text: Two hundred and eighty-six feet above the forest floor, Tavaaris dangled from a rope. The leather of his harness creaked gently as it held him, and the Old Steel used to fashion the hardpoints had never been known to fail. All that being said, Tavaaris hated heights. He continued to mutter prayers to his forebears as he tried to muster the resolve to continue up the corpse he was scaling, anxiously rubbing one of the many charms between thumb and forefinger he had tied to himself. Tavaaris’ world was a new one. His people had come forth from ancient crypts, facing a sky ablaze and frozen lakes, corpse-strewn forests and shattered mountains. The wisewomen had claimed that as Tavaaris’ people had been born, so too had the planet, though the world’s birth was a difficult one, wreathed in flame and death. His people hid below while the heavens wailed and gnashed. Very few survived this period, or so he was told. But that was long ago. The world now enjoyed skies of purest white, and the air smelled sweet, although no sound made it this far up - save the furious beat of his heart in his chest, as he tried to calm his frayed nerves. He inhaled, focused on the silence, and closed his eyes a moment, letting go of the charm and steeling himself. Staying here wasted valuable time, so he gripped the rope and resumed his ascent. His village regularly sent out explorers and treasure-seekers to map the world and bring back valuable objects - Like the Old Steel of his harness - which is how he found himself this far up in the air in the first place. It’s known that many objects of interest can be found in places strange and common, but the truly spectacular finds always came from the world-corpse; ancient, rotting remains of a man the size of a mountain, wrought entirely from Old Steel, and located in the center of some of the most treacherous terrain the world offered, among mountains torn in half and boiling lakes of poison. It was not a journey for the faint of heart, and this was Tavaaris’ second time here; not enough to shake the feeling of anxiety that came with every few feet he ascended. The world-corpse was a functional mountain edifice; sheer cliffs going up hundreds of feet, ecosystems and floral biomes occurring within and without of the steel. Trees blossomed on the exterior, vines crept along limbs larger than can be imagined. It was unclear to Tavaaris if the creature had ever lived, or if it was a monument of some kind. He did know that nothing lived near here aside from plants - not a single creature called the miles surrounding the world-corpse its home. The approach to the corpse was both near-fatal from the hazards, and funereal in silence. Up and up his ascent took him. The entrance to the world-corpses’ innards took place through a shattered glass plate about 500 feet off the ground. The hole itself was three times again Tavaaris’ height, and the opening was practically a needle-hole, relative to the scale of the world-corpse itself. His people had tried to create easier entrances on some of their expeditions here over the many years of journeys, but the Old Steel had never acquiesced to the insistence of their cutting or bashing tools. As he ascended, Tavaaris ruminated on his extreme fortune; He had never been particularly good with contributing to his tribe in the capacity of a community leader or organizer, and he had little interest in family. All told, the fact he could grow his people’s prosperity via clever use of bow, his eyes, and courage beat exile any day of the week. He pulled himself into the cavernous hall atop the world-corpse. Even after hundreds of years, nature still did not dare to intrude. The smallest of lichens and thinnest vines had crept up the colossal body and could be seen tiptoeing - or the plantlife equivalent - into the interior. Shattered glass, torn steel, and the endless colored thin serpentine shapes bursting from the walls in repose defined the room. Old Steel made plants flee at its presence. There are few things darker - and more terrifying - than the inky black of the inside of a cavern, and the world-corpses’ innards were no different. He squatted down in the hall, removing his pack, and retrieving the components of a torch; wooden handle, expendable cloth, jar of oil, and flintstone. Seconds later, the room blossomed into a comforting orange light. The features of the room hidden in shadow crept into view; jagged columns of Old Steel, short and square. The remains of a few camps that had once been set up here, now rotted into uselessness. The ceiling remained out of view, being about 5 times taller than Tavaaris was, he recalled from his previous trip. His anxiety ratcheting down, the perception of scent came to him slowly; the specific smell of the world-corpse could not be mistaken: Dust, earth, petrichor, oil and metal, and something else. Not blood, not food, not someone from his tribe, but something acrid and sweet and poisonous. It was here the last time he ascended the world-corpse, and it didn’t bring him harm then. He let it fade into the background of his perception. The inside of the world-corpse existed outside of time, outside of the necessary rhythmic cycle of Ta rise and Ta fall, of sleep and shared meals and working. Minutes could be hours, hours could be seconds, and he found it critical to make time to assess the needs of his body in the moments of quiet between ascent and descent down the corpse’s spine, or pulling unfamiliar artifacts from its blackened bowels, rooms the size of a generation house in his village. He started to make camp. The throat of the corpse laid at the back of the vast hall he was in, a vast vertical tunnel that he had never seen the bottom of, about seven times his height in diameter by his estimation. It was from this central shaft he had previously accessed the manifold rooms on his previous excursion, and it was down this column he intended to descend once more to pull more valuable finds for his people; useful shards of Old Steel or other exotic materials for weapons or to protect the village from storms. Sometimes he would find whole tools, such as the fire-blade he discovered last time, with a short, narrow blue flame out of a tin neck that was hotter that any fire he had made or had heard of. Slabs or bricks of Old Steel enchanted to repulse metal from it were everywhere in the World Corpse, but due to their weight, he could only bring back one or two per excursion. He was offered a tidy sum for each, though. He settled into the small camp he had built, lit by a now-sputtering torch, and prepared to rest in preparation for his journey into the poisonous, stygian innards of the world-corpse. Tired from his trip up, sleep quickly approached. His last thought before drifting off occurred too late to keep him awake with its implications; exhaustion muting the question under a blanket of sleep.