The Colossus of Kettlewood

In the autumn of 2015, I was a 29-year-old archivist living in the town of Kettlewood, a place of faded brick and perpetual mist. My uncle, Elias, had died two years prior—not from illness, but from a sudden heart attack despite his robust physique and infectious charm. He could swap stories with the town’s drunks and then dine with the mayor, and everyone adored him. His death hollowed out our family, leaving my mother a ghost of herself and me drowning in a grief I couldn’t name.

One evening, while cataloging old county records in the basement of the Kettlewood Historical Society, I stumbled upon a leather-bound diary belonging to a 19th-century land surveyor named Hiram Pottle. The pages were filled with meticulous notes about a ‘Great One’ that the local indigenous tribes had spoken of—a colossal being that was said to dwell beneath the hills, a guardian of the land. I dismissed it as folklore, but a strange compulsion made me copy a few passages into my own notebook.

That night, sleep eluded me. My mind kept returning to the diary and to Elias. I recalled a peculiar incident a year after his death: a friend who dabbled in the occult had, without prompting, remarked, ‘Marta, you’ve got a guide. He’s enormous—a veritable giant, broad as a barn door, and he looms behind you like a mountain.’ She had paled and stumbled back, as if the very air had thickened. I had laughed it off then, but now the words echoed with an unnerving resonance.

Driven by a mix of grief and curiosity, I began to investigate Hiram Pottle’s notes. He described rituals to ‘call the Great One’—ceremonies involving the alignment of certain stones in the woods east of town, at specific phases of the moon. The next full moon was in three days. A mad idea took root: if I could summon this being, perhaps I could ask it to bring Elias back, or at least give me a sign that he was at peace.

On the night of the full moon, I drove to the ancient stone circle. The forest was thick with shadows, and the air was cold and still. I followed the diary’s instructions, lighting candles and chanting a guttural phrase that felt foreign on my tongue. As I finished, a low rumble shook the ground, and the trees began to sway violently, though there was no wind. A massive shape emerged from the darkness—taller than the pines, its skin like bark, with eyes that glowed like embers. It was the Colossus, and it spoke in a voice that vibrated through my bones: ‘You have called, daughter of sorrow. What is your desire?’

Trembling, I asked for Elias. The Colossus tilted its colossal head. ‘He is beyond my reach, but I can show you the path to him. You must follow me into the deep earth, where the rivers of memory flow. But know this: once you enter, you may not return as you are.’ Desperate, I agreed.

It led me to a fissure in the earth that I had never noticed before—a gaping maw hidden by moss and roots. I descended a spiral staircase carved from bedrock, the Colossus’s form shrinking to human size but still immense. At the bottom, a cavern opened into a vast underground sea, its surface shimmering with phosphorescent light. The Colossus pointed to a distant shore where figures stood motionless. ‘There are the ones you seek,’ it rumbled. I waded through the shallow water, but the figures remained still, their faces blank. One of them was Elias, exactly as I remembered—handsome, smiling. I rushed to embrace him, but my arms passed through him as if he were mist.

‘You cannot touch him, for he is not of this world,’ the Colossus explained. ‘He is a memory, and memories can only be observed. But in observing, you may choose to stay and become a memory yourself—forever a guardian of this place, forgotten by the living.’ I looked at Elias’s serene face, and a part of me wanted to stay. But then I thought of my mother, who still cried every night, and of my own life waiting above. I shook my head. The Colossus nodded slowly. ‘Then go. But you will carry the weight of this choice, and you will know that he is at peace.’

When I surfaced from the fissure, the sun was rising, and the forest was as quiet as a grave. The stone circle was gone, as if it had never been. I drove back to Kettlewood, but the town felt different—the people seemed distant, the colors muted. I returned to the Historical Society and found the diary had turned to dust, its pages crumbling at my touch. But I kept the memory of that underground sea and the giant guardian who had shown me the truth.

Now, on the anniversary of Elias’s death, I still visit the spot where the fissure opened. Sometimes I feel the ground tremble faintly, and I know the Colossus is watching. I’ll never tell anyone the full story; they’d think me mad. But sometimes, when the fog rolls in off the hills, I catch a glimpse of a towering silhouette among the trees, and I am reminded that there are things far older and stranger than our grief, and that even in death, there is a kind of peace—if you dare to look for it.