#pollux gave up his immortality to be with his brother after he was slain ...

[normalbrothers]

Jupiter [Zeus], changed into a swan, had intercourse with Leda near the river Eurotas, and from that embrace she bore Pollux (the boxer) and Helen; to Tyndareus she bore Castor (the horse-tamer) and Clytemnestra.

[corinthbayrpg]

NAME. Elene Petrakis (Helen)  AGE & BIRTH DATE.   Unknown, 3,000+ GENDER & PRONOUNS. Female & She/her SPECIES. Rift  OCCUPATION. Archivist at the Museum of Corinth FACE CLAIM. Emilia Clarke

BIOGRAPHY

(Tw abduction, war, death, hanging) They thought she was going to be a monster. A queen gave birth to two eggs, and whispers had abound of what horrors could lay inside. Everyone had see what had become of Pasiphaë’s child, the ferocious creature that tormented the island of Crete until it was slain. They looked at the eggs and feared creatures of equal terror would emerge to plague this world. Perhaps they had even been right. But what emerged instead was a babe, bright and beautiful even in the cradle, along with her siblings, every one of them humans with ten fingers and ten toes. To the child they gave the name Helen, a princess of Sparta and daughter of both a king and the mightiest of the gods. She grew quick and strong, her earthly father ensuring her capabilities with any weapon that could be fit into her small hands. Perhaps in another life, she would’ve been a warrior, more comfortable sat atop a horse with a bow in hand than others would grow to be in their entire lives. She wrestled against other children in the palaestra, and frequently went hunting with her brothers. But even as a child, Helen was golden, and so her fate was tainted.

The first lesson she learnt that beauty could be as much a curse as it was a boon befell the princess in her girlhood. She was merely thirteen, when Helen was abducted from her home in Sparta. Theseus and his companion Pirithous had decided that they would take wives, but only those great enough in stature to themselves. As a daughter of Zeus, Helen became Theseus’s choice, taken to his mother Aethra to be watched over in Athens, while the pair descended into the Underworld to claim Persephone for Pirithous’s bride. That was the last time she laid eyes on either man, for her rescue came long before the sole survivor’s return from the failed abduction. It was her brothers Castor and Pollux who came for Helen, leading an invasion into the city for the return of their sister, whisking her away back to Sparta.

After the abduction, King Tyndareus became concerned with the safety of his daughter, that others may attempt to follow in suit. A closer guard was kept on the princess, and when the time came for Helen to marry, a great contest was put forth. Men from across Greece came to compete for her hand, including the man that would eventually be married to her cousin. It was Odysseus who suggested that an oath be sworn by all the suitors, a pledge to uphold and defend the union of Helen and whomever her husband was to be, should quarrel ever arise. With his daughter’s best interest in mind, Tyndareus agreed to the idea, unknowing of the trouble it would eventually bring.

Menelaus had not been her choice, but at the time of their marriage, Helen had no cause to protest the arrangement. His attention was flattery, the greatest of the great many who had come for her, and for a girl of fifteen, it was easy to allow herself to be swept up in the fantasy. But real life is hardly ever so idyllic, and her husband soon proved to be far removed from what she had wanted. Lust and love are so easily confused for each other, but the want of a person is not the same as to see their soul. To Menelaus, Helen was a trophy; the most beautiful woman in the world, the daughter of Zeus and Spartan royalty, a coveted possession that he had won and displayed proudly. Even as she sat beside him, Queen of the land that had always been her home, she found no value in her life anymore, and none that took her more seriously than a girl with a pretty face.

It was not the life Helen had wanted for herself. A golden cage is still a cage, no matter how much finery decorates it’s bars. She gave Menelaus a daughter, gave him years of her life, and yet received little in return. Bored, lonely and wistful, it was then that Paris appeared in her life. First came Aphrodite, who informed her of the Trojan prince’s impending arrival. She promised Helen the connection she had always yearned for, an understanding that would never be found with Menelaus, and bid for the young queen to go with him when he came for her.

Paris was everything that he had been promised to be. Kind, attentive, and genuine, unlike her husband. He cared to hear Helen’s thoughts and opinions, her desire for independence from the marriage she had become trapped in, and a close knit bond formed between the pair in a short amount of time. They made plans to run away from Sparta, to return to Paris’s home of Troy and live amongst the dryads in the land beyond the city, where they would be safe and Helen would have the chance to be free. It was a selfish decision, and one she would not make again if given the chance to rewrite history, knowing all the grief that was to follow.

Menelaus was not a man to let his bride go so easily, Helen knew that. Still, never in her dreams did she imagine he would call upon her once suitors to uphold their oath, and lead them across the sea to reclaim his wayward life. They never got the chance to reach the trees, before the city was besieged by Greeks. War had broken out, and thousands upon thousands of people would die before it came to an end. The Trojans that housed her did so with spite, blaming her for the death that arrived at their doorstep, and though she had the company of Paris and Hector to shield her from the mass of their anger, Troy became just as lonely a place as Sparta had once been.

Both the Trojan princes would lose their lives in the war, and it was meant to be Helen’s fate as well. She was shunned by the women of the city as the walls were breached and Troy burned around her. The daughter of Zeus, a trained fighter in her own right, and yet she had been reduced to a state of fear and desperation, surrounded by people on both sides that reviled her. Trojans and Greeks alike wanted her blood, prepared to stone her to death for the role she had played in such a great destruction, but it was for Menelaus that their hands were stayed. The king had declared he would be the only one to kill his runaway wife, and so she was brought forth before him and his blade. But at the sight of Helen, dropped to her knees in subjugation, he was once again taken by the sight of her great beauty. Though the rest of Troy would not be so lucky, the once and again Spartan Queen’s life was spared, and she was taken back to her homeland along with the victorious Greek army.

Sparta no longer offered a comforting home to the woman either now, however. The image of her as a wanton adulteress had spread across the Greek land, never mind the truth of the matter, and the remaining years of her human life were no more happy. After Menelaus’s death, Helen was chased from the land by the anger of Nicostratus and Megapenthes, who still harbored hatred for their stepmother that had simmered across the years. She fled to Rhodes for sanctuary, where a woman she thought to be her friend resided. Polyxo had been the queen of the island for a number of years, after the death of her husband, and so Helen mistakenly thought the place to be safe to her.

But though Polyxo received her warmly, inside she held a desire for vengeance. She, along with many others, blamed Helen for the events of the Trojan war, where her husband died on the first day of fighting. When the former queen came to her for protection, she saw the opportunity she had waited on for years, placed right onto her lap. And so it came about that while Helen had been bathing in her chambers, Polyxo had the handmaidens she had given to her dress up under the guise of furies, to drag her out of the tub and through the city. She was taken into the public of the island, amongst it’s people, and hung by rope on a tree branch for everyone to see, until her once pink lips turned a shade of blue.

Perhaps death had been kinder to Helen than her life ever had. As Zeus’s child, she had been taken to Elysium for her eternal rest, a land of paradise and splendor. And yet even so, she had not been happy. It was during this time that she had made a companion of the goddess Hestia, one of the few friends she had found even in such a utopia. She could see the sadness that resided in Helen’s soul, the feeling of loss that she had never truly gotten to live as she desired, and so the goddess offered her a gift; a second chance at life, to return to the earth as an immortal. It was a decision she made with ease, and so Helen was sent back to the land of the living, no longer a mortal woman, but as a rift.

But she could not be Helen anymore. No, her name had now become synonymous with the great and terrible war that left the city of Troy in shambles. In order to be truly free with a new beginning, she had to be someone new, too. The infamous women went through an abundance of names at first, trying them on like the dresses she wore, but never back to her own. It was during this time that she returned to the destroyed city, to the hills beyond where the dryads Paris had spoken of lived. It was with them she found a feeling of true peace, maybe even for the first time. There was a kinship with the dryads that the former queen had been missing, the feeling of belonging amongst a people that for the first time, did not see her for only her beauty. But nothing can last forever, not even for immortals.

She loved the dryads greatly, and remained with them until the very last had returned to their tree, to slip into a slumber that would last for thousands of years. Alone again, Helen slowly reformed herself to fit into the world she was left with. Elene Petrakis was a name she adopted centuries later, when the story of Helen of Troy was more myth than history. It was close enough to remain familiar, and yet not so much that to hear it felt like reopening the wound that never quite healed inside her chest. A life as Helen had lead to a great destruction, and so Helen she would no longer be.

That was how Elene’s story began; she was a wanderer, who moved across continent to continent, never settling anywhere for more than a few years. She used the new talents she had gained as a rift to help those wherever she ended up. Women in particular, she found herself protective of — perhaps it was too much like looking into a mirror, the reflection of everything that used to shackle her in her human life. But she was still a Spartan princess before she was ever known as the face that launched a thousand ships, and she could swing a sword just as well as any man. And swing she would, in the defense of those who could not defend themselves. It was not a righteous crusade so much as her inability to watch others suffer as she once did. Greater conflict it was easy to steer from, to turn away and let the world become what it would, and the greater humanity she cares little for the fate of. But individual people in suffering, Elene has found, it is much harder to walk away from.

It’s surprisingly easy to be a ghost, even when the entire world thinks it knows your story. Who would ever connect the pretty blonde they saw in a crowd to the woman of legend? Her name became a cautionary tale, a treacherous and wicked woman or an unfortunate victim, even a cheesy pickup line for those bold enough to spin it, all depending on from whose lips it fell. After awhile, she learnt how to shut it all out. Elene learnt how to keep her head down, and not include herself in the rabble that existed around her, whether supernatural or human. She intended to keep on living that way, maybe even for the rest of her immortal life, until the fall of magic came.

It happened suddenly, and returned just as quick, as if the world had been reset. Though the two week period in-between was a strange adjustment time, Elene had been prepared to return to her life as usual, until the whisperings reached her ears. It was an impossibility, and yet, talk of the dryads resurfacing was not something she could ignore. She remembered the days of living among the trees, the last time that she had truly been happy. It was an ache so sharp, that’s led her straight to Corinth Bay to see for herself. It’s a city she’s been avoiding since the veil first tore, evading the pull it had on the supernatural creatures of this world, that it might would bring a chaos into her life that Elene sought to avoid. But at the chance of seeing her friends again, there is little she would not do, even if it means stepping into an unknown danger.

PERSONALITY

+ protective, generous, observant -  defensive, contrite, withdrawn

PLAYED BY Abby. CDT. She/Her.