Colossus
By: Theo Beecroft
Tags: Fiction, Archaea, Exulansis, Archaeology, Short Story

Methanococcoides burtonii (image by the author)

The snow falls heavy; the world is going white. How long has it been since the expedition disbanded? Since the rest returned South and I continued alone? I once kept time wrapped around my wrist, but after my last fall it stopped ticking, and I threw it into the swallowing fog.

There was a blizzard that screeched for months, battering the skin of our tents and keeping us zipped up with threats. It paced outside in frustration, spitting and bellowing because we would not come out to die. Whilst it slept, the others fled, unwilling to brave the ice fields and the turning winds again, but I would not go. My life’s work lies here in the North; in these cathedrals and amphitheatres of the ancients.

Icicles dangle from my face in the outside, but I have kept to the ruins for warmth. Most sleep rigid beneath white blankets, but here and there, the drifts are low, and I can cut a swath within. The ice preserves, and I rest in these tombs while the world howls outside. I cannot leave whilst history lays so closely beneath my feet, so I will stay here, where no one has been for centuries, and see what was lost.

Moonglow draws the night in silver, and the snow has grown tired of falling. I struggle across the ice sheet seracs to a mound tipped by two steeples where an avalanche has swept the top of a window clear. I tread across desolate fluff, setting down to pick away at the frosted entrance, and though it takes time (my arms are but bone and blood), I manage to shovel an area large enough for me to squeeze through and shatter the glass. My legs go dangling first into the past, before the rest of me plops down after.

The dark echoes my footsteps as I edge forward, so I take a flare from my backpack and, shivering, spark it red.

Not once have I seen ruins as lavish as these. Flocks of colourful shapes hang in clear mausoleums along the walls; the remains of creatures, rock boned and paddle limbed, are splayed out flat as if they were flowers crushed in books; My face shines ruddily back at me in a looking glass full of fractal eggs. So thin. So very thin.

There are parchments and hieroglyphs, things that even I cannot decipher, beside each of these treasures. There are too many to read as I make down a hallway opening into a cavernous chamber.

I look up and see that I am in the body of a stone colossus; its ribs curving from the spine above me, down ossuary columns to my sides. The crimson bounces off of glaring eyes of marble; tongues of rock, long silent in the mouths of unknown animals carved into the giant’s ancient bones.

The entrance doors next to me, collapsed by the weight of the compacted snow centuries ago, are poured through with ice drifts. A flood frozen in time.

I pace deeper into the silence, and slowly perceive the skeleton of a great beast held aloft in the air on wings of wire. It is as if I am standing still whilst its bulk skulks towards me in the gloom. The jaws of its long skull are held in a wide-open bellow, and as I inch beneath it, I can make out the lick of its tail receding, segmented, up into the black.

To my sides are alcoves; chambers filled with alien shapes. One holds a banded obelisk, its polished side resembling the cross section of an inane gut; another houses the crumbling remains of a demon stood expectant of a long forgotten embrace; within a third, there is an upturned dress, its banded frills petrified and chipped away; and in the last, a large, glass tank sits delicately, bone dust floating atop its gelatinous contents.

Running now, and breathless with all this discovery, I approach a set of stairs as my flare ebbs and sputters away. No. Not when there are so many questions left unanswered. In the darkness, I grope around my supplies for another, but my flares are all gone. How could I have been so clouded by the carelessness of excitement? I search my pockets and I hear a matchbox rattle. I clasp it with the desperate numbness of frostbitten fingers, feeling foolish and wretched as I weep and drop match after match in the hollow dark. There is a spark as I hold my breath, and a small flame comes to life in my fingers.

I see the steps in front of me. I hear the hiss of the match. I ascend as my thin frame shudders. The fire picks out the contours of a statue at the zenith of the stairs. Carved in rock, with a bearded face weighed with a burden of deep concern, this statue surveys the great hall of treasures set beneath him in cross legged contemplation, as if these artefacts and beasts were some eternal mystery that he must unravel for the sake of mankind.

The match sparks pain through my hand and I drop it as space disappears. I trip and fall, and my face is like porcelain against the frozen floor. I taste blood between my chattering teeth. I breathe light and low by the statue’s feet, groping as I go, to trace the runes beneath the icon with my chilled fingers. They read:



C H A R L E S D A R W I N