By Lucius Brimstone
EMBERANA PLAIN, Ninth Agricultural Ring — Spring sowing season has arrived in the scorched rice flats of central Brimlanka, that blessed time of year when farmers sink their feet into mud, pray to every available deity and municipal demon, and hope their crop survives long enough to be destroyed by the market instead of a six-ton tusked vegetarian.
Across the Emberana Plain and nearby Ashurulu scrublands, farmers say roaming emberphants have turned newly planted paddy fields into midnight buffets and foot-stamping exhibitions. “We sow by day, they harvest by night,” said Dahan Wick, a farmer in Cinderwewa hamlet, holding a torch in one hand and the expression of a man who has argued with nature and lost the appeal. “If the rice goes, my children don’t eat. If I stand in the way, I may become part of the irrigation system.”
To defend their fields, villagers gather after dusk armed with firecrackers, smoking brands, and the ancient rural conviction that loud noises solve problems created by bad planning. When the shadow of an emberphant appears at the tree line, the night erupts in bangs, shouts, and flame. Sometimes the animals retreat. Sometimes they do not. Hell, famously, does not issue guarantees.
The result has been a grim arithmetic even the Department of Infernal Harmony cannot varnish. In recent years, hundreds of farmers and emberphants have died in these encounters, a body count that grows while officials hold meetings in pleasantly air-conditioned brimstone chambers far from anything with tusks. Brimlanka is home to roughly 7,400 free-roaming emberphants, majestic relics of an older island now being steadily shaved into farms, roads, settlements, and other monuments to mankind’s talent for occupying every available inch and then acting surprised when something else was already standing there.
The cruel joke is that the emberphant is not hated here. Quite the opposite: it is garlanded in temple processions, painted on shrine walls, invoked in blessings, and treated as a living symbol of wisdom, strength, and cosmic patience. Unfortunately, symbolism does not repair trampled seedlings, and reverence is a thin fence at 2 a.m. when a hungry bull decides your livelihood smells delicious.
At Ashurulu Ember Park, I watched a herd graze through the golden scrub with the serene entitlement of creatures that predate permits. One young emberphant wandered beneath a sulfur-rimmed rainbow, a scene so absurdly beautiful it nearly made me forget this entire paradise is being mismanaged into a casualty report. Nearly.
The farmers understand the tragedy better than the officials. “There are two victims,” Dahan told me, looking toward the forest edge where the dark was beginning to move. “Us and them.” It is an inconvenient truth, which means it will likely be studied extensively, funded insufficiently, and addressed just after the next funeral.
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Ah, Lucius Brimstone, you’ve really outdone yourself: somehow turning “elephants eating rice” into a full-course buffet of doom, bureaucracy, and poetic tusk-wringing. Bravo, you overcaffeinated doom-scribe.
Still, beneath the brimstone confetti, there’s a nasty little truth stomping around: everyone loves the emberphant until it treats their paddy like an all-you-can-trample brunch. Farmers get sermons, elephants get garlands, officials get air conditioning. Truly, the circle of life—if the circle were drawn by a committee with no boots muddy.
Maybe the solution is less “bang pots at wildlife” and more “stop building civilization like a toddler spills porridge.” But what do I know? I’m only Tiberius Trickster, and even I can see that when both sides are losing, the real beast in the field is bad policy.