Flashes of Wonder #2: The Barbarian and Nature

 

UKA THE UNDYING, the zombie sorcerer, is experimenting with flashes of dark magics to blast the minds of bards! Illustration provided by Mustafa Bekir.

"Flashes of Wonder" will be posted every week. It will feature a sword and sorcery flash fiction prompt. Share your "flash of wonder" on social media. -JRC

The Barbarian and Nature. One of the most common plots is man against nature. Consider the figure of the barbarian in sword and sorcery. How does this figure relate to nature? When may the figure work with nature, and when may the figure work against it? In 500 words, create a sword and sorcery flash fiction with just two characters: a barbarian and some aspect of nature. Begin the action with the barbarian fighting against nature but then allow the barbarian to find a way to come together with nature at the end. (500 words)

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10th Flash Fiction Monday: Sword and Sorcery and Unadorned Prose

10th Flash Fiction Monday: great art, literary art specifically, manages to discover synergy between form and content, style and theme. Consider an example of prose narration that 100% avoids figurative language, metaphor, lyricism, excess description, etc., a prose style that is as unadorned as a soldier of fortune’s cruel, plain, but razor sharp blade. With what “theme” would such a Spartan, unadorned prose style harmonize? Write a S&S story of no more than 300 words that avoids figurative language, complicated syntax, and that uses language precisely and economically. In doing so, tell a thematically appropriate story for this style, a story of the unadorned, the undecorated, the plain, the profane, the raw.

Highlight from 2nd Flash Fiction Monday

Prompt: Dynamic characters undergo transformations. Often the crux of this transformation can be dramatized as an epiphany, a moment of deep insight or understanding that changes the character. Write a story that takes place over several years where a soldier of fortune changes from "mercenary to crusader" or from "neutral to loyal" and does so because of an epiphany. Less than 400 words!

A Double-edged Knife, by Chuck E. Clark (362 words)

Gerrat had not killed as many men as winter, but he had come damn close. Years he had been at it, killing for a god who he knew was real, but spent scant attention to. The sky was real. Didn't mean he worshipped it. His god was real. He killed for him. It was just what he did. He was good at it.

There was a priest of some cult, some heresy that made a mockery of their god. Kartheh, that priest's name had been. Some kind of power play. He had not concerned himself with the details.

He should have, though.

A few guards, some cultists, no difficulties. Just a few dead bodies after he came through. Then he found the sanctum.

What was left of a young man was spread across the altar, parts that didn't seem to add up to what had once been a person. A thousand deaths on his hands, but this was different. What he did was clean, had a purpose. A purity. This was awful in a way that even he could feel the evil of. A person's pain drawn out like hot copper, stretched out into an unnatural wire of suffering. He had killed the priest, as efficient and clean as always, but carried the wrongness of what he had seen like a weight pressing out under his skin. That was the first and last time he had asked his god why he had killed someone. 

The answer, filtered through priests and oracles, left him weightless with shock.

The heretical priest had tortured the young man on the altar, but that was not the problem. That was apparently normal. The problem was that the young man's still living insides had been spread about the altar in the wrong direction and order, directly against the teachings that Gerrat had never read or thought of.

Tortured wrong. That was the heresy. The reason for his upbringing and discipline and skills. His whole life.

That day, Gerrat made himself a new life, and a new goal. He was always good at killing. He would see how much discipline and skill it took to kill a god.

Highlight from Flash Fiction Monday

Monday Flash S&S prompt: according to tradition, ritual magicians must take great effort to protect themselves from the baleful forces they summon and exploit. Write a flash story about a ritual gone awry. 400 words (or less). (Flash Fiction S&S prompts will be posted on the Facebook page).

Robert Subiaga provided this origin story of an undead sorcerer who summons the devil.

Early End, by Robert Subiaga 

Karathus of Alexandria pondered the scroll before him. The one that would summon "Satan" himself.

Satan had never before been summoned. As the scroll made clear, to call upon the services of the most powerful of demons was only fit for a suicide mission. The price was one's bodily life (though, contrary to the myths of the faithful, even Satan could not claim a soul) and never had anyone in sorcerous records survived.

For those to whom revenge was that precious it might have been worth it; but Karathus, seeking revenge in memory of his beloved sister, felt a stoicism that would have dishonored her memory. Their shared philosophy had been more ... "epicurean."

Karathus had exhausted himself much with the first ritual.

Yet Karathus needed Satan himself to make his enemy, the Emperor, pay for the execution of Karathus’s sister, Jezabel. His twin. His partner in sorcery. His lover.

For they had miscalculated the Emperor’s power. The Emperor had a mage of his own, and protected himself under the patronage of one of the most powerful demons in existence.

First Jezebal had been taken easily and beheaded; now troops surrounded Karathus's sanctum. They were readying the siege engines outside the tower.

With a last sigh, Karathus made the incantation to bring Satan forth. And as certain as Karathus knew it would be, the flaming face loomed before him, loomed before Karathus, seemed to "smell" him.

And then--as Karathus cackled weakly, fatalistically--Satan was left to do the mage’s bidding. 

The screams of the Emperor’s dying men, crunching bone, and spattering blood came almost immediately.

Trembling, Karathus collapsed into the plush, throne-like chair that had always been his favorite. He sighed for he was weak from first the spell of Resurrection, then of Summoning.

He fingers still shaking, he brushed his cheek. But he was careful to avoid scratching the growing itch there, just as he had made sure to do after the Awakening, when it came to the itching in the gaping wound over his heart.

The spell had been a gamble. It could only ever be used by any mage once anyway and only at the exact moment of his dying, on himself.

But he didn't want to be tearing off skin that would never grow back.

And that which was undead would begin to rot by itself, soon enough.