prompt: empty, title: after ever after in misc. flash fiction

“Is this place hallowed,” asked the cleric, canvassing what remained after the awful battle, “or is it merely hollowed-out?” “I don’t follow,” replied the bard, his only friend who had survived the conflagration, “or anyway, I cannot tell where you are leading me.” “I look upon these fields and ask myself, is this place now a sort of sacred or is it merely soaked in red? Does this locale mean more for the sacrifices made this necessary evil day or do the losses make it even less than it was before, when the either of us only knew it as an inkblot on a tattered rush-job map?”

“I fear I am not the one to say,” he understood the holy-man’s dark moods, even if he was more the type to deflect with jest than brood upon it like his comrade, “you’ve known me long enough to understand that I, without the benefit of sacrilege, would then have no rilege to speak upon at all.” He dropped the façade of cheer himself. “Peter, dear old friend, we won. We lost good men, killed many deluded into believing their side just but we won this day. The usurpers scatter, our homeland endures. We held to our commissions.”

“We did.” White light emitted from his fingertips as he sketched sigils in the air, concentrating on attempting to consecrate the battlefield in some meaningful way. “And yet I look upon our allies still upon the earth as well as our enemies bereft of life and I have difficulty convincing myself that some of the empty bodies lost while some others of the empty bodies won. All the same in death’s embrace, victory seems absent from the occasion. No breath to proclaim it so.”

The bard strummed his lute, soft and low, magic from the very universal weave emanating out in pulses, commanding the vultures to delay their feast. “Someday, in one generation’s time, idiots like myself will be hired to tell their epic tales and the victory will be proclaimed for them. Even those opposed will be valorized for their effort toward their doomed cause.”

“Tommy,” the priest abandoned all the artifice of his station, “remember when we were young? So het up just that we could work the spells, so convinced we’d be heroes of the realm one day. Drunk on the old stories, practically tasting laurels on our brows?”

“Oh yes.” Another strum. “It was a hell of a thing.” “They never told us,” he looked off toward the corpse of an archer they’d both traveled two continents with before their tragedies concluded, “this was how success would fall upon our tongues.” “If those songs had told full truths, I never would’ve left the farm,” he packed away his strings, “but then the farm would now be over-run.”

There was nothing left to do for them but find a public-house and discover if they could fill this vacancy with ale. Hallowing their dead was now history’s task. Hollowing the casks was theirs.