For Sue Vincent’s photo prompt.
Once the ring of stones had been unbroken. The stones had been one, created to act as one, perform the same function for the same people. But times changed, the people scattered, their beliefs fragmented. For centuries the stones held firm, bound by thousands of years of tradition until one broke away, taking retribution with her.
The lapping of flames and the screams of the dying, the crying of children, the pouring of blood into the grass tore her from her roots. She would no longer be bound to the deep earth but would appear and disappear, never resting, never looked for and never remaining. She appeared after tragedies, wars, preventable catastrophes, and she brought fire, flood, storm and vengeance.
She brought fire to the big house on the hill, and for a while, she could be seen through the charred timbers and broken walls, standing gaunt and black on the ridge overlooking the town. When she left, the prints of her stony, fiery steps remained, and no crops, no plants, no bramble weeds ever disturbed the sacred ground of her passing.
Those paths seem to criss-cross the world…(k)
She’s had a lot of nastiness to avenge one way or another.
She sounds like an incarnation of one of the Four Horsemen…
She was pretty ferocious. More like a cross between Robin Hood and Boudicca.
Sounds it too…
🙂
Wonderful myth-making! I’m thankful for your talent in crafting, sometimes re-crafting, folklore.
Thank you! I’m not a big fan of retelling myths and folk tales, at least not in the way that sets them in American high schools with pom pom girls and abandoned houses. I do like making them up from scratch though.
You have developed a great story for this simple picture, where you don’t even see the stones properly.
But you know they are there 🙂 Thank you!
:-))