"Battlefield Berries" by Joanne Barnden

They gleamed like jewels which had been carefully polished – but they aren’t jewels. They are the most precious things in the world, more precious than the finest gems. The blood which dripped from the cobblestones into the dirt below created them. They are unique – found only on battlefields where the blood has spread and sunk into the fertile dirt.

They are known as the Battlefield berries, as red as the blood from which they have grown and as rare as the sprinkle of gold on cedar. They tasted like nothing in the world, better than butter and milk and more pleasurable than the sweetest chocolate. People have died for a taste once they set their eyes upon them, for they were as beautiful as the dawn of a new day and more enticing than the combined temptation of all the beautiful women combined.

Once found, the fruit would last for centuries if picked, but the plants withered and died in the time it took for a leaf to fall from a tree. Thus the picking time was short and they bloomed for picking at the dead of night when there was no moon, so many a time the plants would rise and fall with none of the berries that was their pride and joy.

The city was filled with their sweet nectar – haunting, tantalizing it drew the victim forwards, towards its lush profusion over thickly clustered green leaves. You would kneel down and reach out and never realize the beautiful sight covered a cold, decaying corpse.

Battlefield berries covered corpses in a profusion of blood red drops like the life which had bleed from their veins. And for all that people died for them, for all their beauty – in their raw state the fruit – that beautiful, satisfying fruit was deadly. For its germination only came about in the fresh blood of a newly dead corpse. A corpse which it had bled to death with the sharp, stake-like seeds disguised by the beauty of the berry.

It could be said that the Battlefield Berry killed more than the battle.