Book One – Chapter 8

YVES HAD FORGOTTEN most of the last days. He was travelling. He was crossing the Northlands plateau. As he did, he existed in a state of automated near unconsciousness. The Jabarrah kept him alive. Energy scavenged from the barren surroundings served as a meagre sustenance for his battered form. His mind, with none to claim for itself, became a void severed from coherent thoughts. Every once in a while, the blurred memories of the past week emerged. Elusive and indistinct, they slipped away just as quickly, like shadows drowning within in the dim recesses of his mind. He was quite content for them to disappear there.

After the shift, Yves had eventually emerged from the crater, where he was met with a bewildering sight. There was his Chest of Useless Artefacts, hurled onto a makeshift wooden sled surrounded by a bunch of other poorly secured artefacts. He understood that the sled was fitted for the barthar, and then he realised that the spillage of artefacts was a bounty of items collected from the cliff behemoth. The Vicha’s consumption of the colossal creature had birthed an unexpected trove. The curse had shifted the living mass of the behemoth to another dimension, leaving everything material it had ever ensnared with its tendrils. All these artefacts must have simply fallen out of the behemoth as the creature itself had lost substance. It was, literally, unearthed history — a mountain full of treasure.

Yves could not estimate the lifespan of the behemoth; it must have surely existed for centuries or even millennia, shaping the cliff region long before it had turned into the desolate landscape of today. As far as Yves discerned from first glance when finding the sled and from various semi-conscious second glances throughout the week of travelling, the artefacts were an amalgamation of bygone eras — of forgotten seafaring voyages, Tairan cultures, and remnants of those ill-fated adventurers whose journeys met an abrupt end in the behemoth’s maw, whether on land or where its tendrils had extended into the ocean.