Term · Berserk
Behelit
An egg-shaped stone with a face scattered across it, and the worst possible thing to be holding on your worst day.
In Otakana the clue reads: Egg-shaped stone with a scrambled face
- Type
- Term
- Series
- Berserk
- Letters
- 7 · Hard
A behelit is small, fleshy and unpleasant to look at: a smooth egg with an eye, a nose and a mouth stuck on at the wrong angles. It changes hands by accident. People find them in gutters, inherit them, buy them off a market stall, and the ones who do are always the ones about to lose everything.
The stone works on despair. When its owner has been driven far enough down, the features slide into place as a face, the thing weeps blood, and a door opens onto the figures who trade wishes for whatever the wisher loves most. Kentaro Miura's world runs on that bargain. Everything terrible in Berserk starts with somebody being offered exactly what they wanted.
The rarest one is the Crimson Behelit, the egg of the king, which does not simply open the door but adds a seat to the group behind it. Miura kept the design deliberately childish, closer to a toy than a relic, which is why finding one reads as a joke until it stops being one. He began Berserk in 1989 and drew it until his death in 2021.
Spelling BEHELIT
BEHELIT is seven letters and two spellings are loose in English. The Japanese ベヘリット reads beherit, with an R, while Dark Horse's translation prints Behelit with an L. Otakana wants the L. Everything else behaves: an E in the second and fourth slots, then a straight l-i-t. Say be-he-lit rather than be-heel-it and the row lines up.