Sansuna

Sansuna the Ġgantija: The Stones that Remember

She went there to remember. She went there to forget.

At the solstice, the stones would open their mouths.

The temple was already heaving with people; tourists with cameras, locals with folded chairs and picnic hampers; children chasing echoes... But Marija stood apart, barefoot, leaning against the limestone, feeling the hour before dawn stretch thin as skin over bone. The sun had not yet risen, yet the horizon glowed faintly, as if something older than light was stirring beneath it.

She closed her eyes.

That was when she felt it.

A tremor. Not a sound, not quite movement. More like the echo of a heartbeat passing through the soles of her feet and inching up her spine. She turned sharply. Nothing stirred. And yet the hum deepened, more intimate now, and unmistakably alive.

One of the megaliths was singing.

Marija placed her palm against the stone.

The world inhaled.

Heat bloomed. Light fractured. The air thickened until it shimmered like water under a struck bell. Vertigo swept her sideways, and when she opened her eyes, the temple was no longer ruined.

The stones stood whole, unscarred by centuries. Chalk-white, newly born. The sky was sharper, bluer, and smelled of rain and crushed herbs.

A woman moved among the megaliths, hauling a stone that should have crushed her ribs, cradling it instead like a warm ħobża. She turned, startled, yet ubafraid.

“Ah,” the woman said, eyes dark as flint. “Another one who listens.”

Marija swallowed. “Where am I?”

“In the moment before certainty,” the woman replied calmly. “You futurers call it a temporal fissure. Time is thin here. The stones hum because history is still deciding what it will become.”

She set the stone down with reverence. “You’ve walked into the making of fate.”

“You are Sansuna,” Marija said.

It was not a question.

Sansuna smiled, slow and knowing. She was tall, yes, but not monstrous. Her strength was not brute; it vibrated, resonant, as if the earth itself lent her its bones.

“My strength comes from listening,” Sansuna said. “These stones remember. They store heat, grief, love, stories. We are building more than temples. We are building memory engines.” She ran her hand along the limestone, affectionate as a mother. “So that when we are gone, you will still hear us. But something is wrong,” Sansuna continued, her brow creasing. “The engines are failing. Time is fraying. You did not stumble here by accident. The stones called you.”

Marija felt it then. A tug behind her ribs, ancient and familiar. A longing.

“You are of my lineage,” Sansuna said softly. “Malta is not a place. It is the omphalos of the world. It is a palimpsest. And you... you are written into it.”

“They will say I built this alone,” Sansuna went on. “That I was a lonely giantess who vanished when the work was done. They will flatten me into myth, because it is safer than truth.” She laughed once, bitterly. “I am the last one who remembers how to listen. If I change what is coming, Malta itself may unravel. And you...” her gaze sharpened, “...you may cease to exist.”

The stones began to flicker.

Marija gasped as eras bled through one another: knights marching, buses coughing smoke, fireworks bursting over festas, cranes clawing the sky, tourists pressing coins into ancient grooves.

The Xagħra plateau undulated like sails in the wind. Time was collapsing.

“Anchor me,” Sansuna said. “Carry my story forward, so I am not erased.”

The fissure screamed.

Sansuna carved her symbol into the stone, swift, and certain, and pressed Marija’s hand over it. With a sharpened bone, she traced the outline of her palm.

“The stone will remember you,” Sansuna whispered. “It always does.”

Light tore open the sky.

Marija fell back into the present, her breath ragged, her hand burning.

Someone nearby frowned. “Were you just...?”

But the sun rose, blinding, and the moment passed.

Marija did not stay for the celebrations. She went home, shaken, carrying silence like a sacred oath.

Weeks later, a newspaper headline caught her breath:

NEW CARVING DISCOVERED AT ĠGANTIJA: ANCIENT HANDPRINT FOUND

The experts were baffled. The carving matched the others perfectly. Too old to be vandalism. Too precise to be coincidence.

Marija folded the paper carefully. She pursed her lips. She said nothing.

She wrote, instead. Everything she remembered. Not for acclaim. Not for proof. She knew what would happen if the outline of her hand were measured against the stone.

Some stories are not meant to be excavated.

And, besides... as her pen moved, she felt the old hum rise again in her bones.

The stones did not call her because she was Sansuna’s descendant.

They called her because she was Sansuna.

Remembered forward.