Character in Action
Flash Fiction
Submission for Iron Age Media’s prompt: The Duel
Character can be a very troublesome thing for the rootless.
Civilizations, the people who inhabit them, the buildings they create to live and plod away within, the creations crafted from abstract minds and the myriad of discoveries about reality and the record belonging to causality that have and have not yet been unearthed all contain character.
Locusts rip and tear at the seams of this once lambent era. No longer plumb with prosperity, swords are drawn and commerce has been curtailed by the obfuscating fog belonging to the gods of war. Infernal beings are on the march and seek to discredit the blinking eye of hope.
Battling all-encompassing nightmares take more than men with the innuendo of a victory in mind, the helm of any army requires valor to be breathed into it, without this you cannot animate the alternative to the execrable.
So who was the best man for the job?
Contests of strength, speed, and sense were accompanied by their immoral mirror aspects exhibited in war: contests of stratagem, sensuousness, and slothfulness. The former bore strong relevance to the sportsmanship of people, but the latter emerges in times of war, where all is “fair” as in love.
The last two men were destined to decide among themselves, under the very eyes of the soldiers they would lead to either death or victory, in the very same contests that eliminated a hundred prior, in deciding who would lead a Kingdom off to war.
Moreover, as lands the world over understood the presence of fertility deities paired with deities of war on the same coin, these two men understood what they were fighting for, the future of their creed and soul.
Where one man lifted stronger than the other, the other sprinted faster.
Where one man hid his plans from the other, the other sent off scores of women to extract the plans buoyed by the art of temptation.
It was contests like these which decided the merit of whom would lead a Kingdom against legions of malevolent.
Nobody was more shocked by the personality animated among those who followed him, than he was by the war’s end.
Inevitably, these rooted people created a new lambent era.
One with it’s own arts, crafts, and discoveries.
Character.