“You’re sure about this, Glennis?” a young man with a lizard tattoo snaking across his back asked.
Glennis nodded. “You’ve sacrificed a lot more.”
Elloch remained silent for several heartbeats. “Only seems there still might be a better purpose for all those trinkets.”
“Well, I don’t care any more for their sparkle,” Glennis responded. “I’ve lived with that trash for too many years now. I’m wanting my cabin back.”
“So you’re not afraid of the outsiders returning to claim all those baubles?”
Glennis slowly shook his head. “I doubt it. You’ve proved to the rest of us how the lom was even more bitter than it tasted. The outsiders won’t return to taste that color now that we know their shame. They still might dance, and their ships might be crawling with the llungruel vermin, but they’ll not raise that creature here, not after we’ve burned all the lom fields. We may go hungry, Elloch, but we won’t be so foolish as to feed the llungruel any longer. They’ll search for new fields now for llungruel and lom.”
Elloch felt his stomach rumble, a reminder of the cost of his people’s awareness. Hunger affected many others worse than it affected him, and Elloch ignored his appetite’s discomfort.
“Would you like me to throw the match?”
Glennis growled and glared at his friend. “I’ll throw the match just fine. You’ve already burned your pile, and a fine job you did, turning our sacred island to ash. It’ll be another year before anything can grow their again. No. I think you don’t need to be tossing any more fire about.”
Glennis tossed his match onto the pyre formed by all the trinkets and collectibles that once crowded his home. The harbor wind stoked the infant flame, and all the pieces of foreign furniture caught fire quickly, blazing with an intense heat that soon melted the chiming baubles, the sequin masks, the miniature carvings of creatures and man. The smoke rose thickly, and many a villager gathered around Glennis’s fire to feel a warmth that distracted them from their hunger. The pyre burned from the morning into the dusk, so that the flame provided a beacon for the small group of makoros returning from the sea, their crews struggling to remember how to draw their nets back into their boats after their legs had been for so long denied the sea. The feel of a smile surprised Elloch as he watched those returning fishermen light candles in their craft, and such sparkle reminded the young man of how the llungruel’s eyes had so recently gleamed in the lom.
“Do you think the sea will ever feed us again?”
Glennis shrugged. He remained silent as the flame reflected in his eyes.
“But at least we won’t have the fever any longer,” Elloch said.
Glennis still nothing more, feeling no desire to dispel the hope young men such as Elloch required. His people once more had the sea. And the sea’s waters might again clear for the absence of the outsiders’ ships. But for now Glennis's stomach still grumbled.