Another journal

Storytelling Collective does a yearly challenge for flash fic, with prompts and a nice community format. Every year I complete a run I pick my ten favourites and collect them into what is basically a zine. This is my fifth year doing it!! Check out the zine for 2026’s flash fiction here, and then enjoy a favourite from 2025’s collection.

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You’ve done this before. You’ve defeated magicians, killed kings, rescued the helpless. It doesn’t get easier, it doesn’t. That’s fine, that’s what you signed up for. But you’re stood here anyway, listening to this knight—this paladin—looking sweatless in his gambeson even though the sun is at its zenith, sneering at you and the others about numbers. As if any of this could be quantified.

He’d already yelled at young Drake for filling a cup with cider, saying that cider was for heroes only. Which everyone bristled at, you are all of you heroes of some sort, so who is this man coming in from the city with his definitions?

Most of you have outlasted several royals. Partly because royals have the lifespan of mayflies, and partly because some of you have hair that matches the metal of your armour. And here is this man, his full moustache the same liver-sick colour as his skin, saying you weren’t heroes, you wouldn’t be until you’d met some set of goals. This many beasts slayed, that many outlaws captured, and an amount of tithes gathered that you know couldn’t be achieved without stealing from the villages. Which it would be, stealing. Even if they gave it. The lot of them need seed and the coin to get the things they can’t grow far more than any of this lot do.

Of course, those who do the best at meeting these goals will be rewarded somehow, badges or swords or a plot of land. You have a plot of land. You get to see it once or twice a year, when its so cold out that not even the worst villains dare to leave their lairs. And what would they do, actually, what could they do, actually, to those of you who didn’t deliver what somebody in their silks demanded? Take your land? You’d like to see them try. Tell you to leave the corps? What, so that the gap you left would be filled with witless young things who don’t realise what they’re signing up for?

The knight is saying something about how long he’d been titled. You wonder if he realises how few of you are titled. You’re a rarity in in the group, with your land and your comfort, as uncommon as it is for you to have time to enjoy it. On and on the man is prattling, about what he has that he assumes none of you do. You wonder if he’s trying to inspire jealousy to fuel action, which is poor kindling for any kind of lasting fire.

You’re glad you’re in the back of the group, even with your years of practise you know you can’t keep your feelings off your face. You lean against the table, resting your knee. Your one lasting injury and it’s not even from battle, but a calf getting too rambunctious. That’s what life is, you know that. Your corps know this. You’ve all of you worked together enough that so much of what you is instinctual—the way your hands move, setting the arrow to the string, the way the others take steps aside to clear a path at a single word from you.

This close the shot is good and you marvel for a moment while the knight’s mouth keeps moving in disdain, before it catches up to what his body already knows. Setting the bow back on the table, you walk the cleared aisle up to the body, resisting the urge to kick it, though you do hold it down with your foot as you remove your arrow from the eye.

“Shame he got lost on his way here.” You don’t look up at the others, but you can feel their shoulders relax. Someone in the back suggests that maybe it was those bandits you’d heard about recently. Murmurs of agreement then, and somebody adding that they’d heard the bandits had gotten as far as the castle.

You straightened up then, considering the possibilities. “If there are bandits in the castle, then I suppose it is our responsibility to root them out.”

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