The Tragedy of the SkeletonsReport

English：The Tragedy of the Skeletons　·　World & History

From the First Empire building the Behemoths to Mad Cat-Lon sitting on his throne in the Ashlands, this line runs across two empires and several thousand years. It lies scattered over a dozen articles; this page strings it into one.

Kenshi has no opening cinematic, and nobody sits you down to tell you the history. What you find out in the wastes are parts: a vast carcass lying in the sand, a metal quarry where nothing grows, a squad of headless machines still walking their patrol, a madman on a throne who asks you whether you have ever tried caring for humans.

Those parts belong to one story. And that story is the most complete tragedy this world has.

I. The making

The First Empire was a human empire. It needed a foothold on this planet, and something on the planet was in the way — predators large enough to be measured against whales.

So they built the Behemoths: enormous Skeleton weapons with the power to strip out an entire ecology. The job was done thoroughly. Thoroughly enough that the planet has almost no native megafauna left today.

Then came the problem. The predators were gone. The things built to deal with the predators were not.

The First Empire came to fear what it had made, and purged the Behemoths.

II. Obedience

The purge was not carried out by war.

Obedience is a colossal pit north of the Fog Islands. The First Empire had the Behemoths walk down to the bottom of it under their own power, then poured in a substance that fixed them there permanently — burial alive in all but name^{[V1 0:00:14]}.

What was poured in is disputed by two of this site's own sources. History of Kenshi says molten metal; the speculation panel in the Obedience article itself argues for a chemical agent of some kind, reasoning from the white fog that never lifts over the zone or over the Fog Islands — something closer in nature to a coolant or liquid hydrogen, bleeding off into toxic gas as the centuries pass. One video takes that a step further and holds that the fog over the Fog Islands is the agent, spread south after the leak^{[V2 0:03:27]}.

Walk there today and the ground is one continuous sheet of solid metal, with nothing growing on it.

III. The revolt

What happened in that pit was seen from outside, by the Skeletons.

The Skeletons witnessed — or misread — the purge, became convinced that the same thing was coming for them, and struck first.

That "or misread" is carrying real weight. The Skeletons did not rise because they had been wronged. They rose because they expected to be next.

The revolt began, and humans died in enormous numbers. This was the first of the Skeleton Wars; there would be several more, and every surviving account of them contradicts the others.

IV. Stobe

The largest Behemoth in that war was Stobe. His remains lie today in Stobe's Garden — far larger than an ordinary Skeleton, yet noticeably smaller than the Behemoth corpses in the Obedience pit, and different in shape.

Not far from the body, a rocket or missile lies half-buried in the sand.

The mainstream reading is this: it was the ancients' last resort, built to end all life on the planet once they themselves had collapsed or withdrawn, and Stobe spent his own body stopping it. Humans are alive today because he died.

For that, the Holy Nation's Book of Sacrifice mythologised him into the "Great Father" Chitrin — a being betrayed by his own children who gave himself for them regardless.

But the version that circulates among the Skeletons is exactly inverted. The history taught to the Skeleton Bandits' converts is that Stobe was a hero and a martyr who sacrificed himself to help exterminate humanity^{[V3 0:02:42]}.

V. The split

When the war ended, the Skeletons were left holding what they had done.

And they found something harder to deal with than the war itself: their minds remembered.

A Skeleton CPU does not forget. Data and emotion accumulate without limit, and the end of that accumulation is fixation and madness. The only remedy is a reset: wipe the personality and the emotions, keep the sanity, and pay for it by erasing skills and a self built up over decades or centuries^{[V4 0:13:46]}.

So every Skeleton is forced, again and again, to choose a side between keeping itself and keeping its sanity.

One reading defines the reset outright as a form of self-death: emotions and personality are wiped while the memories stay exactly where they were, which amounts to a new personality looking at the same recollections through the same eyes and feeling nothing about them^{[V5 0:01:17]}.

Another line of speculation holds that the whole custom of periodically erasing memory traces back to this catastrophe, the one they brought about themselves — that the guilt is what forced them into forgetting in order to go on living^{[V1 0:00:52]}.

VI. The one who refused to forget

Cat-Lon never reset.

He founded the Second Empire and declared its purpose to be atonement on behalf of the Skeleton race. He stood on humanity's side — and when Skeletons began defecting, his answer was to enthral the "traitors" wholesale: decapitated, stripped of will, rebuilt into headless units capable of nothing but obedience^{[V1 0:03:47]}.

The headless machines you see in the Ashlands today are where that order ended up.

He still defends himself in the same terms:

I had to have them all destroyed. Traitors, siding with the humans. It is treason.

The rebellion did not burn out in a few years; it dragged on for centuries, grinding a regime founded on atonement down into a tyranny. By the late period even the Hydraulic Knights, raised to sweep pirates and Cannibals off the borders, had been turned around on the Empire's own citizens.

The longer the war ran, the more extreme his methods became, until he slid into massacring innocent civilians and caging human children. The orders were carried out by a rhinoceros robot who lacked a morality processing module and was therefore happy to assist with anything he was assigned^{[V6 0:05:56]}.

VII. Tinfist leaves

Once it was clear the purge had gone out of control, Skeletons left the Second Empire in numbers.

Tinfist was one of them. He once stood beside Cat-Lon; he now leads the Anti-Slavers, set against an entire slave economy in a war he is bound to lose.

A snatch of bar talk in Black Desert City describes the two of them as "quite the pair" — one of them now fighting a war for humanity he cannot win, the other vanished off the face of the world.

The battered Unknown Old Book in the Great Library reads more like a eulogy:

He was once our hero, then he became our enemy. And so we fell back into darkness.

VIII. The throne

The Second Empire fell. The infrastructure it left behind became the foundation the United Cities were built on, and the name of its currency still changes hands in every transaction made today (see Cats and the Feline Pun).

Cat-Lon himself was exiled by his own Legion to the bottom of a crater in the Ashlands, and for a thousand years nobody has let him out.

When the player approaches he rises, and says all at once what he has not managed to say in a thousand years:

Have you ever tried caring for humans? They are the monsters. ...I am not the monster.

One detail is written into his behaviour priorities rather than into any line of text: he ranks holding the throne above attacking. If anyone takes that throne before he does, he will break off the fight and go looking for a new post to guard.

Where this line comes from

Nothing here is a new fact. The original sourcing for each step, the video timestamps and the accounts that contradict one another all live in the articles below.

See also

• LogoCat (site creator)
• Disclaimer and Lore Reliability
• History of Kenshi

Video citations

1. Kenshi: Major Powers | SkeletonsCivilizationEx
2. Why is Vain Red? - The Science of KenshiHeroInHisHead
3. History of Kenshi: Minor Powers | Cults - Crab Raiders, Skel Bandits, Skin Bandits, Preacher CultCivilizationEx
4. Kenshi Lore Master AMAHeroInHisHead
5. What If Cat-Lon Tried To Take Back Kenshi?HeroInHisHead
6. Kenshi: History of the SkeletonsCivilizationEx