Paradise Lost -- One of Many WIPs

Blogger had been fighting me all day publishing this post. This story is about Centaurs, and the narrator is a stallion. He has long pale hair and his tail is the same color.

PROLOGUE

We might have worshipped the invaders as gods. The One God, when he'd walked among the Centaurs, had walked upright on two legs, and our scriptures foretold a second coming, but not the cruelty and brutality of their arrival. Man’s weapons belched fire and thunder, and my people fell. On a crimson tide, they flooded our quiet valleys.

We were defenseless.

For centuries, the Andalos had been a peaceful herd. The One God had persuaded my ancestors to put away our weapons, and the Days of the Sword now belonged to legend. I had reached two-and-twenty years and had never seen war, but my friend Maluso and I had taught ourselves to use two rusty swords, the weapons that had once slaughtered other Breeds. The battle movements—piaffe, passage, capriole and courbette—had evolved into ceremonial dances.

For many years, the war between Man and the Centaur was to rage. Locusts, wave after wave, they came, two-legged beings pointing their sticks, leaving the stench of death and destruction in their wake. I began this account when I was free and a warrior, but the story and my life changed completely when I became a captive.

If this narrative has a bitter taste, it is only a remembered flavor, merely an after-taste of blood and ashes.

Love is mightier than the sword.