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The challenge? Write a story in exactly 6 sentences based on Denise’s one word prompt: LINK. Visit, comment, and write & post your own on  Six Sentence Stories  

He wore many chains about his neck, mostly gold, some mixed and linked to polished stones, some of these gemstones.

The mirror in front of him showed their glint against his naked chest and graying hair, and though his eyes had been brilliant blue in his youth, they’d faded over the years, both of color and of the life force that supplied their vitality.

Turning his hip to the mirror, he noticed his flattened backside, and lifted his chest and sucked in his belly — his “father figure” as his dresser affectionately called it – to give an appearance of balance to his strong figure; for his remaining good-will edicts as the People’s chosen leader, he’d best wear his vest and the long midnight-blue jacket with the scarlet braid across the shoulders and down his sides.

He glanced at the thick scroll on his side table, a long list of the laws he’d written, to be presented to the council and locked into place before he retired to the countryside to raise bees with his long-term and endlessly patient mistress.

But maybe, he thought to himself, I could hold power for another year, just to make sure everything gets done that needs doing, as he eyed and then lifted the heaviest-linked chain of them all, the one presented to him just last week by the glittery-eyed sorcerer, Modrigal.

His neck veins bulged with the effort as he bent and looped the chain around his neck, stood tall, and then dropped, soundless and dead, to the thick-pile carpet.

© Liz Husebye Hartmann (2023)