Seeing Through a Single Eye

It was a cool summer evening in the village as the residents darted around, dousing flames and chasing down the wyrms that had caused them.
"Get back here you little thief! I caught that rabbit fair and square!"
"Augh! My garden! How dare you burn those flowers, get out, shoo!" It was the third time the wyrms---- small, dragon-like lizards---- had raided the village in past eight weeks. They were a nuisance to everyone, and winters had been increasingly difficult since they first came, stealing or burning whatever food they could find. Even elves have difficulty fending off pests sometimes.
A young elf stood in his family's garden, holding a long pole with a determined expression on his face. Liren was ten, and the oldest of three. His father was helping the other men to put out fires that had gotten out of hand. A green wyrm slipped under the wooden fence and snagged a carrot longer than itself before Liren noticed it. He cried out and ran at the foot-long lizard, swinging his pole into its side. The wyrm dropped its stolen carrot and leapt up to Liren's face, slashing its spiked tail down the left side of his jaw. Liren grabbed at its wings, pinning it to the ground. He'd show these pesky lizards to steal from someone's garden! The wyrm struggled to escape and, when that failed, blasted a stream of fire at the boy, burning the entire right side of his face. Liren screamed in agony and released the wyrm, clutching at his wounded eye. The creature flew off with the carrot clutched triumphantly between its teeth.
"Liren! Liren, what happened? Sofi, fetch a healer, your brother is hurt!" The younger girl nodded and ran off as fast as her little feet could carry her. Liren's mother lifted him to his feet. He sobbed and wouldn't move his hands to show her his face. His knees buckled and he fell back to the ground, shaking from the pain of his burns. Sofi returned with a healer in tow, panting heavily after having run faster than she ever thought she could. The healer and Liren's mother brought him back into the house, calling over an older boy to drive off any other wyrms.
Liren couldn't see anything. One eye was streaming tears, but he couldn't even feel the other. His mother's hands were pressed firmly against his ears, holding his head still, though he didn't know why. His face was numb, yet it hurt worse than the time he'd broken a rib falling off the roof the year before. He had been trying to help his father make repairs after a wyrm invasion.
"My poor Liren…" Muffled voices entered his thoughts, but he didn't understand them. Something about eyes, he thought. Just then a cool substance slipped across his cheek, and he felt something tug at the skin around his right eye.
"Give him a week to get used to it, he'll be alright." Cloth-like material was wound tightly around his face, but it only covered the right side. Liren remembered no more as he drifted into a dreamless sleep.

He slid in and out of consciousness for the next week, never leaving his bed. There were bandages around his right cheek, covering his eye. Liren didn't know what had happened the night he was attacked, but he knew that his right eye wasn't moving when he told it to. Every time he tried to open his eye under the bandages, he simply felt an uncomfortable tug at his eyelids. When the week was over, and the bandages were finally removed from his face, Liren saw his reflection in the bathroom mirror and screamed. Some one-eyed beast was staring back at him!
The flesh of its face was raw and tight around the bones on one side, the lids of that eye were sewn shut and were healing over. Everything about it was lopsided and scarred. Liren lifted a hand to his right cheek and the monster did the same. He felt around his eye and realized that it was his own face in the mirror, right cheek and eye socket sunken in around the bone, a permanent sneer where part of his lip had been burned away, one nostril stretching halfway up his nose, and all the flesh was red and scorched-looking. The entire front portion of his hair on the right side had also been burned, leaving an ugly bald spot that had started to grow back.
Liren cried, slumped against the wall, tears streaming from his one eye as if it were trying to make up for the lost one. His mother, having thrown away the bandages, held him in her arms and let him cry. She probably should have told him earlier that his eye was too badly injured and had to be removed before it affected the other one, but she had been so worried for him. She sang an old lullaby to calm him down, carrying him to the table for breakfast.
Liren could barely eat. It wasn't so much that he didn't want to, but his depth perception was way off and he could hardly grab his fork. When he tried to walk through the house alone, he ran into doorframes and walls. All the delicate things had to be put away so he wouldn't accidentally break them. Finally his father came up to him and said,
"Why don't you go outside for a while son? There's more open space and less things to knock over. I'm sure your friends have been worried about you." Liren complied while his family went about making the house a safer place for him to walk in. He cautiously ran his hand along fences and walls, being sure to always keep his ugly right side towards the places no one would come from so they wouldn't see it. He found a bench with a tall bush on the right side of it and sat there on the left. He didn't notice how much space he'd left on his right until it was too late.
"Liren!" Keli, one of his best friends, spotted him sitting there alone and waved at him. She walked over and sat on his right. Liren turned away, covering his face with a hand. "I heard your garden was attacked last week, have you started replanting yet? I know you worked hard to get everything to grow."
"N-no, I haven't replanted anything yet… I forgot…" It was true; with everything that had happened, he'd entirely forgotten about his garden.
"Oh. Is something wrong, Liren? You're not looking at me." She reached a hand out to his arm, and he felt her fingers brush against his skin. He tried to resist, but Keli was strong for a ten-year-old girl. She took hold of his arm and pulled his hand away  from his ruined face. He turned to see her reaction and wished he hadn't. Her eyes were wide with shock, mouth a perfect little o shape. Unconsciously, she reached a hand to her own eye, and Liren felt a sudden pang of jealousy and loss. She still had two working eyes. She didn't have to worry about running into walls or having an ugly face. She probably thought he was hideous now. Liren's eye filled with tears and he jerked his arm away from her, running back home. But he'd forgotten there was a fence around the bench and promptly collided with the end post. He stumbled back to his feet and walked more slowly with a hand on the fence to guide him.
"I'll n-never go outside a-again!" Liren sobbed into a pillow, blankets piled on top of him.
"Oh, it couldn't have been all that bad." His mother said. There was a knock on the front door.
"Don't let them in!" Liren cried, but his mother was already on her way to see who it was.
"Hello Keli."
"Hi Mrs.Toal, can I see Liren?"
"Of course." Keli walked into his room, and he yelled at her,
"Go away! I don't want to see anyone!" He pulled the quilt tighter, so that only his left eye showed. He was sitting up now, and he looked like a colorful blob with half a face. Keli walked closer and tugged the quilt off of him. He glared at her, tears and snot dripping down his face. "I said go away! Leave me alone!" He sobbed harder, wiping at his face with another blanket. Keli's eyes were sad; she leaned over and kissed his sunken cheek, then turned and left. Liren stopped crying, eye wide with surprise as he watched her go.
Keli saw him everyday. If he didn't come outside, she'd go inside and make him come out. When the other children worried that it would be unfair to everybody if Liren played their games, she went and played with him alone.
"He can't join our snowball fight, he's half blind! He can't aim, and we'd have to go extra-easy on him because he's too easy to hit when he can't see well enough to duck in time. It wouldn't be fair."
"Liren can't climb trees with us, he might miss a branch and fall!" They weren't trying to be mean, and they did still want to be his friend, but the other children just didn't see how he could do all the things he did before when he only had one good eye.
It was Keli who made him feel wanted, Keli who made him forget his eye was gone,  Keli who made him smile on the bad days, and so it was to Keli--- sweet, strawberry-blond, freckled Keli--- that he proposed, stuttering like a frightened child when he knelt before her. However, it was only two days later that the wyrms again made their near-monthly raid on the village. A friend of Sofi's nearly lost the use of her foot to their fire. When the lizards left, Liren left with them, and neither was seen for a very long time.
The villagers worried that he had gone after them to avenge the loss of his eye. They all despised the pesky little creatures, but for a single elf to go out and kill them all because of a childhood incident was just crazy. Some wanted to find him, others said it was best to leave well enough alone and just be grateful they didn't have to constantly go hungry anymore. Keli worried for Liren. He was long used to his one eye, but there were hundreds of those lizards and only one of him. Somehow, she wasn't certain he could defend himself if they all attacked at once should he invade their habitat.
Three long years passed, and no sign of Liren or the wyrms. Then one morning, a scout ran into the village saying that a strange man was coming with lizards writhing along his whole body and a fire where his right eye should have been. He had obviously been exaggerating, for when the villagers saw the man, they noticed that he only carried one lizard, and there was no fire burning in the pit of his missing eye. Keli was the first to recognize him.
"Liren! Liren, you've returned! Oh, your hair is so long, didn't you ever bother to cut it?" He was covered in minor burns and cuts, with a single purple wyrm sleeping on his shoulder.
"I've tamed them." He said, "They won't bother us anymore." The villagers asked how he'd done it, and said how they'd thought he was going for revenge, and wouldn't he please tell them the story? But Liren would say nothing more on the matter, and simply requested that he and Keli be married as soon as possible. It had, after all, been a whole three years since he proposed. It was a beautiful wedding.
Since Liren's return, wyrms became as popular a pet as cats and dogs. They proved to be quite helpful during the winter, keeping the villagers warm and dry. To this day, Liren still refuses to tell the true story of how he tamed the lizards that were once such a nuisance. Most agree though, that he went with the intention of revenge, and saw something there that made him pity the creatures. Perhaps his having only one eye opened his vision to see the other side of things.