Here is the tale that the grandmothers told me, as well as I can recall it.
The island was called Mau, and the fairest maiden upon it was named Noa. When she was a girl, and her three small siblings were but infants, their parents were both lost at sea in a terrible storm. From this storm came Soroena, an eel as large as the mountain of Ewandar. In the springtime, a single bright blue star rises above the horizon at sunset, and a serpentine trail of white stars follows it; this is the eel approaching the island, demanding a sacrifice as it did every third year at the end of the rainy season.
“Is this eel like the great lind-worm of the North,” I asked, “scaled and finned, with teeth like sabers?”
“Hush,” Luana said.
The next constellation to clear the horizon was a human figure, arms spread wide. This was Noa, chained to a volcanic rock a short distance from the shore of her island. She had grown to womanhood caring for her siblings, while others fed the slow but inexorable appetite of the eel, but this time she was not so fortunate. At sunset, her fellow islanders secured her to the sacrificial stone, and there she would wait. Soroena would arrive at midnight, and devour her whole, leaving only her hands and feet in the iron shackles—and, more importantly, leaving the waters surrounding the island safe for another three years.
Continue reading “Journey to the Water Chapter IX: The Temple Under the Mountain”
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