Dwindling Topographies

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.

Originally published in Apocalypse – Dark Drabbles #6 by Black Hare Press in 2019.