Sworded Tales

Ingerd never sought to become a ratter, let alone Head Ratter of the Opal District Chef’s Quarter.  She excelled at it though.  Hunting vermin.  The gods had seen fit to give her this particular calling.  Why?  She never cared to ask.  Religions, and churches, and people for that matter made her uncomfortable.  She was more at home in the dank mazeways beneath the city.

So she hunted vermin.  She scourged them, and she learned with a facility that set her apart from the other ratters in the Guild, made her an oddball.  She didn’t care.  She could hunt circles around any of them, and those that put coin in her pocket knew as much.

Ingerd was a ratter.  She would never have considered herself a ranger. Continue reading

Dappled sunlight skated across Gordon’s eyelids but it was the gunfire which brought him to his senses.  At least he thought it was gunfire.  The reports were muffled and distant, the shouts which accompanied them oddly harrowing.  He opened his eyes and the blurred vision cleared into a woodland canopy on a clear, crisp day.

The pain of his groin still ached with the throb of his pulse, but he crept to a sitting position.  His nose finally caught up to the rest of his senses, and the stink of the grave assailed him.  He looked around and nearly placed his hand on the putrefying corpse behind him.  Pain forgotten, Gordon flew to his feet and stumbled back from the body. Continue reading

Scissoring slices of slipper-leaf gnashed between considerable lengths of teeth.  The pungent punch of the roughage brought the chewer to the brink of retching, but penitence was necessary to maintain the upper hand.  One could not allow the curse to take hold.  Not fully.  Such roads lead to oblivion, and that was a path that must be avoided at all costs.  Too much work to be done.

The chewing halted as the figures dropped from the cleft of stone.  The penetrating eyes that watched forced a mind geared toward meat to focus on the actions at hand.  Cloud cover shifted the rays of light, and the scales which coiled tightly about the watcher responded.  A gentle modification of hue and a dulling of the gloss granted virtual invisibility once more. Continue reading

“The cookies call to me.”

Andi looked across the table at Carl.  She could see his eyes flick to the cupboard where they kept the snacks.  There was a fine sheen of moisture on his lips, and she thought that he was actually salivating.  She was about to speak when he continued his daily confessional.

“I dreamt they were crying last night,” he said, eyes seeing the sleep scape he described, “The cookies.  Horrified that I would abandon them.  I think I woke crying as well.  This was after the parade of bicycles with cookie tires with the coconut confetti, mind you.”  He rubbed his face in his hands and chuckled in the present, his stomach growled in ill humored synchronicity.  “Shut it,” he said to his groin. Continue reading

As the sun descended toward the horizon, a chill began to seep into the air amidst the lengthening shadows. The horses stamped with unease, hooves muffled only slightly by the damp underbrush of the scrubby terrain.  Haron did his best to keep the animals quiet, steaming breath pouring from flared nostrils as the boy gathered reins and patted necks in consolation.

Zulian continued her circular sweep of the area, her lithe form disappearing for brief instances behind clusters of evergreens or thick uprisings of shrubbery.  She carried the shortspear loosely in her hand and remained wary of the nearby sounds and sights of the sparse wood. Continue reading

Everyone has it.  The extent of ownership, however, runs the gamut.  Some deal with the inability to resist the slightest temptation on a regular basis.  Some are able to hold out beyond what seems to be reasonably sane limits.  How is willpower generated though?  That’s the question I’ve been pondering of late.  Is it an innate gift possessed from birth?  Is it a learned behavior?  Is it a skill developed through training as any other?  Likely some combination of these elements are the truth of it, but I often marvel at the varied responses to and perceptions of the concept of willpower.

Take pain for example.  A rational mind understands that pain is merely the nerve endings conveying to the brain that the activity being experienced is considered suboptimal for continued bodily health.  Once that rationale is in place, the concept of pain should take on a different tone.  That tone however is still vastly different across the spectrum of minds experiencing the pain.

Why? Continue reading