deep breath, deep breath
Short ones this time. Prompts from an anonymous greyface on tumblr.
Secret of Kells © Cartoon Saloon
Eye
There were two, there was one, there were thousands.
Outside the bloody mound that the serpent wrapped itself in, its followers created faces for stone idols that stood sentinel, and they weren't enough.
So on the spikes that guided the fanatics to the lair to cut out the throats of offerings, they carved a legion for their god to more easily watch their sacrifices writhe and struggle and sob.
They were false, but symbols have power, and that power was enough for it to feel if not see when someone was foolish or mad enough to wander into their sights—
—and then there was a boy with the strength of hope who aimed to the genuine for spreading it and tore it out; and while it ate itself, the last faerie clawed every eye that watched her people die blind.
Reflection
The stained glass windows of the church had been beautiful. They still were, in a way, shattered and scattered in a thousand different shades of red in the flames.
Forced behind a pew that had been knocked aside and against the wall to keep the raiders from seeing him, the pieces of glass were his only way to see what was happening in the rest of the church.
He almost wished they didn't.
They caught flashes of books, labored over for years and years, some older than himself, torn apart for the pages to fly away in the heat-created breezes and to burn.
Of his Brothers too slow to hide, too slow to flee, their silhouettes ran through with the Northmen's great swords; some lifted by the neck of their cloaks and flung into the inferno.
The reflections' distorted shapes and colors leant it unreality—until the smell—the smell of roasting hair and robes and skin.
His horror of what had happened kept him hunched over in the hidden spot until long after the Northmen had left, dragging a few of the more able-bodied of his brothers along with them-for slavery, perhaps, or their corpses for trophies; he couldn't see clearly enough to tell.
(Aidan would be haunted long afterwards, not just for what he had seen, but what he hadn't; the guilt of not truly watching and surviving would claw through his dreams even after he made his way to Kells.)