The Many they Called Legion

An Amythic Retelling

The shoreline on that side of the lake felt different the moment they stepped out of the boat.

The air was heavier — salt and scrub mixed with the faint iron tang of disturbed earth. No familiar synagogue skyline, no neat Judaean terraces. Just a broken slope, scattered rock, a few twisted trees, and, further off, hills where pigs rooted in the scrub.

The disciples moved closer together without discussing it. Gentile territory. Foreign ground. The kind of place their mothers had warned them about in tones that wrapped fear in piety.

Jesus stood a little ahead of them, boots sinking a fraction into the damp strip of shoreline, taking in the land with that same unhurried gaze he gave to everything else.

Borderlands did not make him tense.
They made him attentive.

Above them, the hillside was pocked with tombs — shallow caves cut into the rock, shadows within shadows. It was not a place you lingered for pleasure. You came to mourn and you left quickly, grateful to return to the world of the living.

That was why the movement startled them.

A figure burst from between the tombs and ran down the slope toward them.

The disciples reacted as men do when something unpredictable comes too fast: they shifted into a loose defensive cluster around Jesus, feet planting, shoulders squaring, not entirely sure whether they were about to face a wild animal or a madman.

As the man came closer, details resolved: bare skin streaked with dirt, ribs visible under taut flesh, hair matted, eyes wild with the strained focus of someone who had not slept properly in years.

There were cuts across his arms and chest at different stages of healing — some fresh and red, others older, silvered over. His feet were toughened to leather from moving over stone. Fragments of broken chain still clung to his wrists and ankles, metal chafed smooth where it had rubbed him raw.

He shouted as he ran — words and sounds tangled together, phrases that might once have been prayers, curses, pleas, now fused into a single jagged noise.

The disciples flinched. A few took involuntary steps back; one reached for the knife at his belt. This was exactly the kind of encounter borderlands were supposed to contain.

Jesus didn’t move.

His stance was relaxed, weight balanced, hands open at his sides. No recoil. No defensive set to his shoulders. Only his eyes changed — sharpening the way they always did when someone’s pain was about to collide with him.

The man slowed as he neared them, as if an invisible line had risen in front of his feet. He dropped to his knees so abruptly dust rose around his shins.

Up close, his smell hit them — sweat, old blood, earth, the stale sourness of someone who had lived too long without soap or shelter. The smell of a human life pushed to the edges and left there.

He kept shouting, but the edge had changed. Beneath the roughness was something that sounded like terror.

To the villagers, he was a solved problem.

They had pushed him out to the tombs when his behaviour grew too erratic, too loud, too frightening for children. They had tried chains. He broke them. They gave up.

After that, they chose a simpler solution: leave him where he could not interrupt meals or stain festivals. Visit him only in stories — a cautionary tale told at evening fires.

He became a rumour with a body.

Women fetching water avoided the far path. Children dared each other to throw stones and ran when he roared. Men talked, with the satisfaction of those not directly involved, about how some people just couldn’t live with others.

He lived among the tombs because there was nowhere else.

At night, when the wind rose, his screaming drifted down to the town. People heard it and pulled blankets tighter, grateful — in a way they would never admit — that their own madness did not sound like that.

He hurt himself because pain was simpler than abandonment. It gave him edges.

Whatever had happened to him — fists too early, war too close, losses never named — had shattered his sense of self into fragments he could no longer organise.

Voices, impulses, memories, rage, despair — they moved through him like a swarm. Eventually, he stopped trying to sort them.

The villagers called it possession.
It was easier than naming what terror and exile do to a human mind.

He called it nothing.
He had lost the words.

So when he saw the boat drawing up to shore that morning, something in him responded before thought arrived.

It wasn’t curiosity. Strangers came and left.

It was a quality he recognised without language: stillness. An absence of recoil.

Jesus’ nervous system did not contract at the sight of him. It remained open — grounded, alert, unafraid.

That was what pulled him down the hillside.

His body ran toward what it perceived as safety while his mind screamed warnings.

When he hit his knees in front of Jesus, he was not worshipping.

He was bracing.

“Don’t torment me,” he cried.
“Don’t hurt me. Don’t send me away.”

The disciples heard blasphemy.
Jesus heard the shape beneath it:

Please don’t be like the others.

“Come out of this man,” Jesus said.

He was not speaking to a creature lodged in a chest. He was addressing every story, every judgement, every terror that had wrapped itself around this human being.

The man shuddered, eyes darting for the expected blow.

It didn’t come.

“What is your name?” Jesus asked.

To the disciples, it sounded practical.
To the man, it was impossible.

Name.

Once, he had one — whispered with affection, shouted across fields. Over time it had thinned beneath other labels: madman, danger, unclean.

Enough terror, and your name stops belonging to you.

His mouth opened.

“My name is Legion,” he said. “For we are many.”

The sentence frightened the disciples.
It explained everything to Jesus.

Not demons — fragmentation.

I am crowded inside myself. I don’t know where I end anymore.

Jesus took the information seriously, without panic.

Nearby, pigs rooted on the hillside. The herdsmen watched from a distance, curiosity balanced against caution.

“Don’t send us away,” the man cried again.

Plural felt honest.

He had been sent away from everywhere that mattered.

Jesus’ eyes stayed on his.

“You’re not going anywhere,” he said quietly.
“You’ve been sent away enough.”

The man’s body trembled. Years of adrenaline and exhaustion warred in him. But his shoulders began, almost imperceptibly, to drop.

Safety did not arrive with trumpets.
It arrived in the absence of expected blows.

“You do not belong in the tombs,” Jesus said.
“You are not a grave.”

The words struck deep.

Later, people would tell the story cleanly — demons, pigs, drowning.

On the ground, it was messier.

The herdsmen shouted. The pigs panicked. Herd logic took over. Bodies surged, slipped, fell. Water churned, then stilled.

Money sank.

The herdsmen ran — not toward the man, but toward town, carrying the story first.

On the shore, the man’s breath slowed.

Jesus stayed near, not touching without permission, anchoring the space with calm.

The man’s body came back to him.

Tremors eased. His gaze steadied. Memory floated up — bread, a face, his name in a different tone.

“Look at me,” Jesus said.

He did.

In that gaze, another rearrangement occurred. For once, he was reflected back as human.

Time passed. Cloth was brought. He allowed himself to be covered. He sat, then rested.

By the time the villagers arrived, the scene unsettled them more than screaming ever had.

The pigs were gone.

The man was sitting. Clothed. Quiet.

That calm frightened them.

Economics failed them. Theology failed them. Social order spoke clearly enough: this had gone too far.

He had blurred the boundary.

They chose their language carefully.

“Leave,” they said to Jesus. “Please. Go away.”

Jesus nodded. He did not argue.

The man felt panic surge — then realised the rejection was not aimed at him.

For once, he was not the one being sent away.

As Jesus turned toward the boat, the man ran after him.

“Let me come with you,” he begged.

Trauma logic. Attach to safety. Make it permanent.

Jesus shook his head.

“No.”

The man crumpled.

Jesus placed a hand on his shoulder — light, steady.

“Go home,” he said.
“Go to your people. Tell them what has been done for you.”

Not a commission to preach — an instruction to re-enter life.

The hardest thing possible.

The man turned slowly away from the water.

He took a step toward the town.

Faces sharpened into focus — those who had chained him, avoided him, laughed.

He did not shout. He did not demand.

He walked.

Behind him, the boat pushed off. The borderland shrank.

On the hillside, tombs kept watch.
By the shore, pigs lay still.
On the path into town, a man once called Legion rehearsed how to say his own name again.

Whether the town would receive him, whether the integration would hold — those stories would unfold later.

The work of staying whole would be his.

The choice to see him as such would belong to those who had once preferred him safely among the dead.