Arachne

The weaver ensnared by her own web; the playwright and eternal spectator of the Theater of Fate.

Threads cascade from Arachne's fingertips, twining into curtains, scripts, and cages, each strand spun by her own hand, only to shroud her in an inescapable cocoon.

The auditorium remains forever vacant, with none but herself to gaze upon the solitary performance onstage, a drama repeating without end, a play that knows no final curtain. She is the phantom haunting the theater, and the very incarnation of Fate itself.

Unlocks at: Awakener Level 1

In the late autumn of A.F. 3@7, I traveled to the "Theater of Fate" in the old district to audition for a mezzo-soprano position.

I arrived at 4:17 PM. The sky was gloomy, yet no rain fell. The main entrance was unlocked, and the auditorium stood empty; there was no sign of any interviewers.

Yet at the center of the stage, a puppet show was unfolding, there was no puppeteer, no music, only several pale humanoid marionettes dancing in silence. Their movements were unnervingly precise, and the faint clicking of their joints as they turned was spine-chilling. As for the strings... those threads descending from the dome seemed alive; they trembled slightly, tightening and slackening as if keeping time with an invisible rhythm.

Just as I turned to leave, a woman's voice drifted down from Box Five.

<Italic:"Welcome, Christine.">

The voice was neither young nor old; it sounded like an echo seeping through dust-laden silk curtains sealed for centuries, eerie and terrifying.

A cold shiver ran through me. I hadn't even introduced myself; how did she know my name? And these puppets...

I bolted for the exit, but just as my hand reached for the handle, countless spiders swarmed from the darkness. Their eyes glimmered with ghostly light as they spewed out silvery threads, attempting to block my escape. More horrifying still, the spiders began to speak in human voices, chanting over and over: <Italic:"Sing, my angel... sing for me...">

I screamed. I tore at the webs. I ran with all my might. Somehow, I managed to escape.

...

Since then, I could not bear the thought of any gaze cast down from VIP Box Five, and so I requested that the opera house have the box sealed.

And yet... now, whenever I stand beneath the spotlight and sing, I feel the faint tug of strings at the tips of my brow.

Have I, too, become a puppet manipulated by invisible strings? I dare not think on it further.

Excerpt from <Italic:The Memoirs of Christine, the Singer>

Unlocks at: Affinity Level 3

The curtain had not yet fully risen when the stage lights cascaded down like a relentless tide.

The audience of Mythag held their breath, waiting for the hero of fate to take the stage.

The stage was small, so small it could barely accommodate the heavy tread of Oedipus. Yet, as the boy in the school uniform raised his hand, his voice pierced the silence of that modest stage, his opening line falling like a divine oracle: <Italic:"It is I, the wretched man, doomed to slay my father and wed my mother.">

...

<Italic:"What law of the mighty gods have I transgressed?

Why look to the heavens any more, tormented as I am?

Whom to call, what comrades now? Just think, my reverence only brands me for irreverence!" >

So questioned the young Antigone, challenging the injustice of divine law.

...

In the castle of Denmark, Hamlet paced in contemplation. <Italic:"To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them?">

...

Before the high bench, John Proctor slowly lifted his head and declared his answer: <Italic:"Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name?">

...

Those words concerning fate had coalesced into today's performance.

Arachne stood in the wings, her fingers digging unconsciously into her palms.

The tears shed in empathy for the characters, the thunderous applause at the final curtain call...

As she took in the myriad of faces in the audience, she suddenly felt that her heart, whose beating she had long ceased to regard, had finally found its rhythm.

At this very moment, her voice, her very existence, was etched into the vast current of fate. She was no longer a mere witness to destinies; she was now the unfolding lines of a brand-new script. Audience, performer, playwright, their fates had become inextricably bound through this living drama...

The triumph of the heart, it turned out, was this quiet, and this deafening.

Unlocks at: Affinity Level 5

At first, Arachne did not know she could see Fate.

The world, like everyone and everything around her, was blurred, clamorous, and ruled by chance.

At the age of two, she spoke her very first word.

It was not "Mama," nor was it "Papa." Instead, standing beneath the porch, she whispered a single "Goodbye" to the old family butler.

That night, the butler died of a heart attack. Clutching the pocketwatch he had left behind, she wept herself to sleep outside the lodge. She did not yet understand death or destiny, but she had already tasted the bitter sting of a future revealed too soon.

At five, amidst the flushed faces and raucous cheers of banquet guests, she mimicked her mother, rising on tiptoe for a clumsy waltz.

Her red dancing shoes were as vivid as blood, an omen in plain sight. When she tripped during a turn, no one noticed the flash of a vision in her eyes, as if the fall itself had been destined.

On her seventh birthday, her father gifted her a spinning wheel named "Moirae," after the three Goddesses of Fate. She ran through the woods, her laughter bright and unguarded, until she tripped, and heard the crack: the spinning wheel was broken.

She knelt among the fallen leaves, tracing the fracture with her fingers, and she suddenly saw it: countless threads surging from the break, coiling around her fingertips and stretching into the invisible distance.

Then came the "firsts", her first time in an opera house, her first true friend, the first time she buried a beloved dog...

Every "first" was haunted by a silent final act flashing before her eyes. She began to understand: every opening scene already carried the shape of its finale.

From then on, her gaze could no longer rest on surfaces. Human faces became mere veils, through which she could peer at the destinies churning beneath. She knew who would wither at the end of summer, who would hang themselves on the eve of their wedding, and whose child would bury them ten years hence. Surprise died; anticipation withered.

The "future" was nothing more than an obituary she had opened ahead of time.

She tried, at first, to warn those around her of the misfortunes to come. But every time the words left her lips, they only hastened the prophecy's fulfillment.

Seeing the terror and recoil in their eyes, she finally grasped the truth: To foresee is not to forestall.

The Web of Fate was already woven. Her "foresight" was merely a stray beam of light slipping through the mesh, it illuminated the end, but was powerless to alter the weave.

And so, she took up the spinning wheel named "Moirae" again.

The break had been mended, but the scar remained. Day after day she spun, and her gift for fate merged itself into the wheel in ways she could not explain.

From that moment, the destinies of all flowed and intertwined through her fingers, woven into a colossal web spanning space and time.

Imperceptibly, she too was ensnared within this eternal web. She bore witness to laughter and grief beyond counting; infinite turning points, infinite possibilities, each one dragging its foredoomed destruction to the stage again and again...

Yet Arachne would not stop, not to weave, but to sustain. Should she cease, the entire Web of Fate might unravel, dragging countless lives into nothingness along with it. But she also saw that when the web was finally complete, Its awakening would bring devastation nothing could avert...

She is the weaver and the captive, the spectator and the prisoner, the playwright and the player.

Is it a blessing or a curse to see the ends of others?

Arachne stopped asking long ago.

Unlocks at: Affinity Level 7

As the Weaver of the Web of Fate, Arachne governed the threads of countless lives, with past and future flowing through her hands. Yet, she harbored a hobby that bordered on the frivolous.

She loved the theater. Not for the twisting plot or the well-turned phrase: those were already etched into her mind. As the creator of the script, she knew every turn of the story and every line of the actors by heart.

Yet, time and again, she stepped into the theater.

What she truly craved was the immersive sense of "presence", the feeling of truly being there.

When the curtain rises and the audience sinks into darkness, the stage becomes the only true world. In that moment, time is no longer a river running in a single direction, but an enactment within a confined space, past, present, and future overlap here. Everything ceases to be a script upon a page and becomes a tremor of life unfolding in the living present.

And she, at last, is no longer the exile gazing at the threads she can never touch.

Inside the theater, she can briefly seal away her memories. She can step onto the stage as the girl gasping out her final words, or sit among the crowd, granting the actors their freedom. Casting off the prophet's burden, she allows herself to simply tremble, weep, and hold her breath at every stirring pulse of the performance. Not as a seer, but as a living soul, adopting the posture of the ignorant, breathing in sync with the characters, shattered by a single line. Even knowing the end is written, even knowing the tragedy is foreordained. This illusion allows her a fleeting escape from her sentence as an eternal spectator.

No longer exiled from fate, but welcomed into it, even for a single instant, even as a phantom.

This small indulgence was already the most luxurious grace fate could bestow upon Arachne.

Unlocks at: Affinity Level 9