The Dole 1 of 7

PART 1: Deirdre

Jul 15, 2025

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 knew 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 was 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 had lain in state there with his mouth preternaturally agape, a petrified recording of his final emotion. He persisted in this catalepsy, inert, suffering every pang of his decay as his mind screamed elsewhere. He neither ate, drank, nor even moved, but continued to live, rotting alone in an excruciating eternal torture. He could not be buried, because—as was forbidden by their faith—he was not dead, although some had argued for it.

He had been thus memorialized for them for generations now, a salient reminder of how they profited from dragons in the world—and how they benefitted by what they disallowed into their world.

So they had been led to believe.

With dragons in residence, the Atrox has been all but forgotten. Some disbelievers say was dead; but others feared there was 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 sang their song:

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

The Ones.

They were the Ones, descended through the eons, from self-appointed prelates. They were the Keepers of The Way, the oral tradition that interweaved their agrarian ways of life with appeasing dragons. But The Way didn’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 imposed their intransigent dogma on the believing, they warbled their truths in the Phrygian mode, so they had to believe, for the Ones were hallowed and their songs were sacraments. And for those who needed proof, the holy test was 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 remained safely buried; and further, instead of dragon fire, water rained 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 were 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 i

n 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.