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The Creature Chronicles
by K. D. Kragen 
Author of The KillWare Chronicles (2004) and Plagueman (2005) Philosophical sci-fi/fantasy in the tradition of
Jules Verne, H. P. Lovecraft, and Gladys Knight & The Pips "Fairy tales are more than true, not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten." ---G.K. Chesterton What if we sapiens (humans) were only now beginning to attain a scientific capability we once enjoyed—and abused—countless millennia ago? What if, instead of reaching for some pinnacle of technological mastery, devolution was the paradigm, and we were merely blundering down a road once traveled? BOOK ONE: Creatures of the Heart Sometime tomorrow, or maybe the day after. On their honeymoon in the south of England, Tony and Genny sit down to a quiet supper at the Three Swans Inn. The next moment they are fighting for their lives against mad giants riding strangely aloof horned beasts. Subsequently believing themselves to be rescuing unicorns from giants, our young adventurers race across the Kentish countryside to discover an old farm in a meadow owned by a mysterious recluse named Harold Barkis. Harold is part of an ancient and secret worldwide brotherhood, "Sanctuary Keepers," who for thousands of years have tracked the legends of unicorns and giants. Taking up cape and broadsword, Harold leads Genny and Tony on a journey into the Earth winding down a labyrinth of passageways to a ghostly, prehistoric underworld filled with vast technological wonders, mutant rodents, and a mysterious black tower that points to the stars. BOOK TWO: Children of Nephila Six years later. Tony, Genny and Harold are back on the farm. Genny and Tony now have a daughter, Megan Rebecca. While watching "Bambi Meets Godzilla" on TV, Megan is confronted by one of the sane giants, Girte Brechtele, who has emerged from her subterranean borderlands to warn her human friends of a new danger from below. Meanwhile, out on the mid-Atlantic island of Flores in the Azores, a covert US-British military operation unearths evidence of an ancient and bizarre civilization. At the same time, outside El Ferrol, northern Spain, a huge beast stalks through Seņora Angelo's vineyard nestled in the quiet Galician hills. Barely escaping the clutches of military agents, Genny, Tony, Megan, Harold, and Brechtele flee back into the earth. There they come upon the realm of the Nephilim, even older and more terrifying than the strange world of Book One. They soon discover that huge monsters of prehistoric world wars are being revived after two hundred thousand years of cold storage. As Brechtele's group approaches this antediluvian realm, a military expedition from Flores Island is heading in the same direction. Relentlessly pursued by cyborg survivors of the ancient wars, these two groups finally meet and end up struggling together for their lives, if not for the fate of the Earth (as always). Near the climax, there appears that eldritch Assyro-Babylonian proto-being, primeval chaos and the abyss incarnate, the incomparable Tiamat. BOOK THREE: Space Leviathan Like an astral serpent, the creature circled the outer planets, lazily pacing itself after a timeless passage through happy empty space. Slipping in gentle silence between the dark shadows of long cosmic sweeps, it snagged the solar winds and rode them on ancient gravity currents toward the system's central star. Delighted light! Cosmic sustenance! The beast fed lustily on that inkling energy whose rays reached ever out even to the far frigid gateway of this simple star and its twelve companion spheres. The creature fed and hummed and thrilled in the growing particle warmth. It frolicked and danced, swimming on to that bright starfire like a comet awakening after long icy sleep—but with purpose, and with an identity it sensed, thrilled at, rested in as the nuclear center of a luminous self-knowing, and with a name given it from most ancient time. Leviathan. Gliding unhurriedly, playing among planet rings and asteroid clouds, following the wispy scent of gravity angels, drawing, caressing, circling in eddies of dim sidereal force, calling, singing celestial music, Leviathan answered the song of the twelve spheres, breathed in the cosmic rhythms while the growing solar currents blew outward and drew inward the space creature to the young central star's fusioning furnace. An energizing banquet: Leviathan breathed deep the small star's sweet radiation bouquet. Leviathan, the spaceflyer, intergalactic whale, celestial dragon whose tail sculpted the dark in swirls of rainbow night—it glided ever closer to the source of its happy immortality, a beast without equal in all the cosmos, gargantua from dark matter's ocean shores. Read the The Creature Chronicles short story "Eternal Life" (PDF doc). Coming Soon — The Creature Chronicles — Watch Out For Them K. D. Kragen Home Planet
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