The First Sleeper

The skeleton of a colossus half-sunk in the high-desert pan east of the Vale — a man stands no taller than its pinkie finger; you can walk into the cup of its skull. The Korl name it their first ancestor.

It lies on its back in the open sage steppe, face to the sky, so vast that the ribs arc up like the rafters of a roofless hall and a band of riders can shelter in the hollow of its skull. The wind has stripped the sand off the upper bone and packed it round the lower, so the giant seems forever in the act of rising and never quite doing it. The Korl, the big folk of the high passes, say it is the First of them — the one who lay down when the world was young and let the desert keep him. The Ashwalkers give it a wider berth than the heat alone would explain, and leave a finger-bone of their own dead among its phalanges when they pass, so the Sleeper will not mistake them for prey when it finally sits up.