Into The Light & The Once And Future King

So I have two Elephant Words stories to talk about in this post because I’m a terribly slack blogger…

First up is Into The Light, which is a short tale about the forbidden love between an angel and a demon who meet one day when Jerusalem is changing hands during one of the crusad

es. They can’t be together, despite their love, and, indeed, the very touch of the angel burns the demon’s skin.

Of course, it’s about a lot more than that, it’s about how one can endure the pain of separation for brief moments spent together when that’s all you have. Why? Because the love that you share makes the pain bearable, and the pain of being utterly without each other would be unbearable.

The relationship that the angel and demon have in this story is the ultimate long distance relationship, a subject which is rather close to my heart.

The picture of the dark corridor with the light pouring in at the end was very inspiring. It led me to think about this meeting place between light and dark, and that’s how I started thinking about an angel and a demon meeting there, with the demon watching the angel walk away, back into the light. That led me to the last line…and from there it was a matter of filling in the story in between.

Secondly, we have The Once And Future King. It was my turn to post the picture this week and, I’m afraid, I’ve been rather preoccupied with all sorts of stuff, and so I almost completely forgot to find a picture. So I headed over to one of my favourite stock photo sites from when I was working as a graphic designer (http://www.sxc.hu) and, for some reason, entered “sword” into the search field, which led me to this rather interesting picture. Fast forward a week to today and, you guessed it, I almost completely forgot that I actually had to write a story about it!

Thankfully, for once, the idea came quickly to me. I’ve always been interested in Arthurian legend, and so the idea of the warrior king returning to Britain to save us in our darkest hour sprang to mind. And then it hit me…what use would he be? If he turned up in the middle of a modern day battlefield, he’d be shot in an instant.

It’s a simple twist, little more than a pun, really, but I had fun writing it and, hopefully, people will enjoy reading it.