The Scribe of Hecatonchires: the mad chronicler of the Furies

The Scribe of Hecatonchires was a mortal of the Greek era, remembered as the very first of his kind to be imprisoned by the Furies for breaking a blood oath to a god. His cell lay within the Prison of the Damned, the living dungeon the Sisters had fashioned from the flesh and bone of the Hecatonchires Aegaeon, and there he endured years of torment at the hands of his jailers. To keep himself from losing his mind entirely, he wrote painstaking records of the Furies and their schemes, page after page, and those writings survived him as the clearest mortal account of how the Sisters of vengeance fell from honorable judges into servants of a single god's ambition. When the Spartan Kratos fought his way through the prison, the old chronicler told him plainly what no one else would: that Ares and the Furies had conspired together to overthrow Zeus.

The first mortal in the Prison of the Damned#

Long before the Scribe's imprisonment, the Furies had made an example of the Hecatonchires Aegaeon, the first being ever to break a blood oath to a god. Deeming death too merciful, they converted the giant's flesh and bones into the walls of the Prison of the Damned, a dungeon that lived and breathed around its inmates. At an unknown point after the prison's making, the Scribe became the first mortal cast into it, condemned for breaking a blood oath of his own. The god he had sworn to was never named, though he may well have worshiped that god before his fall.

The Scribe himself never denied that punishment of some kind might have been his due. By his own account the Furies of that earlier age, Alecto and her sisters, were honorable judges. Merciless in their judgement, they were nonetheless fair, punishing only those who truly deserved it, the oath breakers foremost among them. That distinction mattered to him. It was the measure against which he charted everything the Sisters later became.

What they became, he learned in the flesh. Night after night the Furies came to his cell, and what they did there he called unspeakable. Megaera loosed her parasites upon him, and he could not rid himself of them. The years of torment drove him over the edge, and the prisoner who had once been a man of letters became a ragged figure whose courtesy survived his reason, friendly and polite in a manner more unsettling than any snarl.

The records of the Furies#

One discipline held the Scribe together. He recorded, painstakingly and without pause, each of the three Sisters and their various schemes, and that labor of ink was the only thing that kept him even remotely sane. His pages were later found scattered across the Prison of the Damned rather than gathered in his cell, and why they lay so far afield was never explained. He may have cast them through his cell's window himself, letting them fall where they would, so that anyone who came after might find them.

The records read as the diary of a fraying mind and the ledger of a careful witness at once. "An oath to the gods is too easily sworn and not so easily broken," he wrote. "The Furies see only their version of right and wrong." Of the prison itself he recorded, "It is the first traitor who was made to house us. The walls... they breathe." He weighed the Sisters against one another with a scholar's precision: "The Fury Megaera seeks only punishment of the flesh, but it is the Fury Tisiphone whose tricks are more cruel." And of the Fury Queen he judged, "The Sisters punish all of us without remorse or mercy. The cruelest is Alecto. It is she who taunts you with what you cannot have."

His pages also preserved the story of Alecto's son. On the night Orkos entered the world, the Scribe wondered in ink whether the newborn was the prophecy's Marked One, and how one so newly made could already be counted a failure by his father. Years later he recorded Ares seeking counsel with Alecto, the heartlessness of both toward their own son, and the pain of Orkos echoing in his chamber. When the oath keeper finally fled, the Scribe set it down: Orkos had escaped and meant to betray his mothers, and had come to the Scribe's cell before the dawn, repeating the words, "There is no escaping the Oracle's eyes. Her sight burns with truth." Another page recorded the hunt that followed the Sisters' newest quarry: "The wrath of the Sisters is relentless. They seek a white skinned warrior. The fist of Ares must be returned to his master. The oath must be kept."

Some of those pages lay in places that seemed chosen rather than chanced. The warning of Tisiphone's cruel tricks waited just before the chamber where that Fury first spun her illusions of temptation, and the final page naming Alecto the cruelest lay before the room where the Fury Queen conjured the Scribe's warning made real, an illusion of Kratos's own home, his wife and daughter restored to him, the very things he wanted most and could never have.

Counsel for the Ghost of Sparta#

The white skinned warrior of the Scribe's pages came to him at last. After Kratos slew Megaera and Aegaeon and retrieved the Amulet of Uroborus, and after he saw through Tisiphone's illusion of a hero's welcome from the King of Sparta, the Spartan found the old chronicler in his cell. The Scribe told him what his records had long attested: that both Ares and the Furies had planned to overthrow Zeus, and that the Scribe himself had been the first the Furies ever imprisoned. The Sisters had originally been fair in their punishment, he explained, but after their dealings with Ares they had taken a far more ruthless approach, judging by their own version of right and wrong rather than by any honest measure of guilt.

The Scribe also pressed a harder truth on his visitor. He held sympathy for Orkos, and he reminded Kratos that the oath keeper had betrayed his own mothers for the Spartan's sake. When Kratos answered that he had never asked for that help, the Scribe replied that regardless of his denial, he had taken it all the same. From a man whose mind was in ruins, it was a strangely clear judgement, and it spoke to the sense of compassion and honor that survived somewhere beneath his madness.

Madness, honor, and an unknown fate#

For all his courtesy, the Scribe was not a man to be trusted without question. He had, after all, broken a blood oath, and by his own testimony the Furies of that era punished only the deserving. Whatever crime had brought him to the prison remained his secret. Yet his conduct in captivity argued for the better part of him: the discipline of his records, his pity for Orkos, and his honesty with Kratos about debts the Spartan preferred to deny.

His end was as obscure as his beginning. The Prison of the Damned was destroyed, and the Furies themselves were slain, Alecto last of all at Kratos's hands. What became of the Scribe amid that ruin was never recorded. With Orkos dead, the oath keeper's bindings had lost their keeper, and it may be that the first prisoner of the Furies was finally freed of his oath, but no account tells whether he walked out of the wreckage of Aegaeon or perished with the dungeon that had held him longer than any other soul.