Don't Start - Too Late!
Created | Updated Sep 1, 2019
Don't Start – Too Late!
Sulphi and Ashkan carefully tied the makeshift gate to the ramshackle fencing. It had been a long day, and, as the sun painted the far mountains in a blaze of red and orange, they gratefully sat around their campfire, eager to still the rumbling in their stomachs that challenged the bellows of the newly captured aurochs!
Eight beasts snorted and nudged at the erguvan branches that confined them. The huge bull pawed at the dry ground, eyes blazing with indignance.
Ashkan laughed, such a prize! Such a plan! Why had no one ever thought of it before? He and his brother would be truly famous and powerful.
Instead of hunting the beast for meat and hides, they would confine them, domesticate them like dogs, and live life with full bellies and fine leathers!
The herd would breed, they would sell the calves, new fences would spring up all over the villages, all over the land, maybe all over the world?
Their people would never know hunger again!
The smiles fell from his face as the sky erupted. A glowing, egg-shaped thing appeared silently out of the roiling redness. Hovering above their camp, further adding to the panic of the aurochs.
Ashkan fell to his knees, surely Gök Tengri had come forth to punish them for the sin of pride, daring to challenge His plan for the nature of things!
Sulphi looked through his fingers towards the blinding light that now came from the egg. A figure, surely Tengri, stepped towards them.
The God, cleverly disguised to appear man-like, long hair scraped back in a tail, shabby clothes and worn sandals, held up his hands, not in anger but in greeting.
He sat with the brothers, speaking softly in an unfamiliar but understandable dialect, and, when the night was done, the visitor climbed back into the egg and soundlessly disappeared into the blue morning skies.
"What do you think, brother?" Sulphi asked his elder, poking the embers with a stick.
"A warning from the Gods, a future too strange to imagine! We, it seems have a choice, my brother?"
"If we believe it! Surely some amusement of the gods, a test to see how stupid we are maybe?"
"So...we .." He searched for the alien word that the God had used, "We create these 'farms' and live well for tens of thousands of seasons…."
"Or….we set them free and forget about our future blessings ….because…."
It was no use, the brothers collapsed into fits of hysterical laughter as the big bull loudly passed wind behind them.
"Because the world could perish as the sky becomes filled with auroch farts!"
Surely Gök Tengri had never played such an amusing joke on any of his people; the brothers were truly blessed!
