In the first year, you cried when it rained. You stood with your sword in the air and the pedestal at your feet and nature poured tears down your cold marble cheeks.
People placed flowers in front of you; bouquets for the adventurer who vanquished the gorgon. Who stood with her sword raised and saved the town. For years they bring you flowers that used to make you sneeze and you wish with whatever soul remains in solid stone that you could sneeze again. Your sword is still raised, and the flowers keep coming. The town is safe. You wonder if it can be enough.
They dedicate a day to you at some point. The children paint your body and clothes in bright chalks, lay crowns of ferns and daisies on your head. They hide behind your legs, they stand in your pose, and everyone feasts and sings and thanks you. For that day, their attentions and love is enough.
Tears still stream in rivulets on your smooth cold skin during storms. You wonder if they’ll carve divots in fragile stone and make canyons as deep as your sorrow The sun rises and the crying is evaporated away like morning dew. Another day comes, and the chalk wears off, fades with the sun and washes away with the rain. You are alone again, and the town you lost everything to save bustles around you. You have nothing, and once when you were young you thought you knew what ‘nothing’ was. You know better now. The nothing you had wasn’t enough, but this is worse.
One night the drunks come.
They pee on your feet. One man whose breath you can’t smell tries to pry your sword out of your cold dead fingers and slips in his own piss. He cracks his head on the corner of your pedestal. Blood runs around your feet and you feel for a moment like you felled him yourself. Once, you were proud of the men you killed. Vandals and monsters and ruffians. His blood drains away and his friends are too drunk and panicked to save him. Even prepared, your friends couldn’t save you. The drunk fools squandering their lives have no chance. You find that you’d weep for them if you could, but it’s a cold clear night and winter is coming soon. The stars wink merrily on his last few moments, and by the time the guards come he is dead and his friends try to run away from them and trip on their own feet. One guard stops and brings a bucket of water to cleanse your stone feet. Once, you would have scorned him for being concerned with your memory than the lives of his own living residents. Now you know he’s just keeping up appearances. People won’t come to visit a urine soaked statute. He’s just keeping up appearances. Maybe that’s why he hired your adventuring party to deal with the gorgon.
Bitterness comes with winter, biting your heart like the cold nips at the noses of the children, growing up before your every eyes. Nature slows and goes to sleep, and for a few nights at the darkest time of the year the world around you is as still and quiet as you are. The silence and the emptiness used to worry you, used to make you afraid of what lurked just around the corners. You know true silence now. You know what it feels like to be so still your heart doesn’t beat, to be so alone that the world itself wouldn’t surprise you. The ache of your loneliness makes the silence of new fallen snow feel warm and familiar.
You have been alone the whole time. You know that now.
In the spring, a litter of kittens is born in the barn. The parents bring the animals to the town square, putting them in a box at your feet. They pray to you to keep the kittens safe- then rest a sign against your legs you can’t read. Luckily, a child just learning his letters sounds it out. It’s a promise that these kittens are born from a perfect mouser who is also a companion to the lady of the house. A cat who sleeps in the warm hay at night and clears the barn of pests in the day. You had a lot in common with that cat. The farmer cheerfully boasts of the cat’s hunting prowess to a young man recently married. Brandishes a little patchy kitten at the new bride on his arm. She accepts the kitten and it meows its gratitude. You abruptly realize you can hear.
You’ve been able to see.
Somewhere in the stone body is you.
Your heart can’t pound and your body can’t bleed, but you feel. You. Feel.
The town bustles but there’s ringing in your ears, thoughts in your head, emotions in your heart, the sun in your eyes.
You are not dead!
Hope and terror have gotten you out of everything. Everything until the gorgon. You fought dragons and gnolls and demons and men and you can fight this! Hope and fear have driven you to victory before.
For years and years hope fuels you and fear chases you. You cannot run. You cannot scream, but you cling to hope. Your party returns to your statue, to say kind words in your memory. It helps. Only a little bit, but it helps.
The town thrives and changes around you. Because you fought for them once. They honor you on Hero Day and they tell your story with wild embellishments you wouldn’t correct even if you could. You fought for them, they say. You fight for yourself now.
Children grow and lives end. The kittens adopted at your feet become cats with ferocious reputations of their own, the children who sounded out the letters become learned adults, and the drunks who were taken away return reformed men.
You watch over them all, and when it rains you remember the feeling of tears. You focus on what you were when you were alive.
War looms like a specter over the town.
The roads through the pass come close to the town. With the gorgon gone, the mountain pass has become a main thoroughfare to the capital. The fights along the border are on the other side of the mountain. The capital is behind you.
The townspeople pray to you for help. For peace. For luck. For protection. They pray because they can’t move anymore than you can. You are all trapped in this little town with your feet cemented in place while the war rages ever closer.
Men and single women are conscripted to die. Mothers hold the line at home. The forced-warriors leave with rusted swords and tearful kisses. They promise to come home again. They do not promise to come home again alive. You face the main gate of town, and have watched people come and go for years, for what feels like generations. As they leave, the soldiers touch your sword for luck. They touch your sword and you think for a moment that you feel their warm hands bidding you goodbye. This town that has not forgotten you, this square that feels like home, and your stillness that cannot leave fill you with protective anger.
You are not ready to say goodbye yet.
When you were young you lived on your own and you did what you had to in order to survive. You have nothing now, but you had breath then. You had the will to fight. That was why Hendricks took you under his wing. That was how you became a warrior.
The will to fight is still in you. And although you do not breathe, and you do not speak, and you do not cry; you still feel. You still have the drive to fight.
The war looms closer in black smoke rising from the pass. The mothers hold the line with shears, with rakes, with pitchforks, with knitting needles. They spare each other any words. They know what comes for them. They know what it will cost if they lose this fight.
Your sword points at the gate.
You know war. The army will come with spears, with swords, with knives, with armor. You see them on the road. Lines of soldiers. Hardened by war, they only see the objective in stone, metal and blood. They don’t see the courage, they don’t hear the terror, they don’t feel. They can’t feel, or they could not fight.
You feel, and so you fight.
The rumbling groaning cracking of stone makes the the tense courtyard loud. Your feet break free and you leap from your pedestal, stone sword raised. You open your mouth, but no scream comes out. Behind you the voices of the women rise, not in alarm but in triumph. They feel it too.
You will not be idle anymore.
You died once for this town.
You won’t do it again.
You are alive.