The Burden

The host

Custodian was identified as: Llama's porter partner. Approach accordingly — the objective is recovery, not destruction.

The host was Llama's first traveling partner — an older porter who taught Llama every route, every rhythm, every lesson about patience the plateau has to offer. The plateau shepherds call the taking the Drying's Tithe: when the buried circulation fails, the monoliths demand a keeper, and the flocks accept it with stoic grief.

There was no single disappearance. The porter got slower and slower over the years, and one day on the plateau, stopped moving entirely. Llama thought they died of exhaustion and mourned. Llama has been carrying supplies past their partner's petrified machine-form on every trip since, not knowing.

The Burden is a giant mechanical camel — a gravity anchor and dry pump guardian that increases weight, crushes persistence, and holds the last moisture in channels that feed Farm Town instead of the plain. Its crushing gravity field has a rhythm, and Llama recognizes it: the partner's walking pace, dragging water away from home one step at a time.