What I know is that the Void used to be much bigger than it is now, infinite expanses of nothing, populated with eight crystal behemoths, or sometimes twelve, or seven. I have heard that you could not see one side of them while looking at the other. I have heard entire cities could have been built in a single eye socket, and that Ravener’s Ridge, the towering mountains that sometimes split the Void in two, is what remains of the tenth behemoth’s spine, and that the leviathan seas at the eastern edge formed from their footprints in soft soil.

I used to wonder how anything so large could survive, what it ate, how it moved without collapsing on itself, but I think the Void was a less savage place in their time. Not pleasant, not kind, but not as hungry. Not as vicious. I cannot help but wonder if they existed because of that fact, or if it was like that because they existed. I suspect it was the latter.

I am told the Void was not divided back then, not shattered and shifting, not splintered at its core. That the behemoths were able to wander infinity in slow, lumbering strides, and that communities of all sorts formed and fell below them, between one step and the next. They did not consume or create anything, but consumption and creation followed in their wake. Moretta says that when the constructs brought the behemoths to the ground, creation ceased and the Void began to consume itself. I asked her, once, how something infinite could become smaller. I will spare you the answer.

One of the Collectors will speak of the behemoth’s return, for the right price. I should not have paid it, but I needed the information. It told me that the behemoths that wander the crystalspines now will never stop growing. That, if the Void can contain the constructs within the fifth forest, behemoths will once again freely travel the Void. It told me not to hold my breath, as if it mattered whether I did, because the Unraveller would not allow this to pass, that he would find a way to outwit the Void and release his creations once again.

A long time ago, I would not have believed the Collector, but I have seen the small constructs now. I have witnessed a loop gate snare a void beast. I have seen the rotting corpses of leviathan dragged to the shore of their seas.

Some say that the Crystalspine forests are proof that the Void is collapsing in on itself. They say that it is endless and infinite and dying. They say that the Void was bigger, once - if such a thing may be said of a place which would dizzy an ouroboros - and that it was once filled with creatures so immense as to be unfathomable. The Crystalspine forests are what is left of them, the faceted, shimmering bones of denizens long gone.

They are not as long gone as some would have you believe, but it takes time to grow to that size. The behemoths which wander those forests are their descendants, a hatch from so long ago in the future that none left remember their advent.

They are made of the same crystal as their forests, their legs so similar to the trunks they walk amongst that they are often mistaken as inanimate when they fall still. In each of their bellies twists a burning core, a small sun- this is where the light in the forests comes from. Stick to the shadows, for once. The cores will burn blue or purple, except in the fifth forest- their cores are orange or green or sometimes black, if they were built instead of born. Avoid those ones. It’s better you do not know why.

Do not look up while in any of their forests, or you will find a maw full of obsidian-shard teeth stretching down, surrounded by ten thousand jaundiced eyes, all fixed upon you. It is too late then. Do not run- there is nowhere to go. Do not look away. Do not blink.