SPILLING TEA WITH A HOUSEMAID OF WYVERN HALL

SPILLING TEA WITH A HOUSEMAID OF WYVERN HALL,  by Gretchen Tessmer, pending art by Simon Walpole

 

go ahead and ask the mighty sky kings
to spill the location of their secret passageways
through cumulus castles adorned with spiral thermals
moon chimes and suncatcher chandeliers

but I fear they’ll not tell you anything

jealous, proud creatures are my masters
with their amber eyes and gilded wings
too beautiful, too ancient, too wise
hiding hatchling origins as all the lofty ones do

(but just because it isn’t pretty doesn’t mean it isn’t true)

come, I’ll tell you…

birthed in the heart of the mountain
they were vile, slimy serpents
stunted, slow-moving, so low to the ground
for so long you might have stepped on the poor wretches
crushed them underfoot and never known it

they crawled on their bellies, blind and eating
mealworms in the dark, slurping up black mud to survive

hard times

but they escaped, and good for them
yet, only after
they ate their captors
threw off their fetters
and stole the crown jewels

and how they guard these sky halls
against the mere whisper of those shameful times

with omissions buried under heaps and heaps
of glittering gold and silver-tongued lies

 

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Gretchen Tessmer lives in the deep woods of the U.S./Canadian borderlands.  She’s published short stories and poems in many places, including Nature, Bourbon Pen, Strange Horizons and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, as well as previous apperences in Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, with her poetry collecting several Pushcart, Rhysling, Best of the Net and Dwarf Stars nominations along the way. 

Simon Walpole has been drawing for as long as he can remember and is fortunate to spend his freetime working as an illustrator. He primarily use pencils, pens and markers and use a bit of digital for tweaking. As well as doing interior illustrations for various publishing formats he has also drawn a lot of maps for novels. his work can be found at his website HandDrawnHeroes.