Tuesday 17 January 2017

Ebu Gogo in the Primodial Swamp

She came from one of the Spice Islands. A diminutive, naked female from an obscure remnant of a dying hominid line. She is the last of her people: the rest were killed by disease and slaughter in an invasion by Portingale privateers. She fled to Paradijs on a raft and came to the Guarded Lake seeking to enter the mind of the crocodile, where she might breed her tribe anew and find solace from the brute hostility of the outside world which had been thrust upon her.

She found her way to the dimmest, darkest, most distant of all of the crocodile's memories: the primordial swamp of its birth. Maybe it was some maternal connection she felt to the crocodile's opaque recollections of its own mother. Maybe it was simply her fear and sorrow compelling her ever deeper. In any case, she inhabits those memories now and dwells in that thick humid swamp, among the amphibian beasts whose descendants died so long ago not even the dinosaurs could remember them.

There, she broods, and breeds: from her womb she has sired generations of half-hominid, half-amphibian children who guard and serve her. A new tribe to replace the one that she lost. A new people building a new civilization in the crocodile's memories of the founding of the world.

4 comments:

  1. Excellent!

    I love the half-hominid, half-amphibian children ("Mythago brood"?). That's a proper, biology-be-damned touch of the weird (and what else would you expect in a giant crocodile's mind?).

    ReplyDelete