The Dole 2 of 7

PART 2: The Selection

Jul 16, 2025

"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.

TO BE CONTINUED