Pounding Metal

The battlefield laid quiet, for it was now a graveyard of the unburied metal. Their corpses lay among the buttercups and forget-me-nots, deep under the ground as years passed unforgiving. The sun still shone and the wind still blew, but somewhere in the past mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters waited in vain to a day that never came. These men that were once boys who played in the yard with sticks and laughed at each other's silly tales were no more and in their place stood different parts of armors, blades and rusted metal, something a young girl mind could not comprehend. She knew not what these things were or used for however she knew that this was a place to death and that whoever they were their souls had long departed to the celestial planes to walk with the ancestors.


The clangor of the swords had died many years ago, the shouting of the slaughter was hushed; silence lay on the snow and the babe found herself lost within a unknown land, probably of an extinct race that once walked the Earth. The pale bleak sun that glittered so blindingly from the ice-fields and the snow-covered plains struck sheens of silver from rent corselet and broken blades coated in rust, where many bizarre items were scattered around, some remaining under the layer of snow that began to slowly but certainly melt away, leaving place for Spring to make its appearence. The nerveless tea-cup paws dared to touch: helmets, shields, barrels, stocks buried in the ground, metal tubes, rusted frames and many more forgotten by time.


Her eyes could not believe such wonders, such bizarre objects that lied buried with a part of a mysterious history that she knew nothing of. There must have been a war that happened here, or more than one. They were all fools. There is no such thing as winning or losing. There is only won and there is lost, there is victory and defeat. In this wasteland of white there was nothing for her mind to hang onto but old metal that offered no clue how to get back; she had wondered to far south. There was no familiar sight, only the heart beating in her chests stopped her from becoming as frozen as the landscape. When the babe whirled around to at least see the tracks she had made, there were none. The only way to navigate was by the sun and in only a few hours it would sink below the horizon, leaving her shivering under the stars and far from the Eastern lands she knew.


She knew she must find a way to return back where she came from, an unfortunate event caused her to wonder and if it weren't for the bizarre objects she would not have got so lost. How could she be so naive? Her pace diminished as she approched a small puddle, formed from the melted snow, of still water; there were no turbulences or movements. Her luck must've changed. Hor fortunate. Her mother showed them once, how to always find their way back home, how could she forget. She never made one herself but she remembered it clearly; every movements of her mother was registered in her scholar mind, all she had to do was access it and repeat it. The leaf that tumbled before her was a red maple, cast away by its wintry boughs to the air that sapped the babes heat. It twisted against the unseen air, gravity dragging it to it's final resting place, not far from where she came to a halt. So alive, yet dead, like her mother.