In a collapsed hall, an echoing crunch truncates panicked screaming.
Later, a wrinkled sheet of parchment skips corner over corner across the heaving stones of an empty plaza, catching on a clattering stand of dry stalks rising from a russet mound that was once a fighting machine. The bones of its soldiers were scavenged long ago. Crimson splashes dapple the parchment in a delicate arc like the islands of a whimsical archipelago. A map describing the mysterious geography of a small violence.
Its cartographer is feasting now, alone in the darkness, an artless crunching amid a shifting landscape of bones.
*
Dwindling Topographies first appeared December 2019 in
Apocalypse – Dark Drabbles #6