Tanka Epic, Part 2

This is the second part of the Tanka Epic, an attempt to write an epic poem where each stanza is a standalone tanka. To find the first part, click "Tanka Epic" on the right hand side and then scroll down. To read this part, simply click below!

In the Opal Court
Addressing the King of Men,
The Seraph promised
A chance to defeat our foes
And drive them back to Hell’s depths.

Facing now their glaives
And spears, barbed to rend the flesh,
Not once does he flinch
Or break his valorous charge
For fear of death or yet worse.

A Pit Lord stands tall,
Swinging a flail of green steel,
Blocking the Knight’s path.
Struck in the chest by the beast,
He falls to the blackened ground.

The Knight stands quickly,
Dodging a blow from the beast
Which sends ash flying
From the chthonian soil.
This battle has just begun.

The combat rages
As the black sun creeps upward
Into a dark sky,
To its tenebrous zenith,
An omen of blood to come.

The Knight fights fiercely
With his fiendish counterpart,
Both parties focused,
Oblivious to the melee
That slaughters their brethren.

Man against devil,
Steel parries steel, steel rends flesh.
Blood in red and black
Swirls together and pools
In the mortar of these streets.

The obsidian roads,
Slick now with blood, and broken,
Showing sharp edges,
Crushed by hooves and armored feet
Shriek, and mourn their masters’ deaths.

Through all this he fights,
The paragon clad in steel
That glows like the sun.
His clothes soaked by blood and sweat,
His muscles burn, his heart aches,

But he does not fall,
As he takes punishing blows
From the demon’s flail
And returns the strikes in kind,
Scoring its leathery hide.

As the umbral sun
Once again begins to dip
To the western sky,
The Knight Seraph grits his teeth
And prepares to finish this.