Helos

Legend paints Helos as a man of remarkable beauty. The statue erected in Liberio, along with the stage production Willy Tybur later mounts, presents him in a tailcoat and breeches befitting a soldier, topped by a plumed bicorn hat, the very image of a gallant champion.

The stories credit Helos with courage far beyond an ordinary man, since he supposedly confronted the Devil of All Earth when victory seemed impossible. They also portray a sharp schemer, one shrewd enough to stoke the feuds dividing the Eldians until their empire collapsed from within.

Whether any of these traits ever belonged to a living person is impossible to say, as the hero exists only inside a manufactured myth.

After receiving the Founding Titan, Karl Fritz resolved to steer Eldia toward ruin as penance for the centuries of horror the empire had inflicted on humanity. Working with the Tybur family, he invented a Marleyan champion named Helos to inflame the fighting between rival Eldian factions. The resulting legend claimed that this hero killed the Devil of All Earth amid the Great Titan War and plotted alongside the Tyburs to bring down the empire. Marley went on to seize Eldia's mainland territory, and Karl Fritz withdrew to Paradis Island with his capital.

Generations later, following the Marley Mid-East War, Willy Tybur pauses before the Liberio statue of the hero and voices his fondness for the figure to Commander Magath, who dismisses the monument as pageantry, no more solid than Marley's standing in the world. One month afterward, Willy stages a theatrical retelling of the legend for the assembled world leaders and ambassadors, then stuns his audience by admitting that the whole account was engineered to bury what really happened in the Great Titan War, along with the century-old pact between his family and Karl Fritz.

The famous image of a spear-wielding Helos striking down the Devil echoes an older event: the death of Ymir Fritz, pierced by an ancient Marleyan soldier's spear during an attempt on the Eldian king's life. The katakana rendering of his name also resembles the ancient Greek word from which "hero" derives.