Hourglass Skull Novels & Stories

Five glass globes of different sizes rested on the top shelf with mysterious fog swirling inside them. At the top of the shelves, rested three human skulls. Old and yellowish. But the scariest part was that they all were emitting sounds which could steal the wits of a man leaving him cold and white. The skull resting at right was cackling continuously. The one at left was crying by releasing ugly wails that could chill the very bones of a human being. The one in the center was yelling the verses in an unknown language.

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.

The creature crawled into the light. It was a nightmare of corrupted geometry. It looked like a wolf that had been put through a meat grinder and reassembled by a glitching AI. It had no skin, only a skeletal framework wrapped in a pulsating, oil-slick layer of Shadow Matter. Its forelimbs were two massive, sickle-shaped bone blades that struck the stone floor with the precision of a clockwork mechanism.

If he looked down, I was finished. But before his eyes could track the ground, a loud, violent crash echoed from the far end of the hallway. A large ceramic vase had been smashed to pieces. Standing right in the middle of the debris was the source of the noise. Through the gap in the fabric, I caught my first real glimpse of it. It wasn't human. It looked like a distortion of reality—a creature made entirely of thick, swirling black smoke, held together by a skeletal frame. Its fingers were long, sharp, and tipped with hardened gray wood.

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.

A thin trail of salvia escaped from his mouth, jaw slack. "Bastard!" Babi jumped, punching the ground with his free fist. The crack in the floor opened wider and a long limb wound its way out. The arm was grey and contorted, as if the bones were made of rubber. It reached, snatched for the whirling bird who seemed to be enjoying the frustration below. Whatever the limb belonged to could not squeeze through, but the top of a withered skull was visible, covered in a few wisps of wiry, white hair, home to flies, crawling from the split that spanned from brow to back.

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

As it got closer, Blake could see the creature more clearly. The body was that of an oversized dog, no more of a wolf, with its straight and seemingly sharp black hair. There was a skull in the shape of a dog in place of its head with no eye sockets or mouth to be seen but a crack along the center of the skull. The creature was moving its head from side to side, and then the center of the skull head opened. Within were what looked like red membranes, and a mighty sonic shriek was heard from the opening. It reminded Blake of a movie he once saw with a similar animal called a Shrieker.

Then she started racing to the door of the cottage without minding the injury on her foot and her stomach. "Help me! Please, help me!" She banged on the closed door, the more she knocked and yelled, the rotten wood kept breaking away until it made a big hole in the door. She kicked the door and it sprang open immediately. Then she stopped as a shiver ran down her spine. "Is anyone at home?" She sniffed and slowly walked inside the cottage as a candle that was on a skull lit up immediately and it made her flinch. She looked at the antiquated cottage and marveled. She studied the skull and noticed that blood was dripping out from the mouth and eye sockets of the skulls.