Short Story Preview: Dowser

Good evening.

For those interested, here is a draft of one of the opening stories for Rooted Hate Entangles Copper Veins. This story introduces the monolithic constructs of an elemental inventor named Kahryatt, and focuses on Dowser, a massive mechanical construct of mysterious design that knows not where it steps while it searches for water reservoirs in the leveled basin of The Body's centermost continent. It also introduces figures of a species known as the Kylyy, who have been wronged by these mechanical constructs since the beginning. The figureheads of the Qyo-Kylyy Empire seek wrathful vengeance on the mad stone magus that leveled the majority of the once-mountainous-continent for the mass-production of these stone-and-steel sentinels.

Without further ado, we present Dowser, from the forthcoming collection Rooted Hate Entangles Copper Veins! Be sure to let us know what you think in the comments!

DOWSER

The Dowsing Sentinel lifted its left hand of copper fingers and calculated the best place to step in the direction of underwater canals it sensed, Dowser pressed forth unhindered by the freezing temperatures beyond. The fingers twisted and turned, overlapping, and Dowser slowed its movements and stood still. A thin antenna was elevated from within to the top of its rounded-boulder head, the receiver of the antennae bloomed into a series of silicon panels that shook from a small magnetic ring surrounding the base of the receiver-turned-transmitter, and a high chirping resonated from the entire tower ensemble while the bulk of the mechanism it protruded from bellowed a sequence of low, delayed and distorted notes of action. From its right hand protruded three forks that formed and clawed at the muddy ravine, revealing fresh, cold water seeping up and above the soil and stone. 

After a few patient minutes running water palpably slipped down the rocks. Dowser bent its body to allow its centermost optic lens, illuminated in gradients that morphed into varying dimensional illustrations against a single foggy quartz eye, to retrieve the information of its consequences. The image was absorbed by diaphragm transducers that vibrated the large quartz eye, thus animating into action a reservoir of a recycling liquid organic community called ovi through seven channels lined with hydraulic pistons that propelled a solid-liquid copy from Dowser’s outermost stoney skull through the cranium and distilled with black liquid iron oxide through the process. The image within the biological liquid passes across a series of small magnetic transducers, becoming electrically boosted and transmitting the stream of Dowser’s visual experiences beyond the landscape of The Body through its totem-adorned antennae and back to one of the many grand antennae primae awaiting the lived experience of the drone. 

From below the abdomen of the stone construct protruded a collapsable leg with a mesh footstep, lowering slowly into the deepest, dampest coral-pink silt. From this and the other two legs Dowser drank from the accelerating stream, and sat motionless other than the ever-spinning magnets that propelled the vacuum pumps within the machine’s hull. 

Dowser slept, optic receptors off, while sipping water for the better part of two days; a measurement determined by the passing of Her Mind’s Eye, what Dowser’s master refers to as the sphere of wavering radiant energy that passes above the expanse of The Body. Perceived like many stars that serve as a source of warmth and growth in other galaxies, Her Mind’s Eye must also sleep. 

On the second night of Dowser’s acclamation of water, three flower-born Kylyy scouts had followed the placid-yet-mighty footsteps of the utility construct, and had become trapped beneath Dowser’s right mesh filtration system. The scouts were suffocated with silt and crushed by water and rocks that were blocked by the mesh filtration system. Only one beetlesteed escaped, but with no living Kylyy to return it, the steed ran aimless and flailing beyond the dunes. As the long night passed and Her Mind’s Eye finally blessed The Body with morning light and warmth, Dowser was remotely reactivated and retracted its hollowed-stone vacuum-pump leg into its torso module. Massive tanks of water were sealed within, and the construct became heavy, slow, and incredibly dangerous to those in its path. The great stone construct turned around and continued to the northwest, uncaring or perhaps unknowing of the landscape for which it trampled.

A grave and guilty static crackled from Dowser’s antennae. The construct stepped up and over dunes and eventually into the deep crater basin, carved from a long-passed mountain range by other constructs several star-patterns ago. 

After depositing the collected runoff and receiving a cleansing blast of solvent spirits from a construct designed for the preventative maintenance of constructs, Dowser returned to the site of the river that it had raked free, which flowed moreso in the days of the construct’s travel. Dowser would continue this seeking-and-acclimating until the storage tanks in Colossi Basin were full, and more were being constructed all the time. 

One afternoon, seven Kylyy scouts armed with long chutes riding stouter beetlesteeds happened upon another traveling water source that Dowser had stuck its vacuum cavity. Two of the scouts rode along the chasm, one leaping over the river, then they attacked the legs and were met with shattered shoulders and broken chutes. Three others attempted arrows but Dowser responded cold and unthreatened. They climbed to the top of its head, then were shaken off the increasingly hot plateau as the antennae vibrated the plate beneath the invaders. 

Four more invaders climbed to the top of its head, but three were tossed into shock and off the base by the violent quake and were unable to deploy their gliding leaves and petal wings to break their fall. A lone soldier had clung to the red-hot lead antennae base to the point of charring disentegration and became a standing pile of hot soot and plastycene mess, stuck permanently to the construct’s antenna. 

Countless days had passed. Day after tireless day, Dowser sought different underwater canals, unbothered by any accidental death it caused. It was decided that scraping the charred kylyy soldier from atop Dowser’s head was a task too meager to be dealt with at any given present. Perhaps a day would come when all constructs would be cleaned in great detail, every corner blasted with rough but massaging sands and ridding them all of dirt. The kylyy soldier would be cleansed in a perfect instant with a good deep-clean, every fan and fin and port and manifold blasted, maybe even polished, and cleaned deep in a newly-swapped solvent tank. The kylyy invader that so foolishly attempted to attack Dowser’s antenna would be dissolved into formless matter, vacuumed into a tall cylindrical tank that would fill up every seventy days or so, when another construct would remove the canister and pack it with the hungry microbes that live for eating and absorbing dust. The microbes grow to the size of a small frog, the dust and sand and garbage they accumulated is not wasted but absorbed and made into new cells, so every microbe becomes a new and different creature, unable to reproduce other than perhaps a severing of one of their strange fingered, or feathered, limbs, and is given the appropriate oils and nutrients to focus on eating more dirt and sand and garbage so that they could heal themselves into a new self, devoid of vanity altogether. Though Dowser’s master doesn’t much allow this in their massive basin stronghold. After the microbes eat the dirt and sand and garbage, a construct dumps the new creatures under the hot sun, and they are left to finding food with their own devices, although this usually means death in most instances. 

Needless to say, the charred kylyy would remain atop Dowser’s head for an undeterminable amount of time. That day had finally arrived, in the summer of 2238. It was impossible to tell if Dowser itself could determine the begrudging days of claiming and transporting water, but each and every Colossi construct complied with the scheduled sand-blasting, glass-polishing and solvent-cleansing as though they looked forward to the matter. The charred kylyy soldier would finally be rinsed, and the joints and gears and tracts cleaned and oiled for smooth, optimal work performance. 

None of the constructs within the large cavern-turned-auto shop had active running components. The procedure of deep cleaning would be a long one, and a group of angry kylyy had been watching Dowser’s arduous workload over the better part of a year, waiting for a day the constructs would let their guard down. It took a long time and they pushed their beetlesteeds to traverse the basin valley as fast as possible, eventually reaching the mouth of the cavern. There were no surveillance figures or any clear line of defense; the kylyy had greatly underestimated their impact on the construct over their last few attempts at warfare. Did they even realize that they had been attacked? one rather religious kylyy thought to herself. The group of forty kylyy invaders entered the cavernous garage, looked around at all of the constructs that had occupied it. There seemed to be no activity in this present room. The outer-elemental constructs stood on a conveyor track that moved slowly around the room and into the back shop that occupied most of the mountain canyon around. 

The recognized general of this squadron, a reluctant but strong willed and energetic leader named Aechmea Bromeliad had her squadron of fossilized-wood-armored specialists hitch their beetlesteeds just outside of the cavern and each member equipped an oxygen maximizer mask. Bromeliad led the way, feeling as though their attempts at being quiet were fairly futile. Why wouldn’t there be posted guards, or traps laid out for solicitors? Did the creator of all of these statue sentinels truly fear no enemy? Throughout this long journey Bromeliad felt as though there was nothing they could do to enact pain upon the tall mechanical beasts and that anybody sent on one of these missions were certainly destined to die. It seemed as though the Qyo-Kylyy people, as far as they had come, were just not built to fist-fight sentinels made out of mountains. In fact, members of her squadron had felt as though the courtesy of tactile silence throughout a research-and-destroy mission had dissolved into work-environment banter. She was losing their respect because the futility of the mission, paired with a great decrease in oxygen levels beyond the respiratory (and flatulent) exhaust of their beetlesteeds. The squadron was effectively, slowly, losing their minds.

“How many constructs do you think I gotta topple over to be able to go home?” a stout descendent of some old-redwood ancestry, but with rather attractive pink-orange petals growing from his collar and protecting his solid stature from the cold weather conditions, though it didn’t help as much as anyone had hoped. 

“I bet Aechmea is going to get all the credit, probably a spot up on the warm plateau above, if we even get back to the beetlesteeds at all.”

Bromeliad turned around and stood tall, the roots of her feet pushed hard against the slate ground to stand taller than everyone. “Hey, shut the hell up. If any of you try to run now, the Monos will have all of us killed even if I press forward into this damn cavern myself! Keep quiet and stop wasting your energy on sassing this mission.” Truth of the matter was that this was the only motivation for Bromeliad to press forward. There wouldn’t even be an argument to surviving a retreat. This was either a one-way mission as the past few have been, or we would somehow, impossibly, destroy every one of these constructs. This would most assuredly secure a tribute for all of them, The Body knows how long its been since Qyo has had a tribute for destroying Colossi.  

“Did the bosses give you anything at all to stand a chance?” said Akebia, one of the soldiers whose company Bromeliad wasn’t tired of, and she worried it reflected to her other troopers. 

Bromeliad let out an audible sigh. “Not really. Apart from everyone’s diamond-edged axes and my diamond spear we have about fifty black-powder bombs, and a handful of flares to ignite them with so we’ll have to be smart in how we place them.” She looked around the garage, observed hanging tools without luck, watched the conveyor carry the last of the constructs into the next room. The conveyor had an audible electric hum but ran smooth and otherwise noiselessly. 

“Something about a well-oiled machine, General?” joked Akebia, though Bromeliad said nothing and followed the slate steps up and left of the tracks. Everyone followed dutifully and the rise within Bromeliad urged her back into the mindset of a trained demolition-assassin she had been bred to become. All of us were selected by military overseers first and foremost as soon as the saplings emerged from our birthbulb, Bromeliad reminded herself. We must do our best to see this mission through and take back our sunny planes. 

The next room of the cavernous garage was much larger than the last. Hanging from tethers on steel tramline were mechanical limbs of every and all variety of the imagination. On one conveyor carried the torso cases, being removed by carefully-automated rubber-clad hands, slowly passing in and out of a large furnace where the limbs also passed through. Bromeliad inferred that the pieces were brought together and placed on a different conveyor that led to a cooling spot where the steel would shape around its molding template. Every new construct seemed to be built perfectly symmetrical. The heads weren’t anywhere to be seen. Bromeliad wondered how massive this cavern-garage canal system really was. 

A soldier towards the middle of the pilgrimage became existentially claustrophobic and hard-panicked. “There’s no way we can handle all of these bozos, we couldn’t even topple one construct let alone the whole damn factory! You’re on your own!”

Bromeliad paid no mind. As far as she was concerned the soldier would either die here or get lost and die in the desert. Probably become food to some exotic undomesticated moth or something. She said nothing, hoped that no one else would, but another soldier spoke up above their phlegm-defined insecure vocality. “Pothos! You can’t leave, you’ll never make it out there on your own!” Bromeliad turned around, her focus broken and her quiet, level-headed demeanor vanished. 

“Both of you, get back to formation! If either or both of you weedheads tries to unhitch a beetlesteed under the turmoil you’re in they’ll all try and break free and run.” She picked Pothos up off the ground with a single tough arm and patted his shoulders of dust. “Use those weird emotions to try and find a good spot to put these bombs. The conveyor ports may not be a bad idea, but we want to blow this place quick, so it might be in our best efforts to place them relatively close together to ignite a chain reaction. We may not blow the whole damn garage but it’ll be a start.” But will the constructs then come after us? she thought to herself, or would they simply fear us at that point and respect us? Knowing our congressional we won’t be the heroes of today, but there will be no heroes over the great length of time this would surely take to end. What was the end goal? This was no time to ask such questions, we must advance on the well-oiled machine. “Cart-puller, open up the canvas cover and ten of you take a bomb. Stand over by the turning point of the conveyor and wait for further instructions. You, you, you, you you and you, take a bomb and set them around that big totem in between the transfer area between here and the next room. Come back when you’re done and place a couple around that weird vacuum canister thing.” Bromeliad looked to where the half-assembled constructs passed into the next room and wondered how good of a job she should really do in this task. Initially she wanted to blast something and attempt to go back home, although the allure of stopping these massive constructs was a pride-filled prize she would normally never satiate over. 

“On second thought, everybody get to your positions. Everyone else grab a bomb and place them around the blasters and solvent tanks, but don’t remove your flares without my signal if you know what’s good for you. I’m taking a backpack with five bombs into the next room. I think that’s where the heads are built and assembled onto the rest of the bodies, so that’s going to be our initial blast point, got it? Don’t do anything until you hear the blast. Put the bombs in a formation leading to the assembly furnaces but only when you hear the first blast! Akebia, you’re with me.” The soldiers were silent, obeyed dutifully but watched with confusion as their general and a lieutenant grabbed a few bombs for a dangerous suicide mission.

This has been a suicide mission from the start, Bromeliad thought, and the idea had only fueled her steps. The Cavern was big but they were able to reach the next room without fatigue. With gas-powered hookshots they scaled the layered mountain-wall and waited to step on the conveyor, the heavy bombs weighing down their backs. From the last smelter the arms and legs were perfectly attached to the construct, and it burned red hot as it dangled by the harnesses connected to the tramline. The heat was almost too much to bear, but the general and the lieutenant scaled the sides of the opening big enough for this general size of construct to pass through to the head room. 

The head room, as she accurately theorized, was a central point where many caverns all round the mountain-range brought their area’s constructs to be repaired and upgraded. In this much, much larger shop than the last two, hundreds of tramlines carried headless constructs through a series of head installation constructs and put through a cooling bay to solidify their shapes. Hundreds of designs, some without heads or standard legs altogether but with wheels and just massive speakers and antennae. The sight overwhelmed them both, but a powerful wave of admiration washed over Bromeliad as she looked at the incredible craftsmanship of the enterprise. 

Who could be behind this? 

“General,” said Akebia “I know what you are thinking, but there is no time to admire the sight.”

Bromeliad turned her weary eyes to Akebia “There most certainly is. I have a camera, totally a prototype and not to be known by anyone other than you and me. It only has one shot, but I think if we can climb to the right angle--”

“Is this what it’s all about?” asked an irritated Akebia.

“No, not at all. I mean, we have to blow this place apart. There’s no question about it. Hemerocallis would never let us return without doing so. I just almost wonder if these constructs even notice us or if they’re doing nothing wrong.”

Akebia stared at Bromeliad for a long moment. “These constructs are made from these mountains themselves. From what I see, everything we know about these machines is true. They’re fully automated, built from mountain-material, and incredibly varied and dangerous. We already don’t stand a chance against them, imagine if we fail to blow them all up and they come after our canyon! It’s all we have, General. We don’t have the weaponry to even reload fast enough to handle the whole army!”

“What if there are more out there? We have no idea how big this world is. If we blow this place to bits and somehow survive long enough to get home and tell everybody about it, there’s still the possibility that this isn’t the only factory pumping out new sentinels. I’m just saying, if we can get a photograph of this scene we can show Monos Hemerocallis so we know what to look for when they come after us next. We really have no choice but to attack now, but I have to get a picture. It could change our world.” Bromeliad climbed the wall and hung off of a corner ledge, aimed the camera down and focused on the center structure, a massive head with many long and thin ports emitted passing lights in unfamiliar sequences. From the base outward were a few circular tiers of moving platforms that stood what seemed to be the standard construct model in varying sizes based on which platform they stood. Two legs. Two arms, with interchangeable hand modules. An antennae-capped head, complete a small tape-relay brain pattern within the head fixture. These were as tall as about ten average-sized kylyy, though nobody truly knew what that meant. Behind the central head, much larger constructs were being built in stranger forms, being brought in and out one of five larger bay doors that led deeper into the mountain factory-city. Bromeliad took a breath and a loud flash erupted from the camera, solidifying the image within the burnt-but-not-dead biological camera, whose flash burst from the cells of the petals being ignited all at once. The image would be stored, processed, and transmitted once taken back to the developer facility in Qyo-Canyon. 

When Bromeliad packed the flower-camera up and climbed back down to the lower-level slate, Akebia was gone. Bromeliad panicked, looked around to any obvious form of getting around, followed the slate down to the lower level, far below the hanging constructs along the tramlines, where mounds of metal shavings and pools of oil and ovi  and dirt fell and sat presumably until a vacuum construct collected it all. Akebia was climbing a tall mound of metal shavings along the side of the lower-level room with the gated ceiling and grabbed hold of the metal gate. She climbed to the center of the room, where all gated floors met and placed the bombs the best she could within the grates, just below the centermost headpiece.

“Akebia, you don’t even know if that will set anything off or if it will even break that steel construct, get those bombs and get back here now!” 

“If you want to set off a chain reaction I suggest you place your bombs between the moving platforms. We might have a shot at getting this done.”

“Pull the damn bombs, Akebia. Now.” Akebia crawled through the grate and better positioned the bombs within the casing of the head itself. Bromeliad cursed and ran back up the slatestone ramp, treaded lightly across the patchy grate and waited for passing construct traffic to pass by. She reached the moving conveyor of nearly-completed constructs that passed around the centermost head figure, though it wasn’t until now that she knew why. She planted her two bombs on a static piece of steel in between the platforms in hopes to topple the lifeless constructs forward into the main hub-head itself. Maybe such an impact paired with Akebia’s awol placement would cause quite a bang, Bromeliad thought. “Get out of that grate and shoot the bombs, you pain in the pistil,” she ordered.

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Thelym carried the bomb with worn arms. “You gonna make it?” his travel buddy Iferum asked as they heaved them towards the sandblasters. The line for the blasters was slow and it still had many to get through in this wave of dirty labor constructs. 

“Yeah, I think so,” said Thelym with a forced smile. He hated this mission and hoped it would be over soon, but the feeling he had the entire pilgrimage wasn’t an optimistic one. How do I stand against a construct? he thought to himself. These missions are useless, he continued to spiral. “Should I just place this by its feet?”

“I don’t know, I’m not so sure that’s the best, most optimal spot for blowing one of these things up. Why don‘t we just blow up the sand blaster?” 

Thelym hated conflict, but turned the idea down: “Then it would only take away the construct’s ability to get clean. The bomb won’t hurt anything except whatever construct is in the sandblaster at this very moment.”

Iferum was confused. “That’s what a sandblaster is for? Huh.” 

Thelym packed the bomb he had and decided to climb the construct. I wonder if everyone thought it was just as eery that none of the constructs were on and operating, other than the factory machines themselves that cleaned and built and rebuilt the constructs. The climb was higher than he had imagined, but he made it to the neckline and placed a bomb within. The bomb clumsily fell into the cracks of the construct and became lodged within the center, pierced the outer shell and began leaking black powder from the torso of the construct to the ground. Thelym felt even more ashamed then before, and stood on the shoulder of the construct for a long moment.

“Well,” Iferum said “it was worth a try, I guess.” Before deciding to slide down the leg of the construct Thelym looked around its surroundings. At this very point in time the constructs really had no aggressive tendencies, and in fact were absolutely just tools for use by a person from a remote location, and they simply weren’t activating and using these particular models at the current time. Something caught Thelym’s anther-eyes, and it decided to climb the rest of the way, to the top of the construct’s head. “What are you doing, Thelym? I don’t know if that’s a great idea or not...” 

Upon reaching the top of this particular colossi, Thelym had pulled himself up and was brushing off his petals when he saw a terrifying sight and fell backward. A charred, sticky kylyy body stood standing, glued to the top of the colossi beast, with a look on its face of incredible and utter agony. Thelym hyperventilated and rolled off the edge of the colossi’s head. Its petal was caught on a steel panel that jutted out further than it was designed for, and though it ripped the petal itself it broke Thelym’s fall; however, it was almost time for Dowser’s sandblast treatment. 

Iferum yelled for his friend. “We’re coming for you, Thelym! Hold on!” Thelym was in pain, and knew he wouldn’t make it out of this alive. The sandblaster stopped, expelled the previous construct and led it to the polishing station, and Dowser was turned from one conveyor onto another with Thelym hanging by his petal at its side.  As soon as the door shut with the construct and the helpless kylyy the vacuum started, the outer steel enclosure burst open with a loud and musical metal shriek. Iferum had thrown a bomb and shot it with a flare, causing it to explode the metal hull of the sandblaster and simultaneously sparked the spot of black powder from Thelym’s leaky bomb, which sent three kylyy soldiers flying as flame-engulfed twigs. The bomb within Dowser’s chest cavity ignited and sent it flying backwards into the cavern wall with great impact. 

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Bromeliad heard an explosion, but it did not come from Akebia’s flare or bomb placement. This was from the other room, one of her soldiers acted out of boredom or some striving force for dominance over this troop, and now they’ve started their chain reaction. 

“Akebia, hurry, we gotta go now!” Bromeliad called after her, wondering how long before the colossi woke up and started pursuing the kylyy invaders. 

“You might be safer down here, general, those bombs are going to go off soon and you don’t want to be near the conveyor when they do!”  Akebia cried back. Ultimately Bromeliad agreed and chased Akebia down underneath the main surface grate. She immediately began having second thoughts about the idea, but the blasts were increasing next door, until they became closer and closer and blasted the wall separating them and the conveyor entrances and exits became derailed and sent constructs toppling into the center of the cavern basin. The constructs crushed the grate, with Akebia inside, and nearly clipped Bromeliad into a similar fate. The bombs they planted blasted sequentially as they had hoped. Quickening tempo, the last four decimated the moving platforms holding the finished constructs and exploded the centermost head from inside-bottom. The smell of burning iron oxide filled the room, and the loud blasts lasted only a few short moments. Certainly that wasn’t all of the bombs, but part of her wondered if a series of accidental occurrences led to this disappointing attack. She climbed the slatestone ramp and followed the safest pieces of steel grate leading to the center. 

Constructs were toppled and smashed to pieces, but not totaled by any means. Whoever builds these constructs would probably have the time and energy to build other constructs to fix and restore them. What we did here today only harms ourselves. 

Even after all of this violence, no colossi has awakened, Bromeliad thought to herself in a manner of immense futility. We blasted the central hub into inoperability, or at least it seemed as though a successful mission despite losing her best soldier, and possibly more. She scaled the lower-torso looked inside the blasted innards of a fallen construct, stood on top for a contemplative moment, doing her best to ignore the scent of hot metallic shavings. She closed her anther-eyes and focused her thoughts intently out into the joining workshop they had originated from in hopes of reaching any remaining member of her squadron, but she heard nothing. The general felt no presence from anyone and wondered if they had all really died in an accidental bomb-cart mega-explosion, or if a construct fell on top of them. It was possible enough that they just ran away, willfully becoming missing-in-action to live away from the hard labors of the lower class they had been pulled from and given diamond-axes and a cart full of explosives. 

Bromeliad climbed back down the torso of the construct and walked into the previous garage. The conveyor belt had jammed with shrapnel from the torso assembly cabinet; another successful bomb placement. Smoke and dust filled the room from the sandblaster vacuum filter that had been burned and ripped to threads. Bromeliad covered her mouth and climbed down from the broken conveyor, studied the scene, vomited until she passed out from the found mess of madness within the cavernous shop. Upon waking, she mustered the courage to salvage what provisions she could from the smeared vegetation remains of her soldiers and slowly, thoughtfully, headed for the mouth of the cavern. 

Every beetlesteed was gone from its hitching post. Either a few surviving troopers unhitched them all and let them run free or they attempted to travel with multiple in a party, in any case Bromeliad was left without transport. With nothing else, and extremely limited in supplies, she dug her wooden feet into the pink dirt beneath, closed her anther eyes so that the setting brilliant orb of Her Mind’s Eye warmed her entire anther-optic system, down to the core of her stamin. She stood relaxed, tall and straight, knowing that nothing around would harm her other than the venom of aimlessly maneuvering the barren lands that would travel forever. An influx of happiness surged through her as she stood and blended with the grand and beautiful scenery about, each red rocky mountain and coral-pink dune made for infinite melodies to the eye, changing its dynamic quality with the shaping winds of time. No one would ever have the opportunity to revert back to plant-thought where the sustenance of the environment was plenty for a silent blade of grass. Bromeliad felt as one with her ancestors at this moment and would never let go of this spot at the mouth of a forgotten canyon.