Skip to main content

The Forges

 I remember looking dismayed at the shield I’d given her. An jagged crack ran along its moon-pale surface, inlaid gold and bronze chipped, streaked with blood, plastered with ash in grimy pockmarks. 


“Can you fix it?”, Athena asks, watching me. It’s a challenge just as much as a question, the fierceness in her voice hasn’t dissipated yet. I run a hand through my dissident hair. I grin.


“Stay awhile.”


It rains. Thunder cracks, rolls. A great downpour drenches the trees nestled in this part of my forge, splashes and muddies the ground, rivers flowing down into dark channels leading far below. It’s chilly, steam hisses from urgent heat. 


I am everywhere. In everything. My gauntleted fists crash at the metal, refining. Elegant hammer blows singing. Metal against metal. 


I am dexterous, lithe bronze fingers mounted on countless turrets. They spin and shiver and claw at eager metal, unraveling, molecule by molecule, atom by atom. 


Bronze crashes. Iron splinters. Obsidian whines. I feel great, shaking concussions that make the ground sway. Pendulums back and forth, spires rising and failing. A symphony of iron motion. Everything dances like mountains rising. I know every intricacy. Every geometry is recognizable, every interlocking cleft a signature. 


The blue eyes on me are pure, pristine frost. Perfect as Tethys tides. Sapphire on sapphire. Steady. 


“Why”, she asks, “do you not come to the Mount?”


I chuckle. It is a mighty reverberation that for one pure moment dethrone the thunder outside. 


“Not my kind of place. Nothing beautiful to make, to bend. Iron, bronze— all of it can be shaped. But the personalities there? Inflexible.” 


I can sense a smile on her lips without looking.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Monsters in the Age of Men

 I saw a woman in the grocery store.  I saw her true shape, beneath raven black hair and pale eyes. She bore great wings, wings that carried endless plains across them and above roared storms, bruised clouds cracking and howling. Lightning split the sky into so many shattered pieces. She stared back at me, surrounded by the tiny people who so long ago had feared and worshipped darkening skies, crashing crescendoes.  We found each other out in the night, behind the building where trees and grass and vines grew untamed like in memories of vanished wilderness. I felt electricity when our lips met, felt spiking painful potential when I caressed her bronzed skin. In my ear I heard thrumming and pounding, shrieking wind. Building and building up into the sky, strong enough to crack mountains and scatter the stars.  I gave her the sea, brine and crushing depths between every kiss. I unfurled myself beneath massive wings, sprawling and armored and impossible, flashing colors...

The Moons that Hunters Must Walk

 The Five Moons claim the sky with blood and cosmic violence. Crimson-saffron light splashes across the huge storm clouds beneath their fierce visages, and turns the world eerie. Dreamlike. Haskes, the Moon of Windfall. Storms curl into whirlwind frenzies across the bone-colored face. It is the place of howling furies and hellish nightmares, where hunters must walk across the Stormchasm to stand strong against endless wind-- or be thrown into bottomless abyss. Ahnios, the Moon of Waves. Hunters know the Tidesong, a deep welling howl of sorrow and exultance, the song to be sung out when those worthy sailed out across tsunamis vast enough to sunder continents into crushing abyss. A moon of an ocean untamed, beautiful, and unforgiving. Khinq, the Moon of Dunes. Those beneath the chaotic sky know the Blood Passage as a time of fear and annihilation, a time when the Moon of Endless Sand has returned from distant void to once again reign among its brethren. Red glows like silent, crawlin...

Traitors Folly

 Traitors Folly Dad always dragged us to roadside attractions. But, while I’ve forgotten the tallest stack of butter and the fattest cow and a million other tidbits of oddness, I haven’t  forgotten the Monument to Insurrection.  I don’t think I ever will.  Whatever internet searches might have you believe, there are roadside attractions in the East Coast, they’re real common. Of course, I can’t tell you exactly where we were— no one can seem to remember, or doesn’t want to remember. Just that, heading back from relatives in Philadelphia and about five more hours from home, dad was excitedly pulling us into some lot. It was morning, maybe seven or eight, and no one was really there.  “All the better!”, dad practically cheered, and we were out, stretching legs or twisting backs. Dad went on ahead, of course, but not far. I could see him, standing in the shadow of what must’ve been our reason for stopping: a bronze statue of a man, maybe thirty or so feet tall....