Grigory Filin or Bad Grief

My path was not called 'The Spider'. No, think wider. It was 'The Silkworm'! The end of a railroad, I pulled strings firm; unaware someone more cunning pulled mine upstairs.

Bad Grief has bright red hair that sticks up from his head and grey eyes. He has freckles all across his face. He wears a heavy grey coat over a salmon-coloured button-up shirt, which is covered by a green damask vest patched with leather. He wears brown fingerless gloves and a green necktie, and his shirt is not tucked in. His trousers are brown with a green shade, and he wears heavy brown workboots.

Bad Grief is a poetic man who speaks in theatrics and metaphors. He is rarely serious and makes his job appear easy. Truthfully Bad Grief holds a tight grip over his reputation among his men - one that he occasionally finds slipping. Bad Grief has his finger on the pulse of the Town and is familiar with most of its gossip and rumour-mill.

Grief dreams of not being ordered about by anyone (neither people nor, say, the steppe monsters, of which he has a slight superstitious fear). He prefers humiliating an enemy to really, reliably finishing them off (this isn’t humanism, just another side to his love of beauty). He’s a little playful in everything he does, but his is not an intellectual playfulness—more of the contrary, the natural antics of someone who is, in a certain sense, naïve. He’s an “anti-Immortell” who runs an “anti-Theatre” at the Warehouses, his outlaw domain. A general air of mockery. He knows something highly compromising about you; he knows the nets you’ve let yourself get caught in—and he relishes knowing it before you do. He may sneer and grimace, cocking his head to one side and then the other, as if appraising you like merchandise.

Grigory Filin, better known as Bad Grief, is the head of the criminal underworld in Town and a smuggler. Officially, he's considered a "shopkeeper", as he works under the Olgimsky's administration. He sells weapons and illegally made twyrine in the Warehouses.