Selected Scenes from the Ecologies of the Labyrinth

VI

Success is sweet! The shadows are kind! Success sets the heart to beat-beat-beat!

The treasure is heavy. Oh, the treasure is heavy. But that’s the price of great success!

Or so Glathfrap tells himself. He doesn’t have much experience with great success. None of the Jewel-Eyed Folk do, trapped as they are between the big creatures that come down from the daylight to smash and slay and loot, and the even-worse things that lurk below.

The Jewel-Eyed Folk are small, they are few, and they hide to stay alive.

But they are quick.

Today, Glathfrap reached from the shadows as the big creatures lowered the food basket from the too-bright world above. Today, Glathfrap was quick!

Now he rolls his prize along a scuttleway of the Jewel-Eyed Folk: a jar of wine almost as big as himself. He can hear it sloshing, would love to taste it, to share it, but there is an even more pressing need.

He will take the wine to a cold place, a place of power, where the Jewel-Eyed Folk fear to linger. Glathfrap will spill the wine there as an offering.

The Jewel-Eyed Folk are small. They are few. They do not now have a god.

But if they give offerings, they will gain favors.

Offering by offering, they will raise a god of their own. And then the shadows will be kind to them.

Oh yes. So very kind indeed.