The elders wrote that the man wandered out of the vast desert wasteland where few ever dared venture. The Desert of Lost Souls, as this wasteland was called, had been named that for a reason. Many residents of Athens believed it was populated by monsters. Others claimed to have had relatives or friends who years before had trekked there in search of work on the construction of a vast palace or temple at the behest of the gods, only to never return. They spoke of a builder being visited by a messenger dispatched by Zeus, a builder who they say was bequeathed with the visions of a design in scope and complexity like none the world had ever known to be constructed amid the arid wasteland seldom traveled by man. And that tale had drawn more out from the city in search of the structure, almost all of whom never returned. The ones who did professed to have no memory of what they had seen. But this ragged shell of a man, his bare feet cracked and filthy from the mud-strewn street, claimed to have emerged from this very wasteland.
