Category: Fantasy

There is magic in the air.

Our naked feet dance, carrying us round and round in a circle, our steps deliberate, their pattern pre-meditated, their motion meaningful.

The music we make is an echo of a time long gone by, the song the gods of olden days breathed into this world when it was naught but an infant, the lullaby a mother would sing when putting her child to sleep, the verses a shepherd would hum under his breath to ward his flock. Healing. Protective. It is unending. It dwells under the surface, deep within. One can still hear it when shutting off the noise and opening the senses to the unexplainable.

Continue reading “Heathens”

The peculiar nature of the human condition is that their hearts can break, heal, and break all over again. It makes me pause. I oft wonder at it but still, I find it all so very amusing. Humans weep, cracked asunder, and their tears become just another element that enters and erodes the edifices they erected, not unlike the wind or the rain. It is their frailty that defines them, it molds who they are and who they aspire to be, in their short lifespans. It spurs them on to do great things, each a small attempt at erasing insignificance. And then it conspires to turn them and forces them to tear all their accomplishments down. With time they feel they do not have, their hearts heal. Then, they repeat it once more.

They call me Blackheart, and they mean it as an insult. Blackheart in his black obsidian tower. Stoneheart, unfeeling. A heart black as sin. I embrace it, truly. I do not have a heart, at least not how humans define it.

Continue reading “Blackheart”

The noon heat was at its suffocating best, the sun busily going about baking people’s scalps, when Talya’s father called a break from the labor. Everyone had been waiting for the whistle, signaling the pause. Men dropped their scythes. On cue, the women stashed the pitchforks and left the hay bales, then brought out baskets laden with food for the midday repast. The rhythmic hum of harvest was replaced by a tune. Its first lilting notes, sung by a maid, were soon picked up by a choir of men and women. Their voices carried the joy only work well-done could procure. The gaggle of children running merrily around, spurred by the joyous song, completed the tableau.

Continue reading “The Smell of Hay, Oil and Clouds on the Horizon”