Skip to main content

Necropolis

 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 carvings so small you have to feel them to know they are there. 


Everything is too big for normal people, avenues are so wide and broad, buildings like skyscrapers that simply vanish up into shadow. It goes on and on. A labyrinth for titans. 


Everything meets at the center, at a statue ringed by black water in circular canals, but it’s so massive that you can’t see it up in the gloom, just two claws on the mount, and giant legs bent backward at the joints. Is it a God for the vanished builders? A triumphant warrior? You feel an awful foreboding, an ominous realization that somewhere far above you— the statue is looking back. 


They know you are here.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Moons that Hunters Must Walk

 The Five Moons claim the sky with blood and cosmic violence. Crimson-saffron light splashes across the huge storm clouds beneath their fierce visages, and turns the world eerie. Dreamlike. Haskes, the Moon of Windfall. Storms curl into whirlwind frenzies across the bone-colored face. It is the place of howling furies and hellish nightmares, where hunters must walk across the Stormchasm to stand strong against endless wind-- or be thrown into bottomless abyss. Ahnios, the Moon of Waves. Hunters know the Tidesong, a deep welling howl of sorrow and exultance, the song to be sung out when those worthy sailed out across tsunamis vast enough to sunder continents into crushing abyss. A moon of an ocean untamed, beautiful, and unforgiving. Khinq, the Moon of Dunes. Those beneath the chaotic sky know the Blood Passage as a time of fear and annihilation, a time when the Moon of Endless Sand has returned from distant void to once again reign among its brethren. Red glows like silent, crawlin...

The Tall Grass

 Evan sat in the car and looked out into the tall grass.  The dinosaurs were out there . Up and out over the prairie was a vision of ragnarok, all tall clouds black and bruised purple painted by pinkish sunlight as dusk became night. Shadows grew long in the grass and Evan strained looking into it all, eager for a sighting. Even without seeing a thing for nearly thirty minutes— the thrill was there, he could feel it, ancient mammalian fear mixing with modern excitement.  The dinosaurs were out there! Motion, and Evan as well as his fellows in the car instantly turned, making the Jeep rock slightly. It was one of the guides, a tall and lethe woman with dark skin— she was standing. Gazing out to the left off into swaying, pink-tinted grass. Everyone seemed to hold their breath.  She whistled then— or something like a whistle came out— long and thin sounding and oddly metallic. It echoed out into oncoming twilight.  Silence.  The guide looked back at everyone ...

This Sovereign Place

 The lines on her arm match the lines on the ground below. She follows them. Sweat on her brow, the taste of salt on her lips and tongue, crystalline blue eyes flicking between intersecting geometry traced into flesh and lengthy, minimalistic pattern across ancient stonework.  The lines are geometric, straight, unfaltering and unbroken. Each one a thin, black-filled canal over white surface. Black lines that pass over saffron, crimson, ivory, and charcoal covered ground. Look to the flesh. Look to the ground. Back and forth. Measure each step with silent contemplation and heavy, thumping heartbeats.  The glow draped across her shoulders has slowed its strange rhythm, and the girl fears it might fade soon, it’s organic green luminescence lowering and lowering until this place is returned back to the darkness she found it in. Long, thin fingers stroke it’s cool glassy surface, warmth to cold, and the green ripples in response, purring at the base of her spine. It will last ...