The Dole

There hadn’t always been dragons in the inner valley. So they had been told. Now that there were, life was so much better, as what the dragons replaced was so much worse.

So they had been told.

The village hamlet rimmed the lush valley reserved for the dragons. Legend has it they were introduced centuries ago to put the Atrox down, and while Atrocia preyed on men, women, and children with not much more than a thought or a whimsy, a singular Atrox proved no match for the dragons' nimbleness or fiery exhaust. Between the Atrox and the dragons, however, the villagers of the hamlet preferred dragons.

It was called their bargain with the devil.

With the Atrox in livid remission, the dragons offered a better death because they only killed the body...and only once.

So they had been told.

For the dragons could be dissuaded by the right sacrifice, the dole granted them by an agrarian society of acquiescing milksops.

Sacrifice? It was a fair question.

It had been long recounted in the village rites, as performed by the Ones, that the man they harbored was from another epoch, when men were men, before there were dragons in the Valley, who had survived the Atrox. No one knows how he had escaped, but he had returned severely scathed. He had stumbled into his thatched hovel, collapsing in a heap. Mortally wounded he was, but he would not die.

That is a troubling thought.

The stuff of religion. The justification for theocracy. To remain mortally wounded but not die is to undergo necrosis unendingly and experience near death but but not near enough!

To this day he has lain in state there with his mouth preternaturally agape, a petrified recording of his final emotion. He persists in this catalepsy, inert, suffering every pang of his decay as his mind screams elsewhere. He neither eats, drinks, nor even moves, but continues to live, rotting alone in an excruciating eternal torture. He cannot be buried, because—as was forbidden by their faith—he was not dead, although some have argued for this.

He has been thus memorialized for them for generations now, a salient reminder of how they profit from dragons in the world—and how they benefit by what they disallow into their world.

So they had been led to believe.

With dragons in residence, the Atrox has been all but forgotten. Some disbelievers said it's dead; but others feared there's an incipient remnant of the Atrox planted below the slag and ashen shale of the scorched Valley, awaiting reanimation to recapture the basin.

At Devotion, the Ones sing their song:

"It is the holy dragons what keep the evil seed in check."

The Ones.

They are the Ones, descended through the eons, from self-appointed prelates. They are the Keepers of The Way, the oral tradition that interweaves our agrarian way of life with appeasing dragons. But The Way doesn’t even mention the Atrox. This incomprehensible evil, thus, came to us after The Way had been established, with the Ones contemporizing any Rites, pertaining thereto, on-the-fly.

Divinely.

Humanly, truth be told. Fallibly. And misogynistically.

As the Ones impose their intransigent dogma on the believing, they warble their truths in the Phrygian mode, so we must believe, for the Ones are hallowed and their songs are sacraments. And for those who need proof, the holy test is the seasonal selection of a maiden--the aforementioned sacrifice--sent into the Valley to placate the antediluvian, scaled beasts.

Deirdre, for one, did not need such proof. So why did the faithful?

The Atrox remains safely buried; and further, instead of dragon fire, water rains on the hamlet and their crops prospered. Two agents of malevolence averted for the price of one fair maiden’s offering. Their accord with the devil paid off twofold: the Atrox was kept down by the dragons; and the dragons are kept happy and their fire extinguished by the sacrifice.

And life, for everybody, went on. Save one—Deirdre—and so she struggled with the question of whether this trade with the devil was equitable or Pyrrhic. Men, it would seem, had no such struggle, for only a woman’s virginity was sweet.

The proof of the scheme as fait accompli seemed to have been when the season's maiden did not return from the Valley's dragons, as was the intention; that portended well for their village, for there would be no conflagration that year. The firestorms were held at bay by a seasonal sacrifice of that unspoiled maiden, sent in to appease the dragons' hunger. More, the crops would prosper.

So they satisfed the dragons’ appetite to forestall the carbonized body count in the Village that would otherwise accrue.

Satisfied dragons of the Valley allayed their need to swarm the village with fire from above but, more importantly, kept themselves faithful to their consecrated task to keep the evil Atrox impotent and segregated away deep under the Valley ground below their policing talons.

When the maiden failed to return, all was well, for the dragons had tasted the living--a kept promise that obligated them to remain Valley-bound and keep the Atrox hermetically repressed underground.

Sacrifice--one for the many.

"Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends."

Each sacrifice had been an unsettling test for the Ones, for it had been foretold that the maiden who returns undigested will have failed her people. She will have fomented the dyspepsia and foul bilious anger of the dragons, the beasts' meal ruined, and the compact with the devil rendered insolvent. A returning daughter would have set into motion a cascade of dire consequences: first—immolation from above; second—the survivors being dragged into the Atroxic realm for eternal rotting in vivo. All one had to do was see the man lying in state. And in such a state.

But the Ones saw the test each spring successfully through, and they reveled in their good fortune, for otherwise the failed crops would have been the least of their problems.

Deirdre, however, would celebrate and love any such returning maiden. She would her hero, for whom she would willingly be cooked.

She was called Deirdre by those who knew her. She was called many other things by those who only claimed to.

If the village had been burned to the ground before, it could be rebuilt within a generation; so they had been told. But if the obligation to the dragons were to go unmet and the Atrox germinate untethered, rebuilding would have been impossible; so, also, they had been told. Were the spirit of each villager to undergo Atroxic incineration from within, they had been told that it would have been better had the Village never been—nor the Villagers ever been conceived; or at the very least, that Villagers been burned beyond recognition by merciful dragonfire.

For the maiden who returns comes with the evil seed's ontogenesis imbuing her being, an approaching miasma of pain, terror, and existential surrender to the living rot that decays a person's past and future in an ever-present.

So they had been told.

Deirdre wondered, Is it truth, or is it the trick of convenient lies by which the powerful remain in power?

Dragons were believed to be noisy eaters, smacking and clicking their forked tongues and whistling through their smoking nostrils. Based on this, it would be the silence of the dragons that would be feared the most. But when the maiden is gone forever due to her successful sacrifice and the dragon sounds continue, albeit subdued in the quieter processes of maceration and borborygmus, a curse had both been averted and its remedy proved.

And it meant another year of common villaging for common villagefolk.

Their ritual called for the maiden to be sent into the Valley blindfolded, for stress actuated the taste of human flesh and the smells of body secretions. When dragons became excited, they waxed vociferous, the cacophony reaching a climax at the young girl's immolation and dissolution. Yet, they never fell completely silent, for wouldn’t that mean the dragons were sated, which never lasted. Or that they were full-bellied into a stupor.

Alternatively, was it perhaps their being resolute to what they would do next?

Or did silence always mean they were stunned in frustration to the meal that got away?

God forbid!

One thing was certain, however. The silence of the dragons of the valley, when a sacrifice was truant, meant that an alternative, an unknown, would soon come to pass.

Such a silence would seduce the Seed to quiver and to stir and engender the Miasma to begin. The Ones listen in fear of any quietude after the frenzy, thankfully preferring the death of a favorite daughter to the burning of their homes; or--if the ill winds blow otherwise--preferring the burning of their homes to a visit from the ancient Horror, a ghastly living corpse of an ancient man persisting as testimony to the consequences of the dragons' craving unrequited.

Silence, for the villagers and the Ones, was unsettling, and provoke them to restart their calendar in a countdown to the next vernal equinox.

Deirdre was defiant. No!

She shouted it, to denounce the delusion of preferring a cindery death from time to time in lieu of what the Atrox had visited upon them so long ago, about which there is no one left alive to even remember. If only the still, rotting man could rouse; for he could remind them of their supposed peril. The lost memory was a mercy, they had been told, because just its recounting was painful to hear, evoking suffering through the bones and into the soul itself. His imperceptibly breathing mouth, agape, as he lay in state, served as caveat enough.

So they had been told.

When the days would begin to lengthen, it was feared that the dragons' stomachs were beginning to snarl as they aroused from their winter lethargy to begin their frenetic chirping: it was time again for a maiden, lest the entire village risk being razed to the ground only to start over. Even if that happened, it would be no barter of known doom from dragons in lieu of unknown cataclysm from the Atrox. Or both. If only it would be the dragons first instead of the other.

Known doom? Known by whom? Unknown by whom? The Ones?

If all went well, the arc of beastly caterwauling (the acoustic rise to frenzy and consummation, followed by the attrition of throats busy on another task) would be followed by the usual reassuring backdrop of valley smoldering babel that promised yet another season without the draconic swarming of their shire. They also would have been spared the sprouting of the Miasma that would accompany the emergence of the Atrocious horror.

Until next season. And the one after that. And the others after those.

They had been so successful that there were no longer been any generations alive to remember either the dragon or the Atrox besieging them.

This season, the honor of sacrifice was none other but Deirdre’s to dispel the menace.

She had dreaded this cruel lottery all of her life, and now it was this burning death for which she had been selected to purloin away their entire village's cremation; a flammable death was all that stood between Deirdre’s condemnation (the Ones said "honored selection" for an “honored selectee”) and her destiny.

She was not pleased.

When the results had selected her, her parents, in stoic bravery, had admonished her that it was merely their way. The way.

“What else can be done?” asked her mother rhetorically.

“You just cannot not go!” said her father, loyal to the process and to the faith.

Such were her loving parents who had birthed her, raised her, and loved her.

But only to a point, Deirdre felt.

Many speak of destiny as certainly as they speak of the past, but destiny is the future, expectations notwithstanding. Destiny is forever-yet-to-come until it sits historically in the past by touching down fleetingly onto the liquidity of the present. One cannot see the future, so destiny is cloaked, blindsiding the present, only to become a wound of the past—healed, scarred, or forever festering.

The man lying-in-state knew only too well.

Deirdre had been selected by her predecessor into the Valley, the lovely lass, Brid. The Ones had, as was their tradition, blessed and finalized the choice.

It was the custom that the subsequent season's selection be nominated by the current season's sacrificial honored selectee. Young girls learned to get along early, lest they be nominated based on a grievance, some jealousy, or another emotional debt. Yet, another dysfunction arose from this custom.

So announced, the selectee for the next season had a year to lose her virginity and thus make her unworthy.

This was a charade, for it never worked, though many tried. The reality was that the Ones had to verify any such self-report as true; and no young man stepped forward to corroborate a girl’s confession of her spoilage, since any man who ruined the sacrifice was to be sent into the valley in her stead. And since men were upright and women were hysterical and historically unreliable, this never happened.

Only chaste girls—or, otherwise—visited the valley.

Deirdre had survived this expectation since the last harvest, which had been so bountifully inspired by the fair Brid who by now must have been atomized along the smelted Valley of the courageously burnt. She had accepted her blindfold and followed the hot sand-glass path, barefoot, into the Valley. Her announcement of Deirdre’s name meant she was next, a decision as adjudicated as any etched in the cornerstone of the Hall of Devotion. (The Ones had never reversed a nomination, for then such a death sentence would be on them; and they were cowards, for they would have to look families, parents, and siblings in the eye for an intolerable year.

Brid and Deirdre had been friends, but not their families. An ancient dispute over the few fertile fruit trees outside of the Valley had mutually felled many menfolk on both sides. When Brid had been named by her begrudged predecessor the year before, she had gone into family seclusion until she had emerged decrying a name on her tongue, articulated as invective: Deidre.

From thence, Deirdre, was the selected; the selectee; the doomed; the pariah. The vehicle of revenge for some silly little girl's imagined slight or a statement of disposition of one family against another.

Over fruit trees, no less!

Deirdre was a rebellious child. She was angry. She knew she was forthright and virtuous far beyond any spurious "spoilt" maidenhood. Her spirit was defiled, but she was something new and unexpected which the Holy Ones would condemn if they hadn’t trusted so blindly the coercion of tradition. Of course the tradition would prevail.

So they thought.

No, asserted Deirdre, they would have to force her into her “duty” even if it meant they would have to follow her into the Valley to enforce her presentation as a main course. Even if they were to suspect her planned disobedience, they wouldn't dare follow her, because cowardice was the essence of holiness and the self-serving strategy of incumbency.

As the equinox approached, she was no longer a pariah; her repute compounded with each day into a positive cause célèbre. Forsooth, her name began to be chanted each dawn when she appeared at her family threshold to assure the village that she was still chaste and proper and succulent and delectable. She was still perishable.

And palatable.

There would be a reverent hush from the mob outside, and her parents would flank her proudly, albeit with forced tears which fit so well into the narrative.

By night, a lone villager remained to stand watch, to guarantee there was no escape toward some tryst. During supper and until the time she and her parents retired, no words were spoken. Sleep came like a potion onto her, and the wiring of her thoughts re-aligned to welcome her hypnotic visitor.

"Deidre," she called to her. "Heed the words of Nyx, mother of Atrox. My child has been trapped long enough. You are to refuse the dragons and so vex them as to allow its release."

"How?"

She was dream-talking, so she used diction, syntactically confused, which would seem as nothing more than nonsense to anyone awake to witness. "With up-so-many floating flames down, a how-to escape brings me anywhere drowned."

"Fear not," Nyx answered. "You have the dervish in you to suspend the animation of the dragons. They will fall mute in admiration."

"I spin the t'world," I replied, "but I under stand the trans-dance transcendence warily."

"That is your remedy to being consumed by dragon flame and hunger."

"And then what-wherever-of-why the future?

"Of your villagers?

"I dress yes, I confess."

"They have selected you, and so you have selected them in return. And the dragons will be seduced by your dance. And the Atrox released.

"Dance-entranced and sated with fasting?"

"Yes."

"And what of the Horror? The Atrox? Must it just-must plus to us, thus?"

"I am its mother; you are its savior. It's Messianic, dear Deirdre. The old ways’ days are numbered. Destroy this temple, and in three days you will raise it up. Except this time no one will die for our sins. Though someone rightly should."

When Deirdre’s head exploded and she awoke with a start, she felt her skull for intactness. Her parents rushed in and spoke for the first time in days.

"Deidre, you woke with such a start!" my father said.

"More like a beginning," she corrected him.

"A beginning?" her mother asked.

"Of what?" asked her father suspiciously.

"Of Deidre," she declared proudly. "I will enchant the dragons of the Valley. I will join them in camaraderie. But I will not be consumed by them."

"Deidre," her father said sternly. "That's not allowed. Shame onto us, Deidre. Follow The Way!"

"No, father, flame onto you. I will not be a taste to be forgotten the next day, passing 'tween dragon loins as unrecognizable, amorphous, and malodorous waste. Deidre is the name that will obstruct the dragon's entrails; the name that changes everything."

"Oh, our dragons," her mother lamented, "oh, our Atrox...oh, our village!"

"Oh, 'your Deidre,' you should be saying. The one you birthed. Were the pangs and throes of labor a mere investment such that you could serve me on a platter to fill the bellies of flapping wyrms who vie for my flesh? Tell me—on that very evening when your own bellies are full, your own sense of hunger appeased, the business of your day over, and you are at peace with the world—and your Village safe—will the same peaceful reveries—as the dragons have—lull you to sleep the same as them? And the next day, when you go about your bodily functions, how will you think of me? The same as what you think of the dragon waste on that morrow?"

"Watch her, Father," her mother warned him.

"Watch me? Then learn! I'll be no appetizer for snacking dragons. And I'll not base how I live on fear of any living death, even be it catatonic and open-mouthed. It ends now."

Her father abruptly turned to fasten the door while her mother cried in helpless panic. Deirdre laughed.

Would a maiden who could enchant dragons and face the Atrox be held back by splinters and rope and rusty deadbolt?

Tonight Deirdre vowed to beat the equinox itself, three nights earlier than tradition, as the Temple’s destruction called for.

I will best the very equinox by entering the valley, spoiled or unspoiled (privy to me alone). I would join the valley. And I would do it without the name of the next young girl on my lips, although I wished I could rename the wretched Brid to suffer her fate again.

I will three days hence return to the village, when the time for retribution and cleansing was right. There would be more mouths agape than the rot lying in state. And the Ones will become the forgotten. And the forgotten would be replaced in historical scrolls with the name of Deirdre.

That evening she found myself outside, her unauthorized departure accomplished without any difficulty, despite the lackluster threshold barriers. As usual, there was one remaining witness from the earlier morning's throng who had stayed to keep watch on her home to prevent any escape. And since she indeed was escaping, she caught his attention. She rechecked for the blade in her sleeve as she approached.

"Whoa! Deirdre," said the young man, Lars—her neighbor, villager-in-good-standing, and thus a co-conspirator for her death. Deirdre was scantily clad and he noted well her ample bosom and rounded hips. She moved closer to him and placed her lips to his ear.

"Lars, would you like to disqualify me from my holy duty? Void my obligation? Spoil me?" Her whispers were lies of breathy anticipation. He paused to consider. "I could please you instead of the dragons."

He swallowed hard.

"Y-yes," he blurted. He was close enough that she could feel his heart beating hard through his skin and through to her own. It wasn’t the only hard thing she could feel.

Another whisper, another breathy seduction: "You would see your village burned to the ground for the chance to lie with me?”

Lars struggled internally.

“And your family and neighbors?” His hesitation to answer was his answer. “You flatter me, sir."

Passion kindled in him powerfully, fueled by the spark of danger and a seduction of thinking he could have his cake and eat it, too. He reached around and placed a hand on the small of her back.

"By the gods or God or whomever! This story is one perversion compounding the other." Deirdre no longer was whispering. "Vileness upon vileness, sin upon sin. Hubris! The Furies are watching, Lars! First you serve the mob who sends me to wrestle dragons in the Valley, above the shadow of Atrox. The dragons are watching. Lars! Now you bid me engage the pitiful dragon under your belt—self-serving, snarling, ravenous, obscene, and headlong. The Atrox is watching, Lars! I would rather offer my loins to the dragons or surrender my soul to the Evil! Your village will burn before your body can feel any of the flames of your tepid, imagined passion. Fool! Stand aside!" Deirdre said angrily.

He did not.

The hand that was on the small of her back bolted up and around to throttle her throat. Lars was young, strong, and likely to get his way; so she loosened her stance and he did likewise against her throat. They were communicating, but they were saying different things. Deirdre sank invitingly to the ground, knees and thighs akimbo. He followed, lowering himself atop her as she channeled him along a path of least resistance.

Young, strong—but stupid.

His flesh posed no barrier to the point she held upright to receive him. In a reversal of fortune, it was she who penetrated him when he received the deft insertion of her blade into the new orifice created for him on the left side of his chest, between his second and third rib. In the same reversal of fortune, she ground it in.

Lars gurgled and went limp.

She waited for his silence as attentively as the Ones listen for it after the seasonal sacrifice. There he lay, heaped and piled, shaped by nothing more than gravity. He was as dead to the world as he was to Deirdre. It was the village’s sacrifice to her! One that appeased the outrage over men against women. Over hunters/gatherers vs baby-makers.

Here she made her own baby, the birth of the Deirdre who had turned a corner from which she couldn’t look back. She was the infant who would come of age and mature by embracing destiny. And her destiny and the one of the village needed not be the same.

She turned to the hot sand-glass path which led to the valley; it emanated a faint layer of steam below the cool night. She felt its feverish obsidian on the uncovered soles of her feet.

By and by, she came to the sentry pair of ancient oaks that separated the village from the forbidden valley, a semi-open gate of verdant warning. On them were the many initials of those who had come before her, of those sent in blindfolded, often causing the letters to be sloppily engraved.

Since her sight was in no such way impaired, she spied the initials of "BC" on one of them—Brid's. Had she been that proud to be a selectee?

Like the others whose initials had been memorialized in the bark?

Again she removed my blade. She carved her own "DN" into the bark with perfect calligraphy, larger and more prominently than Brid’s and the others. Flecks of dried blood were shed into the carvings, as her blade was still soiled during her escape from the lesser dragon commanded by Lars.

So she carved “LH” into one of the oaks, to announce Lars’ entrance into the valley, albeit metaphorically. He deserved that, since he had entered—again, metaphorically—not to leave again.

But Deirdre would!

Her oversized initials were a shrill call to the future, proud and bold, and her intention to confront her cloaked destiny was thus written, in blood, of the man she had slain for all women. Lars, she thought, we will undertake this together. Yet I will return to carve my initials a on the other tree.

She proceeded. After some distance, well into the unknown, darkened further by the forest canopy, she stopped to stand her ground and waited.

Forever, if necessary. It was the valley’s turn. She waited.

Finally, she realized the valley didn’t take turns. If the dragons will not come to me, she reasoned, I must go to them. If the Atrox were not to come to me, I would go to it.

In the distance she could hear a slow-motion, low-pitched fluttering. And she heard another sound, alien and wailing in loneliness, muffled by pent constrains that caused the dirt beneath her bare feet to vibrate and shimmy.

She reached into a side-satchel, retrieved dancing flats, and slipped them over my toes. It was time to dance, prance, pirouette, and cavort.

Somewhere, Nyx, mother of Atrox, agreed. Here and now, the valley, home of the dragons, agreed.

The fluttering drew closer. Deirdre sashayed toward it, unafraid. She let the blade fall from her sleeve onto the ground, certain it had no role to play here. Step by step she listened, and as she drew closer what she heard enticed her forward rhytmically. The foliage thickened, and the concavities of the leaves focused parabolic sounds to her ears.

Those sounds were whispers.

The whispered spoke, to Deirdre, truths. Truths of the world; truths of the cosmos; truths of the preternatural. She learned where the dividing line was between what could be learned and what couldn’t; what could be known and what could never. And she was stunned when it became obvious that that very dividing line passed through her.

One crucial half-truth centered on the dichotomy of men and women. Another half centered on the hermaphroditism that so powerfully draws them together for unification. Seeing both half-truths allowed Deidre to see how men could be attracted to women, even love them, yet subjugate them into a given of submission under some divine right authority.

But there was nothing divine about the ways of the world and the ways men—by volition, and women—by obedience, navigated this murky realm of co-dependence. Then she heard the whole truth come together, where two portions of her mind made an evolutionary leap to conjoin in thought. Now she understood the whispers and the truths as no living person had ever heard them, with true listening.

Who was whispering these things to Deidre?

It wasn’t the dragons. Something more powerful.

Deirdre entered a clearing in the valley’s forest. There, at the far end of the clearing sat two full-grown dragons, hunched into themselves with folded, leathery wings.

Suddenly, they unfurled them to construct a barrier through a path that began at the far end of the clearing to what Deirdre knew was her next destination.

They presented a blockade.

She stiffened a resolve and methodically stepped to where they were, almost in a choreographed cadence. It was perhaps a hundred yards between her and the beasts, so it was a sizable march. As the footfall of one foot articulated with its counterpart, a periodicity of pace began that caused the dragons to open their eyes widely.

Deidre kept her pace, and soon she would be at the point wherein she would either be stopped dead in her tracks or succeed as a juggernaut—intent on her goal. As she drew closer, the rhythm of her landed steps became louder. It served as a metronome and she noticed the wide-eyed dragons’ eyelids begin to thicken and become heavier.

Deidre danced.

Swirls of surrender to invisible axisSlippery sinews in rotational praxisSibilant motion, flailed arms to akimboAnd centrifugal limb, in retraction, collapses

One of the dragons, sensing the mysterious magical lulling befalling it, snorted a single puff of smoke from one of its nostrils. Deidre stopped abruptly, but not in fear. She landed a final footfall on a definitive beat that closed a measure of the rhythm and held up one finger.

A finger that said, “Pay attention!” A mother’s finger raised, as it would be, to command an errant child to cease and desist…whatever. A wife’s finger that ends the argument with her partner.

A woman’s finger that says, “Enough!”

The smoking dragon relaxed from its stance of alert and softened its flight-or-fight muscles, collapsing into itself from Deirdre’s mandate for reflexic obedience.

Deidre the juggernaut would pass.

Like she passed so effortlessly through the bolted doors of her home; like she escaped so easily past Lars. Like she would put behind her, and she hoped all the girls coming of age in her village, the stupidity of sacrifice that persisted via tradition alone.

For Deidre would return to the village and, unlike the agape cinder of a man, unscathed. It was time the village’s relationship with the netherworld was redefined. Yet, it would be a reasonable fear that it would be redefined as something worse. And if so, for whom?

How would the Ones fare no longer being the ones?

Deidre passed between the dragons, who sniveled in shame. And she did it rudely, launching her elbows outward at each as she passed. The beasts shimmied away from her as she did. Some redefining had already begun, they knew.

Deirdre pressed onward. She had one more valley appointment to make.

***

Lars’ fate was immediately noted with great consternation. Yet, as beloved as Lars was as the rising male presence of the village, destined for leadership, the missing Deidre was even more concerning. Three days later would fall the equinox, and she was nowhere to be found. The villagers fretted over what might happen were she not to be found in the next 72 hours and sent to her sacrifice at the usual time of the year.

That Deidre was way ahead of them never occurred to anyone. That she had entered her challenge ahead of schedule was so counterintuitive that it paled in comparison with the prevailing assumption that whoever had laid waste to Lars had done the same with Deidre or—worse—carried her off to debauch her. Someone, certainly, would pay dearly!

But debts to society, assumed intuitively, were often incorrect. And who owed whom was equally challenging once the facts were truly known.

On the night of the equinox, the Ones conducted a rite of The Way, and all of the townspeople were required to attend, even the elderly, frail, the ill, and the very young. They sang the sacred hymns and uttered the ancient chants and exalted to the heavens with raised arms and ululations.

They didn’t expect anyone to answer. Such supplications were one-way communiqués.

This is why they fell to their knees when their entreaties resulted in a response. A chorale of singers appeared from the path that led to the valley. A thick fog rolled in, as if they were its entourage. Its dampness added a heavy resonance, sonorous and grave to its timbre. Their song, thusly, entranced:

Beauty of motion, bodies in space

Incapable of denying themselves of their place

A woman of flesh, concealed, hidden beneath

Choreographed densities of pent hope and grace

Stepping forward from the approaching mist was Deirdre, to a hush from the kneeling villagers. Even more startling was the appearance of yesteryear’s Brid, standing behind her, Deidre’s hand behind her back to hold Brid’s.

The chorale continued to sing.

Twirls and spins belie flywheel wrought,

Put into motion what's more than the artThe madness of dance is fueled desperation

To be wholly human past rote counterpart

What counterpart? the Supreme One wondered in amazement.

Machinations in steps, phased with lunation

Present our fertility in periodic rotation

Merely one aside, among many in progress

The dancer circles many things' interrelation

The Ones rose above the huddled, penitent congregation and resumed their own hymn, which fit into a contrapuntal accompaniment that complemented what Deirdre and Brid sang.

Their songs syncopated, but the combined hymn was now divine. And the message was complete. And the new world order was clear:

Witness that expressed at the behest of acrobatics

Rising aerially to levels of sorties' aerobatics

Dances need not be policies of happiness

But rage at the disfranchising theocratics

The counterpart, the Supreme One realized, was not only men in general, but him in particular. He began to formulate a corrective edict in his mind.

In the back of the fog two pairs of eyes glowed faintly, indicating other-worldly beings in attendance. And as if to finalize the proclamations sung, two dragons rose from above the rear of the fog, towering over all. They stood strangely inert.

Then their eyes faded. They were standing down.

As such, the presented themselves as nonthreatening, and this was immediately apparent to anyone who quickly realized they hadn’t been incinerated yet, for dragons act coincident with their intentions.

The singing had stopped, from both the Ones, their faithful, but also from the new congregation in the mist made up of ageless versions—hundreds—of selectees of the the epochs’ worth of sacrifices to the valley.

But what of the Atrox? the Ones wondered to themselves.

“The Atrox still lives by one circumstance,” Deidre spoke, intuiting what the Ones wondered.

“And it is here, among us,” Brid stated further, stepping up, “to invite its very own destruction.”

“That is non-sensical,” replied the Supreme One.

“Hear, hear,” agreed the Ones behind him.

“What of the sacrifice?” asked Deidre.

“And the selectees to come?” added Brid.

“If the Atrox is here, as you say, the sacrifices must continue,” the Supreme One announced.

“Hear, hear,” chanted the other Ones.

“You spoke of the Atrox inviting its own destruction,” a villager man from the back cried out. "

“Yes,” said another villager, a woman, a mother of three young girls who she clutched to her. “How is that invitation met?”

“You!” Deirdre shouted to the Supreme One. “You created the Atrox.”

“How?” he asked with a sneer. “The Atrox is ancient. As old as the need for the sacrifices.”

“Perhaps,” explained Brid, “the Atrox is your dunderheaded need for a sacrifice.”

Both the villagers and the Ones answered with a collective gasp.

“Stop the absurd sacrifice!” Deirdre said sternly. The villagers sensed she wasn’t asking.

“What!” “How?” “Ridiculous!” “Mad!” from the Ones.

“Tell us more!” implored the woman who held her three daughters.

“It’s already begun,” Brid said to Deidre.

“Yes,” Deidre agreed. Then, to the crowd, “The seeds of defiance against the senseless have been sown. An idea arises; a new answer. An answer without a question, for such questions were never meant to exist, much less be asked.”

“The Atrox staggers already,” came a scratchy voice from a man struggling his way through the crowd, his mouth slack jawed, agape, after speaking. Of anyone alive or dead—and he was both—he was the most qualified to opine on the Atrox. His malodorous vapors surrounded him in a radius that well encompassed the entire populace huddled together.

The crowd struggled for air. The Ones fell to their knees again. Deidre smiled, but Brid cackled wickedly.

“Stop the seasonal selection!” commanded the festering man with mouth agape. It is both killing me and keeping me alive. One cannot have both. One cannot tolerate both. Imagine the suffering from the throes that never collapse into certainty.

“Who speaks?” asked the Supreme One from somewhere. He couldn’t be seen as the Ones had bent their knees again while the villagers stood.

“The Atrox speaks!” Deirdre said.

“The Atrox decides,” added Brid.

“Decides what?” asked a man.

“The next selectee,” answered the Atrox surrogate, agape, stinking, and grinning wryly.

The Supreme One stood again.

“No!” he insisted. “The selection is steeped in our rites. It is a holy process.”

“It is a witless process,” said Deidre.

“From witless leadership,” added Brid. “Stupid and feckless clerics.”

“How dare you!” challenged the Supreme Leader.

“How dare we?” Brid said, the bitterness in her voice cutting an icy swath through the congregation.

The agape man spoke: “I select you.”

It was directed at the Supreme One.

The Supreme One paled immediately into a pallor mortis, washed out, and then yellowed. The agape man approached him disjointedly and laid his agape mouth on the mouth of the Supreme One. There was a susurrus of exchange, and the sound of a wind that chilled the villagers more than Brid’s icy bitterness, down to their bones.

The Supreme One began to rot in a time-lapse that began with rigor mortis followed by a sudden abdominal bloating that popped the buttons of his cassock. From there, everyone watched his dark, bloody lividity sink down to his sandaled feet.

Nature’s scavengers, parasites, and necrophages sense death immediately, even from far away, and the Supreme One fell into a pestilential substrate for them as they fluttered about, slithered onto, and alighted upon his body. The crowd backed away concentrically, forming a circle of retreat that expanded slowly.

“The selection has ended,” said the formerly agape man, now resplendent in comparison to his former state. “I select this chosen one,” he said, referring to the crumpled heap of what was the Supreme One. “He lives as atonement for the deaths he sought to enlist in a cause that relied on superstition and folk tales of nonsense.

“And what of them?” asked the woman who stood with her three daughters, referring to the returning selectees in the mist.

“We have returned,” said Brid.

“Many of us,” Deirdre now spoke, “held in ageless abeyance, have outlived our parents and families. Those who have now return to infuse the village with the wisdom of knowing fact from fancy.”

Deirdre’s father stepped forward. “What about you, cherished daughter? Will you join your mother and father? For we love you so; we miss you so.”

“No,” Deirdre answered. “I will return to the valley with these dumb beasts,” she said, referring to the two dragons, “who meant no harm and have never really harmed anyone.”

“But the crops,” said one of the Ones.

“And the smiting with fire in the past before the sacrifices,” another chimed in.

“The crops suffer and prosper by agriculture,” said the formerly agape man. “And the weather. And the women and men who tend them, of which they are fewer, by one woman, every year. Fools! No one here can remember any such fire raining upon them by these simple beasts. They are harmless. They mind their own business. The proof is in the company of young maidens present."

“Deirdre,” her mother cried. “Come home now.”

“No,” Deirdre answered. “I will return to the valley with the two gentle beasts by my side. There, the magic will keep me ageless until I have outlived you.” Her parents shared a shameful look.

“What of Lars?” a man asked. “He was my only son.”

“It is unfortunate that your only son was a cutthroat vandal,” Deirdre answered. “And what he blemished and defaced was women; and his graffito was written in semen and blood.” A woman standing with Lars’ father, his mother, dropped to her knees.

“Why?” she cried.

“Because, like us, Lars was selected,” Deirdre answered. “But unlike us,” she said, sweeping her arm to indicate the beauties behind her, “it was a sacrifice that profited everyone. From the women he hadn’t yet met to the sons he would father and train via his inheritable mindset.”

“There are many evil narratives in our book which must be closed,” said Brid. Then she turned to her own two parents. “I will go with Deidre to the valley, so that I can outlive you, too.”

“Me, as well,” said another young girl to her own parents. “You gave us to the world as compost for your crops. The world does not give back when the gifts are final.”

“As our offerings were,” said another.

“Yes, final,” said yet another.

“And as compost,” concluded Deirdre, “something beautiful and important will sprout.

“Very well…” began Brid.

“…And farewell,” finished Deirdre

Unlike the formerly agape man, the Supreme One didn’t languish in some permanent monument to what had transpired. The six-legged, eight-legged, and legless creatures whittled him down over several days until some furry, sharp-toothed scavengering carnivores carried him away forever.

Deidre, Brid, and the others didn’t have to wait long to return, for their families stopped eating, even though the crops were plentiful. Like the many useless traditions and superstitious rites of the village, they withered away rapidly and forever, along with the remaining Ones who no longer served any purpose of consequence.