Chapter 1
In the protector’s eyepit we honor the Father.
The fresh metallic smell of old creaking supports tickled the nostrils of the assembled onlookers. In the central square of the city, flooded with dawn, the final preparations were being completed, while those present impatiently grumbled barely audibly among themselves and stomped around on the eve of the start of the annual holiday. The curly-haired boy, who had lost all patience, stamped his foot in a powerless desire to attract the attention of his mother, who was engrossed in conversation with a friend, and accidentally hit his heel in a hard man’s boot. Turning around in annoyance, he felt a chill on his back, reminiscent of the tenacious icy fingers of the witch from his mother’s fairy tales, who steals naughty little ones from their cribs at night - so frozen he was in place by a pair of snow-blue eyes from under the stranger’s unruly black strands. The man in the colored coat next to him muttered something quietly and the young man with a stern look seemed to have forgotten about what had happened.
While the boy intensely pressed himself into the soft care of his mother’s hands, Ace stamped his injured foot several times in frustration, checking the integrity of the equipment issued to the soldiers, and then turned to his colleague Warren and opened his mouth, but suddenly the crowd around him enthusiastically buzzed with an excited hive: His Holiness the Archbishop himself ascended the stage, slowly, with the help of young assistants. Despite his venerable age, the fire of the wisdom of generations burned in the eyes of the monk, and his speech breathed with heat, inflating the old man’s lungs with blacksmith’s bellows. The flames of the sun engulfed the familiar landscape of houses made of blackened meat and bones inside a giant hemisphere as the story began.
If humanity once had knowledge of why it ended up on this titan, then this valuable luggage was mercilessly lost, erased by the rough indifference of the shifting sands of time. He was great, no, colossal in his royal grandeur frozen in time; the last guard and final stronghold of humanity before falling into the acrid fog, washing the remains of the Father, as the townspeople called him, like a gray sea. Scouts repeatedly reported that from the giant lying on his back, nothing was visible except the devilish fog, into which several daredevils were once lowered in the neck area, but a couple of minutes of absolute silence, after a couple of minutes of absolute silence, they pulled back only a melted stump with stuck nails with pieces of meat.
The Archbishop puffed out his cheeks and loudly saluted the founders of the city, who laid the first stone in the empty right eye socket of the Father. Stones and fertile soil were believed to have been found in the form of dried mud on the cheeks of the colossus, but the dwellings were generally built from the blackened flesh of the father, which, despite obvious decomposition, dried much more slowly than that of ordinary dead people and without the unpleasant odor that the church called it a real miracle and an ardent posthumous desire to protect her beloved “children.” The fact that the blood in the Father’s body did not clot, but remained liquid, was also extremely curious. Scientists linked this to an unprecedented amount of iron, the extraction of which allowed the townspeople to create various tools, reservoirs for collecting rainwater, and even weapons against the subcutaneous bloody centipede parasites that devoured the colossus from the inside.
Like a bolt from the blue, the exclamation of a man with deep nail scratches on his face swept across the square in heartbreaking waves. While the bungler roughly pushed aside the people who rushed to catch him, Warren leaned towards his colleague and, sighing, with visible reluctance, quickly began to babble something. While Ace’s face pressed his lips into a sharp thin thread and changed shade from the usual to more and more ashen, the scratched man spoke. Watching the guards approach him from all sides, he swallowed a cowardly lump and burst into speech about the Father, their God, their island and bastion of hope, but at the same time, a dark grave, stretching the thin fingers of hopelessness to the necks of their future. The colossus crumbles. The guard’s blow flashed like a silver meteorite and pierced the man’s temple, but he continued to fight in agony. Humanity is doomed: one day the titan will crumble to the last piece and our children, our dreams, hopes and aspirations will be swallowed up by the poisonous maw of an indifferent gray fog.
Warren finished speaking and, as if apologizing, awkwardly patted his comrade on the shoulder, simultaneously removing a small badge from his armor, indicating service in the garrison. He left to help the guards with the troublemaker, leaving the devastated Ace to his own devices. Confused, the young man, moving his weak legs, as if in a dream, wandered away from the noise of the crowd excited by the dark prophecy. He basically knew that he hadn’t been coping at all lately: there had been whispers in the barracks for quite some time about his loud awakenings in the middle of the night due to nightmares. Nightmares! Ace grabbed his face, blindly trying to reach his thoughts with his fingers, grab them with his own hands, tear them, tear them apart and never, never experience this again!
A thin girlish cry cut through the silence of the empty streets like a blow of a whip. The second hand lay on top of the first on the hilt of the sword that no longer belonged to him. To expose it even for self-defense is a crime against the church. Now he should take the equipment and get a recommendation, with which in the city, with his reputation, he can get a decent job and finally forget this horror...
The scream stopped abruptly, as if someone had roughly clamped and strangled the small mouth. A couple of side streets away, taking advantage of the bustle caused by the holiday, two strong men stood over a shaking, fallen old man. He, not paying attention to the injuries, extended his bloody hands to a tiny girl, barely more than a meter tall, who was frightenedly closing her eyes with a tear-stained face, while the bastard holding her by the throat, carnivorously picking his unclean teeth with his tongue, tore off the clothes from her thin, shuddering shoulders. Someone’s heavy hand lay on his shoulder. Turning around, in the blink of an eye he heard behind him how his accomplice choked on his own teeth, unable to cope with the blow of a fist wrapped in angular iron and pure rage, as heavy as the tread of an angel of death. Blue eyes burned him with cold, freezing his insides; he shook slightly, slowly lowering the girl to the ground, while one of his pants became thoroughly wet. Before Ace could say a word, a whistle blew behind him: the guards were informed of the noise. Having knocked out the villain with a shot of his fist in the liver, he picked up the old man, took the tiny palm of the girl, who was wiping away her tears, and together they disappeared into the silence of the streets, which he had known since childhood like the back of his hand.
