Created during the last centuries of Miouran antiquity, the colossi have countless names, the most prominent being their Shekzardic name of dlenruk (dlɛn.rʊk). They roamed their home world for millennia and became known to Estvoldian explorers first in 2591 CGC during initial surveys of the planet Mioura, where these autonomous stone guardians were hostile and attacked on sight. As their common name suggests, the colossi are typically enormous in size, most often as tall as a several-story building; while there is evidence that there may have been colossi closer to the size of an average precursor, none have been documented, and the idea of a "person-sized colossus" is possibly the result of mistranslating or misinterpreting fragmented Miouran records from thousands of years in the past.
Colossi are sometimes thought of as an ancient counterpart to the robotic sabarús alphas, as they were created by an organic species to serve as protectors and weapons of war. The inner workings of colossi have not been well-researched, but distant surveys of their Chronous components have demonstrably shown them to be at least partly animated by magic — most unusually, these magical effects register most clearly as similar to "necromantic" spells that are associated with puppeteering corpses. Documents from after the recovery of the precursors in stasis and during the Millennial Calm suggest that even at the height of its power, Ealdremen could not successfully create new colossi. As such, any rare colossi found in the present-day are thought to be ancient relics of Miouran antiquity.
Etymology and other names
The sheer size of the first colossi discovered stood out to the Estvoldian explorers that documented them, and they were originally denoted as lošabr, a then-contemporary Morish word for something giant. The commonality of this word and the ease of translating the concept led to other languages not using the Morish word in their own documentation of the colossi. Later references to the colossi would sometimes call them specifically Miouran giants for clarity, but, as time went on and languages shifted, such words often became antiquated-sounding in modern speech and became only used to refer to the stone guardians of Mioura without mentioning the planet itself.
Dlenruk, the Shekzardic term for the colossi, has the base components of dlen, meaning "god," and ruk, meaning "you," and it has been translated as "god of you" or "your god" throughout the years. Some linguists have theorized that the intended meaning of dlenruk is not that the colossi were meant to be worshipped or that they held dominion over their precursor creators, but that "god of you" was a concise way to refer to a god made in the image of the creator or their own icons of worship.