2h (edited) • General discussion
The war 🥸.
The war began on a Tuesday, but for Elara, the real siege started the moment the city gates were sealed and she was locked in with Liam.
It wasn't the bombs that were the worst part. The bombs were honest. They screamed their arrival and left behind the tangible, democratic ruin of shattered brick and twisted metal. You could mourn a building. You could point to a crater and say, here, this is where the world broke.
No, the worst thing was the quiet, creeping order Liam imposed on their two-room apartment, a tiny, self-declared nation state where he was the sole legislator and she the only, increasingly weary, citizen.
While the world outside dissolved into the chaos of sirens, rationing, and fear, Liam’s world crystallized. He discovered a passion for systems. He mapped their dwindling tins of beans on a spreadsheet he drew by hand, the lines perfectly ruled. He calculated their water usage down to the half-cup. Every morning, he would scrape his chair back from the small table at precisely 6:05 a.m., the sound like a nail being dragged across a coffin lid. His movements were a metronome against the arrhythmia of the war.
“If we maintain order here,” he’d say, polishing a spoon until his gaunt face stared back at him, “we deny them their victory. Chaos is what they want.”
But Elara was starving for a little chaos. A dropped cup. A spontaneous laugh. A tear that wasn't immediately wiped away and categorized as "a momentary lapse in fortitude."
Before the war, Liam’s meticulous nature had been a quirk. He was the man who organized his books by color, then size, then publication date. It was odd, but harmless. Now, with the sky bleeding smoke and the ghosts of neighbors whispering through the floorboards, his quirk had metastasized into a tyranny.
He forbade reminiscing. “Nostalgia is a parasite, Elara. It feeds on the present.” He’d catch her staring out the grime-laced window, her mind a thousand miles away in a sun-drenched field from her childhood, and he would gently, firmly, pull the blackout curtain shut. “Let’s focus on the task at hand. It’s your turn to check the dust traps.”
One day, a miracle. A single, defiant dandelion had pushed its way through a crack in the pavement of their small, enclosed courtyard. It was a tiny, ragged sun, a punctuation mark of impossible life against the gray concrete. Elara saw it and felt a jolt so profound it was almost painful. She knelt, just to be near it. She didn't dare pick it.
That evening, Liam came in, his shoes tapping their usual, steady rhythm. He was carrying a small trowel. "I dealt with the weed infestation in the courtyard," he announced, a surgeon reporting a successful tumor removal. "Breeding grounds for pests."
Elara said nothing. She just looked at his hands, so clean, so capable, and felt a hatred so pure and cold it scared her more than any bomb. He hadn't just pulled a weed. He had extinguished her sun.
Her rebellion, when it came, was not a shout. It was a whisper.
It was a Tuesday, the anniversary of the war’s beginning. Liam was at the table, listening to the crackle of the state-sanctioned radio news, his head cocked as he absorbed the reports of glorious defenses and cowardly enemy retreats.
Elara walked to the shelf where their last remaining treasures were kept. A small porcelain bird her grandmother had given her. A book of poetry with a cracked spine. She picked up the bird. It was smooth, cool, and hollow. She remembered her grandmother’s laugh, a sound like wind chimes. It was a contraband memory, rich and dangerous.
“Elara, what are you doing? The broadcast is on.”
She turned to him, the porcelain bird held gently in her palm. For the first time in years, she didn't see her husband, the architect of their survival. She saw her jailer. She saw a man so terrified of the world that he had built a prison and called it a sanctuary.
“I remember,” she said, her voice rusty. “I remember dancing in the rain. Before you. Before this.”
Liam’s face tightened. “That’s irrelevant. We need to focus on—”
She wasn't listening. She walked to the window, the one that faced the courtyard. With a strength she didn't know she possessed, she wrenched the window open. The sound was a shriek of rusted metal. A gust of damp, smoky air—real air—rushed in, carrying the scent of dust and distant rain and decay. It was the most wonderful thing she had ever smelled.
“Close it!” Liam hissed, rising from his chair. “The particles! The instability!”
Elara looked at the small bird in her hand. It was a perfect, useless, beautiful thing. It belonged to a world that no longer existed. A world of open skies.
And with a small, simple flick of her wrist, she tossed it out the window.
They didn't hear it shatter. The sound was swallowed by the immense, broken city. But they both knew it was gone. An act of perfect, meaningless, glorious destruction.
Liam stood frozen, his mouth agape, his entire system of order crashing down around him in the silence. He had no protocol for this. There was no column on his spreadsheet for a wife who would choose to destroy beauty simply for the sake of feeling something.
Elara kept her back to him, breathing in the polluted air. It was an act of war. Her own private declaration. The bombs could take the city, but he would not take her soul. Not anymore. The siege, she realized, was finally over. Now, the liberation could begin.
continue the rest page of the story with the imagination of your creation in the form that you filled it the rest page continue to the comment section below ⬇️
continue the rest of the story with the same kind of story that is about to come to a close end part written by the your own imagination and your ideas that you will create in the coming pages of this chapter will be selected by the reader in the comments below ⬇️
continue the story of the book with your imagination ideas and creative writing ✍️ that will be the best way to create a good book that you can use in your own mind to get filled with the best creative writing you have to do to make it a success for the book and community of skooler writers is not something that i have ever been interested to do something like this before so i just want to see if anyone else is willing to help out with this project as a team or if anyone is interested in it or want to join me on this amazing community are welcome to join me just to see if we can work together on this project all together as a team community i would love to see people who want to join the project to get the best out of us in the story so we can get the best of it all together in this project…. much appreciated and thank you for your time spent in this project 🤝
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The war 🥸.
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