Writetober 2019

October 15-Legend

"Light has ever been help and hope, and now you too will be a help and a hope to those in darkness."

"But what if I mess up?" Anora asked.

Kayaneh smiled. It always amused her what a mix of confidence and self-doubt young people were. Here her granddaughter was all dressed up and ready to go fight injustice on her first night as a vigilante, and she was having second thoughts. "Do you think your mother was perfect? No, you will make mistakes. Everyone does. It's how you handle those mistakes that shapes you."

Anora looked away, wringing her new mask in her hands.

"Did I ever tell you about my mother?" Kayaneh asked, sitting on the sofa. She patted the cushion beside her.

Anora shook her head and sat. "No. What was she like? Was she..."

"Yes, she had the gift," Kayaneh said, smiling sadly. "Our family has for over a thousand years. You wouldn't have heard the legends in this country. Your mother and I didn't want to tell you and get your hopes up before we knew if you'd inherited it."

"My mother, she lived in a good time, despite Armenia's being divided and subject to others. Yes, Hayastan survived all her captors, until the early 1900s. My mother had fully grown into her powers and was eager to help others, but no one was prepared for genocide."

"She used her gift to hide her people from the Ottomans—the Turks—and shepherded them out of the city they once called home. Each time she got one group to safety, she went back for another and so on. The last group of refugees was to have her fiancé in it, but when she went to the rendezvous, he wasn't there. A patrol had kept him from reaching the group. He was trapped."

"Mother got the group to the tunnel she'd been using to escape, then went back for him. They should have been fine. All the others had been. But the Turks had expanded their search. Without her mirage to shield them, they were found and marched away to die in the desert. Like so many others that day and in the days and years after." Kayaneh shook her head.

"She fled the city then with her betrothed and escaped to Syria, but dozens of others didn't because of her choice. That haunted her. Was it the right choice? She couldn't have known the patrols changed."

"But if she hadn't gone back for him, our family wouldn't exist," Anora whispered.

"That is so, but even my birth and life made my mother question. I was the first in ten generations to not inherit the Light," Kayaneh said with a shrug. "That seemed pretty damning evidence to her. She feared her failure had made God turn his face away from our family."

"She believed that until the day your mother was born. She somehow knew. Your mother had the gift."

"Why tell me this, Tatik?"

"Because, my little gusan, I want you to understand. Though we make mistakes, God never abandons us. He has made us a family of illusionists that we may know his absence is just that—an illusion." Grinning, Kayaneh asked, "And what burns away illusions?"

"Truth," Anora answered without pause.

Kayaneh nodded and took the crumpled fabric from her granddaughter's fingers, smoothing it out. "Out there, people think life is hopeless. They've bought the lie that evil men always come out ahead, that no one will stop them, that they are forgotten. That it will always be that way." She held the mask back out to Anora. "What are lies but illusions?"

Anora smiled and took the mask, pulling it on. She wore it even better than her mother. Kayaneh smiled, radiating pride. She chuckled. "That said, if you wanted to become a social worker or lawyer, I wouldn't complain about your safety."

Anora rolled her eyes but grinned. "Grandma, we've been over this. I will be a lawyer, but with working full time, that's years away. I want to do something to help now. Besides," She said with a mischievous twinkle in her eye that was all too alike her mother's for Kayaneh's taste. "Cleaning up the streets now will make my workload lighter when I do pass the Bar."

Kayaneh waved her off. "Fine, fine. Go and be back before midnight. The police have to earn their pay too."

Anora hugged her. "Thank you." Then she was walking away and climbing out the window. A legend walked the streets once more.