#alternative lore

The Artist: Revised Backstory

While I like Carmina Mora (The Artist)’s design and theme, her backstory leaves a bit to be desired. Her relationship with the Entity is a departure from its usual MO as an opportunistic corruptor. It also brings in elements that, by the very nature of the game, are basically doomed to go nowhere.

More importantly, there is no need to introduce an evil corporation or sinister cult to mutilate and kill an anti-authoritarian Chilean artist. The Pinochet regime arrested, tortured, and ‘disappeared’ those sorts of people for almost two decades, with famous singer Victor Jara and many others suffering tortures very similar to what was done to Carmina. It was the perfect opportunity to acknowledge and publicize a tragedy that is often ignored or glossed over (because the United States backed Pinochet’s coup and Britain supported him for his help in the Falklands War), as well as show that sometimes the things real, ordinary humans do to each other are more terrifying than any horror monster.

So here’s an alternative backstory for our dear Artist.

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Content warning: torture, suicide, and death

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Carmina Mora came from a broken home. Her father was an abusive drunk, and her mother abandoned them shortly after the birth of Carmina’s younger brother Matias. Her father was quick to blame Carmina and Matias for their mother’s disappearance, though Carmina did her best to shield Matias from his abuse. Due to her father’s negligence Carmina was Matias’ only caretaker. It was a task she was far too young for, but she loved her brother with all her heart. Besides Matias, the only other joy in Carmina’s miserable home were the art supplies her mother had left behind. No one ever showed her how to draw or paint, but splashing and scribbling colors onto a page or canvas proved a useful outlet for her emotions and helped her feel close to her missing mother. Carmina could not say she was happy, but with Matias and her art she was able to find peace.

It did not last.

Carmina and Matias were playing along the bank of a nearby river when a local policeman arrived, accusing them of truancy and demanding to know where their parents were. Carmina attempted to explain, and by the time the officer had left Matias was nowhere to be seen. Carmina searched frantically and was horrified to see his limp body being slowly swept downstream. In her brief distraction, Matias had wandered out of sight, fallen into the river, and drowned. The aftermath of Matias’ death was a whirlwind of pain, grief, and guilt. Carmina blamed herself for his death. So did her father, though nothing he shouted at her could cut so deeply as what she told herself when she was alone.

In her spiral of grief, Carmina eventually walked onto the bridge over the same river that had claimed Matias. The location was extremely popular for suicides, earning the name “Death Leap”, and Carmina intended to be its next victim. Convinced she was responsible for her brother’s death, a belief her father confirmed every night with his screams and drunken blows, Carmina could no longer stand the endless guild that clawed like talons at her gut. Desperate for any kind of release, she hurled herself off the bridge to join her brother in death.

What Carmina did not know was the riverbank was also frequented by a local birdwatcher, who made a hobby of studying and sketching the birds that nested nearby. When he came to the river as he always did, he immediately noticed a group of crows circling over something on the riverbank. He was astonished, since crows are not native to Chile, so he immediately set out to investigate. He realized the birds were circling the battered body of a girl: Carmina, who had somehow survived the fall into the river and washed up on the bank.

As she recovered in a local hospital, Carmina became fascinated with the crows that had inadvertently helped save her. She returned again and again to the bank where she had washed up, bringing them food and watching them. She was often joined by the birdwatcher, and he explained that the crows were likely partially domesticated. Crows are extremely intelligent, capable of completing complex tasks for various rewards, and probably came to Chile following someone who once used to feed them. Now that she was feeding them, it seemed that they had bonded to her instead. He taught her to sketch them with charcoal, turning her love of art from a hobby into a passion. Art became an outlet for her guilt and grief, and while her drunken father still screamed she learned to ignore his words.

Carmina was soon old enough to abandon her abusive home and was almost immediately swept up in the growing Nueva Cancion (New Song) movement. Her comrades in the Nueva Cancion movement showed her the joys of songs and poetry. They supplied her with books, something that had been in short supply where she’d grown up, and Carmina greedily devoured every single one. She would later joke that her dream home would be a nest in a tall tower, surrounded by shelves upon shelves of books. Carmina soon began to write instead of merely read. Her poems were quite popular, but her primary focus was always her art. Her signature inky black style, inspired by the glossy black feathers of her crows, was very distinctive and she was a mainstay of the Chilean art scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As she lay dying on the bank of the river, her final vision had been of black wings and avian eyes, so abstract crows were a reoccurring theme she used to represent death. Her crows followed her everywhere and Carmina incorporated them into her art, making the act of creation a performance that included elaborate costumes and her ever-present crows.

Like many artists at the time, Carmina frequently used her art to criticize government corruption and expose injustice. Pushback and threats from authorities merely emboldened her. She openly vandalized the walls of government buildings, police stations, courtrooms, and monuments in her usual performative style, her shining black paint intended to reflect the darkness and corruption she felt hid behind their polished facades. These acts of defiance would soon have disastrous consequences.

When Pinochet took power in 1973 through a violent coup, he immediately targeted anyone he perceived as a threat, particularly political opponents, leftists, and “subversives”. Within two weeks 7000 prisoners were being held at the National Stadium alone, with many more held at other locations or executed on the spot.

Carmina herself was arrested mid-performance and dragged to a nearby monastery in the Atacama Desert, a monastery the regime had seized to use as a detention center. Prisoners were physically and psychologically tortured: starved, beaten, humiliated, denied sleep for days, and electrocuted, among many other horrors. The bell tower in particular was a favorite location for these torments, as it allowed the screams of the victims to echo through the entire monastery and surrounding desert as a potent psychological weapon. Prisoners were hung from its beams and left to dangle while they were beaten, burned, and whipped. Weights were often tied to their limbs, causing their bodies to agonizingly stretch until their arms and legs popped from their sockets. Some were even hung by their necks, left to slowly strangle only to be cut down at the last moment so they could be hung all over again.

Those who died from their tortures or were executed were also strung up in the bell tower, attracting flocks of carrion birds that tore at the living and dead alike. The constant presence of these birds caused the guards to begin mockingly referring to it as the Eyrie.

Carmina’s fame immediately singled her out, and in addition to the normal torments the guards mockingly demanded she paint her fellow prisoners being tortured. They refused to give her actual paint, instead forcing her to use blood, bile, and filth. Under threat of death and torture, she complied with their demands. Carmina crafting a number of abstract paintings that, despite their crude nature, still managed to convey the raw pain, sorrow, and despair of the victims in a manner that was almost palpable. The guards hung these paintings in her tiny prison cell to further mock her, something Carmina used to her advantage. She scribbled poetry on the backs of the paintings, sometimes in her own blood, then tore them into small pieces and slid them through the bars in her window along with some of the meager food she was allowed. Carmina was already starving, so to sacrifice even crumbs was a painful blow, but she soon reaped the rewards.

Her ever-present crows had followed Carmina even to the remote prison, and they immediately swooped down to consume her offerings. She’d often given them scraps of cloth or paper for their nests in the past, so they also snatched up her torn paintings and carried them away. Carmina’s friends and compatriots were familiar with her signature crows and where they nested. Those lucky enough to have escaped the initial purge soon spotted the new additions to these nests and realized Carmina was using her crows to smuggle messages out. Her paintings revealed the true horrors of the regime’s torture camps and were swiftly passed to anti-government groups throughout Chile.

Though Carmina suffered as much as any other prisoner at the cruel hands of her captors and often suffered more than others due to her fame, her guilt at seeing her friends and comrades suffer eclipsed any physical torment. In her smuggled poetry she compared her situation to being back on the bank of the river, watching her brother drown over and over and being unable to save him. As days turned to weeks and weeks turned to months, this guilt began to take a toll on Carmina’s mind.

Her artwork became more savage, and her poems took on darker and darker tones. In one, she wrote about wishing to drive the dull palette blade she’d been given for her “art” into a fellow prisoner’s eye and leaving him for the birds. The poem expressed a longing for all those around her, prisoner and guard alike, to die so that the crows would be her only company. Their dispassionate black eyes held no judgement, and though they screamed at least their screams did not fill her with guilt.

She remained defiant despite her fraying sanity, until at last her schemes were exposed. In a desperate gamble, several of Carmina’s most shocking poems and paintings were released to the public. It was hoped that the visceral evidence of what the regime was doing would spark outrage around the world, and the resulting pressure would force Pinochet to ease his grip. The attempt failed. Pinochet had powerful allies, allies who had helped him take power and had a vested interest in keeping him there. Carmina’s artwork was dismissed as false propaganda, and Carmina herself was painted as a deranged anarchist and communist. The efforts to expose the crimes of Pinochet and his regime only managed to stir up a handful of minor protests and diplomatic rebukes, which were easily ignored.

As the world turned its back on the suffering of Chile and its people, it became clear that the release of Carmina’s art had done nothing but seal her fate. Once it was revealed that she’d somehow been smuggling subversive materials to anti-government groups, retribution was swift. The guards dragged her out of her cell and hacked off her hands with machetes in front of the other prisoners, demanding to know how she would paint her pictures or scribble her poems now? She told them she would paint with her bloody stumps and speak her poems aloud every minute of every day. In response the guards cut out her tongue and threw her back into her cell to ‘paint her pictures’.

The final account of Carmina Mora comes from a prisoner who was in the process of being transferred to another facility. He was dragged past Carmina’s cell shortly after her dismemberment, and claimed he saw her there. Blood was trickling from her mouth, but her eyes were filled with madness as she dragged her raw sumps across the rough concrete wall, painting her final masterpiece even as she bled to death.

She was never seen again.

The legacy of the prison facility where Carmina was held is a confusing one. Shortly after Carmina’s mutilation, contact with the facility was lost due to a severe earthquake that knocked out electrical and phone lines in the area. The Atacama Desert is what is known as a ‘fog desert’: the majority of its moisture comes not from rain but from fogs rolling off the nearby Andes Mountains. Extreme banks of fog were not uncommon at the monastery-turned-prison, it was the primary reason the monks had been able to thrive in what is otherwise one of the driest deserts in the world, but when the fog finally cleared almost a week after the earthquake the facility was completely deserted. There were no signs of the prisoners or guards, and all of their equipment had been left behind. The last painting of Carmina Mora was discovered covering the walls of her old cell: spider-like limbs, reeking of malice and covered in sadistic barbs and blades, curling down to menace a single flickering flame of hope.

Government officials stated afterward that the facility was shut down because its location made resupply difficult. The official release claimed that the guards and prisoners were all accounted for and had merely been shuffled off to different locations. Certain local sources dispute this, pointing out that no convoys of guards or prisoners were ever spotted on the road leading from the monastery and questioning why so much expensive equipment was just abandoned if it was a planned relocation. Some claim that the official story is merely a coverup. They instead maintain that a resistance cell attacked the facility, killing the guards and freeing the prisoners. No evidence has ever surfaced to support this alternative claim.

While many of the poems Carmina Mora wrote in prison were copied down or memorized and thus survived, the same cannot be said of her artwork. They were made on scavenged paper with vile substitutes that did not last like traditional ink or paint. They were torn apart to smuggle them out of the prison, picked at by birds, and the surviving shreds had to be stored in harsh environments to hide them from the regime’s agents. The government destroyed any scraps they could find, and those that escaped soon disintegrated. The few scraps of Carmina’s prison paintings that survived were eagerly sought by those fascinated by the macabre and grotesque and have long-since vanished into private collections. Attempts by Chilean groups to recover and memorialize them have met with no success.

Carmina’s final masterpiece has also been lost. The earthquake that struck the monastery did serious damage to its foundations, and when a second earthquake hit a year later it completely collapsed the majority of the monastery. This included the cell where Carmina’s final painting was located. Chile remained in a grip of terror due to the ongoing efforts of the regime, so after the initial brief exploration no one dared venture into the abandoned site for fear that they too would be arrested. When the monastery collapsed Carmina’s painting was destroyed along with it, and the only description of the painting comes from one of the anonymous individuals who first found the site after its abandonment.

Today only the infamous “Eyrie” remains, along with the sprawling graveyard that surrounded the monastery. Many of these graves and crypts are from long before the regime’s occupation, used by the monks to bury their fellows or residents of nearby towns, but a large number of crude or unmarked graves have been discovered containing the bones of those who died in the prison. Its remote location and the sheer number of bodies interred around it gave the monastery-turned-prison a bleak new nickname: the Forsaken Boneyard.

An official effort was made to disinter the graves so the remains could be identified and sent back to their families, but the effort was plagued by bad weather, yet another earthquake, and a bloody accident that claimed the lives of two workers. These disasters eventually forced the identification effort to be called off completely. A movement to remake the site into a memorial was similarly abandoned due to the monastery’s remote location and the risk that further earthquakes might collapse what little remained.