Hourglass Skull Novels & Stories

Jace "Give me a moment." I turned the pages slower now, and I couldn’t find anything in a straight line. The thing wouldn't let me. Every page I turned had me on a different study of it, and each one stopped me before I could get past it. The figure from the back, the long muscles of it laid in like rope under the skin. The skull alone, big as a horse's and shaped like nothing that grazes. A hand again, opened flat, the claw at each fingertip drawn from three sides so you couldn't tell yourself you'd misread it.

She was in Havermouth. Her heart pounded in her head as she slowly turned to look back the way she had come, and her vision shifted, refocused, sharpened perhaps. Amongst the greenery was bone. Skulls with vines woven through eye sockets. Femur formed the fencing in front of the houses, rib bone curved over plants offering them fragile shade and shelter, the points of spears leaning up against the side of a house were tipped with carved points of bone, a door handle, a piece of jewellery…

It wasn’t intact but rather partial; Brad could make out one eye socket and the nose hole, and on one side it curved down into part of the jaw bone. A human skull. U The click-clack of Brad’s fingers striking the keys filled the office, the sound of a dozen pygmy horses galloping. Every so often, the horses would rest, and Brad would stare at the glowing screen, wringing his hands together and murmuring to himself. Then his hands would dive back down and the galloping recommence. He’d been working for over two hours now, the story flowing out of him like sweat. Some kind of wall had been torn down, and he was on a real streak.

I approached him and inquired about Frank. The doctor began speaking, "He was hit on the head, so we performed a CT scan to determine the extent of the damage. We discovered that his skull was cracked, so we attempted to implant a catheter into the ventricles to monitor the fluids, but the vessels were severely damaged, creating haematoma. Can you make out what I'm saying here?" "A haematoma grows within the skull and presses on the brain, resulting in death. How much time does he have, doctor?" I questioned, my eyes welling up.

He stared intently at the bed through rose-tinted spectacles. "Give him up Protelia," she said softly. A mournful moan filled the room. Motions started up in the bed as it began to slowly expand and contract. An aperture opened in the side of the mattress and the bed gave a loud sigh as it excreted a jumble of human bones onto the black carpet. The fat man picked up a skull covered with patches of sticky black ichor. He stared thoughtfully into the empty eye sockets. A hand pushed out from the bed and, for a brief moment, reached longingly for the skull, before melting back into the glossy black mattress.

The sky above the Aethel-Haven was bleeding. The lavender vault had cracked, revealing long, jagged fissures of Chromatic-Aberration (a distortion where light separates into unnatural, glitching colors). Beneath the fracture, Admiral Graves lay pinned to the moss by a shimmering cage of light that Jun had erected, his body a flickering ruin of black static and weeping pixels.

“The sign nearly had me turn back the first time.’’ he whispered as he punched some codes on the lock unit, “I got it from a doctor’s head the first time I tried the umm! Peeking into head thing, they change it every week or so I think, hopefully I have the latest pass code or things are going to get messy.’’ he replied in answer to their bemused looks as the metal barrier swung open. They gathered outside for a moment, afraid to go in, in fear of whoever awaits them inside then summoning courage, they filed in behind Obiora’s larger form as he led them carefully into the forbidden chamber. The room they entered was large and circular, filled from wall to wall with wirings and dials like the

The Veiled Haven seemed to hold its breath, watching as its protectors ventured into the annals of time, seeking, exploring, and unraveling the mysteries of the cosmos. As each guardian crossed the portal's threshold, the energies of the Veiled Haven began to fluctuate wildly. The usually harmonious hum that resonated throughout became a cacophony of disjointed notes, like a symphony out of tune. From the portal's center, a brilliant burst of light emanated, momentarily blinding and silencing everything. When it subsided, a massive hourglass, previously unseen, appeared hovering in the midst of the Veiled Haven. Its sands, shimmering in hues of gold and silver, moved in erratic patterns, flo

The Revenant raised their hands to defend, ice forming in complex patterns. Kael crawled through the chaos. Nobody noticed him. Too small, too weak to be a threat. He reached the Revenant’s feet and grabbed an ankle. Golden light exploded from his hands. The Revenant screamed. Their form flickered, the fog-like quality burning away. What remained was human. A woman, maybe fifty, with grey hair and eyes that burned with fanatic intensity. And the bone crown wasn’t a crown at all. It was part of her skull. Grown into the bone. Fused permanently.

The elbow had broken and healed wrong twice, creating two extra joints that bent backward. Her face was unrecognizable. Her right eye had slid down toward her cheek, the eyeball still moving behind sealed-shut lids that had grown over it. The jaw hung open two feet, dislocated and stretched, the skin torn at the corners. Her tongue, swollen purple and too long, hung out the side. The nose was gone—just two wet holes in the middle of her face. Her teeth had fallen out and regrown wrong, some pointing inward, some jutting straight out through what was left of her lips, yellow and ridged like fingernails.