Following on the trend from my previous short story set in the world of Gear, I’ll be sharing the thought process and some of my inspirations that went into writing ‘The Luna Goddesses and the Golden birds’. My previous addition to the Novella of Gear, was written in the style of a fairy tale, this one is along the lines of a fable. It features the lunar goddesses as they have a conversation with a bird. As in a typical fable there is a moral, which is to stick at a task against all odds.

Just as I wrote ‘The Princess’s Playhouse’ in a single day, this short story came together as quickly. I wrote the story mostly in a single sitting on the evening of Halloween 2020, although I had started it that morning. Because I had a clear idea in mind as to the content and structure of the story it didn’t take me long to write the 1730 words, truthfully I spent longer creating the illustration to go alongside the story.

I first came across the tale of the tiny birds scraping their beaks against the granite mountain at the end of the world, in Terry Pratchett’s ‘Wee Free Men’, where Tiffany Aching tells the story to Rob Anybody. Tiffany tells Rob the story describing the bird carrying out a seemingly impossible task, as it tries to wear the mountain away by simply rubbing its beak against it once every year. I read the ‘Wee Free Men’ as a young teenager and this analogy of sticking to a seemingly impossible task took root in my mind. Whenever I got set a task that seemed either pointless or impossible to complete, I simply thought about the little bird. I stopped thinking about the whole picture and concentrated on whatever task I had directly ahead of me. I now have a reputation for being patient, at least with tedious tasks, not necessarily people.

I hadn’t realised how popular the metaphor of the little bird and the mountain was until recently. Whilst in conversation with a friend he remarked on a line from the season nine finale of Doctor Who, where the doctor (played by Peter Capaldi) uses the metaphor to describe how slow he would make time in order to fully punish his adversary. I wonder how many more versions of this story exist?

In my short story there appears an apparition of death, whom I’ve attempted to make unique in a style suitable for Gear. Any Terry Pratchett fan will be familiar with the skeletal death he portrays, so I did my best to steer away from this description. I’ve envisaged death as a pillar of shadow, shifting and changing as death comes to all, and is no further away than a shadow’s depth.