# Pogranichnik Lore: Is He Hellagur? > No. Pogranichnik (Khorsyn) carries memories of Hellagur's life, but says there is no Hellagur here. His dream, Shieldguards and battles, from his files. Source: https://endfieldhub.org/blog/pogranichnik-lore-is-he-hellagur-endfield Published: 2026-10-07 Updated: 2026-10-07 **No. Pogranichnik, whose real name is Khorsyn, carries memories of Hellagur’s life, but he says it himself: “There is no Hellagur the Ursine General here, only Khorsyn of Rhodes Island and Endfield.”** He remembers leading armies and raising a little girl, and none of it happened to him. His operator files never explain how one man came to remember another man’s life. They do show what he did with it: a dream that said goodbye, a city that taught him to let go, a shield wall built to keep people alive, and a relic he turned down. This is his whole story, from the in-game English text. **How we checked this.** Everything below comes from Pogranichnik’s in-game text in the official English localization: his Basic Info, Human Resources Summary, Files 1 to 4, voice lines and his three in-game message threads, checked against the current game data on 7 October 2026\. His profile files are also on [Pogranichnik’s operator page](https://endfieldhub.org/characters/pogranichnik). Where we read between the lines, we say so. _Endfield Hub is a fan-made resource and is not affiliated with Hypergryph or Yostar._ --- **Short version first:** Pogranichnik’s story in under two minutes, from our YouTube channel. The full story with every source follows below. More backstories are on the [Endfield lore hub](https://endfieldhub.org/lore). ## TL;DR - Key Points * **He is not Hellagur.** He calls Hellagur “a mentor and friend” and draws the line himself: “There is no Hellagur the Ursine General here.” * **But he carries Hellagur’s memories.** Imperial charges, a girl with Oripathy, ruined underground clinics. He says he once “drew on the glory of a past legend.” * **He dreamed of Hellagur’s door one last time.** A clinic called Azazel opened on Hellagur and his adopted daughter. He woke up before he stepped in and never saw the door again. * **A city taught him to move on.** In the UWST’s Mat’ Gorodov, children of Ursus had left the past behind, so he decided he could too. * **His first battle ended in an avalanche.** It left him asking if falling snow means anything beyond burying the dead. * **His answer was the Shieldguards,** a unit trained to keep each other alive, because “sacrifice is never the objective.” * **They cut through an Aggeloid host for 47 minutes,** and he split the entity at its center in a single exchange. * **He refused a legendary relic.** He had already borrowed one legend’s past. The rest of his legacy will be his own. --- ## Who Is Pogranichnik? Pogranichnik is a 6-star Physical Vanguard in Arknights: Endfield who fights with a sword. His Basic Info lists him as a male Liberi, born July 23, authenticated by Rhodes Island and Oripathy negative. His physical strength and combat skill are rated Excellent, his tactical acumen Outstanding. His HR summary gives the rest: “Pogranichnik (ID name: Khorsyn) is a Rhodes Island liaison and a Banner Commander for the Order of Steel Oath. He spent years at the Polar Circle front in the north of Talos-II.” He joined Endfield Industries “to provide relevant combat support.” The codename is Russian for “border guard,” which is exactly what he is. The HR assistant who wrote the summary remembers “uncompromising looks of a professional soldier,” a man who never acts “with doubt nor hesitation,” and an odd soft spot: he spends his free time talking with UWST crew mates in the city plate construction yards, especially the ones “suffering through the pain of shattered dreams.” People who know him describe his humor as “cold, sharp, yet endearing.” Builds and team details are on [his operator page](https://endfieldhub.org/characters/pogranichnik). ## Is Pogranichnik Hellagur? ![Pogranichnik's bowed profile in his official art above the words ONLY KHORSYN](https://endfieldhub.org/images/blog/pogranichnik-lore/pogranichnik-khorsyn.webp) This is the question most players ask, and his own trust line answers it: > “Hellagur is more like a mentor and friend. I’ve come to understand his regrets and guilt, and I’ve learned from his thoughts and skills. There is no Hellagur the Ursine General here … only Khorsyn of Rhodes Island and Endfield. At times, I feel grateful I have no past to weigh me down. Other times, I feel … the ache of solitude.” Hellagur is a playable operator in the original Arknights, an old general of Ursus. Khorsyn is clearly not him, and he is equally clearly connected to him. Several lines only make sense if he carries Hellagur’s memories: * **“I had already drawn on the glory of a past legend,”** he says when explaining why he refused a relic (more on that below). * **The audio journal in his File 4 remembers a life he never lived:** “elite imperial strikers following me in those great charges, the girl with Oripathy, underground clinics reduced to ruin.” * **He compares a UWST city to “the nomadic cities that I’ve seen in my memories,”** cities from Terra, not Talos-II. * **He dreams of a door he “had pushed open countless times”** in a place he has never been. The files never say how this happened. Our read: it fits the way Endfield’s Reconveners work. Reconveners are new people who arrive on Talos-II carrying partial, distant memories of someone from Terra, and they each come to see themselves as “a unique individual.” Pogranichnik’s files never use the word Reconvener for him, so treat that as a theory. We explain the system in [Are Endfield Characters Different From the Originals?](https://endfieldhub.org/blog/are-arknights-endfield-characters-different-from-originals), and the person who runs it in [Who Is Warfarin in Arknights Endfield?](https://endfieldhub.org/blog/who-is-warfarin-arknights-endfield-rhodes-island) ## The Dream of the Door ![A drawn door standing open, with warm light falling on the silhouettes of a tall man and a small girl](https://endfieldhub.org/images/blog/pogranichnik-lore/pogranichnik-door-open.webp) The most personal thing in his files is a message he sends the Endmin late one night, after sorting through old notes. When he first set out from Rhodes Island toward the city he calls Simonch, he had a dream. He stood on “a battlefield littered with swords,” with ruins at its center. Sorrow urged him to leave, “but my body moved forward against my will.” Deep in the ruins stood “that building from my memories, a place that now only exists in name. Azazel.” He reached for a door he felt he “had pushed open countless times” and could never quite reach it. Then the clinic door creaked open on its own: > “Amidst those ruins, I saw him, and that girl … his adopted daughter. I wasn’t surprised, and was just about to step through that door…” The arrival announcement woke him. “That dream felt like meeting a long-lost close friend during a journey, listening as he shared his past with me, right until the very end. And I never saw that door ever again.” ![The same door shut and dim under the words HE NEVER SAW THAT DOOR AGAIN](https://endfieldhub.org/images/blog/pogranichnik-lore/pogranichnik-door-shut.webp) Read next to his trust line, it plays as a farewell. Hellagur’s memories gave him a past. The dream is the moment they stop pulling him backward. ## The City That Left Its Past Behind ![A drawn city skyline at dusk with lit windows, two small figures saluting, and the words SO COULD HE](https://endfieldhub.org/images/blog/pogranichnik-lore/pogranichnik-city.webp) The city at the end of that journey is Mat’ Gorodov, the Industrial Mothership of the United Workers’ Syndicates of Talos II (UWST). Pogranichnik knows its older name: “her name was Simonch when she was still in Terra. She sank in a lake under the tyrannical rule of the Ursus Empire.” Nobody knows why the Empire salvaged her, but she is now “the largest nomadic city on Talos-II, and a spiritual symbol for many.” His File 4 is an audio transcript of that visit, credited to “an anonymous individual” and archived at Rhodes Island, though the speaker is plainly him. He skipped the guide and followed a worker off his shift into a crew theater, where the same man changed into a costume and performed a comedy about workers tricking a corrupt official. Outside, a ten-year-old girl and her twin brother recognized him: “An Oathkeeper! From the Order of the Steel Oath!” They saluted him the way the Order does. He compares them with the noble children of his memories, groomed like “intricate dolls” until ambition turned them into something he “could no longer recognize.” Then, walking the streets alone, “a strange sense of freedom caught up to me.” The old memories “no longer weighed me down.” His trust line spells out the decision: > “If the children of Ursus can leave the past behind, start things anew, and achieve their own feats of honor and glory, then I, Khorsyn, have no reason to hesitate any longer.” He went straight back north. The journal ends: “A field of carnage where survival was the only objective. That is where we fight.” ## The Avalanche ![A white avalanche mass with a jagged edge burying the frame above the words BURIED EVERYTHING](https://endfieldhub.org/images/blog/pogranichnik-lore/pogranichnik-avalanche.webp) The north is the Polar Circle front, where the Order of Steel Oath (the Oathkeepers) holds back the Aggeloi, the Ankhors and disasters from Ætherside activity. He tells the Endmin about his first battle: an Aggeloid host hit his supply convoy while it crossed a glacier, in “an unprecedented Aggeloi construct pattern.” The fighting triggered an avalanche, “burying everything in an instant.” ![Falling snow over a darkened battlefield with the question: does falling snow mean anything beyond burying the dead?](https://endfieldhub.org/images/blog/pogranichnik-lore/pogranichnik-snow.webp) “After the battle ended, I asked myself … when snowflakes fall, is there any meaning to it beyond burying the remains?” Simonch gave him one answer and life with the Order gave him his own: “The sacrifices of the Oathkeepers are made to buy time. Only then can people like you, Endmin, have the opportunity to forge a path of survival for the people of Talos-II. This is our oath.” ## The Shieldguards ![A drawn wall of six steel shields with red stripes over the Shieldguards, under SACRIFICE IS NEVER THE GOAL and SURVIVE](https://endfieldhub.org/images/blog/pogranichnik-lore/pogranichnik-survive.webp) His real answer was a unit. He reorganized and trained the Order’s Shieldguards, and the idea came to him the night before he reached the Oathkeepers’ bastion, looking at “countless tombstones” standing “in rows, forming a wall that held back the enemies from the north.” The Oathkeepers are a shield for civilization, and he forged “another shield for them.” His method, in his own words: > “When I first chose my Shieldguards, I saw a motley of trainees even younger than me. My first task was to strip away their aggression, for they are guards and not attackers. Next, I taught them every tactic I knew so they not only defend, but become the living frontline itself. Finally, I made sure that they mastered survival… Sacrifice is never the objective. It is a last resort for the sole purpose of avoiding more sacrifices.” File 2 shows it in practice. After a lesson, two UW recruits, Vadim Ignatyevich Smirnov and Muravyov, stop “Instructor Khorsyn.” Vadim’s father fought beside him against the Aggeloi and wrote home about him in every letter, and the boys grew up playing Shieldguards. They have passed the fort’s selection trials and want to inherit their fathers’ courage “even at the cost of our lives.” He stops them. “I’ve seen too many aspirants falling at this place.” Being a hero or sacrificing your life are not what a Shieldguard needs: “Son, you must learn to survive. Only then could you appear at places that need you most.” The boys finish the lesson for him: help the others survive. “Then I shall look forward to the day when I fight along your sides.” His three lessons from the Oathkeepers say the same thing: “trust your comrades; second, never back down easily; third, never push your luck.” ## Forty-Seven Minutes ![The number 47 above the word MINUTES over a red sword slash](https://endfieldhub.org/images/blog/pogranichnik-lore/pogranichnik-minutes.webp) File 3 is the outside view, and it comes from an unlikely witness: Tanner Orrigan, a TGCC “special observer and battle asset insurance agent,” reporting to the corporations that fund the Order. The Order lost 31 artillery walkers and heavy UAVs in the battle, and the report is half a sales pitch for more investment. The other half is the fight. Orrigan’s banner was stuck below a ridge, unable to even see its forward fort through the Aggeloid host, until “Banner Commander Khorsyn, the one who had been most uninhibited in expending military assets,” attacked from the far side. Then an unknown entity that had already “blunted the other Banner offensives” reappeared at the foot of the Aurora, and Khorsyn led his Shieldguards straight at it. The observer admits he cannot describe what he saw objectively: “Every hole that appeared in the bastion of iron shields was quickly sealed by another Shieldguard. After 47 minutes of brutal battle, Khorsyn and his Shieldguards managed to carve a path right through the Aggeloid host.” ![The battle frame split in two along a horizontal line, under the words ONE BLOW](https://endfieldhub.org/images/blog/pogranichnik-lore/pogranichnik-one-blow.webp) The entity had killed “hundreds of the Oathkeepers’ best soldiers.” Khorsyn “split the statuesque carapace right through the median plane” in a single exchange, and artillery fire finished what escaped. His ultimate in the game, Shieldguard Banner, Forward, summons four of those Shieldguards to push the enemy line, and its voice line, “Shieldguards! FORMATION!”, echoes this fight. ## The Relic He Refused ![Pogranichnik's official art holding a chess piece under THE ORDER OFFERED HIM A LEGENDARY RELIC and HE REFUSED](https://endfieldhub.org/images/blog/pogranichnik-lore/pogranichnik-refused.webp) The Order’s Grand Treasurer keeps “a massive vault of legacies”: relics of Oathkeeper legends, unrestorable Terra technology and Precursor artifacts. Pogranichnik was offered his pick. > “I was once given the chance to choose a relic to wield, but I refused. I had already drawn on the glory of a past legend. For the rest of my life, I will leave behind my own glorious legacy.” It is the cleanest summary of his story. He has already borrowed one legend’s past. Everything after that he means to earn himself. ## The Photograph He Never Framed His File 1 holds the small things a soldier keeps. One photograph shows him with a mixed crew in front of snowbound steel defenses, a comrade proudly pointing at a giant vessel in the sky. The other shows a great hall in a fort: soldiers raising their cups to him on a stage, his fist on a huge map, a silver-haired old man at the banner commanders’ table, recruits singing around an accordion. “Pogranichnik never showed the picture to anyone, and neither did he frame it.” The same file has his ration reviews, which are the funniest lines he has. The HAS hot pot gifted to his banner “utterly decimated my warriors. Half of the Shieldguards in the entire banner cried out for painkillers,” and some ate handfuls of snow. “However, no one in the banner complained about the cold in the 30-klick foot march.” There is also a map painted on tanned cystybeast hide, made in case every Originium instrument fails. ## What He Wants His last trust line is a wish for the Endmin, and it is the opposite of a soldier’s boast: > “That everyone at Rhodes Island can return to a life of peace and common joys; that the Oathkeepers can finally beat their swords to plowshares and enjoy the company of their loved ones; and that life can finally sink its roots deep into this ancient planet… Even in the face of a devastating defeat, I pray that you will survive by any means necessary. If you do, then everything I’ve done will be worth it.” It also explains why he came back to Endfield. Most of his war is against Aggeloi and Ankhors, but on rare occasions the Oathkeepers have met “inexplicable phenomena: traces of giant creatures, witness reports of peculiar individuals,” and when he heard the Endmin had woken up, he “immediately requested to return.” He has already reviewed the Endmin’s training program and added “one or two extra minor trials based on my experience.” He even has a view on [Ember](https://endfieldhub.org/blog/ember-build-guide-dps-support-weapons-teams-endfield): her commander sent her south to give her a normal life, and “a soldier who could make peace with their past would never have gone so far as she has.” Coming from a man who had to make peace with someone else’s past, that line lands harder. ## Pogranichnik’s Story in Order 1. **Hellagur’s memories.** He carries a past that is not his own: a general’s charges, a girl with Oripathy, ruined clinics. 2. **Rhodes Island.** He serves as a Rhodes Island operator and learns from Hellagur’s thoughts and skills. 3. **The dream.** On his way to Simonch he dreams of Azazel’s door opening on Hellagur and his adopted daughter, and wakes before stepping through. 4. **Mat’ Gorodov.** Twins salute him in the street, and he decides that if the children of Ursus can leave the past behind, so can he. 5. **The glacier.** His first battle, an Aggeloid ambush on a supply convoy, ends in an avalanche. 6. **The Shieldguards.** He rebuilds the Order’s Shieldguards around one rule: survive, and shelter the person beside you. 7. **The 47-minute battle.** His banner cuts through an Aggeloid host and he splits the entity that killed hundreds. 8. **The relic.** He refuses a legend’s relic to leave a legacy of his own. 9. **Endfield.** He returns when the Endmin wakes, and joins Endfield Industries for combat support. More operator backstories are on the [Endfield lore hub](https://endfieldhub.org/lore).