The War God Sleeps

The Temple of Math

Loneliness and a quest for knowledge will drive a person to many things. Combine this with the vision of a shaman, and an age of ignorance ends on the edge of a sword.


Loneliness remained one mystery that defied Sethren’s mind, despite his understanding of structure and formlessness. The space between the lines had become a wellspring of loneliness, an opaque impression only water seemed to penetrate. He often wondered if his father, a hermit whom the folk in the villages thought mad, living as he did on the wild edges of their simple existences, felt lonely. But then, his father lived half of his conscious life elsewhere. Perhaps the ones he spoke to there, the ones who told him things, kept him company.

According to him, loneliness had driven the War God to abandon the world. An entity who caused death by reaching through the lines into the darkness that created them knew the solitude of the Mother; and after so many turns of a world from life to death to life, so many spirals in so many eons, he could no longer bear it. So the War God grew sad and went to sleep.

The hermit spoke of a temple in the north, at the base of Math’s Eye, the mountain range that protected the realm. He said the War God slept there, beneath five points, five lines and a raven’s eye. So said the old tales. So said the mad. No one else spoke of such things.

Little Tree, by F.T. McKinstry

“The War God Sleeps” is included in Wizards, Woods and Gods, a collection of twelve dark fantasy tales exploring the mysteries of the Otherworld through tree and animal lore, magic, cosmos, love, war and mysticism.

© F.T. McKinstry 2017. All Rights Reserved.