Alphabet of Thorn (2013)
“He fashioned his army out of river mud and spit, causing the poets of Lower Eben to write later: Out of earth and water he made them, Out of his breath, They rose up from the mud in endless multitudes, His killing army, There on the bank of the Serpent that rings the world.
He fought his father. Centuries later, the poets would say that he slaughtered his father’s army, that the Serpent turned red with death, that when he faced the last man alive on the riverbank, it was his father.
They fought under the full moon rising out of the water Under the Serpent’s eye.
Axis slew his father, The good, the just.
The Serpent swallowed his bones, And the bloody-handed child became king.
It was actually a tranquil afternoon beside the river. Axis’s father, hiding from his own kingdom for a couple of hours, helped his son daub the minute heads of his foot soldiers blue and attach plumes of milkweed seed to the heads of the horsemen, whose horses were left to the imagination.
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