Dark Forest: ALIEN Inside the Hive: Ghosts of Empire

The Ghosts of Empire

Low-altitude flight across the storm gap reveals structures rising from the floodplain like broken teeth. Erosion has softened their shapes, but not their intention.

Colossal stone heads. Dozens of them. Watching over a vast, empty plateau. The monuments appear to be symbolic but lack any discernible religious symbolism.

They are not warnings. They are declarations.

Whoever built them wanted to be remembered.

But the impulse behind their making is familiar. Immortality is as illusory to us as it was to them, but memory etched in stone offers something close.

The larger the monument, the more fragile the ego that constructed it.