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I think the reason why Castoria's backstory hits the hardest (or at least, hits me the hardest) is because in a story filled with unspeakable horrors, the things she went through are painfully mundane.

Let me elaborate: "hey what if the very ground you're walking on was made of corpses" is a fucking horrifying concept. "Hey what if you were cursed to devour all the people you ever loved" is also a fucking horrifying concept. Fairy Britain is filled with the most gut-wrenching horror possible, and the writing is masterful enough to make them all hit. You will feel sickened and sad when reading lb6. But ultimately? None of these are things that can happen in real life. They can be relatable metaphorically (toxic relationships the likes of Melusine & Aurora unfortunately do exist in real life) but you'll never literally run into someone who will lose their sense of self and devolve into a jet dragon if they stop loving their abuser. It's horror, and like all horror it has many things to say about real life, but it's also a safe kind of horror. It's aggresively not real.

But that's why, in a story that basically explores the must fucked up alleys fantasy allows you to build, Castoria's backstory feels painfully mundane. "What if you were subjected to systematic neglect that left you at the mercy of the cold" feels real. "What if anything of value you had (emotionally or otherwise) were taken away from you one by one" feels real. These are things that happen to people in real life.

Castoria's backstory doesn't get me because it's more horrifying than anyone else's, or because she suffered more by some metric, or anything like that. It gets me because it is mundane. It gets me because it feels real.