Hugh J. O'Donnell

A hurricane is coming, and they say this is the big one. The old man doesn’t have the time or energy to flee out of its path.
Instead, he goes out to his shed and sits among the manuscripts. They are his life’s work, consisting of thousands of poems, short stories, plays, and novels. Whatever struck his fancy.
He never shared his writing with anyone. It was his secret that he kept for himself alone.
He watches, briefly, as the winds rip down the walls and share his work with the world.
Posthumously, he is remembered as a hidden genius.

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The fortress remained sealed for centuries, keeping the evil within trapped inside. The spell was meant to hold forever. But there are always people who will do something regardless of the dangers, simply because it is forbidden.
Worse, rumors of the treasure buried in the darkness spread almost before the wards were laid. It was inevitable that someone would break that seal and sneak in, releasing ancient horrors on unsuspecting people.
Fortunately, germ theory had progressed significantly in the interval. The sages of the present were able to quickly isolate and treat the plague before it did too much harm.

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The hermit woke to voices in the Sacred Forest. By tradition, their people left them to their own devices.
Curious, the hermit threw on a cloak and stepped out of their hovel to investigate. They paused and hid when they saw the grotesque aliens.
The beings were short, squat bipeds with only two stumpy arms.
They had heard of them, a raider species obsessed with collecting resources across the galaxy. By the number of mechanical saws and other tools they carried, they intended to harm the Sacred Forest.
The hermit decided to teach these Humans the error of their ways.

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The crew looked down at the Devil’s Road and considered their odds. The road was prime salvage if you could make it.
A line of pre-collapse automobiles that stretched for miles meant more steel and rubber than most salvagers saw in their lifetimes if you could avoid the devil.
Flanked by the skeletons of old towers, it loomed over the dead highway. Black clouds roiled with electricity, casting lightning bolts down on anyone foolish enough to get close.
They looked at each other and nodded. They just had to be fast. They revved the engines and started down the bluff.

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In ancient times, we believed that the gods played games with the lives of mortals, pitting them against one another in wars for their amusement. They granted boons and bestowed curses.
These days, we say that ‘God does not play dice with the universe.’ We take those stories to just be artistic license, or an attempt by primitive people to explain natural phenomena.
So the giant cubes we found beneath the ruins were something of a mystery. They were too heavy to move, their markings couldn’t be deciphered, and their composition defied analysis. But somehow, I wanted to roll them.

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“Don’t worry, it’ll be an easy job,” the rogue said as we poured over the map of the abandoned temple.
“If it’s so easy, what makes you think any treasure’s left?” I asked.
“Well, there is a guardian. A giant serpent.” I pushed away from the table. He grabbed my arm. “No, wait. I scouted out the site. The guardian’s gotten too big. It can’t navigate the temple corridors. If we go in and out the back, it won’t be able to reach us.”
It was a great plan, right up until the monster burst through the crumbling stone walls.

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