Underside - Lady Anita

Truly a force to be reckoned with, Lady Anita is the seven-year-old girl who rules Underside with an iron fist, and acts as the primary villain of the series.  She was chosen, seemingly at random, to gain unimaginable powers, several thousand years ago. So fearsome were her abilities, that she was able to fight the Creators and force them to flee and create Paralex.

From that moment she turned Underside into a military state, with most of the country focussed on destroying Paralex. The methods she uses with her people are often harsh, with minor punishments being doled out by the Hallows, who acts as her personal police force.

Fear is the main method Anita uses to rule Underside. If the memory of her banishing the Creators isn’t enough of a reminder, then Anita’s rare public appearances often do the job. She only appears to people when things are dire. When she appears in a bustling street of people, every single individual stops and averts their gaze.

But despite her terrible powers, Anita is not indestructible and her powers do have a limit. All of her abilities appear to originate from something very mysterious, lying at the very top of her tower-the Adonium.

Personally, Anita may look like a child, but the unimaginable powers within her have made the little girl into something dark and cold. She’s quick to anger and unleashes her powers with little warning. She seems to take some cruel pleasure in causing suffering to her subjects. Though also an expert strategist, she prefers to act with violence, meeting force with force.

Like with most of my series, the villain is one of the oldest and changed parts of Underside, seeing as, like Acheron, Anita’s plans are what drive the entire plot. Originally, she was the unwitting pawn in a dark version of the Little Red Riding-Hood story, having lost her grandmother to a God-like wolf, and unknowingly asking that same powerful entity for the ability to kill it. She was granted four canine spirits, parodying the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, who gave her, her powers. Her plan from there was to kill the wolf, who represented death itself, thus unbalancing nature. The unbalance would be so powerful that it would quite literally turn the world upside down, putting Underside where Paralex is now.

It would have also been ended with Anita’s Grandmother, who survived, carrying Anita’s innocence within her, returning that innocence to the girl’s soul and undoing all of her evil.

But now I’ve got something far, far better. It all centres around the source of Anita’s power. Let’s put it this way, the first Underside book ends at the top of the Adonium…