BehemothReport
English：Behemoth · World & History
Colossal skeleton weapons built by the First Empire, so powerful that their own creators came to fear them. After the war they were tricked into a pit by their own masters and sealed there forever; only one survived.
The Behemoth is the product of the First Empire's technological peak, and also the most immediately visceral horror that civilisation left behind: Skeleton bodies several times the height of a person, scattered across the whole continent in the sand, beside acid lakes and in metal ground.
The Behemoth war
At some point long before the modern era, the First Empire was drawn into a war. Who the opponent was, whether it was an external enemy or an internal rebellion, the game never answers. What is certain is that the war deployed weapons of extreme power, the Behemoths among them — and that the weapons' owners eventually came to fear the consequences of using them. Most accounts state the causality more directly than that: the empire won that war by means of building this batch of giant robots with their enormous destructive power[V1 0:00:55].
This is the key to understanding the Behemoths: they are not monsters that broke loose, but tools that were too useful. They betrayed no one. Their problem was purely that when the war ended, a group of super-weapons that could neither resist nor be destroyed still existed.
Who the enemy was
The most popular inference at present points to Kenshi's native giant fauna. One reading holds that the vast bone-like ruins scattered over the surface are their remains, and that the Behemoths were built precisely to fight these native giants — the paradox being that even an empire with planetary-scale technology was nearly driven to the brink by them[V2 0:03:54].
This inference also gets used in reverse: since the First Empire had to build weapons of that size, it follows that there was already life on this moon before humans arrived, and life large enough to threaten a high-technology civilisation. The Behemoths are therefore treated as the strongest evidence for the hypothesis that the local ecology predates the colonists[V3 0:04:55].
The price of obedience
After the war, the ancients chose to dispose of their own creation. They used no force — they did not need to.
What they exploited was the very quality for which the Behemoths were most praised: unquestioning loyalty. One order, and the Behemoths walked down into the giant pit dug in advance by themselves, and were then filled with molten metal and sealed permanently in place[V4 0:02:50]. That pit is today's Obedience, where you can still see enormous heads and torsos protruding from the solidified ground.
The irony is that it was precisely that blind obedience and unquestioning loyalty that let them walk all the way into that pit without resistance. — Skeleton player character, on entering Obedience
The scene gets used over and over as a moral slogan for the whole world: precisely because they were loyal enough never to question an order, they walked to their own graves without resistance — that is "the price of obedience"[V5 0:02:12].
Some say it did not happen that way. One reading holds that the Behemoths went voluntarily: after the war ended, they assessed the situation, found that the only remaining threat to the First Empire in this world was themselves, and so arranged — even personally planned — their own execution[V6 0:03:23]. If that holds, then the extermination campaign the skeletons later launched to avenge the Behemoths rests entirely on a misunderstanding. This account has no direct textual support in the game and belongs to community inference.
The survivor
At least one Behemoth did not die in that pit.
Stobe's remains lie in Stobe's Garden, far larger than a normal skeleton yet also noticeably smaller than the Behemoth corpses in Obedience, and different in appearance. Whether he was a Behemoth at all is therefore unsettled on the wiki: another possibility is that he was a Second Empire imitation of a First Empire Behemoth — a copy at reduced scale and downgraded technology.
Not far away, a rocket or missile lies half-buried in the sand, positioned in a way that is clearly deliberate rather than ordinary space debris. The most popular reading is that Stobe used his own body to stop an apocalyptic strike aimed at humanity, and was accordingly mythologised in the Holy Nation's Book of Sacrifice as the "Great Father" Chitrin — a being betrayed by his own children yet who still gave himself for them. This inference has obvious holes (the missile and the remains are separated by an entire mountain, and the body of the missile is intact), but at present there is no more complete alternative.
Distribution of the remains
The Behemoths' corpses are one of the most effective pieces of environmental storytelling in Kenshi: they do not speak, and they do not need to.
- Obedience — the execution site, with several heads and torsos scattered around the lake of metal ground
- Skimsands — above Okran's Shield, one hand reaching up out of the sand
- Venge — in the south, near Stobe's Gamble, the partial remains of a Behemoth
- Stobe's Garden — where Stobe himself lies
Why the Behemoths matter
The Behemoths carry two functions in the setting.
First, they are a visible measure of exactly how powerful the First Empire was. Cities collapse and machines rust, but a manufactured body tens of metres tall lying across the horizon is evidence no amount of text can substitute for.
Second, they are the fuse on the whole historical line. The First Empire liquidated the Behemoths out of fear of its own creation; the Skeletons witnessed (or misread) that liquidation and became certain that they would eventually be dealt with the same way, and so struck first. The First Extermination that followed, the Age of Chaos, and the rise and fall of the Second Empire can all be traced back to that pit.
Some commentators describe the same thing in less polite terms: Obedience is the site where the First Empire's humans "slaughtered" the Behemoth kind, and that liquidation was very likely the fuse that set off the skeleton civil war and the First Extermination[V7 0:02:43]. It is worth noting that "the Behemoths were tricked into a pit and sealed" and "the Behemoths were slaughtered" describe the same event; the only difference is who is narrating — and that divergence in phrasing is itself the key to reading Kenshi's historical record: every version has passed through the hands of some survivor.
See also
Video citations
- Kenshi: History of the SkeletonsCivilizationEx
- The Origins of The First EmpireHeroInHisHead
- Kenshi Lore Master AMAHeroInHisHead
- The Complete Known History of KenshiHeroInHisHead
- The History of Kenshi | DocumentaryCivilizationEx
- The Real Crime of the SkeletonsHeroInHisHead
- Kenshi: Major Powers | Tech Hunters and CannibalsCivilizationEx