Long Live the Legends

By Natalie Mills · Estimated Reading Time: 10 Minutes

Away from the town, among the cliffs that circled the lake, a woman made her way up to the old temple of stone. The woman slowed down as she neared the entrance, as if she were pushing a boulder up the path ahead of her, the burden threatening to roll back over her and down the path. At the top of the bluff, the temple wrapped around the heights like a belt, a long hallway that grew higher and higher as the bluff escalated into the blue sky. It was not dusty and solemn as some people picture temples, but full of light and the outdoors. Birds swooped between the columns and settled in their nests at the top of the pillars, watching the woman as she neared their sacred ground. The sun stood over the whole scene, a blazing face whose expression no one could read. 

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When Sheela was eight years old, she visited the temple for the first time. She walked the long corridor in a cluster with the rest of her schoolmates. Statues of heroes stood on one side carved of the same stone as the bluff. Opposite their stoic faces, the temple opened to the outdoors. The treetops looked like bushes at her knees and ankles, and she could see out past their leafy crowns, down to the lake that crashed over white shards of rock, the fallen children of the same stone that formed the floor where Sheela stood. 

The temple was used for remembrance more than worship in those days. Above the entrance, carved in stone, a flower grappled with a dragon, life out of pistil and scales. Past the entryway, the statues began, each honoring a hero who had kept others alive. Every generation added a statue, carving further into the bluff. As the class walked, they saw the laborer, heaving with duty. The judge, sitting in robes and a matching stone chair. And finally at the end of the hall, the fighter, standing tall, one mottled gray stone hand wrapped around an iron spear, the other palm open, peaceful and in control. 

Sheela’s eyes flickered over the statues, not fully taking them in—she would have to memorize their poses and significance out of her history book later for the exam. Instead she saw the sparkle of the white stone at the right angle of light, the black bugs that skittered back and forth on the lap of the judge, the spider that swung on its tenuous line between the fighter’s spear and open palm that Sheela was watching when her teacher called her back to the class. She never saw if the spider made its leap. 

They reached the end of the temple. Ahead of them was a sheer stone face, waiting to be carved into the next stretch of temple by the next generation with a hero deemed worthy. For now, it was only sheer cliff face and trees.

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In her statue, the fighter waited for many years, rattling in place. She was weightless in the heavy stone, formless in a beautiful sculpture, forever clinched in a single position in a world where she couldn’t move. 

She was the first of her family to fight. Her parents had grown up in a time of peace, and her brothers were too old by the time the war came. But she had always been ready, since watching a duckling struggle to get out of the lake as a child, since seeing her brothers stone the trout that traveled upstream late each summer. This was it, she knew, a world of fighting and if you aren’t ready to dodge the rocks, to carry on through them, to leave a duckling behind, you will die as well. 

Her first experience in the war was in the medical tent, dressing bandages of wounded soldiers. She would remove the metal from their bodies and try to pull back together the skin that was now loose around their bones, slashed by an enemy’s knife. She left the medical convoy because she couldn’t stomach it anymore, the wounds that had festered by the time they reached her, the soldiers who had lost their expressions before their bodies stopped moving. If she was going to fight in this war, she wanted to be there when the metal flew and the skin tore. She wanted to see the blood when it was red and the faces as they looked at the future before them, not after they retreated into the past they had left behind. 

For four years, she fought in the war, wounded once (a spear-tip to the knee) and wounding many more than she could count. Then, the war was over. Peace had been found, a peace that was elusive before the damage was done, even though everything they needed to find it had been there years earlier just the same as it was now. No one who fought in the war quite felt it was over. It was over, it was won even, but the purpose they fought with still lived on, just out of their grasp day by day. 

She began her journey home and met another soldier along the way, wounded in one arm. One leg wound and one arm wound, but they found that together they could carry all they needed for life. He loved her from the beginning. She fell slowly in love but stayed firm once love came. Together they had a child. Then two. Then three. On the fourth child, she was wounded again, beyond a bit of metal to be removed from inside her. The damage was too deep, and she saw her future. She felt it coming. Her face lost its expression and she refused to live until the wounds would rot. She willed herself away from the world and died the next day. Her child lived, four children and one husband, a war she helped win, and a future that she was no longer a part of. 

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When Sheela returned to the temple, a decade and a half after her school trip, she came alone, carrying just enough food and water for the day, determined to find an answer in the stone halls that she remembered from her childhood and to return home that evening with her mind made up. She wound her way up the same paths that she had been up years before, comforted by the fact that the sheer cliffs had held their opaque splendor, that the veins in the rock ran dark with soil just as she had remembered. 

She entered the hall under the dragon and flower, surprised to hear her own steps echo in the silence. Each of the statues were in place, the same as she had pictured from years earlier. She could taste the precise sharpness of the cheese in her sandwich that day, the feeling of falling as she ran back down the hill with the class, catching herself just before she stumbled on the narrow path. 

These days, she never worried about falling as she ran by herself, confident of each step before her. Instead, she felt the surge of falling forward when she watched her nieces explore, climbing trees or swimming farther and farther out into the lake. She would watch them as they laughed, and then in a single stroke as they bobbed out of sight, her insides would seize up as if she was about to fall. She was them, they might fall out of the tree or drift down through the water, but she could not put their arms out to catch them, only grab her own wrist to catch herself as they hopped down from the tree or turned of their own volition to begin their short strokes back toward the shore. 

Sheela had felt it through the years, the life in her that she felt so clearly, admiring a copper strand of hair in the sunshine on the braided rug of her childhood bedroom, feeling her wrists snap with dance as the sweat showered down her face, rushing forward into the next season of school with the dread of early mornings and the excitement of the gaze of her peers, all transferred to these little lives around her, dancing with their stories and songs, just learning that their wrists could snap and their hair spin in the slow dust of an afternoon sun. 

She was here at the temple for an answer, uncertain of which statue would provide her with guidance. She wanted to love the lives that came after, but she wondered if she could do that while still enjoying her own. How could she hold all that she had and add all that she wanted? 

The laborer looked at her with stone eyes, hunched in the next day’s crop, not good for dancing or admiration, just of the soft encouragement that tomorrow’s work would be hard but there would be something to eat by the end of the harvest. The judge was unhelpful as well, a solid face that told her that she could have whatever she deserved. Sheela didn’t know what she deserved. The judge paid her no mind. 

Then she approached the last statue in the line, the one added in the last war, the one whose grandchildren were still living, fragile wraiths with gray hair a few towns over. She stood before the statue and remembered seeing her years before, the spider swinging from her hand, her eyes looking past Sheela out to the pale sky behind her. The fighter stood, her palm still open and her spear upright. 

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The fighter had been waiting decades for this to happen. A young woman was watching her with soft dark eyes, her skin pinched between arched eyebrows. The woman reached out as if to touch the fighter on her open stone hand, but then pulled it back, glancing at the spear in the other fist. 

The fighter didn’t need a touch, just someone to seek her life, her history, someone to desire to live as she had lived, and she could be free of this stone. Sheela, sensing movement inside the still statue looked again at the eyes and wondered, “What was your life? Was it like mine? How could I do what you have done?” 

The fighter moved, fingers on her open hand curling in toward her palm and then out again. The spear rattled in her left hand and dropped, finally meeting the stone that it had hovered over for almost a century. 

Sheela jumped back. The fighter grinned. “What do you want with my life?” she asked. Sheela had not prepared for this. 

“Just some wisdom,” she responded honestly, too surprised to think of any other answer. 

Wisdom, vague unhelpful wisdom. “Of course you want the wisdom," the fighter laughed, “Wisdom is nothing but perspective that comforts you in your loss of action.”

Sheela stepped back, more surprised by these words—the expression of her exact doubts—than she was about a fighter nearing her with the spear still upright.

“You want what you once had? You are wondering if it is worth giving up? You are wondering if it is right that you should even consider giving it up, even though the rest of the world wonders if it is right that you should keep it?” 

Sheela frowned; this was too accurate, too close to her own thoughts. 

“What did you do?” she asked. “You must have seen so much.”

“I gave it up,” the fighter responded. Sheela was surprised. The fighter wasn’t one to give up, yet here she was admitting it. “I gave it up because I could not keep it. And I would rather leave the baggage behind me than build extra space for what I cannot keep.”

Sheela, still in the throes of being young and believing that her hands could hold more than would ever be possible, that her soul could hold every nuance at once, that her mind would never run out of space for her memories, could not imagine the sadness of leaving something behind. 

“It wasn’t what you think,” the fighter went on. “I chose to give it up. But I have always known I would find a way to get it back.” 

“There are second chances at something like this?” Sheela asked, wondering if a second chance would help her know how to use her first. 

“There are if you know where to find them.” The fighter drew her spear, metal raking the air as she pointed it at Sheela. Sheela stumbled backward into the sunlight cast through the trees.

“You have chosen me. That is all that I need.” 

Sheela had heard these rumors—the statues locked in their cages, not just passive stone but angry ancestors hungry for life—but she had not come prepared for a fight. She had brought food to share and arguments to consider, not weapons to use or armor to keep her safe in this quiet sun-filled hall. 

The fighter advanced, and Sheela jumped away. The fighter was no longer what she once had been. Her body was still coming awake in the stone. She was bloodless and adrenaline-filled while Sheela was flushed instantly, feeling the sting of sweat at the first swish of the spear, remembering that she was here to discover more of life, not leave it behind her trapped inside a darkening temple.

Sheela saw the fighter pause. She turned and ran back down the long hallway. Her feet smacked with each step on the stone floor, and she heard the scraping of the fighter behind her as the woman in stone regained her motion, knees lifting, palm that had been open for a hundred years now clenched around her spear as she charged forward. 

Sheela ran faster, shadow and light flickering over her as she ran past pillar after pillar. The fighter was getting closer behind her, she could feel the rumble of heavy stone steps shaking the ground and she could hear the fighter grunting as she caught up. Sheela was almost at the entrance when there was a new rumble behind her, and the fighter’s spear hit stone. The judge had awoken and stepped between them, blocking the fighter for just a moment as Sheela ran. Ahead of her, the worker stepped forward as well, not blocking Sheela’s path, but looking beyond her as the fighter swung at the judge, two unexpected allies in stone that she had not sought or earned.

Sheela ran toward the open world ahead, the awning of green leaves waiting for her outside the temple. But as she neared it, the dragon and the flower above the doorway began slithering, dropping lower and lower, tight across the doorway as the creation of the world met the end of life. 

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One woman left the temple that evening. She made her way down the cliffs, watching the waves roll in below her feet. The wind hit her cheek again. Her eyes took in the lake, each cresting wave thinking for an extra moment before crashing into its neighbor. 

She would be a part of the crashing world, letting each wave shape the sand beneath her feet. She would see leaves fall into the water, stones tossed from a distance, swimmers staying near the shore, and sturgeon ramming through the rush of storms. 

The world was not what it had been when she had left it. She could see the sun setting, painting a pink dusk on the temple above her. She felt the day closing and knew she was missing another meal. But a new day was coming, and tomorrow she would see the sunrise and eat breakfast again. 

The sun sank away from the bluffs, the last one to bow at the temple before darkness.

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Story by Natalie Mills · Photo by Becca Daulton

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