Experimental Short: Choice

Experimental Shorts are works based outside of the writer’s normal scope of genre and ideas, conceptualised and written in under twenty minutes.

How is it that a tool of death is also a tool for creating? It is like this: the battlefield is paint, cast across the canvas that is our world; and the sword is the brush, its strokes illustrating the wants and needs of men, expressing and bringing to life greater ideals and ways of living.

Unlike other implements, the sword is a weapon of choice, a weapon to use in designing your own destiny.

The knife has no love to it, it is a blade to sink into the back of an enemy. To kill out of spite, out of jealousy or hate. Not to further one’s self, but to satiate a darker desire. The rifle has no foresight, killing from such a distance that the soldier can not even confirm his kill. It is the weapon used by those who fight for someone else’s ideal, not for their own beliefs. Both of these tools are used out of base instinct, or through the order of some undeserving authority.

The sword, however, is used only after deep contemplation. It is a weapon of the self, as much an extension of the body as it is the heart, mind and soul. Upon the sharpened blade, countries, politics, philosophy, spiritual truth and life are balanced. It is the creator of new civilisations and the end of the old. In its use a warrior must enter the field of battle and face his opponent, both expressing themselves to their fullest. Within their eyes is displayed their years as children, as brothers, as fathers and husbands, as uncles and grandparents; shown are their desires, their fears, their love and their hatred, their anguish and their pleasure; their eyes show courage and belief, they allow a warrior to see into the very depths of his enemy’s soul, and they act as a mirror to look inward at the self.

These beautiful elements of life are washed away by the sword, and this is why the sword is a weapon of great choice. To see the splendour of a man’s life in his eyes, to witness in someone else all that you hold dear for yourself, and to then cut it out of existence, this is a choice that no other soldier or assassin could make. One must be strong in their convictions, must have belief that their actions are true and just, that they are not acts to reward some disconnected other, but acts that bring greatness to the warrior and his people.

This is my ideal, my goal, my truth that no one can take or corrupt.

This inner strength and truth is needed in order to see the magnificence of a life, to see all that a man may fight for, and then choose to dash it aside to the ground, for a greater cause. For a greater self.

The sword, with its blood-lust and fury, with its fatal power, is our most able tool for creating a limitless path. It takes a life away, so more life may bloom.

Reviews

[Kaylor Mason]

As a lover of swordsmanship, I tip my hat to you in a nod of respect

[Andrew Poole]

Thanks very much. Swordsmanship is a practise and subject very close to my heart, but this is the first piece I've ever written about it. I'm glad another person with interest in the subject appreciates the material.

[Kaylor Mason]

I ask you to read my Winterheart Memoirs--if you like swordsmanship, you'll love that