December 2012 – Leviathan

And so we reach the final month of 2012. This is the home stretch, the swan song, the last hurrah, the end times. December is what I would call a proper month. It’s got 31 days, the weather’s usually cold and about as awful as it’s ever likely to get, there’s holiday time; things happen in Decembers. You’ve got Christmas, you’ve got New Year’s Eve, you’ve got the inevitable fight with your family. It’s all of the things which fundamentally characterise a whole year squished up into one nice, parcelled up, 31 day period.

I’m coming to the end of a week off from work, using up my remaining holiday allocation before year’s end, pissing it away doing nothing in particular. This has been a week of rest and relaxation, a recharging and revitalisation of my mystic energies after a trying couple of months. I have done more or less nothing, and achieved more or less nothing, and this has left me utterly exhausted. Never underestimate just how tiring inactivity can be. Writing has kept me at least moderately occupied, preventing me from slipping into a coma constructed from my own listless ennui.

Anyway, enough of my ramblings, I should probably cut to the chase: it’s Pictonaut time, this month we square off against Leviathan.

This month’s picture is the work of Jamie Jones. November saw me field a pretty hardcore sci-fi image, so I decided that for December I should swing all the way to the other end of the spectrum and go with something with a heavy fantasy vibe. It’s important to try and mix things up a bit now and then, I wouldn’t want things to go stale now would I? The last unarguably fantastical image we had was Faces in the Woods and that was back in February. February!

For those of you unfamiliar with the task, it is quite straightforward. You have one whole month to write a 1,000(ish) word short story about the picture above.

Now with the picture at our disposal let’s pull the sword of words from the stone of grammar and head out on a quest of high-adventure to plunder the nouns form the ancient tomb of King Verbiage!

The Rogue Verbumancer – Speak the words

A-Scribe to Describe – A truth revealed

James Clayton’s epistolary experiment:

Part 1 – The Prophecy

Part 2 – The Coded Message

Part 3 – The Tablet

Part 4 – The Playwright

Part 5 – The Vision

The challenge began here and ended here