Stranger Times

Home & Hearth

Qualifying entry for the 2018 Historical Fiction Smackdown

Firelight flickers through a window like the unpredictable dancing of small children, and the hidden hearth crackles like the hard-won laughter of old men at a tavern.

The wind's cold caress is surprisingly gentle; it feels like the aching scars of old wounds and almost forgotten suffering. The air smells of coming snows, and distant trees bend slightly in the faintest of bows.

Chainmail clinks with each step as a man makes his way to the dancing light at the window. His boots leave deep wounds in the sodden field as he marches, and each little chasm is black from the shadows cast by the nearly set sun.

Each step brings with it the forgotten weariness of months spent away. The stink of a field of decay and pain. The soul-shattering misery of offering companions and foes alike the little mercy of a dagger'a bite. The monstrous rages and deep cruelty that drowned the mind as wooden gates collapsed and children screamed.

He marched through the litany of sins made heroism by decree of lord and church. He marched more by a soldier's habit, rather than volition. He marched as he did through the days and weeks of quiet, dull misery that lay between the bloody days. Bloody days that, like wine soaking meat, now colour and flavour every part of his soul.

His regrets are strange to him. He regrets not spending more of his last few evening scrubbing the blood from his mail. He regrets that the small chest in the cart behind him, pulled by a horse won in a game of dice, doesn't have any children's toys inside. He regrets that, asides from gold, what he carries back with him is pain and restless spectres.

He regrets that all of his stories are of sorrow.

He draws closer now, enough that the dancing firelight faintly sears his sight and leaves a square glow of white in his gaze. This close, his heart aches with a longing magnified by the horrors of his time away. Heartache so fierce it stabs like a knife in his chest, even as his soul sings and he wants to rush to the door.

But, in the habit carved into his body by the horrors of his time away, he marches steadily on. Marching, with the same mechanical regularity that had taken him away from his life and joy.

But as he approaches the door, he find he cannot raise his hand to knock at the door. Not in the same bloody mail, the same cruel visage of his steel helmet, that had waded through bloodstained streets and committed sins no priest should ever forgive him for.

He takes the helmet and drops it in the mud. Pulls the mail over his padded clothes and leaves it in the mud. He unbuckles his sword and lets it fall.

Only then, can he let himself reach for the door.