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Three major events anchor the history of human life on Antarras. The first, of course, is the discovery of hellstone by the original settlers. The second is the signing of the Ostenberg agreement, after the Battle of Swallow’s Pass, when terms
Covenant is a game that, by design, is about making the best of the hand you’ve been dealt—making smart bets even in unlucky circumstances. As such, the game resonates with the spirit of the original settlers on Antarras who invented it: none o
One day, a fellow reporter and I were sitting in our office at the end of a long day, passing a flask of whiskey back and forth, and she asked me a question I’d never asked before, but I’ve never since forgotten: What, she asked, after a long s
CONTENT WARNINGS: body horror (1:28:00), coercion (1:39:30) The… unfriendliness, shall we say, of hellstone’s predisposition to spontaneously combusting upon transport in the early days of hellstone mining precipitated a whole host of research
There had always been those who naively believed that hellstone could, in some way, in some novel form, actually be tamed—could be brought under control, made safer or more convenient, be “domesticated,” as the case may be. And there have alway
CONTENT WARNINGS: body horror (eyes) [00:05:09, 00:26:00], references to cannibalism [1:54:50] Now, what’s deceptive about a sleepy little town — which, though I’ve argued before that Ruin’s Gate was far from, but for the sake of poetry, let’s
CONTENT WARNINGS: body horror (eyes) [2:01:00] Meanwhile, in the writings of Confessor Leviticus to her final congregants, this pilgrimage is characterized somewhat differently. She speaks of the pilgrimage not as a promise, or even as a journe
In The Early Saints of Antarras, Apostle Celéne Osgood—who would go on to later undertake her own pilgrimage and become Confessor Psalms, the noted Evangelist—writes of the sermon given by Confessor Joshua upon returning from their pilgrimage.
The origin of what have come to be known as hellbeasts—distinct from the native animals found on the planet—has also been debated by historians of Antarras. Where the line between animal and hellbeast falls is not arbitrary, but neither is it u
The first hellstone mutations that appeared, in the earliest groups of settlers, were in fact less likely to appear on the miners and more likely to appear on those who handled the pure, unrefined hellstone after its removal from the mines—cour
CONTENT WARNINGS: drug use (0:09:30) One can’t help but wonder, thinking back on the early days of Antarras, just how and why the staple institutions ended up with the influence they did. Could it have turned out another way? Could, for insta
Funerary traditions on Antarras vary by town. The early settlers brought with them a range of belief systems, cultural traditions, and dispositions towards death, so in the earliest days, there were as many cremations as there were burials, and
You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who was alive that doesn’t remember the day the sun didn’t rise. You’d be even harder pressed to find anyone who could agree on what to call it. The eclipse, the great cloud, the long, dark night. No one wa
What to do, with the truth? It’s a question as complicated on Antarras as it was through the history of human civilization on Earth. What to do with the truth when it’s more dangerous than a lie? When it presents a risk you might not be willing
Forgive an old reporter just a moment for a brief aside—a diversion from the story, sure, I’ll grant you that, but one that I think it very much needs. Because the thing the stories like this about Antarras miss, sometimes, is that there weren’
CONTENT WARNINGS: violence, discussions of death Though the original settlers did, for a time, use their own ships to ferry the hellstone they first found back to Earth, the Company’s intercession soon shut down any private or personal spacecra
In his 1962 book Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible, science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke famously wrote that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” He was almost right. Unfort
CONTENT WARNINGS: desecration of corpses, body horror It isn’t as if we ever properly understood death to begin with. Humanity’s spent exactly as many years telling stories about what death means and what comes after as it has dying. Wars have
CONTENT WARNINGS: body horror (1:34:35-1:35:00) Of course, back on Earth they told stories about dreams—prophetic ones, ones with deep significance and all kinds of meanings, dreams that revealed the deepest anxieties and worries that might pla
CONTENT WARNINGS: gore and descriptions of severe violence (0:35:37, 0:39:50) The paradox of hellstone has always been this: it’s plentiful on Antarras but too valuable to keep; it’s rare on Earth, where they have the resources to experiment.
Justice isn’t a word that has much meaning on Antarras. At least, not in the long term. While each town might have been built up with its own best intentions, in the end practicality wins out over idealism every time. Any Company Marshal or loc
CONTENT WARNINGS: body horror (0:27:00-0:30:00, 1:34:00), drug use (0:40:00-0:42:00) Scarcity has always been the name of the game on Antarras—our time on this planet has practically been defined by it. As much as the prospect of a new home amo
Aside from the paths scouted between Antarras’ sparse collection of towns, and the maps kept by the Miner’s Guild, all too much of the planet remains unexplored. This reason is no small part of why the Buzzards do such good business: wander off
To attempt a taxonomy of the creatures the locals call hellbeasts would be a futile task: the monsters that made their way out of the Ruin had no rhyme nor reason, no morphological consistency nor internal sense. They had the form, from the sta