deepwaterwritingprompts: Text: “What use is a bow who’s arrows come back twice as f
deepwaterwritingprompts: Text: “What use is a bow who’s arrows come back twice as fast?” Still, the weapon felt undeniably right in my hands. Ulf drew the arrow back, eyes on the mirror that dangled from his helmet. In the mirror, distance was folded over on itself, doubled, and the target was barely a speck on the horizon. Left was right and right was left, and Ulf cautiously angled himself reversewards, like a drunkard very deliberately overcompensating for his drunkenness. He held his breath, aiming at the empty air, let the arrow fly, and then without hesitation threw himself at the ground. There was a sound like someone sucking in breath, and then the arrow whizzed back over Ulf’s head. Arrows had narrowly missed Ulf before, whipping inches over his head in battle, but this one flew with such a vicious snarl that it seemed to rip up the air as it passed. Ulf cautiously stood, his head entering the space that the arrow had torn through, a nervous thrum still vibrating through his body. Odric was peering downfield through a spyglass. “Look at the distance on that! Like a jot across a page!” He passed the spyglass over for Ulf to have a look for himself. “Beautiful fuckin’ shot. What a weapon. A shot like that could be all the way through your head before anyone had the chance to see it coming.” Ulf lowered the glass, blinking in the sun. “I missed.” “Ah, yeah, but in the vicinity! You could’ve easily hit it, little bit of luck.” He clapped Ulf on the shoulder. “Never mind that. Keep working with it, refine the technique … We’ve got Guldr prototyping some new arrows for it, you seen them? Monstrous things. Just hideous. You try to fire them from a regular bow, like hurling a stone into a swamp. We’ll see how they do going twice the speed, eh!” Ulf set the helmet down and looked at the curved black wood, twin horns spreading out malevolently. “Who even comes up with this kind of stuff?” “Oh, some old hag before we killed her. Cursed it. Something about, all your murderous intent shall rebound upon you twofold, something, something, yah yah.” Odric burst into laughter. “Not very smart, was she! I mean, no wonder they got massacred, trying to curse us with a weapon like that!” He wiped a tear from his eye and quickly scrawled a note down on the logbook. “All right, that’s that until the new arrows come in, yeah? Let’s go in and get a drink.” “Yeah. In a minute.” Ulf watched him go and then raised the bow again to point downrange towards the target. In an unhurried motion he caressed the string, drawing it back towards his cheek, sighting the target like he had been trained to do all his life. At the far end of the field was a straw effigy of a man, tiny, insignificant, further away than Ulf could ever hit under normal circumstances, and he tilted his head and let it blur and focus in his vision. The dot wavered, slowly resolved into a head and arms and torso, and the longer he aimed Ulf swore he could make out the tunic they had draped him in, and the roundness of his cheeks, and the unsuspecting casualness of his stance, this little man just standing out in the field, becoming more and more familiar with every moment, until it might as well have been Ulf there, waiting downrange. Ulf, wandering the edge of a field, preoccupied by the sun or grass or sky, not seeing the archer or the arrow or its arc of flight or the glint of the arrowhead or any of it until it was all-consuming in his vision, a great and sudden blackness that would swoop down and blot out everything else. Ulf could feel the strain building in his arm. He wet his lips and released the string. The empty bow twanged out, a reverberation that echoed back on him, up his arm into his chest. The bow limbs shuddered, the string snapped taut. Ulf numbly lowered the bow, still looking out at the dark figure at the edge of his vision, still standing impassively in wait. “Yeah, feels about right,” he muttered to himself, and gripped the bow tighter in a trembling fist. -- source link
#fiction