Helot: Catena

Her memory has been steeped in blood since the day she was taken to prison.

Whatever was ordinary and warm before feels like a lying dream now, blurred and split apart, driven into her flesh as so many sharp pieces.

She can't recall the gentle arms or the worried face anymore; all that stays in her is hatred, and a question, and no end to either.

Pain, humiliation, betrayal... what was any of it for?

She asked, day after day, and no one ever answered, right up to the day freedom came.

So she will find the answer herself: she will put the question to every filthy heart, one at a time, tearing it from the wailing, screaming chest that holds it.

Unlocks at: Awakener Level 1

I seem to have fallen into something supernatural. I will set down everything I find here...

We were wrapping up the last of the excavation at Evrotas. I woke to find every other member of the team gone, and the town itself thrown back a thousand years overnight.

Buildings that collapsed ages ago stand whole again, the place restored exactly as it once was, down to the countless residents, all of them bones now.

Excitement, shock, and terror seized me at once. I have seen more bones than I can count, and still I cannot stop shaking at the sight. Anyone else in my place would be far more frightened than I am.

Every soul in this town appears to have been butchered by a single killer. Bones sprawl across the streets and lie heaped inside the houses. The town gate is shut fast, for reasons I cannot explain, and the ground before it is choked with those who tried to flee and were cut down anyway, a small hill built of bone.

There are no exceptions. Men, women, the old, children... all of them broken, bodies or skulls smashed in by some enormous blunt weapon. Standing over these dried bones, for a moment I could see the blood running through the whole town.

What happened here?

...

I searched everywhere, dazed, and found nothing, until I entered the town prison.

The carnage here is worse than anywhere else. Whoever did this tore the place apart in a towering rage. There is writing on one wall, dry and brown and twisted, as though someone dying had scrawled an accusation in blood. I studied it carefully. I believe it reads: evil spirit.

An evil spirit? Does that name the killer, or did this town truly suffer something supernatural?

One person slaughtering an entire town is beyond belief. Perhaps only a real demon could reap so many lives so cruelly.

After I left the prison, something about the town had subtly changed. I keep catching the smell of blood, faint, then gone, then faint again.

As I searched for a way out, chains rang through the town without warning, as if something heavy were being dragged along behind them.

The evil spirit! It's the evil spirit... it has found me! I ran until my lungs burned, but wherever I went, that awful dragging of chains followed.

I cannot run anymore. I am under a table in someone's house with the door locked, and still the chains come after me. I can hear it. It is getting closer...

I want so badly for this to be a dream, for all of it to be gone the moment I wake. Wait... the sound has stopped. Perhaps it has left?

...

Researcher's note: The legible handwriting ends here. All that remains are three final words, badly distorted. Our best reading of them is:

The door opened

Excerpt from the diary of a deceased member of the Evrotas archaeological team

Unlocks at: Affinity Level 3

No one who meets her for the first time thinks of coming closer or saying a word; instinct screams at them to get away.

She is utterly mad, or rather, a beast, wholly and completely.

Given the choice again, she would probably rather be a beast than live through what she lived through as a person.

She trusts no one. When those crimson eyes turn on you, there is no suspicion in them, only indifference and the intent to kill.

Suspicion is beneath her now. Everyone is equally vile in her eyes.

If you want one piece of advice for dealing with her, it is this: never try to tame a real beast. There is nothing tame in her, and at the first opening, her claws and fangs will go straight through your throat.

Run before she notices you, and pray her next prey is someone else.

Unlocks at: Affinity Level 5

Under that lady's care and teaching she grew up kind and gentle, every inch a noblewoman's daughter. Then, for a single thoughtless kindness shown to a slave, her "parents" cast her out without a second thought.

The Spartans had never accepted her, and her own people hated her to the marrow.

Overnight she was a traitor to everyone, with no place left in the world that was hers.

In the prison, malice came off every one of them, thick as a contagion, and not one of them had ever met another before.

The torment in that lightless place felt eternal. She came to dread anyone drawing near, and sleep never came; only when she blacked out could her eyes close in peace, and opening them dropped her straight back into the nightmare.

What had she done wrong? How had it all come to this?

Her resentment had nowhere to settle, and she could find no logic in her fate.

Was it because she was guilty?

But if she was guilty, then everyone else was ten times guiltier.

Hatred piled up day after day into rancor, and rage burned through her blood night and day until, at last, it burned away the cage that held her.

The chains that had bound her for years now wound around one screaming throat after another. They had long since become part of her body, and they served beautifully. Blood-slick chain in hand, she went hunting filthy souls, one by one.

Red. Red. Warm red, reeking red.

See? She had always known. Not one soul among them was clean.

Unlocks at: Affinity Level 7

Everything she met in this world seemed arranged to hurt her. Kindness, forbearance, pity, trust, every soft thing was cut out of her and thrown away, still trailing raw flesh.

Forgiveness was never in her vocabulary. Blood and hatred can be answered with only one thing: someone else's blood and hatred.

Blood for blood, the fairest law there is, and one that warriors and slaves alike hold to.

A volcano silent for a thousand years erupted in a single night. A hand reached up out of the underworld and hauled itself onto the soil of the living.

A vengeful spirit, come to run rivers of red through the world of men.

Unlocks at: Affinity Level 9