CHILDREN OF THE STONE

CHILDREN OF THE STONE, by Ann K. Schwader, with artwork by Miguel Santos

 

 

We have not always been this planet’s masters,
though humankind denies it. Other blood
than ours heaped earthen barrows, raised up stones
in veneration of some dark & nameless
power, avatar of elder shadow
slithered through the star-rifts. What survives

is myth & madness. Whispers that survive
the rise of tribes still struggling to master
fire’s miracle speak only of those shadows
that dawn dispels, yet cannot silence blood
deep knowledge of another. Gripped by nameless
apprehension, some adore a stone

like Void incarnate. When it thirsts, their stone
war-mallets spatter tribute. Few survive
to view the aftermath: a trail of nameless
hieroglyphs disclosed by gore. Unmastered
by any of their prehistoric blood,
this text recedes once more into the shadows

for centuries — until some unclean shadow
congeals to godhead, squatting on that stone
where rituals of torment, fear, & blood
have finally summoned what should not survive
beneath a wholesome sky to overmaster
its votaries. They call it by a name less

word than sibilance: a kind of nameless
invocation, serpentine & shadowed
as that inscription. By strange dreams, they master
each tainted incantation, drench the stone
in what its demon craves. No tribe survives
their rising, until heroes born to blood —

bold Gael or Briton, Pict or Saxon — blood
their bronze & iron blades among these nameless
changelings. Only stragglers survive
within the sanctuary of deep-shadowed
tunnels torn like wounds through living stone,
devolved & mutant mirrors of their master.

Yet it is said that blood spilled in the shadows
of nameless dolmens may call forth that stone’s
true servants who survive . . . or their dread master.

 

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Ann Schwader is a two-time Bram Stoker Award Finalist (poetry collection), and two-time Rhysling Award winner (short & long form).   She was also the 2015 Poet Laureate for Necronomicon Providence.   In 2018, the Science Fiction Poetry Association named her a Grand Master.  Her most recent collection of speculative poems is Dark Energies (P’rea Press 2015). 

Miguel Santos is a freelance illustrator and maker of Comics living in Portugal.  His artwork has appereared in numerous issues of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, as well as in the Heroic Fantasy Quarterly Best-of Volume 2.  More of his work can be seen at his online portfolio and his instagram.

Karen Bovenmyer earned an MFA in Creative Writing: Popular Fiction from the University of Southern Maine. She teaches and mentors students at Iowa State University and Western Technical College. She serves as the Assistant Editor of the Pseuodopod Horror Podcast Magazine. She is the 2016 recipient of the Horror Writers Association Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Scholarship. Her poems, short stories and novellas appear in more than 40 publications and her first novel, SWIFT FOR THE SUN, debuted from Dreamspinner Press in 2017.