The Elephant

There was, and there was not, a time when the Raven returned to the city she had once left behind.

Not to stay. Just to visit. Just to see.

She moved through familiar corridors of glass and shadow, where the rhythm of footsteps still echoed like a metronome of progress. The air was crisp, structured, and heavy with ambition. It smelled like polished metal and scheduled time.

And waiting near the edge of the plaza, just where the Kingdom’s garden paths met the stone, stood the Elephant.

A mentor. A teacher. A voice she had once trusted like rain.

His ears flapped gently in the still air. His eyes, vast and kind, held the weight of someone who had carried many things for a long time. He had taught her how to build with care, how to speak precisely, how to walk with intention in a world that rewarded noise.

“You look well,” he said.

“You look tired,” she replied.

He offered her a place to perch, on a low stone wall near the city’s oldest tree. The Raven accepted.

For a while, they spoke of neutral things. The past, the policies, the surface-level ripples of what once was. But then the air shifted. The conversation deepened. And something sharp surfaced between them.

“You must be careful,” the Elephant said softly. “You’re starting to sound… resentful.”

The Raven narrowed her eyes and looked at him, truly looked. Long enough for him to feel it.

“I am,” she said. “I was treated badly, I was lied to. These things happened to me, and I am not the only one. I do feel resentment. But speaking it doesn’t make me bitter. It makes me whole. Sharing these stories gives me back my voice. And maybe, just maybe, it helps others avoid the trap I once mistook for a path.”

The Elephant shifted, uneasily. His weight cracked a twig beneath him.

“You should not have left,” he said. “Look at what it’s done to you.”

The Raven tilted her head. Her feathers shimmered in the slanting light.

“I had to leave,” she said. “I influenced what I could, moved things, shifted conversations, tried to build in the cracks. But the ceiling was always there, just above my wings. When I realized the things that needed to change never would… my heart wasn’t in it anymore. My mind wasn’t in it. I couldn’t stay just to survive a place that kept refusing to become what it claimed to be.”

The Elephant looked down, saying nothing.

The Raven fluttered to the ground, talons clicking softly on stone. She stepped toward him, pulled a seed from beneath her wing, a small, silken pod from the lotus she had once promised to carry.

“Do me a favor,” she said. “Take this.”

He lifted his trunk and curled it gently around the seed.

“Plant it somewhere quiet,” she continued. “Somewhere with water. Somewhere with a future. Maybe it won’t grow. Maybe it will. But it deserves the chance.”

The Elephant nodded slowly, reverently.

And without another word, the Raven took to the sky, not with bitterness, but with clarity.

Some mentors teach us how to begin and grow. Others teach us when it is time to leave.

© 2025 Sarah Dooley. Story and images by the author. All rights reserved.