Showing posts with label stars. Show all posts
Showing posts with label stars. Show all posts

Monday, February 24, 2025

Mountains and Stars

When the land was entirely flat, long ago, two clans contested for the rulership. They were the mountains and the stars, the first things that were. Their battles cannot be imagined today, but the result of them can still be seen. The blood shed then became the oceans, the mountains grew mighty, and the stars succumbed to defeat and eternal exile.
From time to time a star tests the fortitude of the mountains and finds it formidable still. Your Exile Sword is made from a brave star's corpse. It has the strength of bravery, but it can never win against a Sovereign Sword made from mountain's metal. Seek the Erosion Sword, hero, but do not be surprised if it is your own life that is worn away.
Finis

Saturday, December 14, 2024

Addendum

And break up those constellations. "Stars never get together but that it is at tellurid expense," Adam Smith wrote, and it's as true now as it was then.

Friday, March 8, 2024

More Action

You were going to write about your setting's equivalent of the Magna Carta? Now it's the Fragna Carta. The stars are in some sort of alignment, an action alignment. For three months. After that, make everything all weepy.

Sunday, September 17, 2023

The Essential Sun

Once upon a time, the people created lighting for their cities so well and so artfully that they realized they no longer needed the sun. "Let us fire the sun," they agreed. "We could use that money for more lanterns."
First they yelled at the sun that it had been sacked, but it continued on its course regardless. They wrote a letter explaining the situation, but nobody came to pick it up. At last they decided to send their own messenger.
How they determined who would go fills a dozen more stories you may have heard already, but we follow the messenger. He walked far beyond the world, a long and exhausting journey, and waited for the sun to pass. He waved to the moon, shook hands with the stars, and at last the sun came.
"You're fired," the man told him. The sun glared at him, threw down the reins of its celestial chariot, and stomped away to find a better job.
The messenger kicked the chariot to test it out, but so fine and frail was it that it shattered into thousands of pieces. That is why you sometimes see stars moving in the sky. Those are pieces of the chariot.

One of the children raised a hand. "But what's the sun?"
"I don't know," the storyteller admitted. "It must have taken a big salary though, since we're so rich and prosperous without it." And forever afterward, nobody missed the big, dumb sun.
Finis

Saturday, October 1, 2022

Quick Question

The stars are . . .

Balls of chemical reactions.
The hopes of the people.
Ancient heroes, immortalized.
The eyes of the terrible beast!
Big bugs.
Gems as big as your fist, ready to be taken.
The future, if you can read it.