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The Colossus coughs clouds of toxic purple dust on it's grovelling subjects. A mother takes off her veil and puts it over her son’s head, hoping to protect his eyes and lungs from the noxious clouds enveloping them. They both cough and choke violently, pain exploding in their lungs. The dust clogs their airways and they are silenced. They suffocate, but it is easy to slip into death once they stop struggling. The mother dies first, on top of her son. He dies second, comforted by the pressure of his dead mother's bosom pressing into his back. The hundreds who cannot escape the cloud struggle to breathe as the boy and her son did. They soon fall to the ground dead. The Colossus coughs again. The sound rattles tens of thousands of broken souls gathered in the downtown core of Toronto to worship him. This crowd is comparable in size to those that gather for rock festivals in Brazil, but there is no cheerful, carnival atmosphere. Not a single smile or beach towel adorn any of the tens of thousands of celebrants.

The Colossus's skin is white, composed of minerals that take the shape of spiky crystals. This “skin” looks like the fur of a polar bear who stuck its paw in an electrical socket. Hundreds of shimmering white stalactite formations rise from his surface. Between coughing purple sputum, the colossus laughs at the people scurrying in the ruined streets below. The laugh is the sound of continental plates grinding against each other. He hunches over slightly, puts his hands on his thighs and his chest expands and contracts at odd intervals, like a person doubled over with laughter, but isn’t laughter because that is something people do.

'We have to leave.' Jacob says, his words smothered by the geological sounds coming from the colossus. A half dozen people turn and stare at him, then turn their eyes and supplications back to the Colossus sitting on the skeletal throne of toppled skyscrapers, hoping that his coughing has stopped and along with it the smothering death.

Jacob's words are the first spoken in days among the crowd. People have been communicating through dead glances and silent body language for days. Jacob wonders if only he remembers life before the colossus. They were all free and alive before this white crystal freak invaded; they never had to guess at how to please beings that held the power of life and death over them. Some chose to, but none were forced to.

The Colossus gets off of his throne of toppled and crushed buildings. The monstrosity has heard Jacob's words and accompanying blasphemous thoughts. Jacob’s stomach turns to a lump of ice. The Colossus turns its gaze straight to him as soon as he speaks. It stands up straight and abruptly ceases its laughter.

The giant's black crystalline eyes, set in quarry sized pits, turn to Jacob. It stands for the first time in ten days. This breaks the concentration of the crowd; their routine has been altered in a way that brings to their collective mind the notion of eternal doom. The mass of non-speaking, almost motionless people have all condemned themselves to die standing. They would all waste away until after days their blood sugar drops to a point where they drop to the floor unconscious. Depending on what level of resources their bodies have stored, they will come in and out of consciousness for several days until passing into a coma from which they will never wake. Since they have resigned themselves to this fate already, they do not fear it.

Some celebrants drop their outstretched arms for the first time in hours. A torrent of debris stuck to the hindquarters of the Colossus falls hundreds of feet to the crowd of suffocating supplicants below. Dozens are crushed into a paste and a wave of chaos spreads through the crowd. They were the first to worship at the feet of the colossus and the first to die. When they got close enough they licked and massaged the gigantic feet of the thorny colossus. They imagined in their hopelessness born madness that their actions prevented further violence from the colossus. They believe that their unending staring, gesturing and gibbering at the colossus keep him docile and his blood thirst quenched.

The order is smashed among the survivors of the Colossal Holocaust because of the falling rubble, because of the demigods movement. They remember the first days of his Holocaust and flee with reckless, animalistic abandon knowing what is coming. People rush past Jacob, shoulders crunch into his chest and stomach, but he remains standing, looking up at the creature. It raises a city block sized foot and the screams that rise from the fleeing, doomed faithful break Jacob's heart.

Jacob broke their enthralled order his independent thought. He realizes it. He feels enlightened. He sees into the mind of every human being in the entire city. During their worship, they all thought the same, silent nothing. There was no experience grafted onto the senses. There was no constant interplay of memories and problems and the past and the future coursing through the veins of their cognition. There was only the present. There was only the terrible, inevitable present, threatening to destroy them.

A foot crashes down on top of dozens of people, crunching them into paste on the cracked road. Their organic remains are the grout that fills cracks in the road. Jacob doesn't move as a heavy stream of horrified, beleaguered faces rush past him, unaware of what they could have done to anger the giant. Jacob can't believe that he was the first person to question things or remember that life wasn't always this way. The Colossus bends down on one knee and flattens Jacob with a twenty-tonne hand.