A Novella Coming?

There is a city- an island city- set grandly in the center of a forest-edged bay. The bay has two inlets, and over each a Collossus stands, straddling the point of entry. The Eastern Collossus is a man, the sun piercing up into the sky behind him each day. The Western Collossus is a woman, accepting the sun into her waters each and every evening.

They are man and wife, these two, and have not ever touched.

They sing to one another, and perhaps speak, and sometimes whip the waters of their city's bay into a murderous mess for want of ways to punish just the other. At night, their city swells, and blooms, or cracks, and warps, according to the shape they've made between them. There are centuries of drought and war, of taifoon and crops curled ankle deep in every plot of earth. And then comes reconciliation, then come birds, and trade, and sunflowers the height of horses, as their love renews.

Their feet rest deep in ocean bedrock, and the people of the island city say their ancestors carved Them from basalt ranges over eons, cutting out the ships' passage into shapely legs from the solid stuff of mountain gods. The people in the woods around the bay say that They sat up, fullbent formed and seeking one another from the ocean's silty bed one day in time past memory, and froze under the sun before their monstrous arms could meet.

The Man's temper was a heavy thing, and wild, and dashed the island's people from their rocks and homes, some years. The Woman never struck so hard, but her legs stood in deeper water, and her enmity ran deeper still, and held its roots for years, and years. Sometimes the people of the island city would wake to find sharp canyons where their streets had been, and poison oak over their temples. Sometimes the water came like wolves and dragged their children off at night, and they would gather on their beaches come the morn and offer fruit and milk and tears to reconcile the feuding giants.

Sometimes there were fish so thick that they could walk across the bay to land, and overhead the Collussus sang in warbled tones along the wind; never to touch, always- just to stand.