The Colossus

How had it come to this?

These words, or some equivalent, would trample their way about his conscious thought for the remainder of his existence. However short that may be.

How had it come to this?

To call my recollection hazy would be doing it a disservice. It was a fog within a darkness, the pinpricks of light revealing only a frenzy of metals and fire. Hammers on anvils, plates affixed by little more than glowing air, a shape in the fog. Pieces of a puzzle I was trying to assemble in the dark. But the pieces were there. I was picking them up, one by one, as I wandered through the wreckage of what had been a town.
My town?
I could not know. The fog had devoured all memory. Only the pieces remained. I assembled them, drinking in the destruction. Had I wrought this? Wrought. How appropriate.

The pieces told a story of a creation. My creation. Something… bronze. I scrabbled about my thoughts, my memory a perfect mirror of the reality that surrounded me. I had been arrogant. Arrogant and desperate to prove myself to the world. Starving artist? I was consumed. I was better than those around me. I had a project to prove it. A project… A project commissioned by a god.

A god? The crushed corpses, the ruined homes and businesses. The broken temples and monuments. Monuments to a god. A god had brought this destruction upon the world? His own world. What kind of god…?

There had been no questions asked. I had been blinded by my arrogance. A god had wanted me, MY skills, for its work. Its divine work. I was of the divine. My chance had arrived and I had thrown myself headlong into it. Consequence a concern for lesser men.
The materials were provided. Bronze. Bronze that glowed in the shadows. An ore possessed? Tools, the likes of which I could not fathom, had been presented to me.
 

“You will no longer be bound by the limits of the pale gifts of your earth. These are resources fit for gods. Fit… for you.”
A manipulator. Why could I not REMEMBER. Remember our gods. These things lent themselves to good and evil and the grey between. What could have wanted this.  The gods needed us. What would want this slaughter? I stooped to take a spear from a fallen soldier. His shield too. Would they be of any use against my creation?

My creation. The pieces were coming together. Legs fashioned from that unearthly bronze. Fashioned to resemble the plated armour of the noble soldiery. Arms. Arms edged and lethal. Fingers the size of a full grown man. A torso that could house a large family. And a face. The image of the face remained unclear, but ice choked my heart with the recollection of its creation. All this in a haze. I had been possessed not only by my own ambition. There had been something darker at play. Something of the god.
The god. The memories were becoming clearer. I remembered the voice. A whisper, like a tongue across a cold blade. A shadow. Little more than a shifting shadow. Beckoning. Cajoling. It was indistinct. But there was a face. A face which filled me with a dread that crushed the spirit.

I trudged onwards, following in wake of my  creation and the carnage it had wrought. Every corpse I stepped over worse than the previous. I wanted to run, to hide, to escape the monster I had brought into this world; but something drew me onward. A sense of destiny. A sense of fate. I would face down my creation and stare into the eyes of my own hubris, come of it what may.

The images of my past grew sharper still. I saw the assembly of the monstrosity. The cranes. The magicks I conjured to hold the pieces together. Finally, I witnessed my creation in its full glory. Easily twenty metres tall, and glowing as the ingots had. Humanoid, but… not. There was an intrinsic sense of mimicry, as though it tried to  take on human form while its nature betrayed its origins. And hollow. It was made to hold something. In its completed form it had left me hollow, too. Collapsed into a chair, I beheld my magnum opus. I would make nothing greater. I would probably make nothing lesser, either.
Rooted to my chair, the shadow had come upon me one last time.
“Wonderful… Surely a work befitting a god. A god yet to be.”
It glided around me and between the legs of the bronze abomination.
“You have served me well. And for this you shall be spared.”
It slithered up the length of the bronze body, the head its objective. Slowly, silently, it seeped into the eyes of the face, that horrible, horrible face, until the shadow was no more. The eyes glowed and the fog claimed me.

I could see it now, in the distance. It strode purposefully along the wastes beyond the town, eyes set on something he could not see. It glowed malevolent in the grey light. Its steps shook the earth.
I sped my pace. The spear and shield weighed heavy upon my arms and upon my heart. My heart. Flawed and now broken. It had been the cause of this. I had been the cause of this. There would be no mending. But I would face it. I would confront my grave error. My creation had stopped. I drew nearer.

In the ruins of an old temple the colossus waited for me. It turned to face me as I approached.
“Clearly, you do not value your life. You, the one who created me. Who birthed a GOD. You who alone I spared. And now you come, seeking death.”
The mouth of the colossus did not move, but the face stared down at me. I finally saw it clearly. Framed by blades, with no features but the eyes and mouth. It seemed to wriggle and shift beneath my terrified gaze, as though my sight could not comprehend the true shape. The blades cut into the face, and somehow the bronze bled. A black, viscous liquid dripped from the blades and down the smooth bronze skin of the creature.

I could do little but stare at the visage of this monster, this child of mine.

“You have come, so come.” The voice boomed across the jagged wasteland, jarring me from my paralysis. I darted for the ruins as a bronze fist struck the earth where I had stood a second earlier. It clutched at a piece of an ancient pillar, hurling at me. I threw myself into a pit of broken marble as the pillar flew over me. There was no way I could damage it. No way I could correct this. I had created it, but it was no longer mine. Another piece of rubble crashed a few metres from me. I could not stay here any longer. I could not kill it, perhaps, but I could lay a blow upon it. It was my creation and I…
An idea struck. I steeled myself. One blow. I climbed to my feet and darted up the rubble. The colossus stood by a crumbling wall. It hurled another pillar. I threw myself aside and it caught a glancing blow upon my shield, breaking my left arm. Struggling back to my feet, I scrabbled up the wall before it. I stood before its chest. Its glowing eyes regarded me lifelessly.
“You have created a god,” it boomed,  “you cannot destroy a god.”

“You are no god,” I whispered, tensing my legs and raising the spear, “and neither am I.”
I flung myself from the wall at the colossus, putting my entire weight behind the spear. I struck it directly upon the heart, a tearing screech of metal filled the air. It staggered and fell slowly backwards, the glow gone from its eyes. With a crash that was surely felt by all the cities of the earth it struck earth, the pieces collapsing into a great, useless heap of bronze.
I lay amidst the wreckage. How many bones I had broken, I did not know, but I did not dare to move.
“I am no god,” I whispered hoarsely to the sky, “I am human. And my works are only as flawed as I am.”
I let my eyelids droop closed and the dark embraced me once more.