It blows my mind how well-written The Haruspex is as a protagonist. His entire story is a litany of contradictions and split loyalties. He’s from the town, son of Isidor Burakh, but he’s also a member of The Kin, the repressed, nomadic people of the Steppe. They are people with various traditions and rituals that they hold dear, and it’s important for them to stay connected to the earth. Kin ‘herb brides’ dance to make herbs sprout from the earth at their feet. The Odonghs, odd-looking round creatures on two-feet, are said to have risen directly from the earth (the origin of their nickname: ‘worms’). Artemy is a menkhu, someone who ‘knows the lines,’ meaning an ability to understand the connections of the body. It’s like a surgeon (or a butcher, as he’s sometimes called) but more mystic. Menkhu are the only people allowed to cut open bodies in Steppe-tradition, which means they’re also the one ones allowed to do autopsies.

The Kin are an oddly charming group of people, which their weirdness contribute to. This makes it hard to stomach the way that the townspeople treat them. Most of them are employed in the Termitary, a meat-packing plant where they’re allowed to work directly with their beloved bulls. Their low wages and restlessness make them prone to rebellion, to the detriment of their meat-plant overlord Boos Vlad Olgimsky. By the time Artemy arrives in the town, the Termitary has been closed and barricaded. According to Boos, they did it for two reasons: 1) to stop a brewing rebellion among the Kin, and 2) to protect the workers from the new outbreak of The Sand Pest.

Much of your time in the game is spent wondering what’s actually going on in the Termitary. It is home to much of the Kin, an entire ethnic group trapped in this building for ‘their protection’ is at odds with the hearsay around town. Your first day home, a Kin woman jumps to her death from a Termitary window. Whatever’s going on in there, it isn’t good. But Boos refuses to open the doors, instead stationing armed guards at the entrances. 

On top of that, there is great terror in the town spiraling from the outbreak of The Sand Pest and the high profile murders of town elders Isidor Burakh and Simon Kain. While the townspeople might be framed as more rational compared to the odd, ritualistic people of the Kin, the townspeople are just as, if not more, superstitious. They look for someone or something to blame for this outbreak and the murders, and many of them settle on a ‘shabnak-adyr,’ a supposed witch made from clay infamous among townspeople. Despite the lack of evidence for this shabnak-adyr, the townspeople take to burning herb brides at the stake for possibly being this witch they’re looking for, only realizing they’re wrong when the brides don’t turn to clay when they burn.

When you do finally enter the Termitary with the help of an Inquisitor from the capitol, you find that nearly everyone inside it has died. The termitary wasn’t protecting people from the Pest, the Pest had already entered, and once inside, it had free reign to a trapped population. Screams of agony echo off the termitary walls, blood and bodies litter the ground. A truly monstrous sight, one instigated and maintained by the Olgimsky family — the powerful businessmen who control the town’s main export: meat.

As much as Artemy wants to find the cure and heal the sick, he is, all-along, working to help people who are essentially cleansing a small, ethnic group that he himself is a part of. Artemy is under extreme pressure the entire story as a result. He understands that many of the townspeople are good people- such as his childhood friends Rubin and Lara. In addition to them, Isidor left him a list of children to take care of, many of them being the sons and daughters of townspeople- children who Artemy grows to love and care for like they were his own. Murky, for example, is a young girl left homeless by the first Sand Pest outbreak because of Isidor’s decision to quarantine a poor neighborhood of the town, killing many of its inhabitants, including Murky’s parents. Artemy gives her a home in his warehouse and helps protect her from the Pest’s dark influence.

He is further pressured by the response of the more radicalized Kin outside the Termitary, led by possible earth-demon Aspity. Aspity is a mysterious entity- it is said she simply appeared in town during the last Sand Pest outbreak, but no one knows much else about her. What is clear about her is her loyalty to, and love of, the Kin. While Taya Tycheek becomes the de jure leader of the Kin trapped in the termitary, the “mother supreme” so-called, Aspity is the de facto leader on the outside, organizing a movement for the extermination of the town and its people. She is, in a lot of ways, a frightening figure- she’s not interested in half-measures or compromise. For Aspity and her followers, the townspeople have proven themselves unworthy of the land because of their cruelty and ignorance of the earth, and the Sand Pest itself is proof of that. But for Artemy, a fellow member of the Kin, Aspity is more a caring guidance counselor. A mother figure who, despite not agreeing with how he goes about his tasks, maintains a soft spot for him. Meanwhile the townspeople see her as dangerous, quite possibly the shabnyk-adyr itself, and there are occasional plans among the townsfolk to kill her.

Balancing your loyalties becomes the central conflict in the game, even more so than the terrifying Pest and its various incarnations. Artemy has to choose between the town and its people, something he grew up and was thoroughly integrated with. Or the Kin, a repressed ethnic and cultural group that he also comes from.