Weekly Writing – June 3 2023

Wearing a chain of dandelions into battle, strewn careless and delicate about the neck. A boast, or a mockery? You won’t dent their armour. You won’t so much as cut a stem.
Red blood swinging about garishly on yellow blossoms. A child might have draped it around this horror’s neck, pressing a kiss to the glowering black brow of their helm. Or a lover, leaning up on tiptoes to be locked in their iron embrace. Where all else has been stamped into mud and gore, it lives, dancing gaily forward, coyly back with each thrust of their spear.
Your hands ache like hollow-beaten, ringing, dented metal around your sword. A hundred blows caught and dealt back still echo in your arms. You have been forced to the edge of this strew of death – its herald, garlanded in life, is shaking one of your last friends in the world from their spear.
You’ve lost track of where the heart or life might really be under their black armour. All you can see, all that seems vital, is the chain blooming around their neck. In your mind, in your blood-blurred eyes, it is an artery – if you cut it, will they bleed sap and stop?
They aren’t looking at you. They’ve turned towards someone cowering on the ground, not pretending well enough to be dead. You firm your hollow grip on your sword.
You have nothing left to pray to. No one to call on for help. If you cut the flowers loose, new ones might bloom here among the bodies of your friends.
Three steps, slipping in the scarlet mire made of your friends, bring you to a sprint. You raise your sword high. You have nothing left to cry.
No triumph. No challenge. The herald starts to turn to you, the chain that says someone loves it lying like a kiss of sunlight against its breastplate, and you swing your sword down.