Amarantha

Amarantha is remembered for red hair, a detail strong enough in Feyre’s memory that red becomes linked to Amarantha and to the bloodshed of her rule.

Amarantha treats pain and humiliation as entertainment in her court. She displays Clare Beddor’s tortured corpse, keeps Tamlin beside her in trapped silence, and turns Feyre’s bargain into a public spectacle before ordering Feyre beaten as a welcome.

During Feyre’s first task, Amarantha uses trials to mock her captives as well as endanger them. Feyre’s first task is built around her reputation as a huntress, forcing her to hunt a giant worm in its own trench-maze while Amarantha and the court wager on how quickly she will die.

Amarantha’s cruelty also works through petty torment and coercion. Feyre is burdened with impossible chores, and Amarantha’s order that no one help her after the beating is presented as magically binding on the court.

At court, Amarantha uses captive faeries for court entertainment as readily as she uses Feyre. When a Summer Court prisoner is brought before her, she orders Rhysand to shatter the captive’s mind for trying to escape, and objects only because Rhysand kills him too quickly.

Amarantha’s final trial is designed as a moral atrocity rather than a test of skill. She makes Feyre murder hooded captives with ash-wood daggers, has each face uncovered, and watches with pleasure while invoking Feyre’s earlier killing of faeries as justification.

Her control reaches ordinary Fae observances as well as politics and punishment. During her rule, Amarantha bans Nynsar and other small beloved holidays on a whim.

Amarantha also targets the sacred or joyful meanings attached to time. During Rhysand’s imprisonment, she makes him spend every Starfall servicing her because she knows the holiday matters to him.

Amarantha is closely connected to Rhysand’s threats against Tamlin and Feyre before her rule is fully explained. Rhysand calls himself her whore, says he may report Feyre to her, and warns that Amarantha would enjoy breaking Feyre while making Tamlin watch.

Her hatred of humans is linked to Jurian’s betrayal and killing of her sister Clythia. Her cruelty toward human slaves also predates the present crisis, since she killed her own slaves rather than free them after the Treaty.

Amarantha keeps Jurian’s preserved eye and finger bone after torturing and killing him. Lucien says she bound Jurian’s consciousness to the eye, and in court she addresses the eye as if he can still witness what she does.

By making Tamlin hurt him, Amarantha punishes Lucien for helping Feyre during the first trial. She spares Lucien only after Tamlin begs and then forces Tamlin to give him twenty lashes, turning their loyalty to each other into part of the punishment.

Amarantha’s relationship with Hybern is politically strained. An overheard creature says the King of Hybern is angry about her bargain over Feyre, accuses her of stealing his spells and taking territory for herself, and warns that he can strip her powers away.

In Rhysand’s account, Amarantha keeps Tamlin beside her because she wants to break and dominate him. Rhysand also describes himself as forced into sexual servitude by her and says she can punish one subordinate for another’s actions.

Rhysand describes Amarantha’s forty-nine-year occupation as part of Hybern’s wider strategy. In his account, the King of Hybern used her rule as an experiment to see how long and how easily one of his commanders could conquer and control a territory.

Rhysand says Amarantha left him with only scraps of power after deceiving him, and he used what remained to protect Velaris and erase knowledge of it from vulnerable minds. He also says he chose to become her sexual possession to keep her from torturing and killing the people closest to him.

Amarantha’s abuse of Rhysand predates Under the Mountain. During the War, she held him in Hybern-made chains with ash bolts through his wings, and when she trapped him decades afterward she prepared against his daemati powers, drugged him before he could strike, and slaughtered half the Court of Nightmares in front of him.

Jurian says his conscious suspension forced him to watch everything Amarantha did for five hundred years. His preserved remains therefore served not only as trophies but as a means of prolonged witness to her cruelty.

Amarantha personally carved out Lucien’s eye. Tamlin subsequently arranged the magical-mechanical replacement Lucien wears.

Rhys surrendered his freedom by attending Amarantha’s party to protect Cassian and the others. The resulting separation left Cassian with a lasting memory of the sudden silence where Rhys’s mental presence had been.

The King of Hybern speaks possessively of Amarantha and treats her abuse of Rhys as material for mockery. He claims her last report to him said that she was still enjoying Rhys.

Cassian still carries deep guilt over the forty-nine years Amarantha held Rhys captive. The belief that he failed Rhys during that imprisonment continues to wake him from sleep.

Amarantha’s rule rests on stolen power and careful preparation. She secretly brings in her own forces, drugs the seven High Lords with a potion stolen from the King of Hybern’s spell book, and strips away most of their power while they are helpless.

Rhysand describes Amarantha as able to issue commands that are magically binding on those under her control. Her order that no one help Feyre after a beating prevents ordinary aid and makes disobedience functionally impossible for most of her court.

Amarantha continues to control the High Lords through the powers she trapped from them. Rhysand says that if Feyre fails the final trial, Amarantha’s rule will continue forever.

In direct magical combat, Amarantha can use magic to torture and overpower enemies. She breaks Feyre’s bones and crushes her body from within, stops Rhysand’s attack with a shield of white light, and batters him repeatedly while Tamlin heals too slowly to fight her.

Amarantha’s restraint can be calculated when a target is dangerous enough. Rhysand says she never attacked the creatures of the wood or disturbed their territory, even though he repeatedly tried to manipulate her into provoking them.

Amarantha wears Jurian’s eye in a ring and his finger bone on a necklace. The trophies are part of her courtly display, and she uses the eye as an audience for Feyre’s suffering.

Amarantha comes to Prythian a century before Feyre’s arrival as an emissary from Hybern. Under the name the Never-Fading Flower, she spends fifty years charming the courts before drugging the High Lords and enslaving Prythian for forty-nine years.

Rather than kill Feyre at once, Amarantha accepts Feyre’s challenge through a magical bargain. Feyre must complete three monthly tasks or solve Amarantha’s riddle, with confinement and forced labor imposed between trials.

Amarantha gives Feyre a riddle in open court and says the correct answer would immediately free Feyre, Tamlin, and Tamlin’s court. When Feyre cannot answer, Amarantha sends her back to the cell to wait for the first task.

In her second trial, Amarantha traps Feyre and Lucien in a timed mechanism controlled by written instructions. Feyre survives by choosing the correct lever before heated spiked grates can crush and impale them.

For the final trial, Amarantha forces Feyre to kill captives and then glamours the Attor into Tamlin’s likeness. The deception makes Feyre believe she must choose between killing Tamlin and condemning Prythian and the human realm to continued enslavement and war.

Amarantha refuses to honor Feyre’s apparent victory at once by arguing over the wording of their bargain. She claims Feyre asked only that Tamlin and his court be freed at some point, unlike the riddle’s promise of immediate freedom.

Once Feyre gives the riddle’s answer, Amarantha loses control. Tamlin’s full power returns, her dark magic cannot pierce the golden protection around him, and he kills her by driving a sword through her head and tearing out her throat.

Amarantha’s body is left beneath Clare Beddor’s displayed remains with the sword still protruding from her brow, and it is later taken away to be burned. Her death ends the court structure she maintained Under the Mountain.

Under Amarantha’s rule, tunnel camps beneath the Mountain held faeries who were neither useful aboveground nor favored among the captives and nobles. Lucien says prisoners were kept there for fifty years with little light, little air, inconsistent food, and conditions brutal enough to drive some mad or violent.

Rhysand says Amarantha modeled her beneath-mountain court on the feared structure of his own court and violated Prythian’s sacred mountain to do it. Under the Mountain is therefore part of her pattern of appropriation as well as conquest.

Velaris survives Amarantha’s domination because she never knows it exists. Rhysand says he used the power left to him after she trapped him to shield the city and suppress knowledge of it.

Additional accounts of Amarantha’s occupation identify lasting damage across other courts. Summer is still rebuilding after she wrecked Adriata and the back of Tarquin’s castle, she killed Nostrus after his rebellion and executed his family, she ordered Brutius turned into a living ghost, and she personally looted Helion’s thousand libraries.

Amarantha persecuted Thesan’s winged people by having their feathers torn out one at a time and once making a dress from the feathers. Her reign also kept Thesan from openly acknowledging his relationship with his captain and lover.

After Winter’s rebellion, Amarantha secretly ordered the slaughter of the court’s younglings and sent a daemati with the soldiers. Rhys believes the arrangement was intended to make Kallias blame him for the killings and prevent the Night and Winter Courts from joining forces against her.

Some Illyrian war-bands willingly submitted to Amarantha during her reign. In the first months after her downfall, Rhys and his allies hunted down and killed those rogue groups.

Amarantha’s destruction of Helion’s court included the slaughter of three dozen pegasuses.