Death Valley, California is the hottest place on Earth. A slice of paradise best compared to Hell, in the Fourth Era, became a tourist attraction. A barren place where little wildlife and even fewer humans could survive suddenly became a go-to destination to tease the forces of nature. Plains of salt, rolling golden hills, and a starlit night sky are some of the miracles one of one million annual visitors can look forward to in Death Valley. But few know the story of how it came to be. Even fewer know its true name. This is the story of the Garden of Sleeping Giants.
In the first era, Zeus cast Kronos and the other titans from Mount Olympus. The impact of their bodies knocked most of the remaining life out of them, and the ones who didn’t immediately succumb to their wounds became the first pedestrians of Death Valley. Unknown to the Greeks and then to the Romans, the Titans wandered this desolate place until even their immortality evaporated. While Zeus and the other Olympians grew fat with ambrosias and nectars, their once mighty ancestors laid down their aching bones to decorate fields of sand. Rivers and streams of their tears had since dried up leaving only beds of salt in their wake. Blankets of sand covered their skin in layer after layer of Earth until Gaia herself couldn’t help but buckle under its weight. No amount of water could unearth their carcasses, and no amount of earth could entirely cover their hulking masses. Unable to die, the Titans slept—the first giants to breathe their last in the Garden.
In the Second Era, they named this place Dune. A place so alien it might as well have been another planet, Arrakis, but none could call it Earth. A place so insufferable, it could not be considered a part of God’s creation. Even the residents of Dune didn’t know its origins at the time—but the Gods had created this Godless place. But leave it to life to find its way through the cracks. A new organism grew out of the rotting Titans. The “Sleeping Giants” were slowly consumed by a variation of sand plankton. These sand plankton fed on the remnants of ichor in the Titan remnants and grew hundreds of meters long–the new giants of the Garden. These “sand worms” produced a psychoactive waste. This waste attracted Death Valley’s first tourists. Ancient humans found a way to harness the substance and travel far out of the desolate and unforgiving Garden of Sleeping Giants. The Titans could not find a way to avenge their banishment in life, but they were able to do so in death. Their essence created the scourge of spice that caused humans to nearly go extinct in the Second Era. Only when the last of the worms had been hunted and killed while an addiction to spice ran its course on humanity, did Death Valley become a graveyard once again.When the spice ran out, people left the Garden of Death and finally honored the Garden of Sleeping Giants for what it was—Hell.
1art by Pragna Gaddamedi (@prgs.jpeg)
Short Story (Kinda) Tip of the Day!
Wow, so yes, I did indeed commit to another posting schedule that I didn’t stick to for even one more post…sorry about that. But! What I like about writing is that I don’t have deadlines (outside of what I put on myself, which is more than enough). So I will keep that cadence, but know I am trying my hardest to write more. If this were my job, I’m sure in some ways I would love it, but I fear a world where the pressure stamps out the poetry. So here I am preparing for my account meeting writing notes about databases while I find moments in between to finish this post.
Back to the actual post now! I recently got the opportunity to take full advantage of working from home and go see Death Valley with the official Four-Fours Poetry Artistic and Creative Director, Pragna Gaddamedi herself. We had the privilege of being out on the salt flats on one of the hottest days of the summer, and there was something so thrilling about being around that much nothing. Writing in an environment like that makes the act of writing almost passive. There’s so much nothing that anything would fill it. This was what came out of that sandy, sweaty goop. A loose myth that explains why there’s so much nothing there. It’s not a fully-developed idea, but I see a rich history there that people wouldn’t expect. And using the history in the history book is way less fun.
collagist
Lovely notes - it truly is one of those places where vast expanse of nothing makes you feel something.