Ziklag 4.22

SOS, Earth

SOS Discipline - Daily Proverb and Red Letter Reader

Bias is the grease of incentive. cf Pr. 29:4

That evil needs good in order to be better at being evil shows the folly of evil and the greatness of goodness. cf Mt. 7.11

Estimation adopts measurement for comparison in pursuit of purpose. cf Sun Tzu 4.18

From Today’s Stack

from Earth chapter 9: Prudence

“As boys,” Earth said, a melancholy on him. “In the dirt streets of Elusa, we played at legends.” His eyes caught with a zealous fire. “Beneath his own mountain, no one remembers the Forgotten. No priest comes down from on high, neither to preach nor to beg. The women mutter that the monks are surely dead.

“But every boy listened still when the Cor Blossoms bloomed and the gleeman came, how in the Age of Rended Steel the flowers on the mountain bloomed not yellow but gold, how they glowed silver dimlight, was harvested for blessed mecury, smithed with iron in the hot Autumn’s night lest the miracle of power fade before set to blade.

The women may natter how the Forgotten is lost, but the children know. Every boy knows.”

Earth stood tall in the shadow of the looming Master, his brow furrowed, his shoulders thrown back. Then he hoisted the blade into the blue sky above them both.

“Mock me not,” Earth said. “I have held this very blade before, countless times, though it seemed only then a broken branch, and I only a boy at play. I knew then what majesty I aspired to steward.”

Lafe’s changeless, bitter scowl remained, but something in his posture softened. After a long pause, he shook his head to snap the silence.

“By direct order of the Shadowsun of Ambra, the City of Dark Walls, I grant you Emberfire. I do not know her story, nor why she was christened with that name, but I do know that so far as you are not a fool, she will serve you well.”

Earth kept the blade aloft, letting the weight grow weary in his arm. The soft leatherwork of her fletching fit like a fine glove, the weight of her balance was symmetry and precision, light as wind she hailed, heavy as she needed to be she would swing. He could feel it all in a blink. This weapon was peerless.

The light of the day glistened all the more radiantly as he returned her to sheathe handed to him by the Master, who took Earth’s gladius in return and turned away, busying himself with a number of contraptions in the side of the cart.

“Whatever our King sees in you, I do not guess. I do my duty, not favors. You are a green as an apple, a peasant from the lowlands, beggarly and uncivilized scum, ripe for a gruesome death by foul madgyics, or worse. See that you do not trip and impale yourself.”

He did not look back again, attending to another latch, opening a chest over there, rummaging among a variety of tools and parchments, in search of some mystery he did not appear able to find. Earth took this dismissal with pleasure, eager to walk about with Emberfire strong at his side. There, she rode his hip as if made to be one with him, ordered to stand true in audience with Gaoltea.