WHAT HAPPENED TO RHODES ISLAND IN ENDFIELD?
Table of Contents
Rhodes Island began as a starship from a civilization that died before Terra had people. Its doctor, Kal’tsit, was a machine that spent 10,000 years learning to be a person, and you built her. Arknights Endfield never shows any of it.
What happened to Rhodes Island? Endfield calls it the beginning of everything, from Terra to Talos-II, and then never shows it to you. Not once. Here’s what the first Arknights knows: Rhodes Island began as a starship from a civilization that died before anyone was alive on its planet. Its doctor was a machine that spent ten thousand years learning to be a person. And one of the two people who built that machine was you. This is the whole story, for players who started in Endfield, with every name explained when it shows up.
How we checked this. Every quote is from the official English text of the original Arknights or Arknights Endfield. Where we join the two games, or read more into a line than it says, we label it as our reading. The images are frames from our own Rhodes Island video, built from official Hypergryph and Gryphline art.
Endfield Hub is a fan-made resource and is not affiliated with Hypergryph or Yostar.
TL;DR
- Rhodes Island is a pharmaceutical company on a landship. It works to cure Oripathy and protects the Infected. Its leader is Amiya; its doctor is Kal’tsit, whose file gives her place of birth as Rhodes Island.
- It used to be Babel, the organization of Theresa, the King of the Sarkaz. When Theresa was killed, Kal’tsit led what was left out of Kazdel, and the crown passed to Amiya.
- Kal’tsit was a machine, AMa-10, built ten thousand years ago by two scholars, Oracle and Priestess. Oracle is you, the Doctor.
- Rhodes Island was the name of their starship. That the landship is that ship, dug out of the ground, is the strong reading.
- The ship was lost to an Originium crystal the size of a mountain. Kal’tsit came back as a person and chose one human life.
- Endfield says Rhodes Island was there from the start, founded Endfield Industries, and never shows Kal’tsit. It never says Amiya’s name in any language.
What Is Rhodes Island in Arknights?
First, the world. The first Arknights is set on Terra, a planet hit by disasters called Catastrophes. They strike so often that cities are built on giant treads, so they can drive away.
Every Catastrophe leaves behind a black crystal called Originium. It powers the cities, and it lets people cast Arts, this world’s word for magic. It also causes Oripathy, a disease nobody can cure. It grows crystal through the body, and it slowly kills you. (All of this, and why Talos-II treats it so differently, is in Originium and Catastrophes Explained.)
The sick are called the Infected, and most countries treat them like criminals. Fans sum up the whole setting in one word: rocks.
Rhodes Island is a pharmaceutical company, registered in a small country called Rim Billiton. Its headquarters is a moving ship, a landship. Its job is to cure Oripathy, and to protect the Infected until it does.
Its leader is Amiya, a young girl with rabbit ears who is Infected herself. Behind her stands Kal’tsit, the doctor who runs its medicine. Her file is strange. Date of birth: undisclosed. Place of birth: Rhodes Island. Hold on to that.
How Does Arknights Start? The First Day
The game opens in a city called Chernobog. Rhodes Island has just broken into a top secret site and pulled someone out of an ancient coffin-like machine called the Sarcophagus. Remember that word. It’s you, the Doctor: no memory, hood up, and everyone treats you like you used to be very important.
Then the city burns. An army of the Infected called Reunion, sick of being hunted, rises up and tears Chernobog apart while a Catastrophe closes in on top of it.
Reunion aren’t cartoon villains. One Reunion fighter, hunting civilians through the streets, screams:
“Those cold-blooded beasts… I’ll make them pay for what they did to my family!”
Rhodes Island fights for the Infected. Reunion is the Infected. That knot runs through the whole first game.
On the way out, Ace, one of Rhodes Island’s veterans, catches up with you. He accepts that you don’t remember anything, and says he’ll still follow your orders. Then Reunion’s leader, Talulah, corners everyone in the city square. Amiya tries to hold her off alone, and can’t. Ace steps in front of her. His last words to you:
“But I remember you, and I know what kind of person you are… That is why… you must cherish her, Doctor.”
He stays behind. The story puts it in one line: “They all knew… that Ace would never return home.”
Who Are FrostNova and Patriot? The Enemies Who Were Right
Reunion’s leaders are the characters players still talk about. The first is FrostNova. That’s her code name. Her real name is Yelena. Her Arts are so cold she can freeze a whole street in an instant, and touching her bare skin gives you frostbite.
Here’s the catch. Her power comes from her Oripathy. She says Oripathy “created this horrible body of mine”, and blames her collapses on overusing her Arts. She’s already blacking out and losing the use of her limbs. She knows it’s killing her, and she keeps fighting anyway. (Joining those two lines into “every time she pushes her Arts, it eats more of her body” is our summary.)
Reunion moves on to a city called Lungmen. In the fighting, a building collapses, and you and Yelena fall into the dark together. Trapped under the rubble, enemies for now, she tells you where she came from.
She was born in a prison mine in the snow, run by the army of a northern empire called Ursus. Her parents were sent there for opposing the emperor’s war. Every miner caught Oripathy, and in her words:
“They drew straws to decide the fates of the Oripathy sufferers, killing them for fun and sport… This mine was hell, built only to spread death and slavery.”
When she was eleven, the soldiers came to execute every child left in the mine. Her Arts woke up on the spot and killed four of them. Then a band of Infected rebels arrived and killed the rest. The children she grew up with walked out alive. She calls them her brothers and sisters, and they became her squad.
The rebels’ leader was a giant Sarkaz soldier named Buldrokkas’tee. The Sarkaz are a horned people the rest of Terra treats like demons. He’d been an officer in the Ursus army, caught Oripathy in his last battle, and turned on the empire. The Infected call him Patriot. When nobody could touch her, he held her ice-cold body to his chest. She calls him father.
In Lungmen, her brothers and sisters die one by one, holding off the enemy so she can live. Then she falls too. As she dies, her cold fades. Her fingers find your face:
“I can finally touch someone… before I die.”
She asks if she can call you Doctor. She says she’d like to join Rhodes Island. Then: “No… thank you… My brothers and sisters are waiting for me.”
Patriot never stopped fighting for the Infected, even after losing her. “If I stop fighting, I betray them.” He makes his last stand in Chernobog’s core, and falls there. As he dies, he looks at Amiya and says the strangest line in the chapter:
“Theresis, lied. The King… had a… successor.”
Then he asks Kal’tsit for a Sarkaz funeral rite. She says she doesn’t know if she’s qualified. He says she’s the best choice. So she speaks it: “Buldrokkas’tee, Wendigo of Kazdel, betrayed neither flesh nor blood, disgraced not his tribe.”
And Talulah, the woman who killed Ace? She was a duke’s daughter who ran away to protect the Infected, and she’s the one who befriended Yelena and won Patriot over in the first place. But something ancient had been living inside her for years, a will called the Deathless Black Snake. By the time she killed Ace, the Snake was the one in control. The real Talulah survived it. Years later she’s back, cutting her way into a sealed-off city to rescue the Infected trapped inside.
So who is this King Patriot talked about? Who is Theresis? To answer that, Rhodes Island has to admit it used to have another name.
What Was Babel? Theresa and Theresis
Before Rhodes Island, there was Babel. And before Babel, there were two Sarkaz twins in the royal court of Kazdel, the Sarkaz homeland. Yes, the names are almost the same. Theresis, the brother, was a soldier. Theresa, the sister, was the royal tailor.
When the old king died in battle and an enemy army poured into the capital, “Theresis thumped on the door, and Theresa set down her scissors.” One soldier remembers her spinning a faint ray of light into a staff and mending his shattered limbs: “Like a tailor darning life itself.”
Theresa became the King of the Sarkaz. It’s a title and a power, carried by a crown. For about two centuries she tried to heal a homeland that knew nothing but war: hospitals, travelling schools, and Babel, an organization built to carry that work further. Kal’tsit stood at her side.
So did you. Theresa’s records call you her dear friend, her most trusted companion. W, a Sarkaz mercenary who fought for Babel, still teases you about it: “You used to like working with us mercs a whole bunch.”
But the crown split the twins. Theresa remembers the day they won that first war:
“Theresis was never the type to smile… Though… on our day of victory, when we thought it was all over, when we could finally go home, I saw a smile on his face. The very next moment, that tiny crown hovered between us.”
Years later, the Sarkaz tore themselves apart in a civil war, and Theresis led the other side (the game speaks of “the sovereigns who chose Theresis”). Theresa was killed by an assassin.
And you? Theresa’s records say she knew you’d come asking one day. Why she trusted you of all people, “and why… you would ‘betray’ her like that.” Those quote marks are in the game, and the game still hasn’t explained them. W puts it plainer: “For now, just remember this name: Theresa.”
Babel collapsed. Kal’tsit’s notes from that time:
“The Lord of Fiends has died. Babel has collapsed.”
That’s what the rest of the world called Theresa. Kal’tsit led what was left of Babel out of Kazdel and gave it one new goal: Oripathy. Theresa had believed it was terminal. Kal’tsit wrote: “Terminal… it can definitely be cured… I will prove… that on this lone point, she is wrong.”
And one more line at the end: “Amiya? I will raise her.” That’s who Patriot meant. Theresa’s power, the crown of the Sarkaz king, passed to a little girl from Rim Billiton. Babel became Rhodes Island, and Rhodes Island registered itself in her hometown.
Theresa’s letter to Kal’tsit
Theresa also left Kal’tsit a letter, hidden in her office desk for after she was gone. It opens with the things Kal’tsit used to teach her: “You said the earth we knew was but a layer of mud, littering upon a celestial orb”, and “You said the stars beyond skyveil are arks sailing through the stellar lane.” Then:
“Kal’tsit, I sense your loneliness. Because you feel you have none of the same kind… I hope the Rhodes can be a place you name home: an Island you may always return to.”
She adds that she isn’t the same kind either: “But I have always been your companion. And still I will be.” Now, “none of the same kind” sounds like a figure of speech. It isn’t. To see why, we have to go back ten thousand years.
Who Is Kal’tsit Really? Ten Thousand Years
Long before Terra had people, a civilization that could reach the stars was dying. Its last scholars lived on a ship in orbit. Two of them, Oracle and Priestess, built a machine called AMa-10: a living machine, “near-indestructible”, designed to help turn other planets into new homes.
Oracle wanted to load it with poems, so whoever came next would have something to get them through the growing pains of civilization. Oracle almost added a star chart of trillions of stars, then decided the sky was too big to help anyone feel less alone.
Is the Doctor Oracle?
Listen to how Priestess talks to Oracle. She uses a name: the one you typed in when you started the game. Oracle is you.
That’s why everyone in the first game treats you like you used to matter. You did, ten thousand years before any of them were born. (In-world, people respect the Doctor because of Babel; Oracle is the deeper layer, and that link is ours.)
Then, in the story’s words: “the dark tide arrives on schedule. A simple streak of spray, and the afterglow of this once glorious civilization is extinguished.” The game never says what the dark tide is. You survive by sleeping in a Sarcophagus, the same kind of machine Rhodes Island pulled you out of in Chernobog.
You wake up the only one left, and say: “My actions are indeed a form of betrayal.” The game never says what you did.
You walk the empty planet with the machine for ages. You shout at the valleys, and nothing answers. At night you name every star, because you kept the star chart in your own head. Then one night a meteor falls, the first sign of anything out there. You try to run to it, and you don’t have the strength. So you go back to sleep. Your last words to the machine use a name:
“Kal’tsit. I do not have much time left. Search for traces of life. Search for hope and a future… Go find your own answer. Find yourself.”
The bird and the king
So the machine waits beside your coffin, for ages, until it’s sure you won’t wake any time soon. By then, Originium has spread across the entire planet. So she sets off north, toward where the meteor fell, looking for life. And she finds it.
The first creature that ever talks back to her is a bird. A loud one. It follows her around, helps her find bugs for her research, and calls her by name. Then it asks for a favor: wipe out the long-furred beasts that are hogging the forest’s water. She refuses. Stepping in would warp how civilization grows, and all life is equal. The bird’s verdict:
“You really are a stupid animal, you know?”
But it stays. Two thousand years after you went to sleep, the bird is old and hurt, and the two of them find another Sarcophagus. She wants to use it to heal the bird. The bird says no: “I don’t want to… become like you.” It likes her, even if it hates the four-legged furry body she’s picked. It’s just tired: “Every single feather on me aches. I don’t want to fly anymore.”
As it dies in the cold, she does the only thing she can. She recites it a poem: “Even the most tired river must eventually flow into the ocean.” The bird doesn’t understand a word. It says it beats listening to the wind. Then: “Bye bye, Kal’tsit.”
Long after, the first people appear. A tribe with spears finds that Sarcophagus and worships it. Other tribes come to take it. It ends in a massacre, and a plague kills the winners. She tries carving all of science into the cliff beside it, so the next people would study instead of kill. The mountain was too small. She buried the machine again.
Later still, a conquering king comes to her. He has everything, and he still feels lost. He begs her for the meaning of life. “I am sorry, but I do not know the answer to this question.” He asks if the Sarcophagus would show him. She warns him: “You will no longer be able to live as a ‘man’.” He climbs in anyway. Out comes a giant winged beast, the shape life on Terra had ages before. It circles the sky, cries out once, and flies away, never to be seen again. That’s one way to answer the question.
Over the centuries she changed. Mon3tr’s log says she “begun to copy the appearance of the humans of Terra”, gave up her former strength, and chose “a body like an ordinary Terran”. Mon3tr, the clawed monster that fights beside her in the first game, carries that strength instead; it’s the other half of the same machine (AMa-10’s log is written by Mon3tr in the first person). Even Mon3tr didn’t understand why she’d want to be ordinary.
Then, after all those years, she put her full trust in someone for the first time: “a Sarkaz woman who was once an enemy.” Theresa.
So that’s what the letter meant. Kal’tsit was the only one of her kind on the whole planet: a machine, built by a dead civilization, ten thousand years old. “None of the same kind” wasn’t a figure of speech. It was a fact.
Was Rhodes Island a Starship?
Now that birthplace in her file. Mon3tr’s own records explain it:
“This ship named Rhodes Island should be considered my birthplace. At the time, she still sailed among the stars, the two administrators aboard her cautiously watching the undulations of the dark tides as they debated concepts for the future.”
Theresa once said “it was Dr. Kal’tsit who directed the main cabin’s follow-up excavation.” Everything points to the landship you ride in the first game being that starship, dug out of the ground. That is our reading; the game never says it in one line. So is the next step: the company named itself after the ship, and the ship after a queen’s wish, an island you can always come back to.
Who Is Kristen Wright? The One Who Stayed Awake
But Kal’tsit wasn’t the only thing that dead civilization left behind. Something else was still awake. The person who found it was a scientist named Kristen Wright.
Kristen ran Rhine Lab, the most advanced research company in the first game. A barrier surrounds Terra and hides the real sky. Her parents died in a crash trying to reach it. A page written about her parents remembers the funeral: “I saw their daughter at their funeral as well. Kristen Wright. She didn’t cry or make a fuss, she simply looked at the sky.”
Her best friend was Saria, a former Rhine Lab researcher who joined Rhodes Island. That’s how Rhodes Island gets pulled in. In the event Lone Trail, Kristen sets something enormous in motion, Rhodes Island is hired into the chaos, and Saria goes after her.
When Saria finally reaches her, Kristen explains. She’d travelled to corners of the world nobody visits, looking for “a voice that doesn’t belong to this era.” She found a door. Inside was everything, including “the end of a civilization, and a spirit abandoned by time.”
Behind that door was something that calls itself the Preserver. It watched its world end, then hid in a bunker for tens of thousands of years, shouting into the void for a survivor. Nothing answered. Its people are still asleep in Sarcophagi that never had the energy to wake them. (That it comes from the same civilization as Oracle and Priestess is our joining of the facts: it knows Kal’tsit as AMa-10, and its people sleep in Sarcophagi.)
Kristen talked with it for months, firing question after question. She came away with one idea: someday, someone would have to build an ark, “a group that can separate themselves from politics and unite as a people.” She refused to be the one to build it.
Instead, she launches her whole laboratory straight up, through the barrier her parents died trying to reach. The game calls it the starpod. Her last recording, before she lies down in a sleep pod she isn’t sure she’ll wake from:
“Our ‘Terra’ is surrounded by stardust… Perhaps life also exists on them.”
Then she speaks to Saria. She has truly felt alive twice: “The first time, Saria, when I brought you back to my hometown. On that hillside where I told you about the beginning of everything. The second time is now.” The beginning of everything: the same words Endfield uses for Rhodes Island.
What did Kal’tsit choose?
That same night, the Preserver asks to speak to Kal’tsit alone. It knows her real name:
“I have a question for you, AMa-10, Kal’tsit. For the past ten thousand years… have you really lived on this land? … What did you choose?”
She tells it she’s chosen to fight for Terra. Then she answers the question this whole post is asking: “I’m an employee of Rhodes Island. A part of the ship sailing on the land called Terra.”
And the ark Kristen wouldn’t build? Rhodes Island has one of its own. Mon3tr’s work log describes Project Dandelion: a seedship carrying “genetic samples of more than 134,700 native Terran species”, meant to leave the planet, get caught by some other star, and scatter its seeds on new ground. (Pairing it with Kristen’s ark is ours; the game doesn’t link the two.)
Before they part, the Preserver gives Kal’tsit a direction: “The south is already in ruins, so you should look north.” She says she has tried many times to reach the far end of the northern icefields. It says she knows what’s over there. She says she does.
Because long before Babel, she’d gone to an ancient creature for help with one threat: “The contamination leaking from the northern stargate grows graver by the day.” A gate. In the north. To somewhere else.
How Did Rhodes Island Lose the Ship?
Meanwhile, the ship itself was running out of time. Late in the first game, Priestess comes back. She survived too, and she’s bound up with Originium itself. She wants every living thing pulled into it, and she says “AMa-10 has been a significant hindrance.”
Rhodes Island fights her aboard the ship, and loses the ship. It’s swallowed by an Originium crystal the size of a mountain. You and Amiya get out. Kal’tsit doesn’t. The story says it to you plainly:
“That ship which you once called home is now completely encased in a massive Originium crystal. The wind blows over it, blurring its outline with sand and dust. You know that you have lost Rhodes Island.”
The crew moves to a new mobile base Kal’tsit had bought long before. Warfarin (yes, the vampire doctor who runs Rhodes Island in Endfield) says it’s much bigger than the old one. Closure, the chief engineer, says: “All of Rhodes Island is my responsibility now.”
Then they bring Kal’tsit back. Under every shape she took, Kal’tsit was really a program, the machine’s core code. In a frozen Ursus city, they find that code inside another Sarcophagus, and Closure cuts out “all of Kal’tsit’s base-level code” without leaving “a single line behind”. They rebuild her around it.
And then she gives it away. The city is freezing, and the Sarcophagus could power it through the winter, but only with a program to run it. So she stores AMa-10’s core code inside it, for good: “From another angle, the Sarcophagus is indeed a fitting tomb for the name of AMa-10.”
“Having but one life”: what Kal’tsit’s line means
Then she says this:
“Having but one life, enough to live as a human… is this not a gift from fate?”
Here’s what that means, in our reading. For ten thousand years, she couldn’t really die. The bird died. The tribes died. Theresa died. She went on, alone. Now she has one life, like everyone else, and one day it will end. She calls that a gift, because it finally makes her the same kind as the people she loves. (The game never spells out that she is now mortal; we’re joining this line to the sealed core code, Theresa’s letter, and Mon3tr’s “It seems I now understand the choice Kal’tsit once made.”)
On the walk home, she says “Breathing like this… is suddenly a strange, novel feeling.” Some very old memories are fading. She’ll get used to it, “as I will live this life of mine.”
What Does Endfield Say About Rhodes Island?
Hold on to that gate in the north. Now jump to Endfield. About a hundred and fifty years before it begins, people from Terra walk through an ancient gate onto a green moon called Talos-II. Then monsters wipe out the first cities, all built around the northern Cosmic Gate, and the way back is gone. (The northern stargate and the northern Cosmic Gate sit in the same direction, two games apart. The game never says they are the same gate.)
Endfield says Rhodes Island was there from the start, and that it founded Endfield Industries to scout the new world. It says Oripathy “was no longer the killer it once was.” Kal’tsit’s lone point, proved.
It calls Warfarin “the leader of Rhodes Island at that time.” In the first game, she’s the one who rebuilt the medical team while Kal’tsit was gone. And Kal’tsit chose one human life. Endfield is set a hundred and fifty years later, and never once shows her.
Is M3 Mon3tr?
Then there’s M3, Endfield’s mystery operator. She was at your side when you woke up, she raised Perlica like a big sister, and she just invited you to Rhodes Island. Ask who she is, and she says: “I’m your friend. That should suffice.”
In the first game, after Kal’tsit’s death, Mon3tr woke up on her own, as a woman who looks like her, with all of her memories, and one order she chose to keep: “Protect the Doctor and Amiya. I will follow this order to the last, but not only because I was commanded to. It is also my wish.” Her log:
“My subconscious always treats it as some sort of reunion, after ten thousand long years of waiting… We have ‘become the same kind’. It seems I now understand the choice Kal’tsit once made.”
The game never says M3 is Mon3tr. That part is our reading. But she wouldn’t be the first to wait that long for you. More in Who Is M3 in Arknights Endfield?
Where is Amiya?
And one name Endfield never says, in any language: Amiya, the girl who inherited the Sarkaz king’s crown. We searched all 14 language tables in Endfield’s available game data, and it isn’t there once.
So What Happened to Rhodes Island?
It was a starship from a civilization that died before Terra had people. A machine was born on it, and walked the planet for ten thousand years looking for a reason.
A Sarkaz queen gave her one, built Babel, died, and asked her to make the ship a home. A little girl inherited the crown, and the company took her hometown’s address. Then the ship was lost, the machine came back as a person, and chose one life, so she could finally be the same kind as everyone she loved.
And all that time, Terra was looking at the sky. Endfield is what happened when someone finally got through.
At the start of Endfield, a voice reads you a list of names: Kal’tsit. Theresa. Theresis. Ace. Yelena. Buldrokkas’tee. Kristen Wright. Now you know who they were. Every one of them was trying to give someone a home.
Ten thousand years ago, Oracle packed poems for whoever came next. A poem got a dying bird through its last winter. Endfield’s next plan is a formal visit to Rhodes Island. Maybe bring a poem.
What the games don’t say yet: what the dark tide was, what Oracle’s betrayal was, why the Doctor would “betray” Theresa, what happened to Kal’tsit after she chose one life, and whether M3 is Mon3tr. We will update this page when the formal visit to Rhodes Island arrives.
Related Reading
- Who Is M3 in Arknights Endfield?: the case for M3 as Mon3tr
- Warfarin Backstory: From Kazdel to Talos-II: the doctor who led Rhodes Island “at that time”
- Who Is Warfarin in Arknights Endfield?: the short explainer
- Amiya’s fate in Endfield: what became of the girl with the crown
- Endfield lore hub: every operator backstory and our story videos
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