Dipping her hands into the thirsting pond, Lei'bi washed her face. Purified, she disrobed and knelt before the gaping maw.
Rhythmic voices chanted. Harsh, guttural words invoking the ancients' blessing.
Her plea an inaudible whisper beneath the deafening hymn, she offered herself to the volcano.
There would be rain tomorrow.
Hello! :D This is a teeny fifty-word story written for @jayna's #fiftywords challenge. The prompt for this week is - water - and this is my offering.
I have a tendency to use chants and rituals in a lot of my writing. Funnily enough, now that I think about it, none that I've posted on Steemit! (Until now) ~ But water, rituals, and the stereotypical white robe are a common theme for me. Sacrifices too. I'm not a nice author to my characters. Eep. That doesn't mean that I don't love them, because I do, but I also like to make tragedies of their lives and break my own heart in the process, haha.
You can find this week's challenge at the following link - https://steempeak.com/challenge/@jayna/fifty-wordshortstorychallenge-storyround-upandnewprompt-prd2sbjrvl - come! Join us! :D
The image used for my header is a CC0 image courtesy of Pixabay!
That's not just 50 words!! It can't be.. That packed some punch!! Felt more like 1000 words... Some sacrifice she made...
I do not know how such a short story can generate so much emotion in me. I think that is your goal, after all. Simply magnificent. I liked the theme of ritual and sacrifice. Re-steem without hesitation.
Thank you so much! :D So happy that you liked it enough to resteem!
Such a powerful story. As terrible as they were, human sacrifices are part of our history and culture. And I guess, at some level, we still practice them. But under a different name and to appease a different god: 🏦
Faith is a powerful thing.
We all assume that the fear of death was less present in the tribes of the past. Your story makes me thinking of the aspect of "surviving instinct". In order to give myself as a sacrifice to the volcano I would have to overcome my instinct to die. This is probably the reason why substance altering plants were used to silence the instinct and to die without fear.
Good story, liked it a lot!
I would have to agree with the use of mind-altering plants. It's another thing I include in my ritualistic writings, usually, but I didn't think of it here; it's a good point!
Thank you so much for reading! :)
Wow, that is a powerful theme, @kaelci. I love the backstory, and learning a bit more about you as a writer. I think we have to be brave enough to sacrifice our characters.
It's terrible - it's why my first book is taking so long to finish; the ending makes me cry just thinking about it. I briefly outlined the end chapters at the start of the year and didn't want to face writing them properly at the time. Will need to force myself soon or they'll never be done! :)
@jayna, I was wondering ~ how are you finding SteemPress?
I've been contemplating setting up my own WordPress website... it's getting to the point where I peruse various hosts and go so far to put everything into the cart and prepare to checkout, before having second thoughts and wondering if this is really what I want to do.
When you first set SteemPress up, it re-posted a few of your earlier Steem posts... was that an option that can be deactivated? I only want a few select things to be on it, so just wondering. :) ~ I'm thinking of serializing a few works, which would be posted on the website as an online book (similar to https://trilbytrench.com/) as well as here on Steemit, and perhaps e-book'd at a later date when complete... do you think SteemPress would be accommodating for such a thing?
Sorry, babbling! But thank you for any information or insight. :D
I like WordPress and the steempress plugin. I’m thrilled to have a blog where I can collect and organize all of my posts. It feels like they have a longer life this way. There’s a setting you can turn on or off that posts your blog posts from WordPress to Steemit. When I first set it up and started copying over my Steemit posts I posted a few before I realized I had forgotten to turn it off. 😊
Good luck with your novel!!
So much depends on human sacrifices, especially when results are based on faith alone.
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