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 swig, do you think was actually here before us? After a moment, she went on: there’s water, here, and plant…

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 from all kinds. The second question—after, of course, how to safely mine the stuff—was how to safely move …

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 always been opponents to that idea. When Eleanor Greer invented the process that would later go on to be cement…

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 say the sentiment stands — is that, sleepy as they might seem, that doesn’t mean there isn’t always someth…

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 journey, but as a kind of fortification, a taking up of arms. This should hardly be surprising: the visions gran…

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 pathway, Confessor Joshua is said to have declaimed, is not holy because it is the precise pathway Con…

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 universally agreed upon. Are the hellbeasts endemic to the planet, or are they, like us, invasive, coming t…

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—couriers, bankers, or those scientists who first worked to develop the refining process that would come to be …

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 instance, a different church have found purchase in the hearts and minds of the early settlers? Could a different…

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 almost as many mourning practices as there were settlements cropping up on the planet’s surface. Eventual…

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 wanted to talk about it, when it happened, so no easy name ever came into common parlance. Everyone had their…

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 to take? Do we have a moral obligation to share the truth at all costs? To spare the feelings of those wh…

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’t good guys and bad guys, not really. Heroes and villains are things of fairytales, of bedtime stories, an…

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 spacecraft in the airspace over Antarras—at first through violence, and then, as their first major demand in the O…

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. Unfortunately for Mr. Clarke, he had it backwards. What he should have written was that any sufficiently sophist…

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 been fought and kingdom’s toppled over differences of opinion on the matter, and the mysteries that lie be…

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 plague the inner recesses of somebody’s mind. On Antarras, though, there wasn’t the luxury for that kind of t…

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. It’s so useful as a power source that it gets used up faster than the time it would take to truly understan…

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 local Sheriff makes the decision they think is best, and more often than not, what’s best is resolving an iss…

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 among the stars seemed to offer the promise of opportunities beyond those limited few left on Earth to the ea…

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 just a hair in the wrong direction, and you might find yourself in unexpectedly dangerous terrain—and not…

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 start, of something out of nightmares, and warped from there, in all manner of ways. Any attempt at catalogin…

Fear wasn’t always the common denominator among the population of the newly-founded towns of Antarras. Maybe it was always something of a factor; maybe it could never have been totally absent from consideration. But when people talk about the early settlers these days, they focus too much on fear. The story is that they were scared, desperate peopl…

The Company installed its de facto leaders shortly after the Agreement was signed. Company Marshals took up residence in each town, according to one of the many clauses that were debated at the time of the signing, and while their job was, technically, to represent the Company’s interest in matters of disagreement, they fell easily into the more fa…

After the Ostenberg Agreement created a tenuous but stable peace between the Company and the original settlers, Antarras became a place that was surprisingly free from major conflict. Bandits and outlaws caused trouble occasionally, to be sure, and there’s no denying the danger of living in such close proximity to a dangerous, alien wasteland. But …