The knight in the ruins

The owl stood perched on top of the crumbling wall surveying the tower ruins that were her home. It was a night like any other, only tonight it was a lot brighter, as the moon was full and unusually large. It flooded the landscape with its light, casting eerie shadows and colouring everything in shades of grey and silver.

Her head still cocked, she saw a figure in the shape a human slowly emerge
from the forest, swatting branches, leaves and ferns, and muttering in annoyance. A quiet metal clang disturbed the silence with every hit – it was one of those humans covered in metal, like beetles with a shell.
“How on earth does that work”, she always wondered.

The figure stepped out of the forest and into a clearing. Standing up straight, it looked up at the sky – or was it looking for the moon? Then it put its hands on its waist and leaned backwards, stretching. A groan filled the air. Then, the invader searched the fallen rocks that dotted the opening for a flat rock and sat for a bit, catching its breath. At some point, the human shed its head piece and set it on the ground next to it. It drank a red liquid, leaning its head backwards and spilling it into its mouth from a strange brown thing that hung from its side.

The owl was mesmerised. She was watching the human with the eyes of a hawk (ha!), waiting for its next move, fascinated by the strange beast, maintaining her guard in case of danger. After some time, the metal-clad human looked upwards again, and this time the owl was sure – it was looking for the moon. It stood up and picked up its head piece, putting it back on.
“How strange!” the owl thought.

The human started walking through the ruins, pushing rocks aside. Suddenly, something caught its attention. As the human approached, a glow appeared from under a small pile of rocks, coming through in beams of blue-white light. The closer the human went, the stronger the glow became, and the owl almost looked away, but she couldn’t! She’d never seen anything like this, in all the years she’d lived in these ruins – her eyes were fixed on the light in surprise. 

The metal-clad figure pushed the rocks aside, revealing a shape like a star
in a circle on the ground, with a small, round hole in the centre, where the
glow was coming from. The human looked upset, impatient. With trembling hands, it grasped a round object dangling from its neck and pulled, breaking the string that held it there. Fumbling with anticipation, it placed the round object in the hole in the centre, obscuring the glow – it fit perfectly, and the human stood there looking at it, waiting for something to happen.

The ensuing expectant silence only lasted for a few seconds. Suddenly a
rumble started in the ground, and the wall the owl was sitting on trembled. Pebbles were shaken loose and she had to beat her wings to maintain her balance. The shape on the ground in front of the human sunk in the ground, leaving a hole in its place, just large enough for the human to go in. It did.

It was once again quiet in the ruins, and the owl went hunting. Tearing the
flesh off of a small badger a while later, she idly wondered if the human would ever re-emerge from the hole in the ground.

Not long after she’d finished her meal, she heard clanging from the hole,
and the human making a sound with its mouth, but very unlike any other human she had heard of so far. This was melodic, as if it was trying to imitate a nightingale. The iron-clad human emerged, brandishing a sharp branch of metal – the kind that humans use to draw blood from each other. This branch also looked different than anything the owl had seen – it was large and it emanated a white-blue soft glow.

Holding its metal branch proudly, the metal human walked off into the night from whence it came, all the while making those melodic sounds from its mouth. The owl watched it until the trees hid it from her view, and she was almost sure that the sounds meant that the human was happy. She once again marvelled at the experience of seeing something like this up close. The ruins were silent once again, and she went back to hunting.

The Cactus