In the deep, dank innards of a fallen god’s corpse, two scavengers navigated their way through the labyrinthian maze of decayed divinity. As always, Uncle Poe led the way, tugging at his ashen beard, while Gibb followed, holding aloft his lantern and dispelling the dimness that enveloped them.
Step by step they traversed perilous chasms of boiling bile. Step by step they climbed mounds of metallic flesh. Protruding bones like spires of iron. Pulsating crimson networks of faintly glowing veins. Mangroves of carved guts where pilfered organs once hung. They made their way through it all, their only guiding light being Gibb’s lantern, an effulgent lodestar in the ominous near darkness of the Giant’s innards.
Their progression was slow — each step they took an increment of the Giant’s length. But they had not come to explore the entirety of the carcass. They had come for one thing and one thing alone: bounty. And after hours of traversing the long thought filched cadaver, it was bounty that they finally found.
“Gibb, my boy. Would you mind giving me a light?” Uncle Poe asked, peering back to observe the boy, only to be met by his sudden retreat.
Upon hearing Uncle Poe’s request Gibb tightened the hood of his oversized jacket and pulled his arms, along with his lantern, into himself. Once he had retreated into a cocoon of clothing, he glanced at the old man and gave him a sour look.
“This is my lantern. It belongs to me.”
Uncle Poe breathed a deep sigh, his wrinkled skin sagging alongside his body. “I know, child. I know. I just need you to shine it a little brighter. I think we’ve hit a deposit and I’d appreciate it if you could provide me with the light required to confirm my suspicions. I promise I won’t push the two of you too much.”
Gibb’s eyes remained locked on Uncle Poe as his left hand drifted towards the lantern he held in his right. He ran his fingers across its bulbous sphere that contained the glaring cerulean glow that illuminated their surroundings, his fingers scraping at the intricate embossment that was etched around its circumference.
‘Cleanse thy path of darkness, blind thy fears with light’, it read, a phrase Gibb had committed to memory. He tended to struggle with words, but these ten were of the sort he could pull from his mind and recite without struggle. It was something he would do whenever he felt anxious, which meant every time he found himself entering the innards of a Fallen One.
‘Like a Prayer,’ Uncle Poe had said to him when he told him of his ritual. But Gibb did not pray to Saints, or the sea, or the sky. He did not trust them to answer. In fact, he trusted very little when it came to the thoughts and actions of others. He had learnt very early in his life that empathy was a starved concept amongst the masses and that everything and everyone was a potential danger. Everyone that is, except Uncle Poe. Even though being in god guts made him uneasy and his lantern was growing weary, Gibb knew that as long as Uncle Poe was with him, things would not be so bad.
“Ok, Uncle Poe,” Gibb said softly, his eyes wandering upwards and fixating on a collection of fleshy stalactites. “I’ll get rid of the darkness for you.”
“That’s my boy,” Uncle Poe said with a soft smile. “I just need it for a little while longer. If this vein contains what I think it does, then we’ll be done with this place and be able to keep the fire going in that Balefire of yours.”
“It’s not a Balefire,” Gibb asserted. “It’s my lantern. It belongs to me.”
“Of course, my apologies,” Uncle Poe said quickly. “It belongs to you.”
Reluctantly, Gibb unfurled his body, stretching his arm forward and raising it, his lantern glowing brighter and brighter with each movement until the dim red glow of the Giant’s innards was enveloped by the shine of his lantern.
Without a word, Uncle Poe scurried forward, his hand delving into the side pocket of his oversized backpack and fishing out his cleaver: a twelve-inch bar of hollow metal with a chiselled end. He came to a stop in front of what his eyes had caught in the former darkness; an exposed length of silvered bone with a crack in it that bled an orange effervescent liquid. It was a sight that Gibb knew any scavenger would salivate over, and Uncle Poe was no different.
He placed his cleaver against the base of the crack and began to jab, bringing the cleaver down over and over as he chipped away at the bone until, finally, the crack turned to a fault and shattered, exposing a pool of viscous orange within.
“Saints be damned, we’ve got one!” Uncle Poe exclaimed, tugging at his beard as he broke into a jig. “I didn’t think we would find Marrow this rich in an already salvaged corpse, but it looks like the sky’s smiling down on us today, Gibb!”
Even though Gibb was glad to see Uncle Poe happy, he remained as still as stone, a neutral look of indifference occupying his face. But despite that, Gibb’s apathy did nought to dampen Uncle Poe’s excitement. The old man had long gotten used to the boy’s lack of emotional conveyance.
“Would you like to help me harvest it, my boy?” Uncle Poe asked, resting his hand on the centre of his cleaver.
“No thank you, Uncle Poe,” Gibb replied, his arm still stiffly in place and holding his lantern high. “I’ll just watch if that’s ok.”
“That’s more than ok, Gibb,” Uncle Poe nodded, then turned towards the cracked bone and dipped his cleaver into it.
As soon as its chiselled end touched the pool of Marrow, the cleaver began to hum and the pool soon drained until not a drop remained, its contents evicting from its ancient basin and finding a new home in the hollow of the cleaver’s rod.
“We should mark this Giant as a potential return spot,” Uncle Poe posited. “We’ve got enough Marrow to sell to the fuelery to get us by for the next three months, so we shouldn’t have to come back too soon. But when the time comes, I’m sure these god guts have more bounties for us to uncover. Is that alright with you, my boy?”
The corners of Gibb’s mouth twitched in a wasted effort to form a smile. “That’s alright with me, Uncle Poe.”
With their bounty claimed and the strength of Gibb’s lantern waning, the two retraced their path, step by step retreating through the bowels of the Giant. Gibb was seldom the type to express his emotions, mostly because he struggled to figure out how, but he could not deny that, despite not being able to, he still felt like smiling. Not only was Uncle Poe happy, but they would not have to venture into god guts for at least three months. A thought that stirred joyous feelings within him that typically remained calcified.
“What would you like to eat tonight, Gibb?” Uncle Poe said, breaking the customary silence they trekked in. “After we deposit this Marrow, we’ll have enough Resin to get something special for dinner.”
“Plantains,” Gibb replied without hesitation.
Uncle Poe raised an eyebrow. “Are you sure? We almost always have plantains.”
“I like plantains,” he stated.
“But is that because that’s all we could afford for the last few months, or do you actually enjoy eating them?”
“I like plantains,” Gibb repeated, his tone unchanging.
Uncle Poe glanced back at Gibb, momentarily holding his gaze on the boy, then erupted into a hearty fit of laughter. “Well, if it’s plantains you want, its plantains you’ll get, my boy! As for me, I think I’ll try my hand at procuring something a little crunchier. I heard Melissa and her anglers managed to catch a heap of upstream crawdads. They should pair well with plantains if you happen to change your mind.”
Gibb shrugged; his mind fixated on the mnemonic scent of the sizzled plantains they oft had for supper. A meal he was repeatedly told by others was the food of the poor due to their abundance throughout Mausolus. But for him, plantains were a warm, sweet comfort that reminded him of a life long gone. A life, that at times, he could barely remember.
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“I like plantains,” Gibb said, wrapping his fingers around the wrist of his lantern-bearing hand. “They make me feel — happy.”
“Aye, that’s all any of us can ask for my boy,” Uncle Poe nodded. “If plantains make you happy, then I’ll keep frying them up till there be no more left in all of Mausolus!”
“Thank you, Uncle Poe,” Gibb replied, tapping the side of his lantern. “From both of us.”
Uncle Poe turned to face Gibb and flashed him a toothy grin. “As always, until the end, you are most very welcome.”
*
The natural light of the sun was almost too much for Gibb to bear. As soon as he exited through the hole in the undecayed flesh of the Giant’s leg they entered through, the sudden glare of the sun swallowed the dimming light of his lantern and caused his eyes to retreat behind his eyelids. Adjusting to the brightness of outside after hours spent in near darkness was yet another reason why Gibb hated venturing into god guts. But for now, he didn’t have to worry about such things. They had retrieved more than what they had sought out to find and with the bounty they had claimed, it would be sometime before their next excursion into a Fallen One’s carcass.
“Ah, smell that fresh verdant air! See those gorgeous flowers! These fields may be filled to the brim with corpses, but they do nought to stifle the invigorating sight of these fine rolling grasslands!” Uncle Poe boasted, twirling in place with his arms outstretched.
As the sun’s lambent scowl lessened, Gibb’s eyes fluttered open, his gaze immediately catching on a bed of sunflower buds sprouting from the grass just beside his feet.
“Smells like death to me,” he said candidly.
“Oh, come now, my boy! You should learn to enjoy the beauty of the great outdoors! It’s where people like you and I are destined to spend our lives!” Uncle Poe insisted. He turned away from Gibb and scanned the horizon until his eyes lit up and his grin widened. “Look over there, Gibb! Seems like we’re in for some rain!”
Gibb followed Uncle Poe’s gaze to find at the end of it lay a tusked, red-skinned Fallen One several dozen meters away from them. If it had been upright, it would have stood at about 27 meters, the smaller end of the Ogre size range. From the impact crater around it and the sanguine oozing from its corpse, it was evidently one that had only recently fallen from the sky.
“We really have had quite the blessing of luck today,” Uncle Poe chortled. “Even if the Giant we scavenged had been as dry as bone, that Ogre would have provided us with a fresh bounty to sell to the apothecary!”
“Are we going to scavenge it anyway?” Gibb asked.
Uncle Poe shook his head and rested his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “No need, my boy! The Marrow we gathered is all we require. We should leave it for someone else who might need it more than us. The people back in Bergelmir are practically going mad with boredom waiting for fresh corpses to fall. No doubt if more continue to rain down, these fields are sure to become a lot busier. You and I know that better than most!”
“Yes, you’re right,” Gibb nodded. “I don’t like it when it's busy.”
“I agree! The beauty of these grasslands is truly showcased when only a handful of scavengers are out and about. In my youth, I spent hours taking in the sights, and if I still had the time, I most certainly still would.”
Unlike Uncle Poe, Gibb could neither see nor understand the beauty he saw in the fields. Gibb was no stranger to them, of course. By the age of thirteen most children in Bergelmir had already spent years taking trips into the god guts of Trolls, Ogres and Giants, and he was no exception. On top of that, Uncle Poe had told him countless tales of yesteryear that chronicled the old man’s explorations of the grasslands to study the Fallen Ones in his youth. However, after three years of hearing Uncle Poe’s anecdotes and frequenting the fields themselves, Gibb had yet to acclimate to what they contained.
For as far as the eye could see, scattered around the sunflower filled grasslands that stretched far and wide in every direction lay the splayed corpses of the gargantuan Fallen Ones, sunken into the earth to the point that they had melded with it. Some of them stripped to the bone, others still retaining their undecayed, armour-like skin. Their humanoid bodies varied in size, from the 19-meter-tall Trolls to the 90-meter-tall Giants. But for Gibb, all of them had one singular shared trait. Just the sight of them filled him with a sense of unease. Though they were humanoid, their flesh and bones possessed metallic properties and were covered in strange patterns. Their skulls came in various shapes resembling intricate battle helms rather than heads, and the number of limbs, eyes and faces they possessed always varied. They were unique in their strangeness, but most people cared not about where they came from. As far as any could tell they had been raining from the sky and littering the land for centuries. Perhaps in the past, it was a subject of contention, but now, most only sought to plunder their god guts and retrieve whatever bounties lay within. Gibb was the same, caring not for where the Fallen Ones came from — but he did care about what they brought with them. And even though their insides held countless treasures, he knew better than most that they also harboured perils most horrific.
“The fields are nice, but they would be prettier with fewer flowers,” Gibb said bluntly, digging his heel into the dirt beside the patch of sunflower buds. “They make everything smell like death to me.”
Uncle Poe’s brow furrowed as he studied Gibb for a second, before turning away from him with a sigh. “I suppose we all view the world through a different lens, each one influenced by experiences, both good and bad. Who am I to judge what is and isn’t the correct view?”
Gibb titled his head to the side, his eyes widening as they fixed on to Uncle Poe. “I don’t understand.”
“No need to worry, my boy,” the old man insisted, gesturing forward. “Let’s head back to Bergelmir. These old bones aren’t as sturdy as they used to be.”
Uncle Poe began to walk, and as usual, Gibb followed. But before they could make headway in their journey home, Gibb slowed to a halt, his eyes catching something high up in the sky. It was almost imperceptible but still clear as day, like an ink spot superimposed on the horizon.
It took a few seconds for Uncle Poe to realise Gibb had stopped, but once he had, he turned to face the boy and stared at him inquisitively.
“What is it Gibb?” he asked. “Is something wrong?”
Slowly, Gibb’s left hand rose and pointed upwards at the sky. “Look. Another one.”
After a moment of squinted glaring, Uncle Poe nodded in excitement and reached over to clap Gibb on the back. “Good eye, Gibb! Looks like it could be another Ogre, or perhaps even a Giant! But as I said before, we need not chase it. Let’s let the other salvage parties fight over its bounties. The line into the fuelery will surely be shorter with all of them out heading for its impact zone.”
“It looks too far away to me,” Gibb replied. “Too far away and too big.”
“What do you mean, my boy?”
“Too far away for salvage, too big to be a Giant.”
Uncle Poe’s eyes alternated between studying Gibb and the dot in the sky that was slowly descending and growing in size. “Gibb, do me a favour and fetch me my telescope.”
Without hesitation, Gibb moved behind Uncle Poe and opened his backpack, fishing through its contents until his fingers clutched a bronzed telescope. He carefully lifted it out, making sure to not jostle the multitude of lenses that were attached to its front and placed it in Uncle Poe’s hands. Once it was safely nestled in his palm, Uncle Poe grasped hold of it and lifted it to his right eye.
“Yes, it seems you're right my boy. Perhaps it’s a Colossus? It’s been a few months since we’ve seen one of those fall!”
“No,” Gibb said plainly.
“No?”
“Too big.”
Uncle Poe’s left eye darted towards Gibb as his right continued to stare down his telescope. “Yes, too big. You’re right. It is growing larger and larger with each second. I’ve observed corpse-fall many a time in my life, but this is quite the sight to behold!”
“Is it a Behemoth?” Gibb asked.
“Perhaps it is!” Uncle Poe beamed; both his hands now clasped around the telescope as his fingers played at its adjustment lenses. “Oh, that would be exciting! I haven’t witnessed a fresh Behemoth since I still had hue in my hair!”
Gibb watched as Uncle Poe grew giddier and giddier, his feet shuffling uncontrollably as his body shuddered with excitement. It was nice to see the man so happy and Gibb was ready to indulge said happiness by providing him with questions about his youthful endeavours that he so often craved. But as quickly as it had arrived, Uncle Poe’s excitement drained as his feet lost all motion and his body froze in place.
“Wait, no. It’s far, very far. But, it’s not…it’s not a Behemoth. Too big. Far too big. But that means…”
After almost a full minute of silence, Uncle Poe turned to Gibb with a look that he barely ever saw on the man’s face. A twisted contortion that he almost didn’t recognise that caused Gibb to take a step back and tighten his grip on his lantern. Instead of the kind eyes and soft smile that usually occupied Uncle Poe’s face, a look of complete and utter terror had now taken residence.
“It’s a Titan,” he said, his words getting caught in his throat, “An actual, honest to gods, Titan.”
As if the world itself had heard his utterance, darkness fell across the grasslands as the once distant ink spot grew to an immense shadow, one which was large enough to partially block out the sun itself. An artificial eclipse that signified to all that the impossible was happening. That after centuries of absence, a Titan was falling.
Gibb cared little about the study of Fallen Ones, but he knew three concrete facts about Titans. He knew that they were the largest of the Fallen Ones. He knew that one hadn’t fallen in over two hundred years, and he knew that it was said they contained the greatest bounty of all.
But at that moment, he cared not for the bounty the fall of a Titan would bring. He cared not about why, after all these years, one had suddenly appeared. All he cared for was what was closest to him.
“Hold on Gibb! And raise that Balefire high!” Uncle Poe exclaimed, wrapping his arms around the boy and bulling him into his embrace.
Without question or hesitance, Gibb raised his lantern high as its now rapidly brightening light enveloped him and Uncle Poe.
“Cleanse thy path of darkness, blind thy fears with light,” Gibb whispered. And as the earth shuddered beneath the added weight of a god corpse the size of a mountain, he hoped that if his words were considered a prayer, then for once in his life, they would be answered.