The Monks

Lore & Background

The Monks occupy a liminal space in the world of Shadow of the Colossus: they are clearly products of the same ancient civilization that raised the sixteen colossi, yet they exist in a state of arrested purpose. Their robes are pale and worn, their postures rigid, their speech formulaic. They do not question Wander's right to enter; they simply recite the terms of passage as though they have done so ten thousand times before. This repetition is itself a kind of lore—their words are the only surviving record of the civilization's intent, preserved not in stone tablets but in muscle memory and ritual.

Their relationship to the colossi is one of custodianship rather than creation. They do not command the giants; they acknowledge them. When the gates groan open and the dust of the forbidden land spills across the monastery courtyard, the monks stand in orderly ranks, their faces hidden, their hands clasped. They are witnesses to a punishment they did not design and a resurrection they did not choose. The girl in the tower is their charge in the most literal sense—she is the reason the monastery still stands, the reason the gates still function, the reason the monks still speak.

What the Monks' existence implies about the lost civilization is as important as what it obscures. A culture capable of engineering sixteen colossal beings as living seals was a culture that understood consequence on a civilizational scale. The Monks are the echo of that understanding: a small, silent priesthood maintaining a lock that no one living remembers how to pick. Their silence on the *why*—why the colossi were built, why the girl was cursed, why the world is so empty—suggests either that the answers were deliberately buried or that the Monks themselves have forgotten, reduced to function without meaning.

In Their Own Story

The wind off the plains carries grit into the monastery courtyard, settling on the hems of white robes that have not been washed in a generation. The elder monk steps forward, his sandals scraping the ancient flagstones, and his voice carries the dry crack of parchment unrolling. "The colossus stirs in the eastern reach. The gate will open. The blade will find its mark. The seal will loosen by one thread." Behind him, the others do not move. They do not need to. Their stillness is the prayer. Their stillness is the law. And somewhere above, in the tower where the girl lies pale and breathing, a single finger twitches—just barely—as if the world outside is a dream she is almost, almost, waking from. The elder monk turns back to the great doors. His hands, when they press against the iron, do not tremble. They never tremble. That is the most terrible thing about them.

Reader's Guide

The Monks are the robed order stationed at the monastery that guards the gates to the forbidden land. Their singular purpose is to maintain the ritual: they open the gates, speak the terms of passage, and allow Wander to enter the vast plains to slay the colossi. They protect the threshold itself and, by extension, the girl who sleeps in the tower above them. They do not fight, do not advise beyond the formulaic, and do not intervene in the hunts.

Their relationship to the colossi is custodial. They acknowledge the giants as part of the seal but do not command or control them. The colossi are the lock; the Monks are the keepers of the key. Their relationship to Wander is transactional and ritualistic—he asks, they grant, the gate opens. There is no warmth in it, no negotiation.

The ancient civilization they descend from is absent in every way that matters. The world is empty of people, of cities, of history. What remains are ruins of staggering scale—half-buried structures, vast foundations, the colossi themselves as monuments to an engineering and theological ambition we never see fully realized. Their absence tells us that the colossi were not merely weapons or guardians but a *seal*, a deliberate, world-sized lock placed to contain something. The Monks are all that remains of the civilization that built it: a small, silent priesthood maintaining a mechanism whose purpose has outlived the minds that conceived it.

Did You Know?

• The Monks' dialogue is deliberately sparse and formulaic, repeating similar phrasing before each hunt, which reinforces the impression that they are bound to an ancient script rather than acting freely.
• They never leave the monastery or the gates; the entire forbidden land and its colossi are beyond their physical reach, making them custodians of a boundary rather than participants in the world beyond it.
• The monastery itself is one of the few intact structures in an otherwise empty world, suggesting the ancient civilization prioritized the preservation of the gate and the girl above all else.
• The Monks' robes and the monastery's architecture share a visual language with the ruins scattered across the plains, visually linking them to the lost civilization without the game ever stating it explicitly.