The Llungruel and the Lom

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  Though he did not taste the llungruel’s venom, Elloch turned savage as he gazed upon the dancers from the forest surrounding the fire.

  The outsiders mocked him as they swooned in the color that rushed their hallucinations. The outsiders laughed at his brothers’ deaths. The outsiders, as they writhed and fell upon one another, ridiculed his people’s plates filled with lom.

  Elloch learned the purpose behind the hurt the village suffered, and hatred seethed in his heart. The outsiders had introduced the lom crop for a purpose far more cruel than the fable of sustenance Elloch’s people believed. The outsiders cared little for the villagers’ stomachs. The outsiders cared far more for the llungruel.

  Though they had roamed so far from their homes, the outsiders only found the color they craved in the bite of a strange lizard hidden within the swamp of a land populated by a simple folk. The lizard’s bite was maddening, its fever perilous. But by diluting that creature’s venom, the outsiders created a drink that whirled their souls and filled their vision with a spectrum of sparkle.

  The outsiders learned that the lom pulled the lizards from the swamps. The outsiders saw how willingly the villagers grew the lom to appease the hunger that gnawed on native stomachs after the ships befouled the waters. The outsiders grinned when the villager requested the lom seed. The outsider lent their steam and their muscle to plow the lom fields that filled with llungruel. The llungruel multiplied to abundance in such crop; and however rampant raged the lizard’s fever through the village huts, such casualties appeared to the outsiders very digestible in exchange for the lizard tonic that thrilled their gray passions when they danced behind masks around a once sacred island’s bonfire.

  The outsiders saw so much in the introduction of the lom to the village around which the llungruel prowled. The outsiders saw so much in the hallucination they harvested from the llungruel’s bite.

  But those outsiders twirling around the fire did not see Elloch circling in the shadow.

  Elloch crawled between the trees as the bodies and flames danced. He slithered on his stomach, and the ink tattoo of the llungruel he bore upon his back writhed in the bonfire's swaying light. The faces of the beating drummers wore veils so that their hands could not be distracted from the dance’s rhythm. No drummer noticed the village boy who had ignored the outsider’s edict and returned to the island once sacred to his kind. The keepers of the lizard remained too occupied in the keeping of the creature so that their fingers suffered no bites, and neither Mick nor Sam saw the surviving twin crawl behind them. The dancers blocked their faces with masks, and their visions were too crowded with hallucination to see how close a brother tattooed with the mark of the lizard came to their twirling steps.

  Elloch's vision swooned in rage instead of thrill. His hands ignored the heat as his fingers stole a burning bonfire branch. Elloch retreated a handful of paces back into the trees, the flame he held dispelling the shadows that once cloaked him. He moved counter to the twirl of the masked dancers, leaving flaming trees behind him, closing a circle of fire that quickly blazed. Soon, even Elloch’s rage failed to ignore the heat’s hurt as the once sacred island caught fire.

  Elloch did not look back to consider how quickly the flames rolled upon the dancers gathered around the fire. He suspected few of those who worshipped that dance would feel much discomfort in their dying. Elloch refused to look behind as his sore arms paddled the makoro towards home.

  For the flaming island cast his shadow upon the water in front of his craft, and Elloch thought the waves rippled his shape into a lizard’s silhouette.

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