[24/26] Xan
This story is part of the A-Z challenge that I’m doing.
Xan is a character from my another story. Remember the time when I told you about my favorite story? Xan belongs there. Surprisingly, Xan is not a human being. Or an animal. Xan is a three-leaved plant that is hardly four inches tall. Legends have it that Xan is the first plant to ever breathe.
The leaves were purple when it first sprouted and through its life, it changed to green to yellow to red to orange to currently golden. The property that is most unsettling among all is that it can grant any wish, given the seeker’s desire must be a desperate one. Once the protagonist in my other story asked Xan, “But what is a desperate desire?”
To that, Xan replied, “Imagine you are swimming in an ocean. And suddenly you feel something touching your feet under the water. And before you realize, you find yourself pulled down into the ocean by something. You try to escape but the grip on your leg is tighter than what you can manage underwater. Within minutes you find yourself to be out of breath and there comes a time when you’d want nothing but some air. You’d not think of your job, or your friends, or your future. You’d be imagining just some air. You’d be desiring to breathe. You’d be desperate. That’s a desperate desire. If what you want is not a desperate desire, I know you can do without it, and therefore, I tend not to grant the wish.”
In the story, a girl, who was looking for her lost friend stumbled upon a cave in which hundreds of thousands of bodies lay dead, nicely arranged in several feet high racks. In one of those racks, she found her friend lying dead. And in the center of the cave, she saw a tiny plant with three golden leaves — Xan. Xan noticed a desperate desire in the girl to see her friend alive and breathing, and that’s when it granted her wish.
The girl found the friend standing in front of her — alive. But every granted wish has a cost. She had to get her memory wiped clean of the incident. Xan is neither a friend nor a foe. It’s as just to a God as it is to Devil. The girl’s memory was wiped clean and all she remembers of that incident now is just a story.
If she’d be asked, “Tell me about that incident in that cave,” she is most likely to start responding along the lines of, “I know a story of a girl who resurrected her friend in a cave far far away…”
She doesn’t know that the girl in the story that she narrates to everyone is herself. She tries often to remember how does she knows of this story but all her efforts go in vain. Her friend is just a good story to her. She loved reading stories. She is a story herself now.
