Here is the second short story that I am uploading; it's short enough so it doesn't need description beyond it's title, The Brass Prison.

The brass giant stood in the center of a vast ocean, taller than any mountain, but noticed by none. The water lapped against his thighs but he remained motionless. His face was set, staring into the distant horizon; his eyes were unblinking. A woman sat in his closed fist which was kept still at the end of his extended arm. She held a young child to her bosom, its pale-skinned head nestled in her red hair. She wept softly, slowly adding drops to the ocean that her tears had begun to form eons ago. She wished to leave her prison, but she knew it was impossible. She had been trapped there since the new order of higher powers was established; long before the birth of her son; long before recorded memory. But her child was young and she knew he would escape when he grew older. Then he would return and rescue her as well. She would finally be free and there would be none who would not feel her terrible anger and her great despair. The woman knew for it had been foretold to her, and though the prophet’s power had been broken and the prophet had been killed long ago, the prophecy still remained.

***

“Your fate was. Your fate is. Your fate will be,” the prophet intoned in the traditionally solemn tones and enigmatic diction of her kind as her blind eyes gazed across the long extent of her red-haired patron’s future, “Despair. Loneliness. Hatred. Violence. Love. Tenderness. Hope.”
The fortune teller’s patron crinkled her brow in annoyance—could this witch be toying with her? If the blind woman was, then she would be destroyed, power broken, will overcome, and body shattered. But then the young red-haired woman frowned. No mortal would even attempt to fool a god; they all knew what would come of that. Yet as the Red-Haired Goddess came to that conclusion, as she realized that the fortune teller only spoke the truth of her future gazing, her expression changed to one of disguised terror. What could possibly cause the wretchedness that the blind woman foretold?
As the Red-Haired Goddess’s thoughts converged on that question, the fortune teller took a breath and resumed her gazing. “Yet amidst your pain. Your suffering. Your sorrow. You will have a son, if you follow the path upon which this prophet gazes. He will take you from your infallible prison. Your unwavering prison guard. Your impenetrable cage of brass fingers. Your ocean of grief. He will save you. He will love you as a son should love a mother. He will be your world. He will restore your hope.”
Upon ‘hope’ the blind woman’s head flopped down to her heavily decorated bosom, blind eyes further leaving the light as their lids came down. The red-haired goddess looked down at the old fortune teller, eyes filled with an overwhelming mixture of fear, disgust, and hatred that she nonetheless held back. Then she spoke the traditional thanks to the gazer of a desolate sight.
“My thanks to you, seer of woeful times ahead; though your message is bleak and your tidings ill, I wish you peace. The messenger must not be blamed for the message that she bears.”

***

And so the woman trapped in her cage of brass fingers remembered. And so the goddess’s hate grew. Hate for those who had imprisoned her; hate the destiny that bound her; and hate for those who forgot her. But there was one she did not hate, one she could never hate just as he was prophesized to only ever feel love for her.
She held her child close to her heart and wept for their imprisonment and inevitably shared hatred. She held him close to her heart knowing he would soon grow to save her. She held her child close to her heart and smiled through her tears.