The legends of Klane Kalonia are a mixed bag of truth, of fecund invention, of allegory and of parable. They are often inconsistent in style and in content. They have many authors and in an important sense they have none, for they properly belong to that age known as 'The Great Forgetting' and 'The Season Of Innocence' when writing was abjured and in its stead were only the many rich and varied strands of an oral tradition through which they were transmitted and transmuted for uncounted years without any formal transcription. All serious scholars must be cautious when interpreting this wealth of material yet there is no doubt that nuggets of significant historical detail are buried within the legends. The story I am about to tell you traditionally belongs near the beginning of the oldest established canon. Here then, is the orthodox version of the tale of Klane Kalonia and the Creature in the Crater as it was finally written down by the scribes of the Court of Sunrise at Aberstone, at a date thought to be approximately forty years into the New Foundation era. -------- When Klane Kalonia was young he wandered far over the wild lands of the ancient Earth, sometimes falling in with groups of Riders and helping them to herd sheep or cattle but more often travelling alone to roam where he willed. It was a quiet world with few people to disturb the empty grasslands and the long peace of the Season of Innocence yet it had its dangers. Klane was not a rich man. He sold Paramal, the old horse which had once belonged to his mother's first husband. This provided him with a little local currency. He worked when he needed to, lived off the land at other times and sometimes went hungry when he could do neither. His faithful steed Lyr and the alegoyle Suak were his constant companions. Hardened by travel, his skills in horsemanship were honed until he was the equal of all but the finest Riders. With Suak, the aerial predator, he had a special bond forged from the egg and refined over time through coded whistles and gestures into a kind of language unique on Earth. Nor did he neglect to practice with the klane, that alien hybrid of tool and weapon from which he had taken his own name. The klane was all he had left to remember Crinomu, the man he had thought of as his father and Kalonia, the doomed Station of Seers where he was born and raised. From his mother, Orietta, who had perished with the Station, he had nothing save the skills she had taught him and the knowledge of Rider life and lore she had passed on to him. Ever and anon as he crossed the high downs and the deep forests he brooded on the fate of Kalonia and of how he might revenge himself on Trassamul, the Enclave that had plotted to destroy his home and kill his family and on Gyrun the traitor who had given them the means to succeed. Such musings were idle for he had no way of knowing where Trassamul or Gyrun might be or any proper idea of how to fight them. He was only one man pitted against an entire advanced culture that kept itself secret and aloof living parallel lives to the pastoral Riders but distanced and detached by the design of the long departed Guardians of Earth. So the young orphan kept his own thoughts as secret as theirs, listened carefully, observed much, learned more and practiced patience. There was a winter after an autumn of spare harvests and cold rains when Klane Kalonia crossed the Glass Lands south of the river Telaroll. Here the low sun glitters amongst shocked crystalline blocks and fluid forms like hills of ice where a great city melted in a war of an age long forgotten. Beyond the Glass Lands the moors of Ulumol rise - green, bleak and lonely. Klane had heard strange tales about these moors. Once there was a Rider settlement not far from the Glass Lands but it had been abandoned last summer. Something terrible had come to the moors and was said to be living in a crater high in the hills. Now as he came to the end of the Glass Lands, Klane heard a faint whispering whistle on the wind that chilled him to the bone.