The Dole 5 of 7

PART 5: DANCING WITH THE CHARS

Jul 19, 2025

FROM PART 4:

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 axis
Slippery sinews in rotational praxis
Sibilant motion, flailed arms to akimbo
And 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!”

TO BE CONTINUED