflict

Ysta’s relationship with Saul is defined by exchange rather than loyalty. Saul offers payment for the Fe collar, while Ysta provides the magical expertise that makes his betrayal possible. Their cooperation joins political ambition to occult technique: Saul wants control over Alvar, and Ysta’s craft supplies the means. The transaction also exposes the distance between Alvar’s hopes and the adults directing his fate. He believes he is entering a household where he may be accepted, while Saul and Ysta are treating his body as material for an experiment in domination.

Her relationship with Alvar is consequently marked by false deliverance. She knows the truth of his Curse, understands enough to construct a collar that can affect his transformations, and does not warn him that the treatment will destroy his autonomy. Ysta becomes part of the chain of events that leaves Alvar convinced that he is a scourge to everyone he loves. His later fear that he is nothing but a Cursed shell of a human being is inseparable from the experience of having his body controlled and used against him.

With Lucy, Ysta adopts a different posture. She speaks with mockery but also with calculated reassurance, telling Lucy that there is no immediate need to fear her because her weakened state prevents her from hurting anyone. The apparent candor is strategic: Ysta wants Lucy to understand that Alvar’s secret is known and that Emily is being positioned as a source of renewed chaos. By withholding exposure while explaining her motives, she turns knowledge itself into a threat.

Narrative Role and Significance

Ysta functions as a dark mirror to the story’s healing imagery. Alvar’s blood once saves Lucy when she is still in Hannah Delaney’s womb, and later Alvar’s blood saves Lucy again when she is gravely injured. Ysta’s magic moves in the opposite direction: it takes blood, surrounds it with occult symbols and disturbing relics, and produces an object that strips a person of self-determination. The contrast separates healing as an act of preservation from magic practiced as extraction, control, and dependence on pain.

She also sharpens the story’s treatment of bodily difference. The Curse is repeatedly framed through medical language, pregnancy risk, blood infusion, research, and treatment, but Ysta’s intervention shows how knowledge about a vulnerable body can become a technology of coercion. Her expertise does not make Alvar safer because it is placed within a relationship lacking consent. The Fe collar transforms a condition that Alvar fears into a political weapon, demonstrating that the danger comes not only from the Curse itself but from the people who claim authority over it.

At the same time, Ysta’s weakening complicates her role as an apparently absolute villain. She is dangerous because she needs others to suffer, yet she is also dependent on the social conditions that produce suffering. The collapse of Remora and the relative absence of chaos in Axus deprive her of the substance on which her power relies. Her attempt to use Emily as a final source of disorder is thus both an act of aggression and a sign of decline. Ysta represents a supernatural economy in which peace is not neutral: peace starves her.

Her final confrontation with Lucy leaves Ysta as a surviving remnant of that economy rather than its triumphant master. She has helped convert Alvar’s hope into enslavement, preserved his secret for her own reasons, and sought to turn Emily into an instrument of chaos. Yet the admission that her power is fading reveals a limit the earlier scenes conceal. Ysta’s influence depends on betrayal, pain, and malice continuing to circulate; when those forces lose their hold, the Sorceress herself begins to disappear from the world she has tried to corrupt.