_My sister, aptly blogging at @QuilledSister, writes short stories on her blog. Read her stories; they’re wonderful. Every so often one of them lodges in my imagination and sends me wandering down a side path of my own. This is one of those wanderings.
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Original Story
My Response
It was always the same. A trudge down a clean, brightly-lit path, a longing gaze up at the dead thing as if it could somehow hold the warmth that the living thing once had.
People are weird that way, I’ve noticed. They have all these memories of something alive—a father, a sister, a lover, a dog—and yet instead of sifting the memories to find the love they believe has left, they look at dead things instead: drawings, statues, tapestries, as if somehow the pressed and dried trees or shaped rocks or wool marked with crushed flowers and snails have some sort of meaning that their own spirits don’t.
At least this one can tell the difference. I watch them inspect a marble face that isn’t right and dim stony eyes that never held light, clearly comparing the vibrance of memory to the icon of legacy.
Should I tell them? They’ve believed so long they probably wouldn’t understand; that’s another thing I’ve learned about people. They get an idea in their heads, and if the idea lives long enough, it becomes fact, and they call it “belief.”
But I shall tell you, since this one seems lost in thought staring at that door again.
There was never a chosen human. Thousands of years of prophecy about a Chosen One, from a people who believed they were only slightly younger than the dust itself. Would it matter if they had all been born just as the last war was starting? Was it important that they be old?
(They are not old. I am old, although there are many who would laugh at my youth. But this isn’t about me.)
There is a distant land, and in that land is a mountain, the tallest mountain in the land. Some climb it because they long to stand on the summit. But their lungs are not adapted to the altitude, and their fur is too thin and light for the cold, and their legs are not meant for mountain climbing. For one thing, their knees go the wrong way.
But there are some other people who live near the mountain, whose lungs and hair are adapted for the mountain (although their knees still go the wrong way). When they climb the mountain, these two groups always go together: the adventure-seekers and the locals.
Tell me: when they get to the top, who has climbed the mountain?
If you were me, what prophecy would you write of these opposites who go up in the cold? Light and dark, thin of hair and rich of mane, backward of knee and—sigh.
Anyway, I wrote that prophecy, and I said there would be a Chosen One. And there was. But who is to say which was which? The one who is dead or the one who mourns the dead thing by staring at a rock?
Their lives cannot be pulled apart any more than the threads of the tapestries depicting them could be unwoven.
But for some reason, a people who prided themselves on wisdom decided in the unremembered past that there can be only one, and they believed it so hard that they made it come true.
Well, sort of. One is remembered, and one remembers.
Humans are weird that way.
