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“When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin
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“No! You can’t tell me what to do,” Moiety fussed. “And if you would have just listened to me, and taken me home, instead of messing around with those mermaids, my father would of had your boat fixed already.”
“Your mother was trying to ‘marry’ you to an ocean troll! You can’t be serious.”
“Well, I am serious. I am going to go find someone to help us.”
“Haha,” the viking laughed, “the gods go with you,” and he compartmentalized his thoughts back to boat repairs, as the Princess Moiety paraded off into the jungle.
Time dragged. Moiety felt that she must have been plodding along for hours. The interior of the island was a dark tangled jungle. The ground was soft with gripping sucking black mud, and the princess, who was quite up to her knees in the sticky stuff, had a mind to go back and tell the viking what she thought about his lack of initiative in assisting her in her escapade. So far Moiety’s mind had been bouncing up and down on a carousel of similar thoughts. She had not noticed the thick silence asphyxiating the jungle air. Moiety turned abruptly. It occurred to her that she might not know the way back to the beach, and her stomach jerked in protest as she suddenly became aware of the sucking silence permeating the foliage. “Hello!” she called out. Her voice sounded alone.
Moiety turned again. The jungle could not be completely devoid of life. It was a jungle. This time scanning her environment she noticed a lizard, who, as soon as she saw it, lost its grip on the tree and plopped like overripe fruit onto the path. It laid on its side, twitching. Moiety then fully opened her eyes to her surroundings, and saw that she was surrounded by birds and lizards - each one as silent and cold as silverware - each one watching her with unblinking, unseeing orange eyes. Moiety tried to remain proud. “I’m ok, I think the beach is back this way,” she told herself.
Moiety was doing fairly well at remaining calm, and was making some progress out of the jungle, until she saw the monkey. The monkey was only about a meter in length, and was hanging passively upside down on a grape vine. When the monkey saw that Moiety had finally noticed her, she widened her eyes, and smiled a grotesque counterfeit smile, flashing a mechanical maw full of thousands of thin medical needles. She calmly advanced on Moiety’s position. Terror detonated in the princess’ mind.
Moiety backed up and fled towards what, she did not know. Nighttime fully gripped the island and Moiety’s resolve to be brave. Moiety was in full panic, but still vaguely aware that if the monkey had wanted to catch her, it would have done so by now. She continued to push through the muddy brambles, spiraling ever deeper into the bowels of the jungle.
Suddenly, as if it had been spontaneously created, a bright clearing appeared ahead through the tangled vines. It glowed red with an acrid phosphorescent light, and Moiety was drawn in to it like a shrimp to an angler fish.
The clearing was larger than it had originally appeared, it's red light seemed to billow out past where Moiety assumed the ocean should have been. The ground was dry and covered with wispy grasses. A skeletal tree protruded from dead center in the parched ground, its brittle branches scratched the stark sky. The thing that captivated the senses was a dinosaur sized chameleon lazily poised amongst the limbs.
The great lizard was pinching the tree with rounded claws, and the princess felt sure that the tree should be collapsing under her scaly weight. Its face was stunningly large and Moiety was nauseated at the thought that her whole body could fit inside that cavernous dragon mouth with room to move.
The chameleon opened and closed her mouth thoughtfully, revealing a muscular lump of tongue between her expressionless jaws, “I have Support this podcast
