The Leviathan Cogborne

ILLUSTRATED MICROFICTION

The sea does not forgive

It churns, claws, whispers. It takes. And in the drowned chasm called the Glass Abyss, it took again—whole cities, all their ingenuity, their industry, their stubborn ego. The remnants of Aequoris, an undersea utopia once thrumming with life, now writhe in ruin: towers consumed by barnacle-thick concretions, streets choked with kelp and ossified coral. And in the midst of it all swims it. A monster of brass, copper, and glass, a creature of teeth and gears. The Leviathan Cogborne.

No one knows who first thought to cage the violence of the sea in an ormolu shark-skin. Perhaps the architects of Aequoris believed they could bargain with the abyss. Maybe they thought they could stare into its alien depths and not be devoured. The Leviathan was their folly: engineered by technomancers to protect the city from deep-sea horrors, a bio-mechanical sentinel, its brass flesh carved with labyrinthine sigils. Its camera obscura eyes glowed with a phosphorescent cunning, its mouth a hurricane of spinning blades and sharp-machined teeth. Inside its belly, hidden among the gearworks and pressurized chambers, it carried the city’s blackest secret: a pulsing core of thaumaturgic energy. A living thing, cradled in metal. Not quite dead, not quite machine.

The Leviathan watched

It hunted. It defended. And as these things often go, inevitably it turned. The city fell, not in a crash of fire and stone, but in a suffocation of water and silence. The Leviathan tore through the streets it was built to save, breaking bodies and buildings alike with implacable efficiency. The screams of drowning echoed as though coming from the Leviathan itself. When the waters stilled, Aequoris was gone, its creators sunk in the ruins they’d built to escape the land’s unkindness.

Now, the Leviathan swims through its carcass-city, a god-monster drunk on purposelessness. Its brass filigree gleams beneath the water’s murk; its ribs groan with the grind of endless motion. It crafts things—grotesque things—using its own flesh as template. Tiny clockwork sharks with stained-glass eyes prowl the streets, biting at ghostly schools of fish. Its mind has frayed, splintered. Some say it believes it is still fulfilling its purpose. Others say it has forgotten Aequoris entirely and is driven instead to build a world in its image: cold, mechanical, suffused with tooth and hunger.

But the Leviathan is not alone…

Travelers to London and Paris whisper of strange currents in the waters around the city—vortices that twist and pull, dragging ships down to where light is but a memory. And then, the sound: a grinding whine, like an endless scream pressed through brass lungs. The Leviathan doesn’t just guard Aequoris; it lures. No one knows why. Maybe it is lonely. Maybe it is building an empire.

Or maybe, deep within its belly, the thing inside still beats. Still thinks. Still hungers.

Image created using NightCafe Studio, Stable Diffusion, and Abobe Creative Cloud.