Legend of Emerald Scale Lake

The silence of the cabin near Emerald Scale Lake was broken by a scream. If you were to follow the sound of the panic, you’d find a man no older than twenty-seven, gasping and panting due to a nightmare. The man had nothing very unique. He was not too tall and not too short, with dark, unkempt hair and eyes as dark as the pine tree bark that surrounded his home, listening intently.

The cabin was nestled in a small clearing of the woods, the building an old cabin barely large enough for three people to comfortably live together within. Two chairs, rocking chairs, sat outside. The man oftentimes sat there, claiming to be fishing, but, alas, there was no pole. Everybody know’s he watching for The Emerald Scale.

Pine trees grow around the cabin, shrouding it from outsiders. A two-mile dirt road leads to the main road, though the man dares walk that dirt road only after he’s checked the shoreline and waited for the whistling to stop from the woods.

He doesn’t know who whistled in those woods; nobody knows who whistles.

Or how they know the song his mother used to sing to him when he was little.

And he doesn’t want to know.

The lake, a large lake that makes his home seem smaller than ever, sits a dozen or so feet from the steps of his porch, moss and smooth river rocks lying on the shoreline. Tourists who pass through are told the lake is called Emerald Scale Lake due to the renowned shimmering emerald and how it almost seems as though the surface is scales… Nobody who lives there, anybody like the man who lives there, knows otherwise.

Behind the home, in the far distance, you can see the snowy outline of a mountain top, the clouds obscuring certain points, but we all know that mountain is there. Even when, at times, it seems as though it’s disappeared completely from sight.

Even though it was barely even five in the morning, the man knew he would not be going back to sleep. He got himself dressed, wearing jeans, a flannel shirt, and worn-down gloves. It had been colder than expected this late in spring, with most mornings getting as cold as the low forties. The weather in Lunar Ridge could change in the blink of an eye, from freezing cold nights to scorching afternoons, from raining for one second to shining beautifully, with no hint of the storm besides the scent, the humid scent of the earth after rain.

His dark hair, unkempt due to restless sleep, continued to fall over his dark, even though he’d made a slight attempt to brush it out of his face. His eyes, dark brown as the earth itself, held the truth, as most human eyes often do. No matter how good somebody is at holding up a facade, the human eye often betrays that lie, spilling the truth as desperately as possible.

The heavy footsteps echoed through the woods, the echo of them stopping abruptly just as the man stopped in front of the four steps that led to the shore of the lake. He knew the legend; he’d seen it twice himself, never looking it in the eye, of course. Everybody knows not to look into its obsidian eyes. 

The man carried little with him: a knife, simply due to the number of snapped fishing lines he finds wrapped around rocks, and a lighter. He kept the lighter with him for a reason that nobody, not even he himself, understands. The lighter has no lighter fluid and is of no use. It’s merely an empty vessel for what it should be.

I ponder why he carries the lighter. It has no value; it’s one that was bought at a gas station on the main road, and yet he keeps it with him, sometimes setting it on the table as he glared at it, sometimes keeping it in his pocket as though he’d forgotten all about it.

But there he stood, watching the large emerald expanse in front of him, the stillness of the lake, the only light of the eclipse-like moon that shines day and night. If you were to watch him for a moment longer, you would recognize conflicting emotions, just in his eyes alone. Regret but deference. Rage and relief. His thoughts are a whirlwind of contradictions, contradictions he doesn’t understand either, contradictions he wishes he could understand, contradictions he wishes weren’t true.

Then he walks down the steps, his footsteps echoing once more against the sound of distant whistling and water washing up on the rocky shore. He adjusts his footing to the uneven river rocks beneath him, and soon he stands just by the shore. He watches the surface, practically waiting for a serpentine tail to make a splash in the crystalline surface. There are no splashes. There are no other sounds but the haunting whistling coming from the woods behind him.

When thirty seconds pass, he continues walking with a heavy sigh. Rather than looking up, keeping his eyes up in case of a bear or other predator, his eyes focus on the ground. He scans the ground in the early morning sunlight, the sun only just now peaking up from the horizon, though the lighting is dim due to the eclipse. 

Nobody questions the eclipse.

The eclipse is their reminder.

And so he walks. His eyes are fastened on the ground, driven by a fear his thoughts are drowned by every morning. His eyes never leave the ground. He searches for something he doesn’t know of, but he searches for what doesn’t belong. 

It’s a wordless search, a search the man prays his useless that he won’t find something, but just as he breathes a sigh of relief, the silver glint of something catches his eyes. With a startled breath, he takes a step closer. He kneels beside the object, carefully picking it up as though the least aggressive of touches could break it into pieces. 

A necklace. It’s a necklace he holds. But the sight of the necklace is what causes his breathing to hitch, his hands to tremble, and his heart to skip a beat. As he stood, the necklace of a close friend in hand, he heard a sound. As he looked up, his eyes caught sight of a figure in the water. Sleek, emerald, quick as an arrow. Two obsidian eyes that the man avoids looking at. He watches its figure as it swims just near the edge, enough to make the current switch, breaking through the current like an arrow.

And as the man watches, the breath still caught in his throat, he realizes it wasn’t he who screamed just minutes ago.

In fact, the scream had come from outside.

The scream that woke him, that he believed to have belonged to himself…