Flash Friday Fiction: Mea Culpa

Krak des Chevaliers/Qalat al-Hosn, Syria. CC photo by Jon Martin.
Krak des Chevaliers/Qalat al-Hosn, Syria. CC photo by Jon Martin.

Mea Culpa – 160 words

He’d been promised glory and honor, a place in history as a defender of the true faith. What he got was mind-numbing boredom. An impregnable castle and months of nothing but marching and stewing and raging at the enemy.

So he’d impregnated something else. Not on purpose, of course. The market maidens had been a welcomed distraction for lonely nights and lonely knights. How could he have known Marisa’s father was a sorcerer, a practicer of dark magic?

He’d done the noble thing. He’d asked her to marry him. But that had not been enough to appease Ahmad.

Eight hundred years into the future, Ahmad had thrown him.

The women in the marketplace still cast surreptitious glances at him, appreciation for his face evident in their eyes.

He never noticed. He only had eyes for the castle. Besieged by remorse, by loss, by the sense of what might have been.

“Forgive me, Marisa, for I have sinned,” he whispered. Daily.

_____________________________________________________________________________

Here is another Flash Friday entry that I hadn’t posted during the time in which my website was down. We had to somehow include a marriage proposal within our 150 (+/-10) word story; how do you think I did?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*