We remain

We are the forgotten keepers of a lost time, once proud and gleaming in the Roman sun, now fallen to shadows and ash. Our stone eyes search these ruins for a sign of the glorious civilization that once thrived within our boundaries, before the earth beneath us began to shake, and liquid fire engulfed our marble bodies. Most of those who made us perished when the mountain spewed its fiery insides. We watched in silent horror as our creators, our parents, our very gods were consumed in the volcano’s molten rage, and there was nothing we could do to stop it. We could not move our granite lips to voice our terror; we could not bend our rigid limbs to scoop them out of the lava’s path. We could not give those few who were left our stony lungs to survive the world of ash and smoke that followed.

We could not save them.

In those first centuries of solitude, we wished they had made us in their exact image, with soft, pliable limbs and blushing, tender flesh. But they had not made us as they were, but how they had desired to be. We are indestructible, invincible, and eternal. We will remain until the last grain of time falls through the hourglass and the universe ceases. Our rock bodies and perfect features will linger until the sky rains fire and the clouds weep ash. We had survived it once, but we pray through marble teeth that we will not survive again.

Despite that we were made to outlive the universe, we are slowly destroying ourselves. Those of us who had once stood tall, and held a nearly impossible weight, now have no burden to bear, and we crumble without a purpose. Some of us had not been invulnerable to the fiery wrath of Vesuvius—we had lost limbs, whole pieces of ourselves, and were now allowing the scorching winds to erode our features. One of us had been driven mad by the silence that enveloped us once the creators were gone. He was one of those who the eruption has scarred, his sculpted arms shattered, leaving two grotesque and sharp stumps. In the millennia that he stood leaning against another of us, he slowly began to change, willing his lips to turn downwards. The change happened so gradually it was almost as if no change occurred at all; yet by the end of a thousand years, his once perfect features hardened into a furious scowl.

We once thought the glorious Roman sun would return when the smoke had cleared and the ashes had settled, but its rays never touched our stony lives again. Whenever a rogue beam of light wanders across one of our faces, it seems to only throw the rest of us further into the shadows.

We will wait here for eternity, until that last grain of sand falls through the hourglass, until the flames rain down to join us again with our creators. Our granite hearts still long for the touch of human flesh against our rocky skin, for their musical voices to join ours that stay trapped within our granite throats.

Until then we remain, the weary, the broken, the eternal—the forgotten keepers of a lost time.