The narrator delivers the findings from his investigation into the shadowy forest dwellers known as the "Most Hated," believed to be the perpetrators of the attack on the six young townspeople who left on the road east for the old shelfland capital, Ruerdskyeg.

He has also been hard at work in getting a feel for life in and around the town, and relates his recent encounters with the people of Sokvaapit.

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“Sokvaapit” tells a story from the point of view of a journalist working in a foreign country, through his clandestine correspondence with a state funded broadcasting network, covering an expedition into the vast and remote highland territory known colloquially as The Shelf.

The expedition is funded by various trading companies, artisan guilds and universities, and led by an iconoclastic ex-soldier and entrepreneur is heading for a distant city beyond a primaeval forest that has gone uncontacted for half a century, Ruerdskyeg, the old seat of power of a dynasty which once ruled both The Shelflands and all the lower countries beyond.

“Sokvaapit” draws its name from the town on the edge of said forest where the expedition arrives and for various reasons beyond their control, is forced to stay. Doubly foreign, far from both his home country across the sea and part of an expedition from the state established in the lands below the Shelf in the wake of a cataclysmic half forgotten conflict, the narrator relates the daily existence and records the stories of the townsfolk of Sokvaapit, learns of the wider sociopolitical history of the Shelf, and grapples with his own task of spinning a story to fit the widely accepted narrative about the country and the people he finds himself amongst.

He bears witness to, and eventually takes part in, a series of events that tug at the fabric of accepted narratives within the town and in the wider context of the world.

“Sokvaapit” is a story of memory and displacement, of oral histories, ecological devastation, collective trauma, the duty of journalists, and above all the power of stories in a place where the truth is malleable and can cost far more than life itself.

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Written and narrated by Oliver Cole Hancock

Scored by Tobias Walters

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