Legend XCIII – The Gapekeeper

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There once was a being that did not spring from a single origin, but from what remained when things could no longer be separated. It was called the Gapekeeper because it appeared where the world cracked, not openly and violently, but quietly, at the transitions between states that no longer fit together. Its body was a strange combination: The torso resembled a massive badger, earthy, powerful, built for burrowing and enduring, yet from its back rose the long, slender legs of a heron, agile and seemingly unsteady, as if they had never been meant to bear such weight. Its head was narrow and armored like an insect's, with faceted eyes that refracted and multiplied light, so that one was never sure where it was looking. A thin coat of fur grew along his flanks, interspersed in places with moss-like lichens, as if the landscape were already beginning to reclaim him. The guardian of the cracks didn't live in fixed locations. He followed fault lines: where swamps became meadows, where forests gave way to burned areas, where villages were abandoned and slowly reclaimed by plants. His task wasn't to heal, but to preserve. He positioned himself in the cracks of the world, stretched his body across the irreconcilable, and prevented transitions from becoming abysses. As long as he remained there, change remained bearable. The ground didn't crack further, memories didn't completely disintegrate, and even the abandoned retained a vestige of meaning. In the past, he was known, even if his name was avoided. People waited with new construction, with clearing, with returning, until the guardian of the cracks had moved on. But over the centuries, patience for the in-between spaces was lost. Transitions were to be accelerated, smoothed over, rendered invisible. The Joint Guardian was called upon less and less, then not at all. Yet he remained without a reputation, for his existence depended not on recognition, but on necessity. But the fewer transitions were permitted, the more difficult his task became. His body began to tense up, his long legs carried him only with difficulty, and sometimes he lingered in one place so long that plants took root on him. Wanderers who saw him took him for a fusion of animal and landscape, a mistake of nature. Yet, as they passed, they felt a strange hesitation, as if they could not simply leave this place without taking something with them or leaving something behind. It is said that one day the Joint Guardian himself became a joint, that he stood still at a forgotten transition and slowly froze there until no one could say where his body ended and the landscape began. But whenever the world pauses, when a place is not immediately renamed or repurposed, when something needs time to come into being, the Joint Guardian is never far away. Forgotten chimeras like him are not flaws of creation, but its silent supports, and as long as everything doesn't have to be seamless, they have their place.