A quote: “No one is so brave that he is not disturbed by something unexpected.” ~~ Julius Caesar
I’ll start with a story …
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He stood still within the shadowed woods, listening. There! Snow falling off branches.
He liked winter patrol. The solitude of snowscape v crowded families busy with things neglected during growing months.
The sound of something feeding chased his musing away. To his right, just inside the meadow, a hulking bear bent over an elk. Excellent! What a wonderful wall covering that would make, he was planning, when it turned in his direction.
His mind boggled at the sight of piercing blue eyes, ravaged face and dripping fangs as he let loose the first bolt of his cross bow.
Missed.
Shit.
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Now, it’s your turn.
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. featured image, cropped, Adobe Stock standard license
I was lucky to have an Oma who remembered the old stories. She’d tell me them while sitting beside the hearth on a cold winter night, when the crackling fire seemed a meager defense against the encroaching darkness all around us. So I understood from childhood that glamor wasn’t just fashion magazines and photo shoots.
How easily my friends were taken in by the faces and voices of unearthly beauty and grace. How willingly they surrendered their tools of iron and steel, bowing down and calling them lord and lady. They could not look past the comely appearance to hearts as cold and alien as any of Mr. Lovecraft’s eldritch nightmares.
But our would-be masters have no appreciation of the advances in materials science since they last held sway over the mortal world. In my hand is a crossbow of carbon fiber, with ceramic darts, that all their metal-finding magic cannot detect.
Silent but deadly. They will never even suspect, until it’s too late.
Cameron says: They have always hated us. People in the cities can’t abide those of us who choose to stay away. They have always hated self-sufficiency and sneer when we turn down their “generous” programs.
Once in a while, they try to preach the gospel of the holy government to us. They point out how much warmer we would be, how much happier to live in a world free from want and whatever “isms” they came up with.
I’m walking back to our village after dumping one of those people off in the valley. Vultures have to eat and are actually useful.
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