Fire's Shadow

Today's micro-story is a response to art from a Magic the Gathering card, selected at random. I also had some music going while I wrote. The links are below if you are curious! Thanks for reading!

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There is no path to the black mountain called Witch’s Nail. A stone laceration cutting highest of the Broken Teeth Range, the summit curls like a talon at the center of a massif that knows no light, a volcanic cyst offering no trail even to the sun.

One night, in a month of Fire's Shadow, a priest in iron vestments gave obeisance beneath The Nail’s barbed point. The Nail's answer split the basalt ground. Escaping gasses hissed acrid, the night air heating to boiling, but the priest did not, could not, flinch. The apostle knelt steadfast. A second reply cleaved a fissure like a forked-tongue. The ground shifted, opening, an earthen maw revealing an enigmatic fossil.

Without hesitation, the priest descended and began to chant. First a whisper. Then a crescendo of conviction. Then a scream, the single voice swallowed by a din of the damned caterwauling from their throat. The stone fossil exploded, lava streaming into the chasm. Indomitable, the priest continued even as their sollerets glowed red, their greaves buckling in the lava’s flow. At the canticle’s climax, magmatic effluvium erupted in a flood and the priest at last succumbed, releasing a final genuflection and a cry like the agony of thousands before collapsing beneath cascading fires.

The Witch’s Nail never knew dawn, but morn-hour came, regardless. Lava cooled to lithics. Red cinders faded black. Shadows deepened. And, that day, the slumbering beast beneath awoke again.

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Art: Apostle's Blessing, by Brad Rigney

Music: Symphony #3, by Krzysztov Penderecki
Kosmogonia, by Krzysztov Penderecki

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