A Hymn of Overthrown Hexes and Whetted Steel / Discussion

This is the discussion related to the wiki page A Hymn of Overthrown Hexes and Whetted Steel.

Thank you, this is truly an wholesome #the-crypts moment

lzhoudidion 24 Mar 2024 06:26

image credits: (1) (2, decorative header) (3, paper texture, self-edited)

This was originally written almost a year ago to the day in the WL Discord server (or more specifically, in the meme channel #the-crypts) as an creative writing exercise reversing the common 'magic is a little-known and often feared/suppressed element in an otherwise conventional tech fantasy world' trope, and was revised and reformatted prior to posting. A single-line prose poem of thousand dead men walking, slowly being wasted away with the landscape by a corrupt wizard’s powers and a final duel between a spell and a lone bayonet-fixed rifle at the edge of the world. Thank you to zipzipskins, meltedbee, Snapdragon133, Stygian Blue and fora-mina for encouraging me along to finally post this onto the WL.

Last edited on 14 Jan 2025 05:13 by lzhoudidion Show more

Snapdragon133 24 Mar 2024 14:32

I absolutely love all the overwhelming details, it's completely unclear what's happening, who's winning, until all of a sudden the bayonet is in the wizard's stomach. Very very cool

Edit: Came back here to say I LOVE when people reference the Wing's shelves in their stories. Just wanted to shout-out my appreciation for that little detail

Last edited on 26 Mar 2024 00:26 by Snapdragon133 Show more

Vishardsh 24 Mar 2024 15:52

A blur of twisting images, though each individually clear resulting in a confused mass of images merging and shifting into one another, but the prose is so fluid, so viscerally detailed that you need to keep reading even though it's not an easy task, and then, like Snap said, it resolves into the single image of a bayonet in the wizard's stomach, and then everything slows, and stops. The note on discovery works really well in the context of a piece with so much tempo, it allows that last moment to hang a little longer.

The image is perfect, as always with your pieces.

Fucking wizards. +1

Stygian Blue 24 Mar 2024 16:42

What Snack said. Delicious prose — love how the mechanical falcon comes back as the talons of a dove. You have a talent for making the most longform brambles and thickets traversable, though you give us garden shears to do so — one mis-snip, one "oh, to hell with it, I need to know what's going on" and jumping into the weeds to find the next set of brambles blocking the way — just one of that, and the reader can be hopelessly lost. But your bushes are wrought with gold, each leaf a unique colour and shining green and silver and red and emerald and honey-citron and somatoform-beautiful — I know what I am doing when I use that word — in the red rays of the setting sun. And the work is delectable as well. Marvellous, this is. I rate this twelve char siu bao still steaming out of eleven.

-Styg

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What is life if not the contrast between what has been and what will become?