This is in response to the September Speculative Fiction Prompt from Carol Forester of Writing and Works, who has taken over from Diana Wallace Peach of Myths of the Mirror

Diana has caregiving commitments that have prevented her continuing with a prompt she clearly loved. I would like to add my thanks to Diana for her personal responses to the writers who have responded to this fun and often challenging prompt in the past, myself included.

The Stump and the Ring

She was as deadly as she was beautiful…

The battle had been sinister and long, but eventually she had won. He had saved the last of his strength to deliver the twisting spell, but the sorceress had broken his right arm with a precise slash from the flat of her elven steel… then used the return stroke to cleave his wand in two.

When she put down the sword, laughing, he knew that his death was to be ceremonial!

Something of his magic had worked, though – for her eyes flared with anger as she wiped blood from her nose. She paused to look at it, then, screaming with rage, she wiped the stained hand on his torn tunic, and slashed down at his own face with the side of her offended fist.

She was not a nice person, he decided, as the trained hand smacked into his own nose. It hurt…

He managed to roll flat with the blow, his right arm uselessly raised but cushioned – with the remains of his wand – against his solar plexus. She slowed and looked down at her prey. Her eyes cooled to ice. From the harness between her breasts, she drew the dagger. It flashed in the cool moonlight, a pale mirror of her bared teeth.

Knowing that his death was imminent, he laughed with irony at the shards of iron that flew as molten drops onto his tender skin from the stump and core of the broken wand… a wand that now fizzed, pathetically

She snarled at his insane laughter, thinking he was mocking her; that he had one remaining trick to play. Crouching low, she came for his throat by running the point of the dagger along the length of his torso.

He moaned, annoyed at his weakness in the face of the approaching demise. His last action was to take a gulp of breath, as though it would carry his consciousness through into a dubious other realm.

The silver dagger glinted below. The wand fizzed, again. He knew it would be the last thing he ever heard…

But then… nothing,… until her hot and beautiful body slumped onto his, unconscious.

For long minutes he lay beneath her, expecting cruel laughter and trickery and then a dagger’s slow death.

But nothing…

In pain and with one arm, he pushed himself, breathlessly, into a semi-upright position. He looked at the head of the silent sorceress, apparently asleep on his chest. The remains of his wand, on the end of his damaged arm, still glowed red hot and was welded to a rather tasteful ring that the fading but resourceful twisting spell had driven through her septum.

The hot night air was tainted with a slight smell of burnt flesh

He would not, he muttered to himself, be bragging about this one down at the inn…

©️Copyright Stephen Tanham