The Sovereign Archive

  Fear rises up and out into the night. The horned face emblazoned with markings like terrible, piercing eyes thrusts forward and out. Guided by instincts with the force of a living locomotive. Steam billows out of gaping nostrils. In the dim brain of the Triceratops it is gripped by awful, primeval terror. Fight. Live! Fight! Live. Fight. Live!  Jaws crashed down. Heavy, impossibly heavy. Fatal. Moonlight catches impaling teeth, massive blunt daggers meant to pulverize bone and concuss flesh, pulling giant chunks from still living prey. The Tyrannosaurus is Death in the Cretaceous world, it is emperor and regent over all living things, it is the epitome of annihilation born in flesh. Its black hide almost glows in the night, darkness on darkness. So fast for something so huge. Blurry. A mountain astride legs, legs as thick as the cedars of biblical Behemoth. Step. Step. Step. Bite.  Horns reach. Push. Sweep. Jaws crack, close, yawn open to a furious gullet. The titans dance, spin, gra

 You dig. You’ve been digging a long time. A featureless blue sky sprawls, staring down at you. It scorns you white-hot sunlight, painful and scorching. Judgmental as long vanished gods.  You’re dirty. Dust on clothes that in another world, another time, were expensive, implication of status. Now they’re just a shell. A hollow you live inside of.  Digging. Digging. Digging. A shadow crosses the sky on huge wings, plunges you into darkness for just a heartbeat. There’s blood under your fingernails. You swore you scrubbed and scrubbed, you were careless this time, so careless—  It’s done. Another doll in the dirt.  Dusk comes and chases the Sun over the horizon to usher in perpetual, desert midnight. Cold, unblinking stars manifest in silence. You numbly climb into your car beneath them. Driving away from this, from the thing you broke.  She’s there by the side of the road. Bloodied. Gazing at you.  Every mile is accompanied by that face.  No other cars. No gas station light, no haven to

 We sit in the car awhile. It’s quiet. Dark. The rain runs down the windshield in little rivulets and rivers, an intricate little geography that draws in so much of my attention that I don’t realize she’s talking for a full minute.  I don’t ask her to repeat herself, much as I want to. She talks when she’s nervous, fiddles. I can see her rubbing her hands together, clasping and unclasping, looking out into the darkness. A lone streetlight down the road throws amber light over everything, everything wet and dark. More droplets racing down the glass.  She kisses me. I don’t fight it, or press back. I can feel the fear in it, this moment of reaching out. It feels like falling. Her big, brown eyes are damp. I’m afraid too. We watch each other, face to face. She looks tired, so tired— do I look like that? Is this what happens to people who— The streetlamp flickers, and dies.  We’re plunged into darkness. I can feel my heartbeat pulsing, my mouth is dry. I realize I can’t hear the rain falli

 I remember looking dismayed at the shield I’d given her. An jagged crack ran along its moon-pale surface, inlaid gold and bronze chipped, streaked with blood, plastered with ash in grimy pockmarks.  “Can you fix it?”, Athena asks, watching me. It’s a challenge just as much as a question, the fierceness in her voice hasn’t dissipated yet. I run a hand through my dissident hair. I grin. “Stay awhile.” It rains. Thunder cracks, rolls. A great downpour drenches the trees nestled in this part of my forge, splashes and muddies the ground, rivers flowing down into dark channels leading far below. It’s chilly, steam hisses from urgent heat.  I am everywhere. In everything. My gauntleted fists crash at the metal, refining. Elegant hammer blows singing. Metal against metal.  I am dexterous, lithe bronze fingers mounted on countless turrets. They spin and shiver and claw at eager metal, unraveling, molecule by molecule, atom by atom.  Bronze crashes. Iron splinters. Obsidian whines. I feel great

  The Crescent All Night Diner  glows with its familiar neon sheen, just off the highway and surrounded by thick woods. It’s raining another autumn rain, steady and chilly. Mist makes everything seem dreamy, the glittering blue lights reflected in funny ways.  Mary is still bleary when she walks through the door, hastily stamping out a cigarette. Her boy, little Daniel, has been having nightmares. She frowns, thinking of his screaming and crying, shaking so bad that it’s hard to even hold him. Another appointment with Doctor Ash, maybe medication..  Mary grabs the hot mug of coffee left for her off the counter with one hand and quickly ties her apron with another just as Janet begins to unpack a full days worth of small town gossip into her ear. It’s funny. Janet is small, unassuming behind thick glasses and primly tied hair, a church girl completed by her Virginian drawl. But by god did that girl listen, and talk, and sabotage. Of course Mary doesn’t catch Janet’s nervousness with qui

 A dance.  The crash of behemoth legs, thick as tree trunks. Pillars to hold up flanks that could encompass all of the sea and sky and earth. Rising. Falling. Walking mountains claiming  this Earth in deliberate, primordial strides led by yawning shadows.  A dance.  Furious horns and proud frills. Cracked shield-faces thrust up, out, and retracted, unyielding. Painted in striking bold pronouncements from one clan or another. Dizzying arrays of horns like an endless parade of the finest, fiercest blades. Sheathed in keratin to exaggerate, enlarge.  A dance.  Swaying, armored sides. Lashing tails clubbed and spiked, beaked mouths barking, snapping, coughing. Angry forms thrilled for a fight, eager to prove against predator malevolence. A thud shattering hungry teeth. A crack that splinters bone. A sickening slash at flesh that brings bloody rain.  A dance.  A thousand, thousand voices. Chorused, harmonized thunder. It sings out. It whispers. Valleys caressed, mountains mapped, islands ch

Anastasia frowned. It was a beautiful Florida day— finally. After nearly a week of rain, finally the bruised-looking clouds had abated and brilliant sunshine shone down. And of course, like most things in Florida, the good didn’t last. The heat had swelled and fumed and throbbed into an all-consuming, concentration sucking nightmare.  Poor Anastasia camping in front of a laptop crammed next to the rattling AC unit as it sputtered and coughed felt every unerring moment of rising temperature. I knew I was going to fucking die in Florida , she thought, as another frustratingly information light work email buzzed.  A glimmer caught her eye. A sinful, wonderful glint of water.  The pool. The zoom call had dragged on for three and a half hours. Three and a half hours of everyone straining to not burst into confused, existential tears of the rapidly disintegrating world. Three and a half hours of trying to not think of wasted schooling, degrading interviews, lackluster paychecks.  The pool.

 It’s a huge space, a room in somewhere so vast that the horizon is just endless black wall and endless black space. There’s an ocean with dark waves you can sense and hear, but can’t see.  And an island at the center of it, with a city. Look around you and see the ships. They are behemoths, huge and angular and organic, arching skeletal profiles silhouetted. They are waiting.  Everything is smooth as stone and ebony like a night without stars, cut through with fine lines of amber, gold, ivory. Soft, organic light pulses in those countless lines. Ancient, undeniable heartbeats.  It’s freezing. Your breath comes out in billowing fog. Thin, dark ice frosts across structures as if it were a fine artisanal coating.  The doorways are too tall for anyone human, and they flower open, or the seams vanish making the entrance into a wall. Nothing has blemishes, nothing here has been built. It’s grown. Manifested. Every surface is eerily warm against the biting cold, ridged with intricate carving

 It always looked like Stonehenge to me. So that’s what it got named. Big, vine-covered concrete blocks in a small clearing off woods five miles up the tracks running southward.  My secret for the summer.  I remember standing there in the June heat, marveling at it, grinning ear to ear. What a prize this glorious ruin was. Just for me. Walking in it’s long shadows like an archeologist wandering through what little remained of humanity. There was riotous graffiti scrawled everywhere; countless signatures in countless, dizzying styles. Bold, fierce looking letters declaring obscure rivalries or tiny intimate proclamations of forbidden actions.  I couldn’t lose my grin. It was just perfect.  I made the trek daily. Bag packed, a smuggled pair of dad’s old boots to feel that much more powerful— as if I could become him, astride no man’s land in a war that had come and gone before I was even on this world. Unrelenting heat. Soaking in sweat. Air thick enough to drink. The secrecy of it was s

 Sheriff Warren stares at the ocean.  It’s beautiful. Warm. Crystalline blue water laps up on rock and sand, and a fresh salty scent that feels almost welcoming.  Warren squints, looking left, then right. The same in both directions. Virgin, untouched shoreline. Spires of rock jut up from the water in places, eerie and alien, lined by ancient strata down their flanks. The Sheriff checks his watch. It’s noon.  He fishes for a cigarette, pulling it from a pocket— and fumbles. A light breeze throws it from sand to the water, and Warren watches it float away almost dumbly. He’s shaking a bit. The cigarette drifts merrily, passing through a sunny patch of ocean.  There’s something down there.  A truck .  Submerged. It looks like it’s been placed there, gently. The driver side door is the only thing ajar. Warren cranes his neck, looking hard through sunglasses and ocean and fear. But all he sees in the cab is blackness, shadow.  Twenty four hours ago, Sheriff Zachariah Warren was the premier