She was sharp and long, well cured through the tempering of extremes: wooden shaft soaked until soft. Slender grain stretched until straight. Tail end fletched with the taut, water-tight feathers of the eagle. Edge filed

to the finest tip, such that her head could divide between joints and marrow. Such was the preparation she had gone through to become a select arrow in the panoply of the Warrior.

And she rattled in His quiver has He moved.

The scent of battle reached her. The dread, the dark, and the fear. The shout and the abandonment. The charge and the breakthrough. The route and the victory.

But she remained in the shadow of the quiver, resting on the back of the Warrior. She saw none of it herself, but only heard of it from below as her fellow arrows rose up and away.

And she mourned what might have been.

But as the sun set, burning the rim where earth met sky, she felt the hand of the Warrior. And at once she was out in the blaze of a glorious end, where the arch foe of the Warrior had made its last stand. And it was with her that He pierced His serpentine foe.

And as she flew into the heart of the King’s enemy, it dawned on her that she had not been kept from anything, no, not from anything at all.

She had been saved for the best thing.

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