I entered another flash fiction contest, this time through Writing Battle, and I did fairly well. A few thousand people entered, I made it to the top 32! Woot! The genre was "Dystopian Utopia", and the story had to include a "magician" and a "spear."
"Under the Innocent City" The Elders had just finished torturing him when the flicker of movement on the stairs caught the Magician’s attention. He gave no sign, eyes down, feigning heaving pain, watching the blood run along his chains to pool on the polished stones of the floor.
The Elders, all women this time, muttered to each other in their private language, rough consonants and strangely fluted breaths at odd intervals, nonsense. They touched the bloody spear tip to each link of his chains, a maddeningly long process; by the time they’d hung the spear on the wall again, the point was nearly clean.
They left without looking at him, shuffling up the far stairs. The Magician missed the early days, centuries before, when the Elders had feared him. These hooded women were not afraid. They were simply done. The Magician heard the oaken doors scrape open and then closed again. The silence in their wake was welcome...
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