A long time ago I read Madeleine L’Engle’s A Swiftly Tilting Planet, which included a prayer of sorts, ending with

…the lightning with all its rapid wrath,
And the winds with the swiftness along their path,
And the sea with its deepness,
And the rocks with their steepness,
And the earth with its starkness:
All these I place,
By God’s almighty help and grace,
Between myself and the powers of darkness.

Today’s Inktober prompt is Armor. And what better Armor that the elements themselves? So I drew, not the elements, but crystal-like metaphors for them, to surround my person in need. I then looked up L’Engle to get the quotation right, and was flabbergasted to find that she had derived her invocation from something now referred to as…Saint Patrick’s Breastplate!

Instead of L’Engle, then, I included phrases from the original, in the original language. Up top it says “attomriug indiu,” which means “I bind to myself today.” “fudomna mara” is “the depth of the sea,” and so forth. I faked some uncial calligraphy for the phrases, intending to lend a mystic-incantation aura to the image.