listen:
The small fishing village of Kasparenya was established generations before I was born. By my time it had grown fat and sprawling, rich in thieves and merchants alike. Like my mother and her mother before her, I led a quiet life in our cave house. The townspeople extracted easy gold from the generous hillsides while mocking our unfashionably modest lifestyle.
For years I lived alone, growing food and herbs by day and feeding my brain with Great Mother’s ancient books by night. Occasionally, people passing my field would taunt me.
“Why don’t you work in the city, earn some coin? Perhaps then you could dress less like an old crone and more like a decent woman.”
I wiped my brow. Digging was hot work on a summer day. “I must tend my garden, and I do not need more coins. Enough is better than riches.”
“Whatever you say, Cassie.” Sarah turned away, but not before tapping her forehead and giggling with her friends.
They always ignored my calls to beware of greed. Old books had nothing to teach the modern world and they stood in the way of progress. Why not have more, if there was more to be had?
Kasparenya’s gilded church spire was a fitting symbol of hard work and enterprise. It showed what a man could do if he worked hard and dug deep. It showed what to aim for when more was never enough.
We should learn from history. But how to learn when history is forgotten and those who remind us are mocked as wrong-headed fools?
News of the gilded spire travelled far and brought even more people to wonder and dream of riches, then buy shovels and buckets. Meanwhile I harvested and stored enough food for a season, oiled my tools, stockpiled candles, and waited.
And one day a shiver started in my bones that grew inexorably. I rolled the stone over the cave entrance and hid.
Above, though I could not see or hear, I knew it was happening just as the visions foretold.
The endless beat of huge, leathery wings.
The stench of sulphur as the ground trembled.
A shriek that split the air when the dragon, drawn by our golden beacon, discovered its plundered hoard.
Fiery vengeance raining down from the sky.
I rocked and chanted as mother and grandmother and all the mothers before had done in their cool, dark sanctuary.
Shackle your greed and curb your desire, lest all be consumed by brimstone and fire.
I tried to warn them.
(to be concluded in Inktober 13)
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