Flash Fiction

It was the last day of a thousand year war. The sun rose like an oil painting over the swathes of industrial waste, over the unsmiling chimneys, the ineffectual turbines like Passchendaele intensified.

Looking out over the wasteland, across the wasted years, Silas Barnsfather felt a tear well in the corner of a smoke churned eye. He brushed it away, remembering a scripture from ancient Mesopotamia.

    'Winners and losers, they both die. History survives.'

As was common, he's was a tool of history.

It had started, the war, he recalled, with the new barbarians knocking down the gates. They had rampaged in placid Elysian days, blossomed across long gone years and grown with misbegotten deeds. The war had stuttered and paled but eventually with a stream of half lettered myths, it became a many faced beast with a will of its own.

It was history. It overwhelmed. It devoured. It summoned Silas Barnsfather to witness what it had wrought. He was the reluctant document.