Chapter Eight
The Viking and the Princess
The Chameleon, Shame, has damaged the Princess. Her body is full of holes where it tried to remove her heart. She is alive but dying and mostly zombified. The glow worms encased her in silk in an effort to slow down encroaching death but they cannot stop it themselves. In order to save the Princess this time Akedah must take her place. Akedah has lived up to his namesake. He has volunteered to take the woman’s place inside of the silk casing. Moiety will awake on the island alone for now.
“By trying to grab fulfillment everywhere, we find it nowhere.”
― Elisabeth Elliot, https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/55040 (Passion and Purity)
Moiety was dreaming lucid dreams. She was walking on a dark red marble floor with long veins of gold. The whole slab was a single cut placed in its entirety. A gray lighted pool steamed in the center of the room that was lit all around with beeswax candles. This was her childhood home, but she was not a princess in this house. She was there as a cleaning woman. She was trying to do her job, but she also did not want anyone to recognize her. The queen walked through the room, and Moiety turned away. The ocean giant, Aipaloovik knew she was there. He was looking for her, going from window to window and peering into the room. She kept moving. The water in the pool was sloping and heaving back and forth as if in an earthquake. Moiety felt no earthquake. She tried to stay hidden. Aipaloovik appeared in the window, behind Moiety. The windowpane was not glass, it was a laminar sheet of falling water. In her dream, Aipaloovik reached through the water to grab her with his huge yellow palm. Moiety gasped and sputtered awake into the reality of a wet humid jungle.
The first thing Moiety knew was that her chest hurt.
For some reason, she was wearing Akedah’s wet wool tunic. It was itchy and uncomfortable. She was holding a parchment with some barbaric runes.
Moiety wanted to get off this creepy island. The last thing she remembered was speaking to a flashy lizard with a curious offer. Something about making her wise. What happened? Was she wise now?
Where was the grouchy barbarian?
Moiety knew that if she was able to make it to the coast, that she could walk around the perimeter of the island. She would eventually find the longboat. Maybe Akedah was still there. Maybe he had left her. Moiety would have left him.
Moiety started towards the light.
She came up close to the edge. It was a dizzying distance to the bottom. The waves lapped over the crags jutting out of the water at asperous angles. No one would survive that fall she thought.
Moiety made her way back to the boat and waited a full 52 minutes before deciding to set off in the longboat by herself.
It was a beautiful day. Recent rain had pulled the edge of the heat out of the air and beautiful full clouds were lining up in rows like children waiting for a drink at the water fountain. Moiety was moving along at a quick clip and looking forward to a new adventure. Except for the deep digging pain in her chest, life seemed absolutely grand. Moiety sailed on to sunset feeling utterly self-satisfied.
The sun left its glow the western sky and the stars appeared, gently at first in the east and then swelling up the sky with blinking pinpricks of joy, they became the entire field of vision. A heat storm rose in the north. The billowing castles tossed plumes of lightning back and forth highlighting their architecture in waves of lucid red and giving the impression of a momentous royal celebration.
What was that pain? it seemed to be getting worse the further away from the island that she got. It was heavy. Moiety lifted her shirt to see if she could find clues on her flesh. What she found, dropped her to the floor of the boat. There were six round holes up the sides of her chest tunneling neatly into its interior. Each one was easily deep and... Support this podcast
