To check out all the great entries this week, check out the link above, curated by Bradley Ramsey & Leeron Heywood
Welcome to the Atlas, Friends.
Today marks the beginning of a new expedition: Flash Fiction February. The challenge is to take a daily prompt and a genre and map out a story in under 1,500 words.
Day 1 asked for Action + Romance. The traditional route would be a battlefield of soldiers or a duel between knights. But here in the Atlas, we look for the wonder hidden past the conditioned look of things. I found myself thinking about the violence of biology, how the chaos of entropy and the rigidity of stasis are constantly at war inside us. And how, perhaps, that war is exactly what keeps us warm.
Here is -
37 Degrees of Violence.
Two combatants, alike in purpose but opposed in method, awaited the light. When the darkness pervaded all, there was truce, but when the spark ignited in the sky, it began.
The Mason waited calmly, barely a flicker of movement. Their centre was ice, nothing shivered. Every atom was still, steady. It was as things should be. The Mason held a staff, angular and rigid. Its tip was a solid fractal structure, impossibly dense in its design, and yet it had a perfunctory perfection. Mathematically precise and deadly. The darkness was a held breath. It was The Masons domain.
Across the void, fidgeting back and forth with a nervous flammable energy, The Vandal waited eagerly. Their whole being itched with anticipation knowing that soon, the spark in the sky would ignite their battle. The Vandal was ready, their heat would not be diminished. They held a bow that contained impossible threads of wire, all humming with exotic, entropic energy. A shiver of arrows was an actual shiver, a vibration that could rock any defense.
The sky tore open. A pulse of electricity, a demand for life shattered the truce. The combatants bowed in the darkness, the war had begun.
The Mason leapt forward with their staff and carved deep fissures of stone out of the darkness. Walls and defences that came together in a complex architectural equation. The arrangement was tectonic but precise. The Mason slammed pillars together, demanding a fortress.
The Vandal danced with a flame-like energy, never in one place for more than a moment. Shooting strings at the defences that gripped the newly constructed walls at strategic points. The strings were designed to rip, tear, to break, and bend, and boom!
A second wave of attack saw The Vandal flood the walls with oceans of red. Hot liquid fire poured over the defences burning anything in its path. Within the flash flood there were agents of menace. Tiny soldiers with secret missions, ready to burn, to morph, to eat, all from within the opponents deepest barracks.
The clash was a maelstrom. A lighthouse against a storm. A ship against the waves. A mountain against the wind. Stone against time. The noise of it was like the formation of stars, intensely powerful, and yet in this space of darkness, nothing of it could be perceived by any mortal.
The Mason sent forth his builders and defenders who forged gates of white bone locked tightly shut. Shields of calcium stood ready to grind down any attack. Acid traps were hidden within the corridors of the fortress ready to catch unwitting foot soldiers.
The Vandal infiltrated through the pipes, expanding them and applying such pressure that they began to groan. The Vandals laughter was heard throughout the frame of the stronghold as her fibrous siege materials grappled with the structure, pulling it and twisting it into movement.
The battle wore on, and soon they both began to tire of the constant fight. No matter what Vandal threw at Mason, they were at a stalemate. Vandals’ heat could not burn down his walls and gates, Mason’s defences were not enough to push back her floods and her fires. Everywhere they looked, it was a mess of both forces fighting in corridors, on the walls, in the dungeons.
Within the mess of battle something unusual began to happen. The two opposing forces, alike in strength and persistence, began to cause friction. Where forces met, and where chemicals met calcium, bonds began to form. The rhythm of the fighting began to change in increments, like the slow creep of the tide.
The hatred was still there, but it had begun to hum. The friction of Mason’s rigid cold against Vandals furious heat was creating a mediation; it was a temperature. A perfect, impossible thirty-seven degrees.
Over and over Mason had tried to crush her under the weight of cold and stone; Vandal had tried to consume him, to wear him down with heat and liquid. But in the deadlock, they found a rhythm. Push. Pull. Constrict. Release. It wasn’t peace, peace was for the dead. This was a frantic, sweating harmony.
A heartbeat erupted in the swell of the fighting. A volcano of immense energy that pulsed outwards across the battlefield like a tsunami. The wave passed through everything, vibrating through the pillars, rumbling the shields, rippling through the seas of chemicals, and shaking the combatants.
In the light of this new enigma Mason and Vandal both saw something new. They saw that their fighting; their equilibrium, had birthed an improbability. Mason realised then that he was the anvil, and she was the hammer. Apart, they were useless metal and aimless force. Together? Together, they were a forge.
From opposite ends of the battlefield they ran towards this new energy source and clashed in an explosion of passion.
“I will not let you burn this down,” Mason whispered, tightening the cage of stone around the centre of this enigma.
“And I will not let you freeze this over,” she promised, igniting the enigma with torrents of chemical liquid, warmed from her fiery temperament. They swore their enmity like a wedding vow.
There they lay locked in an embrace fuelled originally by enmity. Neither side could let go, neither side could win. But in their to and fro, when Masons staff and Vandals bow would clash in lockstep with each other, when their movements became so pre-empted as to be a dance, a new feeling emerged. Grudging respect as they saw each other’s skill, the thrill of a slice that just missed, or a thrust that didn’t quite connect. Attraction as their prowess fuelled the dance, their bodies swaying in and around each other. Convulsions and weaves moved through them in perfect time. Love as they saw the balance that emanated from their war, the way their two energies mixed and blended. The heat and cold found a perfect comfort. And as they grew in love, the heart they fought over radiated. Feeling was born that day. In the battle of opposites, harmony was found. Romance in all its glory was forged in the flames of opposition.
On the outside, a child drew its first breath, a small sound in a large room. But inside, the war raged on, a billion tiny soldiers holding the line against the chaos, a billion tiny fires keeping the cold at bay.
We call it biology. They called it love.
From the Cartographer’s Desk:
I loved writing this because it reframes a mundane biological fact (body temperature) as a mythic treaty between cosmic forces. It reminds me that peace isn’t always the goal, sometimes we need the friction to feel alive.
A Question for you: If your own internal creative life was a battle between two forces (like The Mason and The Vandal), what would you name them? Is it “The Perfectionist vs. The Child”? “The Librarian vs. The Wildfire”?
Tell me your combatants in the comments.
(P.S. If this story struck a chord with you, please Save this post to your library. It helps the Atlas grow more than you know.)
I absolutely love the premise dude, super creative stuff.
What a fantastic read....thank you!