The Loosed Damned

He is not a figure out of the poem, he comes from something the poem does constantly: Dante is recognised as alive by Charon, by Ciacco, by Filippo Argenti, and by the souls who notice that his feet move the stones. Down here a living body is the one thing that should not be there, and that is exactly what the game has always measured, which is the trace. A loosed soul is a damned one that has caught it.

He was born out of a measured gap. The third chapter had three big encounters, a few environmental hazards and nothing else, and between one and the next nothing happened; players asked for the fix in a single word. He moves slower than a walking player and faster than a wanderer of the antehell: alone he never catches you, three of them in a corridor make you choose which side to pass on.

He is not killed and he has no device of his own, because his own punishment takes him back: the arena is the weapon. In the storm it is enough that he leaves the line of calm and the wind carries him off; on the ring the convoy of weights runs him down. You lead him, and since he follows the trace, leading him means walking. Whoever has no patience for leading still has the usual weapons, because a loosed soul lives on the same object as any other damned one.