New Fiction by Ken L. Jones

The High Tower of the One Orbed God

By

Ken L. Jones

A giant of a man named July Star was riding a huge Clydesdale warhorse which had an ornate saddle and which had shrunken human heads woven into its mane. The rider was covered in tattoos of mystic symbols both on his bare chest and upon his bald head and clean shaven face where he also had war paint and a huge earring in one of his ears. He was considered handsome by the standards of his time and was hugely muscled and was clad in tight buckskin pants and high topped deerskin boots.  The terrain he rode through was bombed out, burnout and full of large craters in this era known as the Dark Days. As he rode on he eventually spied a high tower that had somehow survived all the recent carnage.

            “By the Mother of All Wheat yonder lies the tower of the one-eyed god, “he mumbled to himself. “Tis said that those who undergo the rites of that demon are never fit for a useful life again.”

            Coming upon the place at last he tethered Mankiller his horse and then retrieved a long crude hemp rope with massive stag antlers attached to it from the back of his mount. The elders of yonder Pitts Place had hired him to destroy this scourge before there was no one left to till and tend the fields anymore and he was more than glad to do that for them for the price they had agreed upon. As July Star swung the makeshift grappling hook he invoked the Father of All Rain and if to guide his aim and if to prove that deity was listening, his rope caught the ledge of an open window at its apex with nothing more than a gentle clanging. July Star then pulled a huge battle axe from its berth in the side of Mankiller’s saddle.

            “By the Womb of Stars let nothing know to man stand ‘gainst this pure forged steel and my own good right arm,” he prayed aloud tucking the weapon into his belt as he began working his way up the rope.

            It was a long dizzying climb and he tried hard not to be nervous about how high he was up now. Something like a demon’s chatter began to make itself manifest the closer he got to the top of the tower and he realized that it must be the mad god he had heard such fearful whispers about.

            Finally reaching the ledge of the window he looked in the room and gasped in astonishment. “Such wizardry have mine eyes ‘ner beheld in truth this god holds his supplicants prisoner by magic most black indeed.”

            Thus saying he came carefully into the room and with battle axe drawn reared back and shouted for the Green Goddess Liberty’s torch to guide his aim. Leaping boldly into the room he was shocked to see the source of all this. It was an ancient dusty square of some kind that was flat and somewhat resembled a black mirror. Images and voices leapt across its ebon depths. Nearby it were other strange and ancient boxes that seemed to have something like veins and arteries running into it. Lying around it on the dirty stone floor were the missing inhabitants of Pitt’s Place that he had been sent to liberate. They were glassy eyed and drooling on themselves as they stared at the god and something about their very demeanor reminded him of the dreamers in the lotus eating palaces he had been in, in many a distant flesh pot of a decadent city . Always a man of direct action July Star jumped over the groveling worshipers with his battle axe reared back and with all of his might he planted it in the lone orb of this pulsating god and as he did so it bit him back with something very much like lightening the shock of which sent him flying across the room even as his axe remained melted and fused with the now sputtering and smoking eye of this evil god from a long lost era. Screaming and crying at the death of their end all and be all the one-eye god’s followers dove one after another to their death out the very window that July Star had just climbed through leaving no one who knew the exact details of what had just transpired to besmirch July Star’s otherwise unparalleled reputation.

This was the only time that July Star ever walked away in shame from an assignment or bounty that he had agreed to execute. He slunk off to new adventures and he always bristled if any one mentioned the one time he had failed or dared to ask him what had become of his signature battle axe. The weapon remained embedded in the high tower even after everyone deserted the now mute god.

Two centuries later a young man hearing the tale of all this made his way to that fearsome place of rumors and because of his titanic strength arms and the truth of his intentions was able when no other man could to withdraw the battle axe from its place of long interment and in doing so became a mighty king whom people spoke of for many centuries after that.

Visit Ken's poetry page on this blog: http://georgewilhite.blogspot.com/p/poetry-by-ken-l-jones.html for more information on the author as well as many of his poems.