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

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

Necropolis

 It’s a huge space, a room in somewhere so vast that the horizon is just endless black wall and endless black space. There’s an ocean with dark waves you can sense and hear, but can’t see.  And an island at the center of it, with a city. Look around you and see the ships. They are behemoths, huge and angular and organic, arching skeletal profiles silhouetted. They are waiting.  Everything is smooth as stone and ebony like a night without stars, cut through with fine lines of amber, gold, ivory. Soft, organic light pulses in those countless lines. Ancient, undeniable heartbeats.  It’s freezing. Your breath comes out in billowing fog. Thin, dark ice frosts across structures as if it were a fine artisanal coating.  The doorways are too tall for anyone human, and they flower open, or the seams vanish making the entrance into a wall. Nothing has blemishes, nothing here has been built. It’s grown. Manifested. Every surface is eerily warm against the biting cold, ridge...
Post a Comment
Read more

Rite of Spring

  Fear rises up and out into the night. The horned face emblazoned with markings like terrible, piercing eyes thrusts forward and out. Guided by instincts with the force of a living locomotive. Steam billows out of gaping nostrils. In the dim brain of the Triceratops it is gripped by awful, primeval terror. Fight. Live! Fight! Live. Fight. Live!  Jaws crashed down. Heavy, impossibly heavy. Fatal. Moonlight catches impaling teeth, massive blunt daggers meant to pulverize bone and concuss flesh, pulling giant chunks from still living prey. The Tyrannosaurus is Death in the Cretaceous world, it is emperor and regent over all living things, it is the epitome of annihilation born in flesh. Its black hide almost glows in the night, darkness on darkness. So fast for something so huge. Blurry. A mountain astride legs, legs as thick as the cedars of biblical Behemoth. Step. Step. Step. Bite.  Horns reach. Push. Sweep. Jaws crack, close, yawn open to a furious gullet. The titans da...
Post a Comment
Read more