No one knew where the swords came from.
They’d always stood there, looming
giant sentinels over the village.
Dex squinted against harsh sunlight,
peering at colossal blades towering.
Pigeons swooped
Wheeling between giant quillions,
pale wings catching light otherworldly.
Wind sighed around the edges,
lone grasses twitching and rustling against iron.
Words failed him in that moment,
light shifting and bending,
enormous steel plunging
deep into stone earth.
The hair on Dex’s arms prickled.
No inscriptions, no runes, no words or plaques, and yet:
Knees and tears coursed down to dry earth.
He knew without knowing,
the depth
the breadth
the height of care of the Shaper–
these blades could belong to none other–
who would claim with this sacred stillness.
Reaching a trembling hand,
and then:
a low rumble,
an ancient forgotten song to meet him:
kinship, steel, and covenant.
Protection.
Home.
Author’s Note 🌿
Some of you may recognize the artwork from last year; I’ve been tinkering with this story about Dex and the mysterious swords for longer than that, with not much luck. It didn’t want to be a full-blown novella, it didn’t want to be standard short story, and even the typical flash fiction format just seemed… meh. Even the artwork struggled; I knew what I wanted to see, but getting it there took multiple revisions.
And then, as I began developing course materials for a middle school creative writing class, I ran across prose poetry. Sudden fiction. It all came to the forefront, back from the mental archives of college circa 2006. A tighter word count and a more —ahem— creative sort of layout…. Yes. It seemed like it might work with my recent return to poetry and poetic forms.
And, it did. After more than a year of tinkering, I finally felt reasonably satisfied with this first completed piece of flash fiction in… let’s just say a very long time.
For that alone, I can let this one fly free.
❦ Heather
Thank you for reading the inaugural edition of Pen-Scribbled Stories, a haphazard archive of experimental prose and story. Pen-Scribbled Stories is a subsidiary of the Heather in the Blue Mountains newsletter.
**If you enjoyed this creative ramble, please consider checking out some of my other work. 🌿