It’s Friday, and inkeeping with terrible world events currently transpiring, Chuck Wendig of terribleminds asks us to write about hope. So, simply, this is a story about hope.

Hope’s Fire

They took it all. Everything we owned. Our land, our homes, our possessions. Heirlooms passed down from mother to daughter and father to son. They took first the things which were tangible. Useful. Our wealth became their greed, and they squandered what they stole.

Next they took our ideas, but our ideas were not squandered; they were warped. Peace became war. Knowledge became power. Freedom became slavery. They learnt from us, and they exploited us. They struck when we least expected it, and before we knew it, our way of life was no more.

They took our words. Our books burned, our language banned. Hundreds of years’ worth of history, condemned to smoke. The ash of our funeral pyres became the ash of our traditions. We sang no more songs to the wind; offered no more prayers to the spirits of snow and sunlight. The moon passed through our sky un-blessed by our chants.

In iron they chained us to their fields, calloused old hands guiding the flesh of youth. This is how the soil is tilled. This is how the seeds are sown. The harvest is handled thus. Once masters of our land, we were mastered in turn by thieves.

But songs live on. We tell stories to our children of days long ago; days in which we were free, in which we sang to the wind and prayed to the sun and chanted our prayers to the moon. They have taken our land, our possessions and our ideas, but they cannot take the flame of hope which quietly burns inside our hearts. In our bodies we are chained, but in our minds we are free. One day, the embers of hope will fan, and a wildfire will rage across this world. We wait for that moment; for the moment in which we will rise up and live again.