Fiction by Neve Schauer
When he was across the sea, my father sent us a picture of himself holding a graystone Warhammer. My mother was so proud of him; “I knew he would make rank,” she’d say, hands on hips, staring proudly at the photograph she’d framed over the fireplace. When the call had come for war, my mother had been desperate he go, awash as he was in the legacy of her history, and having none himself.
My mother had always told him that she believed in him, wrote him letters three times a week to tell him she was rooting for him as he sloughed through the mountains and grottos filled with vile creatures. She asked for descriptions of how he used his Warhammer, how it felt in his hands and if the weight of it was familiar yet.
My mother could no longer go to war. One leg was missing everything below the knee; “I got that beast even after he got me,” she’d say, one hand resting on the stump of her thigh. “He ate my leg. I took his head.”
In her letters, my mother asked my father to describe the scents of the world he lived in—freshly oiled leather, campfire smoke that got into every thread, blood on the breeze after a skirmish. Sometimes, when he managed to get a letter back to her, she would lift the paper to her nose as if she could relive the battle penned on the yellow paper.
As she sat one evening, rereading his inked tales of glory, I snuck into her room and opened the chest at the foot of my parent’s bed. I’d seen my mother open it a few times, though she liked to be alone when she did. I’d peeked through the crack in the door and watched her run her calloused hands over stained wood and pitted carvings that held the remnants of blood that would not disappear, not even with the firmest washing. Now, beneath rough wool of travelling clothes that smelled like old smoke, hidden under cracked leathers of days past, I uncovered my mother’s whitestone Warhammer.
It had not seen combat in many years, hidden away in the bedroom of a warrior who was a homesteader now, a glimpse into a past long gone but hardly forgotten. I dared not take the Warhammer into my hands, but I tried to touch it the same way I’d seen my mother do, tracing the history carved into the pale stone, running my fingers along the inlays of metal that wound down the handle. Even in the dim light of the room, the images of dragons were clear in the wood and iron, tiny beasts that would never again guide the hand of my mother.
When my father returned from the war, he and my mother would trade stories, compare battles. My father would do it to relieve the burden of what he had to do, to purge the heavy feeling of guilt over the lives lost, the bodies that fell under his blade. My mother would listen with eyes that glistened in the firelight, leaning forward in her seat in rapt attention, and her hand would grasp the arm of the chair in the same way it had held the hardwood handle of a weapon.
My father’s graystone Warhammer would lie beside my mother’s, and he would never look at it again. But she would caress both weapons in the dim hours of morning with a reverence that extended even beyond the way she touched my father…with an undying fire reserved only for the Warhammers.
