The secret stories of Metro
The station is abandoned, the platform crowned with a mountain of junk. There are books, pieces of furniture, newspapers, broken bicycles, busts of forgotten heroes - objects of the old world, collecting dust. Maybe objects remember too? At this station, people see things. Artyom had a vision of two old men, discussing god and fate, smoking shisha, while a cat lazily napped alongside. Homer saw things the way they were - the platform bustling with commuters in rush-hour, the polished ghost-like carriages gliding along the rails. And Hunter saw himself, or at least a part of himself he'd prefer not to recognise.
This is Polyanka, what is known as the 'Station of Destiny' where lucky travellers are visited by fate or gifted visions. Some believe the tales, but others say there is simply a gas leak at the station, which causes vivid hallucinations - in Metro, reality and mystery are two sides of the same coin. But the story of Polyanka is just one of many that make up the world of Dmitry Gluhkovsky's Metro series - a franchise which grew from a series of books, into three games and an expanded universe. 20 years after the nuclear apocalypse, people now reside in the Moscow Metro, having swapped irradiation on the surface for a far stranger sanctuary below. 'It's an empire of myths and legend' as one of the old men at Polyanka describes it, and all anyone need do is walk the tracks to hear tales of psychics, secret cities, cannibals, giants worms and magic books. The Metro novels are rich in rumour, but some of the crazier stories never found a place in the games, so pull up a pew comrades.
There's the story about demons and communists. In Metro 2033 while visiting the city of Polis, Artyom happens upon a book theorizing that Lenin and the Bolsheviks actually rose to power using the symbol of the pentagram (the Red Star) to contact and strike a deal with 'Demon Lords'. It claims that all those who died in the early years of Communist Russia were sacrifices to those demons, and it's even implied that they manufactured the nuclear apocalypse to reap a great harvest of souls. According to the book, they now inhabit the red stars on the Kremlin's towers, explaining why Stalkers say 'you can't look at the Kremlin' without being hypnotised. What's even more incredible about this, is that it points to the enemies in Metro not being mutants at all, but demons, manifested in our plane of existence by the mass blood sacrifice of a nuclear holocaust - a demon for every red star.
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