Disclaimer: Shadow of the Colossus belongs to Team ICO. This derivative work is not for profit and is simply my "love letter" to a game I found magnificent.

Notes: Set mid-game, with mid-game spoilers and hints at end-of-game spoilers. This is largely composed of my own thoughts and guesses throughout my playthrough, but I felt that I could not rightly get them down in story-form until I'd finished the game. Being a fan fiction, I made up a lot of this whole-cloth, but much of it draws from my actual experience in playing. I'm sure you'll see which parts were my own adventures in Colossus-slaying.

Murdering Mountains

He felt the electricity crackle across his skin and the burn of poison searing his sinuses and tearing his lungs apart. The young man awoke with a start, his dreams as unwieldy as the shattered earth beneath his feet. He was safe now. He had dozed off at the shrine at the half-moon canyon.

Light glancing off the sword in his hand caught Wander's attention. It wasn't the guiding light he'd been following, just a bit of daylight off the edge. He shouldn't have fallen asleep with it in his hand like that, it was dangerous. It seemed he still didn't quite know how to use the thing. His methods with it consisted mostly of brute force and ignorance, but brute force and ignorance were working. He'd felled many impossible creatures and was over the halfway mark to his goal.

The sword was an unfortunate necessity. He'd wished, more than once, that he could have done his task with arrows, but there was not an arrowhead in this world with the same enchantment on it as this particular sword. His arrows were blessed-arrows, under a spell so that they would never run out, but it was not the same. Wander was a warrior, but he was an archer, not a swordsman. He'd seen battle – having been part of the force that had defended his city last year when it was under attack, but archers were of one class, swordsmen were of another. Those that knew the ways of the blade were noble by birth, trained to it from youth. Archers were of the common people, only allowed to utilize the weapons used in the field to acquire meat.

He recalled one fast-moving Colossus that moved like a great cat and how it had cornered him upon a cleft of rock. He'd cracked its armor by sending it careening over a cliff. He'd failed to get a clear shot of its back when he'd leapt down after it and was sent running for all his might before it could catch up to him and kill him. He'd watched it circle and paw at him in futility once he'd gotten to place it could not reach him. He'd spent the next hour pumping a forest of arrows into its back. He'd clearly caused it pain, but in the end, he had to take the sword to it. He'd found the archery so much easier.

Here was, at a shrine in an ancient land, completing a spell for entity or entities (he couldn't figure Dormin out – whether it was a he, she or we – or more than likely, all at once). He was murdering mountains, but he did not know what he was killing exactly. The Colossi seemed to be a part of the earth, living geology – made of the stones and the mountains themselves. At the same time, they had the hair of wild animals and felt… warm. They felt warm when he was climbing them. He had no idea if they had souls, but they possessed all of the behavior of living beings – and their eyes, oh, their eyes… The eyes of each beast, when he looked one in the eye – betrayed an immense soulful sorrow.

They were guarding something - that much Wander knew. Perhaps they were once guardians of the great cities, when people used to live in these lands, before they became forbidden. Maybe they felt an obligation to beings long departed. They were definitely guarding Dormin's seal, and Dormin was the only thing that can give Wander what he really wanted.

The creatures' shadow-blood felt cold when it entered his body through his pores and wounds. He felt like he was dying every time. Wander would see the light that people were supposed to see when they died before crossing truly over to the other side. At this point, he wondered if he might actually be dead, or dying. Despite the healing that praying at the shrines was supposed to give him, his body felt horrible. Large portions of his skin felt numb, although he could work the muscles beneath it. He was scraped and beaten. Dormin had warned him that the price he was to pay would be heavy. Wander did not care. No cost was too great to restore Mono's life. Even if he died at the end of this, as long as he saw her soft and warm, her beautiful eyes open and sparkling, it would be alright. If he gave his body it would be alright. If he gave his soul, it would be alright.

He felt that he had already given his innocence.

The young man wanted more than anything to be with his beloved again, but it wasn't even that, really. If she lived but he did not, he would give that. Mono was young and beautiful and perfect. It was strange, perhaps, for a woman who loved animals as much as she did to fall in love with a man who was a hunter and a warrior, but that was just her sweet and forgiving nature. She deserved to live longer than she had. Her death was wrong. That was the simple fact of it. She did not merely die. She had been taken from him.

It had happened when Wander was away on a journey. His city never would have sacrificed her had he been present. He would have stopped it, by any means possible. Wander's society was one that some might call cruel. Some people were said to have "cursed fates," but a cursed fate could be almost anything. Sometimes, the elders had a vision that something bad was going to happen in relation to a particular person, or that a very good person would one day do something very wicked or become someone very evil. Such people's lives were taken to preserve their innocence, to send them to the other side with a pure soul. Others, however, were said to have a cursed fate if they were found to have a physical abnormality. Some were "given to the gods" because they were found to have a serious disease. The city could not afford the precious food and resources to sustain members of the population who were or would become very weak. In general, it was seen as a harsh practicality. In the case of terminal sufferers, it was seen as a mercy. Mono, being a young woman, may have even been subject to one of Emon's visions regarding "women who were destined to bear cursed children."

Whatever she might have had, it was still wrong. It was still wrong to take Mono from him! Yet here was, perfectly willing to sacrifice sixteen lives to save one and possibly his own on top of that. Probably his own on top of that – he was in horrible shape. Gray. That's it. That is what he felt. He felt gray.

When he had returned from his journey, Wander had found his dear one freshly-sacrificed. She had gone easily, he was told, and there was no trauma on her body. She bore no wounds and did not bleed. There were no scratches upon her or bruises. She had been given to the gods in the kindest way possible. Still, the moment he saw her still form upon the altar in the city's public square was the moment he lost his mind.

He'd told everyone that he was going to go bury her in the meadow where they'd shared their first kiss. He'd ridden well past that meadow.

His courage, perhaps, was his strongest quality – the only thing he really had going for him, but courage, like love, is sometimes a foolish thing. He knew these lands were forbidden. He knew that to bring back the dead was the most heinous of the violations of nature – or at least, that is what he'd been taught since he was a child. The dead were meant to rest, even those bright, young and filled with life that had been sacrificed for some minor anomaly. Did Mono even want to come back?

She needed to. The world needed her soul, her life, her brightness. When he made his vows to her, he had promised to protect her and he had failed to do so. It had to be set right -even if it meant being the flea on the back of a hulking beast determined to visit a gruesome death upon him. Even if it meant scrapes and wounds and broken bones that would never heal properly. Even if it meant that his body was broken, or taken. Even if it meant he lost his soul. Even if it meant defying and destroying nature itself.

Even if it meant murdering mountains.

END.

By Shadsie, 2011.

My first and possibly only SoTC fic.