Now, Darian’s guardian, Doctor Waeko, had a child one year and named him Borbus. The child was conceived in a twisted sex ceremony Waeko performed with a poor woman in his congregation, but he loved him dearly and his priestly duties were often affected because of him. But as he grew up, Borbus became very obese, so much so that his limbs were buried in rolls almost up to his knees and elbows. One day, while he was eating (as he seemed to do most of the time), he choked on a piece of ham and died. Waeko was overcome with grief and in the early light of dawn he called a meeting in the Naham Temple of the Peitho Kephale. He addressed his congregation and explained that the almighty Alaliaq loved them very much and wished for them to join him in eternal paradise. So he had his henchmen bar the doors, cover the whole place in oil, and then lit it with torches. And so, all the members of the Peitho Kephale died that day as the temple burned down.
         Darian was thirty-one years old when this happened (about eighteen on Earth) and he knew that day what Doctor Waeko had planned to do. When the meeting was called, he ran off into the hills. There he sat and watched as the temple, along with everyone he knew trapped inside, perished.
         When all the fires had died out and the smoke cleared, Darian walked down to the village and walked amid the smouldering rubble of the former Naham Temple. He walked through the ashes amidst the charred bodies of the people and fell to his knees.
         ‘Why?!’ he cried, ‘Must I be damned to depravity for all my days? Will there ever be any glory for the orphan boy from Earth?’ And there he wept, for there was no future for him. But, then, he heard a noise and turned around. And a voice spoke, sounding like a computer or android of some sort.
         ‘You do not have to be damned to depravity forever,’ it said, ‘I can show you glory greater than you have ever imagined.’ Darian looked around, and out of the ashes he dug out a large, cylindrical jar with a pale, white head in it attached to artificial tubing at the spine. Though he never seen it before, he knew it at once to be Alaliaq. It spoke again.
         ‘Do you not want this glory, of which I speak?’
         ‘Y-yes,’ stuttered Darian, not quite knowing how to respond to this head-in-a-jar, ‘but what am I to do to gain such glory?’
         ‘Take me with you,’ said the pale head, ‘and go wherever I command you.’
         Darian picked up the pickled head and stood up as he surveyed the land, the gales of the windy moon blowing the smoke and ash in thick black columns. He asked, ‘Where am I to go?’ to which the head answered.
         ‘Follow the mountains south, past the Anician Sea and the lands of Mesomara to the Great Salt Desert of Sitnalta. There you will find the ruins of Arufara. Take me there, my boy.’
         And so, with the head of the mighty Alaliaq rested firmly in his arm, Darian set off down the valley. Now, on Epaphus, one day from sunrise to sunrise is about the same length as eight on Earth. It was early morning when Darian had set off from Naham and by the time he had reached the Ogalapich River twelve hours later, the sun was still low in the morning sky but he was ready to expire. So, after taking a good long drink from the river and eating some roots of cattails he found growing in the shallows, he curled up in the sparse grass.
         When he awoke, Darian judged from the sun, now higher in the sky, and the great bulk of the planet Thoriam now shrinking from half a disc into a crescent, that he had slept for eight hours. After eating a small breakfast of cattail roots and stuffing his pockets with more for later, he picked up the jar that was the almighty Alaliaq, and headed in a direction south-east, away from the mountains where he knew there was ranchlands and - he hoped - food. For another fifteen hours he walked across the sparse shrubland, resting only a few times to eat, before stopping once more to sleep, once again on the cold, rocky ground. The sun was now high in the sky and Thoriam was nowhere to be seen, the planet showing only it’s dark side to it’s windy moon at this time of the long-day. When he woke again, Darian walked yet another fifteen hours and slept again on the ground.