Ryl Madol was once inhabited, that much is clear. Cyclopean ruins of streets, plazas, houses, temples, pyramids, walls, statues and monoliths are strewn across its entirety. It seems that almost every point of the island was at one point built upon by this ancient race. Perhaps, when it was once part of a far larger landmass, Ryl Madol was but a city-centre at the heart of a much larger empire.
But however long ago those days must have been, they are now over. Any border between nature and civilization has long since collapsed. The jungle has crept over everything, every dwelling now only houses spiders and infernal centipedes. The works of intelligent forces are turned to rubble each day under the feet of giant beasts.
Who were the people that built
these structures? Some architectural similarity suggests a vague link to the
cultures of South-East Asia and the Pacific. Especially the art of interweaving
columns of volcanic rock to build structures bears an uncanny resemblance to
the Polynesian ruins of Nan Madol in Micronesia, which is what has earned the
island its name. Just as intriguing are the large stone blocks sanded down into
individual shapes in order to fit into each other like pieces of a puzzle. This
polygonal style of building can elsewhere only be found in Peruvian sites like Sacsayhuaman, which was built by the Inca.
But were the people of Ryl Madol people at all? This is a question that naturally occurs if we take the current intelligent race of the island, the Headtakers, into account. Although these reptilians currently exist in an archaic state, is it not possible that they degenerated from a once far more advanced race which had inhabited the island? It is hard to say. Some of the ruins’ dimensions, especially roofs, doorways and tools, do seem quite inhuman, as if made for and built by entities at least 2.5 metres tall. No corpses, mummies or skeletal remains have ever been found of the vanished race. Were they all devoured by the forces of nature and time? Did they perhaps cremate all of their dead? Their remaining artwork also gives little clue. Clearly, they depicted some of the animals they lived with and (hopefully) mythical monsters, but there are no clear depictions of themselves. Found across the island are large monoliths with the relief of a vaguely humanoid face, which evokes Edvard Munch’s The Scream. Is this what they looked like or just a figure of their mythology? Disturbingly, shortly before he died under mysterious circumstances in the streets of Istanbul, the mad Turkish artist C.M. Kosemen had illustrated just such stone features in his reconstruction of the dinosaur Massospondylus, claiming the inspiration to have come from entities encountered during sleep-paralysis.
The Walls
Most spectacular among the ruins are of course the gigantic walls found in two sections of the island, both standing almost 20 metres tall in some sections. The more intact one is found in the southeastern valley, spanning two mountain ranges in order to shield a river-delta and bay from the remaining island. Likely, this area used to be a city, the wall having functioned to keep the large monsters out. The other great wall in the north-west used to be far longer, but is now broken, many of its sections slowly sinking into the sea. The area it circled may have also been a population centre once, far larger than any others, but the unstable geology of the island has caused this stretch of land to sink beneath the sea. Former hills bearing temples are now heavily fragmented islands jutting above the waves. It is likely this instability which has led to the downfall of the civilization, as frequent earthquakes destroyed their infrastructure and tore down the walls, which could no longer protect the inhabitants from the wild monsters roaming the island.
The architectural style of the walls is markedly different from that of the other ruins. Perhaps this is simply a consequence of mechanics, but it could also suggest that a different culture or even species could have built them before the main civilization arrived on the island.
Anomalies
The most baffling aspect of Ryl Madol are “anomalies”, places or objects on some parts of the island which seem to defy physics. These are largely found underground inside subterranean chambers and catacombs created by the vanished race. Some of these create fields which completely negate the effects of gravity, making things float with no weight. In other sections, gravity is increased tenfold, making for invisible but deadly crushing traps. There are holes and pits which seemingly have no bottoms. Stalkers who accidentally fell into them appeared dead the following days atop random pyramids on the island. Some of the recovered artefacts cause madness and schizophrenia, often leading to suicide or worse. Some catacombs have vats filled with “hell slime”, an unclassified viscous liquid that dissolves any biological matter that falls into them. The entire underground of the island seems to be networked by a labyrinthine maze whose entirety has never been mapped and whose depth seems immeasurable. Stalkers who have gone too deep into it and survived later fathered stillborn children.
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