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.

The strange sound was intermittent, arrhythmic and soft. It was not quite musical but it was built on minor chords that gave it a wistful ghostly quality. Whatever it was, the noise seemed to spook Suak. The alegoyle circled low and wide at the base of the hills but would not follow Klane when he began to climb the slopes of Ulumol. 

"Do not venture onto the moor and do not go near the crater," he had been warned by a loquacious Rider who had once lived in the ill fated settlement. "The creature will show no mercy. It is a great fearsome beast of a kind none have seen elsewhere. It flies like an alegoyle but whilst they can usually be scared off with spears and bows, this thing is much bigger and it is intelligent too, for it can fight with fire and with other terrible weapons. It took three of the fairest of our maidens back to its lair in the crater and we have not seen them since. We could not resist and we had to flee." 

"I shall go there and see for myself," Klane had proclaimed boldly at that distant campfire, provoking only uneasy smiles from his listeners. Now with eldritch sounds on the breeze and the reality before him, Klane felt more than a little uneasy himself, but he was a determined young man and curiosity drove him forward. The crater was not hard to find. Above the course of a shallow stream bed was a stand of small firs and the bare branches of birch and ash trees now stripped of their leaves. The lip of the bowl could be seen, modelled in the evening sunlight and Klane approached it cautiously as dusk was falling.

Leaving Lyr loosely tethered to the branches of an ash tree, Klane scrambled up a short slope and looked down over the rim of the crater. 

Although unfamiliar in detail, Klane recognised at once that he was looking at the products of an advanced technology. The creature's lair was a sort of base, protected by a rectangular perimeter fence and containing a short squat building at one end and a tall metallic tower at the other. All this was completely outside the range of experience of a typical Rider, but Klane had been brought up amongst Enclave machinery in Kalonia and he had seen something similar when he journeyed to the Beacon Of Ulon. He tried to remember all the things Crinomu has told him and the lessons he had received from the seers at the station. Was it even possible that the tower was some kind of space ship? The bottom of the crater looked deserted. Where was the creature? Or was the creature just an invention by the Riders to justify their fear and their abandonment of the settlement? Perhaps there was no creature. Perhaps the Riders in their primitive ignorance had mistaken advanced technology for a creature? But then what about the kidnapped girls? Or was that just invention too? So many questions... 

Klane was on the point of considering a closer approach when he became aware of a mechanical thrashing sound behind him, growing rapidly louder. The creature was no invention of the Riders. Its sensors had detected his approach long before he climbed the crater rim and it had the advantage over him. Twisting round to face it, Klane found the monster almost upon him!

At first Klane could make no sense of the rapidly approaching object except to feel considerable alarm as it came straight towards him. Was it an animal or a machine? A large scaly form like some giant snake was twisting about the axis of a metal frame surmounted by a noisy whirling rotor blade. As it drew closer he realised that it was both an animal and a machine; a heavy creature hanging in loops from the struts of a flying vehicle. When the beast shifted the coils of its body round and through the interstices of the framework, the lightweight craft pitched and lurched in his direction. A large toothy head and wide eyes held him in its sight and he noticed the barrels of strange guns pointing right at him. 

Then came a painful pulse of energy which threw him off his feet. The klane flew out of his right hand and he found himself tumbling through the air and into the crater. A second blast stunned him even as he was falling and he hit the ground hard and rolled downhill barely conscious. Before he could recover, a projectile net fired from the gyrocopter had wrapped him in a fine silken web which completely immobilised him. With every nerve screaming in pain, he could do nothing but watch and suffer as the creature landed and slithered to the ground, securing him tightly with the dexterous coils of its body, then lifting him into the air and transporting him down to the base. 

Klane Kalonia was a prisoner of the creature in the crater.