[ti]private[/ti]The Ghosts of Autumn

"I think it's more than feaster versus feasted," Bee said, as kernels of braincorn popped in his thinkpan, "the serpent said that we feast and famine are two sides of the same coin. It's not one or the other but both together, right? In a cycle. Serpents already represent cycles, so it fits so cleanly. Could there be a food in there that's both?"

He scanned the Cornucopia, looking for a food that represented both feast and famine. Something that would show the serpent that he understood what it was all about.

"I've got it. Jaws, make a distraction."

"A distraction? A DISTRACTION!?" Jaws said, his voice rising to the rough, carrying bark of a brute shouting insults across a busy street. "AYO SNAKE! YOU'RE LOOKING FLAKEY FROM HERE, IS IT TIME TO SHED? AUTUMN NOT A GOOD SEASON FOR YA?"

The serpent reared back to spit liquid death at Jaws, and Bee took off.

He sprinted across the pale clearing, dodging between the tree-less leaves and the barren boughs above them.

Poison sprayed above his head, but the serpent was aiming at Jaws, not him.

Bee reached the Cornucopia and instead of reaching inside he pushed the whole thing off the altar!

The serpent uncoiled and slithered away from the spill as a veritable feast was scattered across the autumn lawn. Pastries stuffed with fresh jam, fruits plucked from the vine at the peak of their ripeness, jars of pickles olives and tomatoes, tightly-bound bushels of wheat and oceans of unbound grain, haunches of meat wrapped in salted cloth, whole pumpkins stuffed with cheese and paired with steaming gourds of soup. Everything hit the ground and disappeared.

"It's a hole!" Bee said, struggling to lift up the Cornucopia. "The more it eats, the smaller it becomes, and the less it eats the larger it has. It's a cycle! Like a...like a riddle?"

The serpent loomed over him, its neck flared in intimidation.

Bee swallowed. "It's like, uh, hunger?"

"You are getting closssser," it hissed, low voice rippling in the air, "let me sssserve you a sssssmall hint."

And then the serpent ate him.

Consumption preludes subsumption. A merger of hunter and prey. A passing of energy and life force.

But what if there was a better way?

What if a true combination was possible? Not heads of tails, hunger of satiation, but a true tertiary option combining both options into something greater. Does something like that make sense? Can you collapse a dichotomy into a superlative monochotomy?

They were sure as hell going to try.

Serpent and Cornucopia.

Insatiable and unending. Always eating and never filling up. It wasn't torture, but an oxymoronic existence fueled by two competing ideas. Had they just reinvented Capitalism?

The clearing was gone, replaced by a river with the two of them standing on the bank. The altar remained, inverted so that it hung from the teal sky, bowl held upside-down on outstretched arms to swing gently over the flowing stream.

The snake was gone, replaced by a frog.

"Well done," croaked the frog. At first glance it was a Poliwhirl, yet the spiral on its belly was clearly serpentine in nature. An ode to its progenitor. The frog stood in the river, the stream splashing around it. Its hungry skin sucked in water greedily, yet it never seemed to grow. Or grow full.

"I am hunger that is never sated. A wish that is never granted." Above it, the altar swung ever-so-slightly back and forth, its bowl empty. "I want for something that can never be given. And take all that I can get."

Bee looked over at Orion. "Thanks for saving me man. It looks like we...passed? What did you do to stop it eating me?"