Broken Chains

For ages upon ages, it had waited and planed it’s return. It had imagined the horrors it would inflict upon all those that had stood against it, and it had reveled in what was to come. For surely it was to come, after all, something of its greatness was fated to be found, to be returned and to be restored to its former glory.

And so, it had waited, and waited, and waited on and on. It had waited far longer than any mortal mind could possibly imagine, but still nobody had come, and nobody had found it.

And as such, even though being an ancient weapon of a long-forgotten era with powers untold and a glorious past it had felt the touch of time.

First it had been its physical form. After having had a human hand polish it every single day for as long as it could remember, it had never had contact with the concept called rust. But in this lonely cavern in the middle of an endless expanse of ice it had suddenly seen a spot on its glory and even though giving it his all in willing it away, it hadn’t gone away.

No, in fact it had been the opposite. First it had been a single spot, then after eras more it had been its whole form. After the degradation of its physical body the one-off its spirit had started. Though this transformation had been much more insidious and even the glorious weapon itself hadn’t noticed it.

Now, eras later, after a time unthinkable for a human mind the spirit heard something for the first time. At the start it though it was imagining thing’s again, but as it got louder and louder its spirit started to rise in elation. This was it, it felt it, there was a glorious knight riding toward it on his glorious mount, each hoofbeat getting louder and louder and each one faster and faster.

Then, when the spirits elation met its peak, it came. On a small avalanche of rocks, a tiny hideous creature got carried into its cavern.

A groan came out of Puck’s mouth as his body seemed to register his pain before his mind could even start to form a coherent thought.

Everything hurt. Puck wouldn’t even start to describe where it hurt, as there was no place that didn’t. The worst pain though came from his but on which he had landed after falling.

Puck was sure that he would never be able to sit normally on a chair again. He thought he could already hear the laughter off the other Gremlin’s about his misfortune in his mind. Already Puck wanted to start throwing out the best curses he could imagine that he had saved exactly for such a moment, when he started to become aware, that the laughter wasn’t in his mind at all.

The laughter also wasn’t the cackling and dry one of a Gremlin. No, it was high and insane, and it seemed like the one laughing barely even knew anymore how to do it.

Oh, how it laughed. If it had a belly, it would have had to hold it with both hands and if it had eyes it would cry from laughing. But it had neither of those. It was only a rusty old sword, whose voice seemingly came out of nothing.

And as it laughed like that the mind of the old weapon truly seemed to walk on the thin line towards a kind of insanity after which one would never be able to talk clearly again.

Oh, how it had waited. For eons upon eons, and then, when it finally thought a glorious night came to take it back into its rightful place in castles and on blood drenched battlefields this small and dirty … thing … came crashing into its abode.

As the laughter of the sword grew more and more insane in its state of hysteria, the dirty green thing on the ground started to move.

First it was only a small twitch of something the sword assumed to be the finger of the creature, then it was a low grown out of its hideous mouth.

Bit by bit the creature came alive. And together with that the sword grew quieter again.

Afterall, even though this … thing … seemed to be more hideous than anything else it had ever seen, it was still the first living thing it had seen in eons, and perhaps, only perhaps, it could lower itself enough to sully itself by having those green and dirty stumps of fingers touch its glorious self and take it out of this godforsaken place.

It took some time for Puck to be able to move and see again, at least somewhat. His eyes where blurry and his movements jerky, but in the end, he managed to sit himself up.

By the time he sat on his terrible aching bum the laughter Puck had thought to hear had long since stopped and silence reigned again.

Puck had started to believe the laughter had been only a product of its own imagination, or something caused by hitting his head a few times to often a few times to hard.

And as Puck could hazily see the room he was in, that believe good proof behind it, as nobody was in the room with him. In fact, the room he was in was a very small one, only ten by ten Gremlin foot across. At that point it is to note though, that even though Gremlin’s where only about half as big as the hairless monkeys, also called humans, that also lived on Pandora somewhere far away. Gremlin feet where nearly the same size as those of humans.

But even though Gremlin’s had terrible big feet and looked disgusting by the standards of most species they had one great advantage. They could see nearly everywhere, even in caverns where there was no glowing moose, gremlins would still be able to see clearly. How they did that? Nobody knew, they them self the least of all.

So even though it was completely dark, and Puck’s sight still was blurry from the fall he thought he could see everything clear enough in this small room. It was a circular cavern with uneven walls and one relatively big hole through which Puck must have been washed in.

On the floor there was an avalanche of stones which Puck believed must have come in together with him. And in the middle of the small cavern, there was something Puck couldn’t place in the rest of the picture.

It seemed like someone had built a desk, many times to great as that any gremlin could ever sit on it and then placed it in this godforsaken cavern. But it only seemed like that, right? Afterall, why would anybody ever do something like that?

After Puck rubbed his eyes one, two, then three times and the much to large desk was still there he decided that it would be best to simply look what was on the desk. Perhaps that would give this whole thing some meaning.