Annie nudged the lizard, her companion, to climb higher onto the rock for a better view. The lizard’s tail dragged behind as it inched its way up. It was weary from their afternoon of exploring, chasing, and eating bugs. It shook its head, and her concentration wavered.

She watched the road from the rock outcrop. The sun was getting low in the sky as the rider rounded a steep bend in the road. Shoulder-length hair flowed out from under a sweat-stained sombrero that concealed his eyes. A scruffy, gray-streaked beard shrouded his lower face. As his horse struggled up the grade, he dug rusty spurs deep into his horse’s flanks. He smirked. Annie could feel each twinge of pain and wheezy gasp from the poor beast.

That man is broken.

As he passed her, his eyes flitted from side to side as if searching for something. For the briefest of moments, his eyes locked on her. Could he see her? Her concentration faltered as the lizard companion exerted its will and forced her out.

_Blink_

The darkness of the other side enveloped her, and the lizard’s silver light moved away. She felt how relieved her scaly companion was to be rid of her. Annie’s lesson that day was to recognize each creature’s different lights by sight. Instead, she had chosen to play, stayed out too long, and was dog-tired. The shining thread that bound her to the world of flesh grew taut, demanding her return.

_Blink_

She lay still, eyes shut, her breathing shallow, and waited. Her arms and legs were cold, heavy, and tingling. Annie wanted to sleep, but she had to get up and move.

She was in trouble; she knew it, if not from Mama, then from Grandma Ochuca for skipping her chores and the lesson. Of the two, she would accept Mama’s any day. Annie had been training for years, but Grandma was never satisfied.

Annie was four when the dreams had begun. Dreams, sometimes nightmares, of being one creature and then another. It wasn’t until she was six that she had discovered the truth. They were not dreams. One night, she had a dream about their cat, Espina. She had watched through Espina’s eyes as the cat stalked a mouse in the kitchen. When Espina pounced, Annie had felt her claws and teeth tear into the mouse’s flesh. She had awoken screaming.

The following morning, Espina had sat at the bottom of the stairs, proudly displaying the mouse she had killed the night before. Slowly, the veil between the waking world and the other side had parted. Annie had learned that she could move from creature to creature and bend their wills to her own.

One day, while exploring the other side, she had strayed too far and had got lost. She had panicked and flown in one direction and then another. The silver thread that had always led her home had stretched and faded. Adrift in the cold blackness, she had felt her connection with her body slipping away. That was when she had encountered Ochuca for the first time.

Ochuca had come like four horse-drawn wagons hurling down a winding, steep switchback trail. Her light was brighter than all the creatures’ lights combined. Annie had tried to flee, but her strength had left her.

A giant, shining, slithering rattlesnake had circled her. Its scales were as white as snow. Its glittering gold eyes were the size of dinner plates. When its fanged mouth had opened, a blood-red tongue had flicked from it and cracked like a whip. Her hiss was louder than a rushing river, and her rattle was like thunder.

It had circled her closer until she could almost touch the white scales. Annie had screamed a soundless scream, choked with panic and fear. And then a sense that no harm would come to her had washed over her.

The great rattlesnake’s thoughts had formed in her head. She said to call her Ochuca, which meant “grandmother” in the language of Mama’s people. Ochuca had returned her to her body and waited until she had woken up before leaving. As she had sped away, she had hissed and told Annie she had much to learn.

She had been afraid to tell Mama right away. When she finally did, Mama had made her promise never to tell anyone. Ochuca was the people’s guardian spirit, and few could hear her, much less cross over to the other side. Ochuca had saved her, so Annie was indebted to her. The thought had terrified her so much that she had stopped traveling to the other side for a while.

Soon, Ochuca’s rattles thundered in her head and commanded Annie to come to her. Grandma taught her the other side’s ways, and said that in time, Annie would become ‘Kukini’ —a respected one. Grandma gave Annie the name Waheia, which meant troublesome because that was what she was. Five years had passed, and Grandma Ochuca taught her the old ways, but she was not always the best pupil.

She was so cold.

Squinting against the sun’s setting rays coming through the stable doors, she sat up. Straw stuck to her hair and clothes from lying in the hay. There were times she wished she never had to come back. There were no chores, no parents to badger her, and no little brother to watch. Mama kept saying she was special. But if that was so, why did she still have to wash and mend clothes, collect firewood, and clean the guests’ rooms?

It was not fair.

Annie rubbed her legs and arms to get warm. She walked stiffly into the sunlight, picking bits of straw from her hair. In the courtyard, her brother Sean chased chicks in circles until he was so dizzy he fell over laughing. He was only six and still allowed to play, but soon, he would have help with the chores.

Papa was the roof of the smokehouse, nothing more than a pile of old timbers hammering on a board. He was constantly fixing things to keep the old inn from falling apart. From inside the Inn, she could hear Mama’s singing. Annie knew, regardless of the time of day, that Mama’s smile would be waiting for her. Well, possibly not today because she had skipped her chores.

A chill wind blew off the desert, promising a morning frost. Ochuca would give her heck the next time she summoned her.

“A rider is coming,” Annie rasped hoarsely.

Papa looked up from his work toward the gate. “I don’t see anybody,” he said, shaking his head. “Annie, darling, where have you been?”

“Just playing, Papa,” she said, giving him her sweetest smile as she passed.

Papa shook his head and got back to work.

She leaned against the gatepost and gazed out at the road. Papa knew she was different but refused to acknowledge it. More than once, she had heard Papa argue with Mama about Indian superstitions. Mama said he believed in the white man’s God. And that their ways belonged to the evil spirit the whites called the Devil. Mama was happy that the inn was far from Capistrano. Any closer and Papa would have forced them to go to the church and school of the Black Robes.

The minutes passed, and she heard the faint clop of a horse’s hooves, and the stranger came into view. Papa looked up from his labor at the sound of the approaching rider and glanced at her as the man rode through the gate. The stranger pulled up the reins as he stopped in front of Papa.

“You look done in, friend,” Papa said, staring from the stranger to the horse. Fresh red spur welts crisscrossed old scars on the horse’s flanks.

The stranger took in the courtyard and the open door leading into the inn. The sun settled behind the mountains to the east, and the air began to cool. Annie could feel a cloying heat radiating off him.

The stranger spoke, but without looking at Papa, “Nice place.”

“I am Timothy O’Malley,” Papa said. “You’ll not find a better inn between Capistrano and San Diego if you don’t mind my saying.”

“A room, food for me and the nag,” said the stranger, as he eyed Papa up and down, “and mezcal if you got it… Timothy O’Malley.” He swung from the saddle with a loud grunt.

“We have all three,” Papa said, grabbing the skittish horse’s bridle and stroking its neck. “Anne darling, show our guest inside.”

The stranger untied his gear from the horse and followed her. His Spanish-style spurs jingled out a cheerless tune. He was a big man, as big as Papa, maybe bigger. As they reached the door, Sean ran up and skidded to a stop. He stared up at the man and smiled.

The stranger glowered at Sean until his eyes became slits and snorted, “Boy, you’re a breed, aren’t you?” he whispered.

He dragged the back of his dust-encrusted hand across his mouth. A toothy snarl showed through his fingers. He rested his free hand on the butt of his pistol and tapped the hammer with his thumb. Sean’s eyes followed the stranger’s hand, and his lower lip trembled.

“No English, little breed?” he growled and squatted so they were eye to eye.

Sean winced and blinked, his eyes widening in fear. A single tear wound down his dirty cheek, leaving a swath of light brown skin in its wake. A satisfied chuckle rumbled from the stranger’s throat. Annie stepped between them, shielding Sean from his taunts. She could feel Sean’s fingers grasp her leg like tiny fishhooks. She kept her eyes on the ground, not wanting to meet the man’s gaze.

“Now, what do we have here, an Indian lover? Wait, don’t tell me, is this breed your kin?”

Annie was about to reply when he took her chin in his hand and pushed her head back. She twisted loose, and their eyes met. The hard lines on his face softened, and he chuckled. Ochuca’s rattle echoed in her head. She felt his emotions from that one touch like a black fog, wanting to swallow her. He smiled, patted her head, and pushed past them into the inn.

Annie wanted to grab Sean and run and hide. Instead, she turned, placed her hands on his shoulders, and told him everything was all right. Sean grinned, wiped his cheek, and hugged her around the waist. She pried him off and shooed him away to help Papa.

As she entered the great room, the smell of roasted chicken, rice, and beans wafted in from the kitchen. The stranger stood with his back to her. He surveyed the room until his eyes fixed on the bar and liquor bottles. He tossed his gear on the nearest table, walked behind the bar, and helped himself to a bottle of mezcal. Annie heaved the heavy steel-hinged wooden door shut with a loud creak. Then she stepped into the shadows, her back pressed against the cold adobe wall.

Mama’s singing drifted in from the kitchen. He uncorked the bottle, sniffed, and crossed the hall to sit near the stone fireplace. He yawned, then lifted the bottle to his lips and drank deeply of the amber-colored spirit.

“Muy bueno!” he bellowed and smacked his lips several times. “Girl, tell the cook your guest hasn’t eaten since this morning. Be quick about it.”

He acted like the Spanish tax collector, Señor Del Anza, as if the inn were his personal property, not Papa’s. She wanted to tell him to leave, but she obeyed and headed to the kitchen. Mama met her in the doorway. A tight-lipped look of concern creased her face.

“What is all the yelling about, Annie?” she asked, having caught sight of the stranger.

“Mama, we have a guest, and he’s hungry.”

Mama studied the stranger. The crow’s feet around her eyes deepened as she squinted. She wiped her sun-darkened hands on her apron. Then touched the leather pouch hanging around her neck.

Does she sense it?

“Light the evening lamps, Annie,” she asked as her hand dropped from the pouch.

A chill ran down Annie’s spine as Grandma’s rattles echoed in her head. Mama turned her back and walked away. He spat on the clean tile floor. Annie imagined that she saw tongue-like, dark wisps follow her as she retreated to the kitchen. She closed her eyes, and when she opened them, they were gone.

His eyes followed her around the room as she lit the lamps. She smelled of liquor and stale sweat as she lit the lamp on his table. He smiled oddly at her, and his face flushed with color. It reminded her of the smiles Papa and Mama traded on those nights when they went to bed early.

“That Indian, your mother?” he asked, leaning across the table as if to snatch the answer from her.

She lurched back and almost stumbled into Mama, carrying a steaming plate of food. Mama stopped short of the table, set the plate down, and slid it toward him, careful to avoid his eyes. His head rocked from side to side, taunting her to look at him. Then, he tilted his head back and laughed. Annie stepped in behind Mama.

“Do I scare you, woman?” he slurred. His gaze was as vacant as a dark corner in an abandoned house. “Are you Serrano or one of those tamed Gabrielano, maybe?”

“No, señor,” she said, but her eyes said otherwise. “My people are Juanero, from near Mission Capistrano.” Her hand searched behind her for mine.

The stranger slapped his thigh, chuckled, and mumbled something about ignorant Indians. Mama turned and gently pinched Annie’s cheek. A shiver ran through Annie as Mama gestured with her eyes toward the kitchen.

“What did I tell you about getting underfoot? Go now and tell Papa that supper is ready before it gets cold. Hurry,” she shouted, pushing her away.

Her shoes thudded dully on the tiles as she ran through the kitchen and out the back. Espina slipped inside as the door swung shut. A sparrow dangled by its wing in her mouth.

Sean’s laughter echoed in the courtyard as Papa burst from the stable. Sean rode on his shoulders, yelling, “Giddy-up!” Papa galloped across the courtyard, dipping and rearing like a wild stallion. As he barreled toward her, he let out a whinny that turned to laughter. Sean slid from his back as he stopped before her and ran ahead.

Papa took her face in his rough hands. “Darlin’, your skin is like ice. Get inside before you catch your death from the cold.”

Annie grabbed his hand and said, “Mama says your supper’s ready.” She whimpered and blurted out, “The stranger is drinking.” She wrapped her arms around him and began to tremble.

Still so cold.

Papa pulled her close and said, “Darlin, there’s nothing to fear. Our guest is just tired and needs some company.” His shoulders hunched as he walked away with her.

Don’t trust him, Papa—he’s broken.

As Annie set the table, she could see the stranger stuff food into his mouth between sips of mezcal. Mama seemed relieved when Papa placed his big, calloused hands on her tiny shoulders. They whispered to each other, and Papa glanced at the stranger.

“I’ll speak to him after supper, Sesia,” he said, scooping up Sean, and they went to wash up.

Annie placed a clay water jug and cups on the table. Grandma’s rattle rumbled louder in her head and would not stop. Grandma, please—what do you expect me to do? She stepped closer to the stove but could barely feel its warmth.

“Mama.”

“What is it, Annie?”

“Mama… can you hear Grandma?”

She closed her eyes and mumbled in Juanero. The corners of her mouth turned down. She clutched the medicine bag around her neck tightly, then, after a moment, released it. “I felt something earlier, but now…” For the briefest moment, Mama’s eyes seemed far away. She shivered as if a cold breeze swept through the kitchen. “Annie, are you sure?”

“Yes, Mama!” she said, grabbing hold of her skirt.

Before she could say more, Papa and Sean crowded into the kitchen. They sat, and Papa asked for Christ’s blessing on the food and their guest, a bit louder than usual. As Papa broke a loaf of bread in half, the stranger’s shuffling footsteps drew their attention.

He stood a few steps back from the doorway, his upper body hidden in shadow, supper plate held in one hand. Gravy dripped from the chipped earthenware like rain on the toe of his boot. He stepped into the light. A disarming smile hid who he was.

Annie’s breath caught in her throat.

“Missus, may I have seconds?” he asked, his words slurred from the drink. Mama got up from the table in a flurry of motion and served him. His smile changed briefly to a snarl, like when his spurs dug into his horse.

He shifted his gaze to Annie and stared into her eyes. Her vision blurred as if a cloud of smoke obscured him.

Papa looked up and said, “Forgive me. I have been a thoughtless host. I will join you for a drink and a smoke later.”

The stranger nodded and accepted the plate from Mama. “Thank you kindly, Missus O’Malley,” he said with exaggerated respect. “I look forward to that, Mr. O’Malley.” He winked at Annie as he turned to go.

Annie began to tremble. Her stomach knotted up something terrible. It became hard to breathe. Ochuca’s summoning rattle roared. She covered her ears, squeezed her eyes shut tight, and prayed it would stop. But it did not… So cold.

_Blink_

_Why have you summoned me?_

_Look, Waheia_

Ochuca’s rattles shook high above her scaly head—she hissed. Beyond her wall of scales, Annie saw a bloated shadow enveloping the stranger’s light. Dark red pulsing tendrils stretched toward Mama, Papa, and Sean’s lights.

_What is it?_

_See what I see, Waheia_

She peered into Ochuca’s golden eyes, and she knew. It was a Soul Eater. An evil spirit that stole the light of the living, extinguishing them forever.

_Grandma, save us_

_I cannot pass between our worlds_

_Then let me go_

_Waheia, you will all die… Stay, and I can protect you_

_No, please let me go_ Annie pulled away. Her silver tether became her lifeline back to the world of flesh.

_Blink_

“Annie, wake up,” Papa said. “She’s ice cold.”

“It’s all right, little one. Mama’s here. Annie… Annie, open your eyes.”

She could sense Papa lifting her off the tile floor and carrying her away. The pounding of Papa’s heart drowned out their voices as her head rested on his chest. Then, her bed’s familiar embrace welcomed her as Papa laid her down.

She was so, so cold.

Mama chanted in Juanero, and her voice faded into the fog. Annie shivered so hard that she thought it would never stop.

“Husband, fetch a bucket of hot coals from the kitchen. She is freezing,” she continued to chant.

Mama stopped her chant and pressed her hands to her ears. It was the thunder of Ochuca’s rattles demanding her return. It felt like it would shake the inn to pieces.

It took all her concentration to breathe. Mama stroked her cheek and whispered her name. Her breath was sweet and warm on Annie’s face.

She opened her mouth, and she tried to speak.

Mama whispered, “I hear Ochuca, Waheia. What does she want?”

The shiver worsened as she spoke, “Sss—ssss—sssss,” hissing over her tongue.

Mama jerked away and let go of her hand. The hissing grew louder in the back of Annie’s throat. From downstairs, Sean screamed. Papa and the stranger shouted at each other, and a pistol shot exploded. The last thing Annie saw was Mama’s back as she ran from the room.

_Blink_

 _No_

Ochuca’s coils squeezed her. Annie strained against them, trying to break free. The more she struggled, the tighter they became and the sadder Ochuca was. She could feel Ochuca’s love and desire to save her from oblivion.

She watched as Sean and Papa’s lights flickered. The stranger’s dark shadow hovered over Papa, smothering him. Mama’s light came into sight and merged with Sean’s, and they fled.

_Then let me go_

Once more, she tried to follow her silver thread to her body, but it flickered and went out.

Sadness radiated from Ochuca as she released her.

_Why had she wandered so far today? Why had he not done as she was told?_

_Go Waheia_ And she turned to face the Eater.

Annie searched for a light that could serve her needs. A quivering pinprick of light hid in a corner of the great room. It was Espina, their cat. With regret, she dove into Espina’s flesh like a thief. Espina shrieked in agony as Annie took her. The cat’s soul shattered into pieces like a clay pot.

_Blink_

She could feel the hair on Espina’s back rise. Her spine arched, and her claws extended. Through a forest of table and chair legs, she saw Papa on his knees. The stranger held him by his collar—a knife to his throat. Blood dripped from between Papa’s fingers where a bullet had ripped through his side. A throaty yowl came from Espina’s mouth.

_I am coming, Papa._

“Hey, stay awake, Mr. O’Malley,” the stranger yelled, slapping Papa across the face. “Or you’ll miss all the fun once I find your Juanero whore and half-breed brats.”

“No, please, I have money. Take it,” Papa begged.

“You are stupid, Indian lover,” he growled, waving the knife in his face like an accusing finger. “I don’t want your money.”

Annie took a few cautious steps. She had done this so many times with Espina when stalking prey. Her vision narrowed and sharpened. The taste of the sparrow Espina had eaten earlier was still on her tongue. She had new prey now.

The stranger whispered into Papa’s ear. Tears flowed down Papa’s sunburnt cheeks. He fumbled helplessly for the stranger’s pistol.

The brass pommel of the stranger’s knife came down on Papa’s head, and he slumped forward. The stranger slapped him again and said, “Stay awake.” But Papa lay on the floor unmoving. “Eh, oh well.” His hand rose, poised to plunge the knife into Papa’s chest.

Espina’s instinct took over. Her ears flattened. The hair along her spine bristled higher. A snarl formed in her throat. Her claws flexed in and out of their sheaths, scratching the tile floor. Annie’s rage thrust her onto a table and into the air.

“Yyyeee-Ooowwwlll.”

The stranger’s head snapped to the side as she landed. She smelled his fear. Teeth and claws labored against his soft, yielding flesh. The hot, salty taste of his blood filled her mouth.

The stranger dropped his knife and tried to pull her off.

I got you!

They spun like drunk dancers. Crashed into the bar and tumbled to the floor. He grabbed her head. She sank her fangs deep into his thumb. He grabbed a hind leg and yanked her off, tearing away flesh as he did. Her claw raked across one eye. He shrieked in agony and held her at arm’s length. She clawed at empty air. He grabbed her neck, twisted, and bones snapped, and tendons tore.

_Blink_

The pain of Espina’s death left her dazed in its grip.

She could make out Ochuca’s white scales stained black in places. The Eater lashed out with blood-red tentacles, slashing her. She struck back, burying her fangs into its shadowy body. Ochuca reared up and struck over and over. With each bite, the Eater shrank until Grandma’s jaw opened wide and swallowed it whole.

_Go._

Annie searched for the nearest knot of bright lights. She moved from one unwilling creature to the next, searching for the one that could make a difference. Fragments of sound echoed around her. She smelled dung. The shrill shriek of hens. The tortured bray of their donkey. The squeal of the pigs as they tried to escape the madness of her passing. Then, one light larger than the others was before her, and she crashed into it.

_Blink_

“Come out; you can’t hide from me,” the stranger screamed from the courtyard.

The sound of the stranger’s voice made this body tremble with terror. Four powerful legs held her up. She had taken his horse. The horse’s will melted away, and all its tormented memories at its master’s hand poured into her.

A pistol shot rang out.

Annie could see the stranger drenched in moonlight through the stable’s open doors. A red halo surrounded his ruined face. He swayed drunkenly, moaning. He fired his last shots at an imaginary attacker. He dropped the pistol, unsheathed his knife, and strode toward the stable.

“If you don’t come out, squaw, I’ll finish off that husband of yours,” he growled.

Annie reared up on her hind legs and smashed her head into the thatched roof. Then she rammed the stall’s gate. It creaked and splintered but held.

“I hear you in there,” he shouted. “You thought you’d get away?”

He searched each stall and lunged at shadows. Finally, he reached hers. Annie tried to control the horse’s trembling and her fury.

He gazed into the stall with his remaining eye and gripped the latch pin. Annie shifted from hoof to hoof and backed up, as he would expect. He grasped the latch pin, cocked his head, and listened. From outside, she heard Sean’s muffled crying. A look of glee spread across the stranger’s tortured face as he turned to leave.

Annie sprang forward and drove her muzzle into his chest. He staggered back and pulled the latch pin free. The gate swung open, and she charged. He looked confused. She guessed he could not believe his horse would ever dare to challenge him.

Annie bit his shoulder. The stranger slashed and stabbed with his knife. Annie reared up, and her hooves rose and fell again and again.

Papa shoveled dirt onto the stranger’s shallow grave beyond the outhouse and spat into it.

Favoring his wounded side, he walked to where Mama sat under a big oak, Sean beside her. She cradled a lifeless, shroud-wrapped child and sobbed. Not far from the tree was another grave.

Papa didn’t say a word. Tears filled his eyes as he stroked Mama’s hair and pried the body from her unwilling grasp. A small, pale, delicate hand slipped from under the shroud as he lowered her into the grave.

Mama got to her feet and swayed unsteadily. She drew Sean into her arms. A purple, swollen bruise marked Sean’s face from jaw to brow, and a bandage circled his head.

It was becoming harder for Annie to see. She, like Mama, swayed unsteadily on the horse’s legs. Warm blood trickled down the horse’s chest from the deepest stab wound.

She could no longer stand and rolled onto the horse’s side. Mama gazed from the grave to the coral. Her hand reached out to Annie, and she began a sorrowful chant.

_She knows_

The horse’s breathing became ragged, slowed, and stopped.

Annie could hear Ochuca’s rattle call her home. Annie shook her rattle in reply and joined Grandma in the eternal night.

_Blink_

The poem is a dedication to the construction of a real pavilion, though the poem imagines the pavilion to be comparable to one constructed in a Taoist heaven. Nansŏrhŏn wrote the poem at the age of eight, and it is considered an example of her potential greatness as a poet.

I

Let me now tell of this.

On the moon, a cotton and ramie sunshade, hung high—
materializing vapors
from beyond the mind’s
worldly boundaries
seem an auspicious sign.

II

If constructed on Earth, this silvery structure would shine in sunlight—
its columns the color of sundown’s misty mauve;
and yet, this summery abode
will not be of the dusty illusions
within a bottled cosmos.

This royal edifice will manifest
as if the azure mussel opened its shell,
blew a mystical smoke,
and after the spout clears,
a palatial residence of exotic timber—
here on the moon.

Or, put another way,
this same residence will be built
by a divine being’s conch shell,
which, when blown,
invokes a spirit, a highly-skilled builder.
Using this same magic,
the demi-god owner of the conch shell
will tile the roof in luminant milky jade.

Or Blue Castle, an immortal of Heaven’s fifth level,
will practice his magical art of lifting brocaded curtains,
and from behind them:
a complex of viewing platforms.

Or, similarly, the Prince of the East Sea
will open the cache of his lambent box
and remove a stately villa.

Therefore, from these examples,
this heavenly pavilion
will only be completed
by a power
outside the realm
of humans.

III

The owner’s name—he who built this seasonal retreat—
is registered on a list of immortals—
position and rank,
among the superior Immortals of the Empyrean.

The owner
was an official of Heaven,
faithful and moral—
he governed the City of Opaline Twilight.
His status and reputation rank among the most sublime nobles,
and he was the most famous
among those in the office
of the Five-Colored Pearly-Haze.

As judge,
he punished Wu Kang
for violating Taoist doctrine,
Wu Kang, whom he forced to wield a steel ax
which radiated glacial-cold
from the hilt,
and cursed him
with an everlasting sleeplessness
to stand beneath a cinnamon tree
impervious to chopping.
Occasionally, the owner
enjoyed watching nymphs
dance to the melody
of “A Dress of Rainbows”—
some, silvery-white,
danced devotedly near the balustrades—
the nymphs,
with brilliant pendants of lilac star sapphires
that swayed
on their sleek lavender jackets,
and coronets
that glistered like starlight,
their hairpins spotted
with iridescent starry pearls.

When in Great Clarity Palace,
at dawn, this demigod would mount a dragon,
then leave for Penglai,
and at close of day,
slept at Fangzhang.
Sometimes this being flew upon a crane
between the Three Islands.
When the owner traveled, Fuqiu with his hengxiao
rode on the left,
and Hongya with his bamboo clapper
rode on the right.

For 1,000 years, the owner lived
a paradisiacal life
in ease,
but one day, fell
into the short illusion of humankind
on the dust of Earth,
because this immortal misunderstood Taoist doctrine
and practiced in error.
He was thus exiled
to Earth’s Palace of Endless Pleasure.
Red Knot wove this connection,
and so, regrettably,
the owner of this spring-like place for viewing
entered the shack of mortality.

When friendless in the earthly realm,
in a room with taffeta curtains
and a silken screen,
sleeping companionless,
the owner may have fretted through the dead of night:
How can I ask a royal favor from the Palace of the Sun
so that I might make use of the Moon Palace?

He found a vial of an Elixir of Flight
and poured a little of the black sand
onto a waft of air.
Like a frightened silver-backed toad
that hops to its underground den,
the incandescent moon
declined into a lunar eclipse.
The owner smiled at this opportunity
to escape the sunlit scarlet grime
of his sublunary life,
and he passed through the ruddy murk
of nightfall,
through a passage to Heaven
from Earth,
an endless traverse, seemingly,
to Purple Palace—
to a banquet the owner had once attended—
a banquet with music
from deities:
marble chi flutes
and bamboo panpipes
evocatively played—
this party continued, in merriment,
as if the owner
had never left.

Yet again, I imagine the many divine beings
who attend
that ever-long event:

the Queen in her chariot,
drawn by cobalt-blue phoenixes,
a feathered parasol
preceding her retinue;
the herald of the King,
riding a milky-white tiger;
behind him
the procession members
follow a jeweled fasces;
Liu An, who wrote a book about divinities,
who summoned two dragons to his reading desk;
King Mu, who traveled west
to the Queen Mother
who lives there in the west,
in the land of demigods;
he let his eight-horsed chariot
rest on a mountain slope
while he went to the palace revelry
in the upper worlds.

At daybreak, the Duchess Shang Yuan
is welcomed—
her combed blue-black hair
braided
into three chignons.

During the day,
the King of Heaven’s daughter
is next received—
she who weaves
a nine-patterned gauze
on a bejeweled loom.

Such a multitude of divinities
gathered on a southern summit
at Diamond Lake:

the kings who assemble
under the Big Dipper
at the capital of the celestial cities
and Emperor Xuan
who, to get his feather robes of an immortal,
at Sen Zhang,
strolled with Gongyuan and his stave—
all attend.

The God of Water and the Immortal of Fire
who play Go
betting a planet on the game’s outcome—
they attend.

The freeholder
received the Queen Mother
at the North Sea—
her wagonette,
drawn by speckled kirin,
arrived in the midst of balsamine.
Laozi, met at the gateway of China’s western borders—
his powder-blue ox
on the lea.

The Immortal of Bees gives honey—
flies buzz
around pots of boiling jade—
an immortality brew.
The Immortal of Geese brings fruit—
in and out
of the glossy
blue-and-white
tiled kitchen,
he travels.

The nymphs Shuang Cheng,
with a mother-of-pearl inlaid flute,
and Yan Xiang
with a rosewood lute
produce a refined, noble melody
from mid-Heaven.
To this music of paradise,
Wan Hua
intones a piercing lyric,
and Fei Qiong
performs an elaborate dance.

A dragon’s-head kettle
pours wine from the mouth,
the wine
fermented from the marrow
of a phoenix.
A tray shaped like a crane’s back
holds seasoned dried goji berries.

One hundred invited spirits
will come from afar;
one thousand saints,
welcomed.

Still, this heavenly palace
of the upper worlds
is not large enough for everyone,
so a new one had to be built.

IV

There was no elegant seasonal retreat large enough,
so a new one had to be constructed—
how else would it be possible
for the Emperor of Heaven
to join such festivities?

Therefore, the proprietor
sent orders to ten lands
and across the nine seas
to collect builders.
A master craftsman
was given a nearby house,
and he selected the finest camphor and nanmu—
the mighty iron adzes and axes,
steadfast as mountains,
worked the pillar bases,
and the bronze levels and squares
shined an auric essence,
radiating throughout the heavens.
A granite forge, lightless-black,
melted iron in a crucible,
and the craftsmen
plumbed their measures
as skillfully
as Gongshu Ban.
A spirit of the earth
hammered his chisel
with utmost skill,
following ideas
like the father of carpentry,
Gongshu Ban.

V: A Reverie of Completion

A prismatic double rainbow
above the completed summery abode;
the ends seem to drink
from a coursing star stream;
the smaller iridescent bow
with redder bands
ascends
like the heads
of the six snapping turtles
that carry the Island of Immortals.

This elegant retreat,
singular,
bemisted:
an amber rafter
glows
in a sunbeam.
Beyond its paper-thin
white jade lattice and silk windows,
a meteor falls—
across from and level with the sky-blue corridor:
clouds upon the plain.

Nephrite roof tiles
sparkle
like scales of fish—
finely cut steps,
aligned
like geese in flight.
Cerise flags flutter
from bamboo poles—
other poles
with peacock feathers—
dense haze,
luminant
with moonlight.

Fu Bo, on the surrounding grounds,
raises a tent—
under the empyrean’s three primary stars,
he hangs curtains
ornate
with fairy-slipper orchids;
others tie sun-yellow tassels
to the silkened windows of the retreat,
adding to the shimmering tassels
already tied—
a fine mesh net
protects the carved banisters
of the graceful summerhouse
from birds, insects, seeds,
and leaves of trees.

Immortals assemble inside—
within the structure
a painting of multi-colored phoenixes
emits chi.
A sylph stands by a window—
perfume overflows
from her mirrored cosmetics box
inlaid with the image
of two phoenixes.

A room of viewing windows
with pale blue drapes,
a peacock-blue jade wine table
behind a mica screen—
propitious waves of shimmering heat
ascend in the eventide.
This same room,
painted with lotus petals,
fanned by peacock feathers—
ivory-white reclining couches,
the room filled with delicacies—
a gracing spectrum of colors
over the building
all through the day.

In this edifice, the proprietor
will hold every revelry
with a revitalizing elegance
and humble, sincere
hospitality.

From the inlaid-with-lotus-engraved-jade balustrades,
dupion tapestry,
ornate with cumulous clouds—
from the gilt eaves,
amaranthine drapes hang.

Nine branches, each with a lantern:
the light falls calmly
upon a quilted brocade futon
and handwoven mat.
Virescent lotuses
and icy-white peaches
on plates, the plates,
embossed with images
of eight celestial oceans.

Only regret
the white-as-cranes marble lintel
lacks celebratory words.

The owner of the estate
asked some highly placed divine beings
to write their feelings
in a poem,
but, for example,
Li Bai, who dedicated poems
to the concubine of Emperor Xuan,
since long ago,
remains drunk
on the back
of a whale—
Li He, whose odes were written
on the Emperor of Heaven’s
summery lookout tower,
now writes
with the absurdity
of the Snake God.

This new summerhouse
only bears
a small inscription
telling the story of its construction
engraved in iron,
written in the sophisticated calligraphy
of Shan Xuanqing.

The upper world pavilions
have beautiful engravings
from the illustrious Caishen,
whose style is
esteemed in history.

I feel shame
that I was, am, and will be
in the grime
of the lost human universe
in my lives
of the past, present, and future—
I have been falsely put on the demigod Jin Huang’s list
for punishment,
and so am exiled
to Earth.

It is also true
that Jiang Lang’s poetic talent
has been exhausted,
so the impression
of the five-colored blossom—
of his good writing—
ended.

This is why Jiang Lang pressed me for a poem.

The voices of past poets
echoed in my mind
in answer.

Slowly I held a vermillion brush
and smiled—
the paper, awash with ink
flowed with words
as a brook
is fed
by a spring.

It is not necessary
for the immortal Zi’an
to help these words—
the phrasing is so beautiful,
and passages, strong;
it is not necessary
to wash and sober Li Bai’s face
so he can join
and help.

VI

Inspired, I present the divine verse
as if kept
in a brocade pouch—
this, the created ode
for this exquisite residence
with a splendid view.

Receiving the dedication,
craftsmen place all the verses
within a hollow
of the double beams,
and celebrants
now pay homage to the view
in each of the six directions:

The freeholder of the land
offers rice cakes to the east:
At sunrise,
may you, honored guest,
ride an ageless sage’s sunbird
and enter Pearl Palace.
At first light,
sunbeams on the ground
under a mulberry
on the shorelines
of the Island of Immortals—
10,000 sun rays
redden
the bemisted day,
turn the ocean’s surface
maroon.

Woodworkers offer cakes to the south:
May you rest
like a sacred dragon
with nothing to do—
one that drinks
from a pristine pond.
On a zitan bed,
drowse and wake
in the tulips’ noon shade—
smiling,
call for a lovely servant girl
to aid in removing
your teal jacket.

Palace maids offer cakes to the west:
Covered by frost,
a petal from a celestial-blue ranunculus
wanes—
an iridescent firebird
cries.
Wearing a plain-woven silk jacket
for the season of rebirth,
embroidered with the character for jade,
a servant receives the Queen Mother—
later, astride a crane,
the Queen Mother
hurries
to arrive at her great celestial house,
though the sun’s rays
have set.

The owner of the estate offers cakes to the north:
The North Star sinks
into the vast and wide North Sea—
the wings of an immortal bird
beat the upper firmament—
courses of wind increase.
A gloom of billows
portends rain
in the Nine Heavens.

Palace maids throw cakes upwards:
Daylight colors brighten a little—
feathery clouds hang like gossamer silk.
An eternal sage’s reverie
floats around his hetian jade bed.
In the same way,
may you lie listening
to the Big Dipper,
the melodies
of the turning
suns.

Woodworkers throw cakes downwards:
Graying clouds
in the eight directions
portend
the night’s
darkness—
a maid informs of the icy air
at Crystal Palace.
Frost has formed
on the rooftop tiles, the tiles
intricately carved
with mandarin ducks.

VII

As the pilings rose,
kneeling, I prayed:
May the cinnamon blossoms never age,
and the alluring fields of grass
enjoy a long springtime.
Though the sun and its luminescence
will someday weaken,
I wish you will enjoy touring
in a bronze-trimmed oaken chariot
and find evermore pleasure.

Though lands and seas change seasons,
drive that chariot
faster than a hurricane’s current of air
and thrive
with a full life.

When the day’s closing hazes
press against the latticed kesi-silk windows,
through a nearby gilded rosewood gate
inlaid with cobalt-blue jade,
look down over 90,000 li
and see the Earth,
small, hazy—

smile and look for 3,000 years
as the clean mulberry fields
yield
to the shores
of the sea.

Despite these burdens,
with your hand,
please turn the sphere of suns
in the Palace of Heavenly Paradise,
and may your body linger in the Nine Heavens,
despite the icy wafts of air.

Those stripes brought me here. They kept me here for months. And now they are about to make me famous.

I pluck my phone from the console and check the signal. One bar. I might get lucky. I touch redial and listen, tongue on the roof of my mouth, for any sign of a connection. Ahead, the road twists right, then left, around turns blind even in broad daylight. It’s nearly midnight now, with the moon a sliver that does little to aid navigation. I want to press harder on the gas. Instead, I tap the steering wheel with one broken, dirty nail.

“Come on, come on,” I mutter at the phone. After a minute, I glance at the screen again. No signal.

“Damnit.” I thumb the screen to sleep and drop it in the console, then shift my attention back to the road.

The gleam of eyes in my high beams throws my heart into overdrive. I slam the brakes, and the dark woods spin around me until the stag is racing toward my door instead of my bumper. My hands drag the wheel toward him just as he leaps to fly into the right side of the windshield. The impact rolls his body until his flank presses through the demolished glass, half passenger, half hood ornament.

Tires skid, rubber squealing, then crunching gravel and low brush on the downhill slope as I leave the road.The ground drops into a steep bank and the car tilts, two wheels in the air before it rolls, leaving the stag behind. Airbags before and beside me explode, thickening the air with the smell of burnt rubber. Rocks, shrubs, and trees somersault on the other side of the blood-spattered windshield. I bounce in my seatbelt, arms flopping and head joggling to some macabre beat I cannot hear.

The car slams into something—a tree? a boulder?—at the edge of the precipice, that loud metallic crunch echoing as my head whips to one side. The sudden stillness, broken only by the falling of loosened debris and the distant bawling of the injured stag, reaches numbing fingers to drag me into its depths as the woods around me fade to black.

I wake to bright agony, the reek of gasoline, and whispered voices. Someone found me?

“Help!” I whimper and turn my head in excruciating increments to see who has come to my rescue. The slope above me shines pale, brighter in the waning moon’s light, which gleams on the silvered fur of animals gathered there, staring at my predicament. Humans stand among them with long mussed hair, willowy forms, wide eyes… and wings.

I blink, rub my face, which burns with gritty powder. When I look again, the animals and winged people are gone. Trees above the slope stretch shadows down the scrubby incline as if to push or pull my wrecked car from the ledge.

What’s left of the windshield sags toward me like a hammock, its surface spider-webbed and perforated. Glass pebbles lay scattered over me, the seats, the floors, the dash, even the ground around the car, their surfaces winking with moonlight. They look as cold as I feel. I reach for my phone. Its usual cubby sits empty save for the glass. My lifeline is unreachable, lost inside the vehicle or lying somewhere between me and the road that I left so unexpectedly moments—or was it hours?—ago.

I push the button on my seatbelt. The catch ignores my fingers, snugs me tight against the seat cushion. I press harder, struggle, and the car shifts, groaning against the rock.

The drop before me wobbles. I freeze. A chill beyond the night air pumps gooseflesh up my neck, down my arms, across my chest.

Movement on the dark slope draws my attention, head and neck throbbing in protest. Halfway up the hill, a figure makes its way toward me. Another motorist saw the deer, maybe. I close my eyes and breathe a sigh. Help, at last.

“Oh, thank god.” The sound of my own voice is like a knife in my head. “Did you phone for help?”

My rescuer continues down the slope in silence until she nears my car. Thick white hair falls over her shoulders, casting darkness across her eyes. Her cheeks are shriveled like a plum left out too long. Her nose and chin protrude into the moonlight, her puckered mouth lagging in the valley between them. The woman’s shoulders hunch forward, rounding her back with the weight of years. One gnarled hand holds a long, knobbed staff, a useful tool on this uneven ground. Dark clothes hide the details of her body.

Outside my window she pauses, takes in the scene. Looks my car—and me—over from end to end, inside and out. She sucks her teeth. Shakes her head. Puts her free hand on one hip.

“Got yourself in a pickle, I think,” she croaks.

The throbbing in my head muddles my thoughts. “Yeah. Can you help me out here? My seatbelt’s stuck. I need a knife or scissors.”

She stares a moment longer, her eyes still obscured.

Her inspection triggers an itch deep in my chest, beyond the reach of fingers that might dispel it. But something else stirs beneath the itch, an unnerving sensation, as if she is reading my soul. Head trauma can cause all sorts of hallucinations.

Soft footfalls whisper outside my door, and I look up just as the old woman grasps the handle.

“Careful,” I warn. “My balance is off.”

“More than you know,” she says. She opens the door while muttering something beneath her breath, reaches across me, and releases the belt with a light touch. The strap zips back into its sheath, and she takes my hand. “Out with you.”

I try to be gentle. She looks as aged as the woods around us. But the power in her hand and arm, strong as the rocks beneath our feet, catches me off-guard. She pulls me upright as if I were a toddler.

“Thank you,” I say. “You don’t know how glad I am to see you. I’m Caitlin.”

“I know who you are.”

Her nose points toward me, but I still can’t see her eyes. I frown. Maybe she found my wallet on the ground? I didn’t look for it in the car. I peer down at her hunched form as it moves back toward the wood.

“Come.”

Strange how I hear her command so clearly, even though she did not raise her voice from a near-whisper. I glance back at my totaled SUV, teetering there on the edge of a precipice so deep-set in darkness I cannot see the bottom. I shudder and scurry uphill toward my savior. Aches erupt down my back, as they have in my neck. Twice, I almost fall.

“Do you have a car on the road?” I call. “A phone, maybe?” Probably not at her age. “What’s your name?”

Her silence makes me wonder if she’s heard me, so I shout my questions again. The effort makes my teeth throb.

“You’ve already roused the forest,” she says without looking at me. “No need to wake the dead, too.”

“But I—”

“Shh.” She nears the tree line, her steady pace devouring the rugged terrain like she could do it in her sleep.

A soft peripheral glow draws my eye. Only shadows meet my gaze. Another, ahead, pulls my attention back to our path. Again, there is nothing to see but leafy boles and the last of the moonlight as it slips behind the crags above the treetops.

We follow the path of destruction wrought by my crash. The canopy’s cover mostly shades our passage. I hurry to keep up with the woman’s form, even though a blind person could find their way back in this trail of vegetative carnage. I look around at the gouged terrain, gaps in the kudzu, saplings splintered or ripped from their foundations, and shake my head. How I avoided every mature tree, how I managed to ram against the one boulder at the edge of the crag, how I remain upright and breathing are puzzles I cannot solve. Any landing you can walk away from, as they say.

Ahead, a snuffling grunt accompanies feeble tremors to one side of the trail. The old woman slogs through uprooted shrubbery and broken branches toward the sound. I follow until I see the catalyst of this near disaster.

The stag lies on its side, blood visible along its flank, belly, and face, even in this light. The angle of its head belies the rapid, trembling breaths that still flutter in its chest. It should already be dead. It will be. Soon.

Ah, hell.

My lungs heave for both myself and this innocent bystander. Stupid mistake. I should have been going slower. I should have waited to call Jonah. I should have been watching the road. My knees tremble. My chest shakes. I clap a hand over my mouth. This wasn’t part of the plan.

It hurts to move and I mutter a curse. Climbing and digging will be difficult for a while. Healing, not to mention finding a new SUV and tools, will slow me down. Such a nuisance, this interruption. Innocent or not, if it weren’t for this deer, I’d already be in town, having a beer with Jonah and telling him about my find.

The old woman reaches the stag’s side. I stumble closer.

She squats, lithe as a teenager, touches her hand to its head, mumbles words in a soothing tone I can’t quite place, and the animal quiets. Settles. Its last breath frosts the air around its head, and the woman stays there long after, her lips moving in a litany I cannot hear. At last, she strokes the beast’s head one last time, pulls herself upright, and looks at me.

“Such a shame,” I say. “He was a beautiful stag.”

She stares, expectant. Her hair gleams in the dark.

“What?” I point at the animal. “I didn’t mean to kill it. He was just there, on the road. It was an accident.”

She watches. Says nothing.

“Surely you don’t think this is my fault. If anyone’s to blame here, it’s the stag. He almost killed me.”

The woman shakes her head, a subtle motion in the surrounding darkness. Again, a glow appears off to one side but is gone when I look that way.

“He volunteered,” the woman murmurs.

My attention swings back to her face. “What did you say?”

“I am Baba.” She steps into the trees, gestures for me to follow. “You should see.”

“What about the road?” I can’t seem to help the whine in my voice. Every muscle in my body burns. I touch my face and find crusted blood there. “I need medical attention.”

Baba stops just inside the wood amid a subtle glow, as if dozens of fireflies surround her. One hand on her staff, she watches me. Waits in stillness.

“I appreciate you helping me, Baba, but I need to get out of here.” I wave toward the road. “I think I’ll try to flag down another driver.”

She tilts her head, a slight cant to the white glow of her hair. “Suit yourself.”

I turn toward the road…

… and awaken still belted in my car.

I blink. Frown. Look around as if I have awakened to a dream. This can’t be right, can it?

No. No, I was out. I was, if not safe, at least not wedged against a boulder on this escarpment, teetering at the precipice of my new life. How did I—

I pinch myself. Hard.

Nothing changes, except that the sky seems lighter now. Stars have faded. Without my phone, I don’t even know what time it is.

I look outside at the ground next to my car. No footprints mar the dewy sparkle there. My head falls back against the seat’s restraint. Baba was a dream?

Whispers, soft as a sigh, tickle my ears like a blade of grass drawn along the skin and I start, jerking my head to the side harder than I’d intended. Pain slices into my head and stabs down my neck into my shoulders. I suck a breath through gritted teeth and wait for it to pass. When my vision clears, I see no one, but I feel them.

“Hello?”

The whispers fall silent. Even early birdsong and morning crickets break off. Morning mist lends an otherworldly haze to the setting.

Then, between one blink and the next, I am back in the path wrought by my car’s passage. Baba waits among the trees while I stand calf-deep in a gouge ripped into the ground, neither of us moved so far as a pace.

“Changed your mind, did you?” She sucks her teeth, a glimmer of light twinkling where I imagine her eyes to be.

“What—” I frown and point at my surroundings as I gape and stutter. “How did—”

Baba plucks a weed, chews it a moment before she moves on. Her footfalls make no sound among the clutter of leaves and twigs, as if she levitates. Her passage sets the sparse weeds swaying and soon she is almost out of sight.

“Are you coming?” Her voice is a whisper carried on an invisible breeze.

Like the murmurs I heard in my car. I was back there. I was. And now I am here. How does that even—

“Don’t dawdle,” she calls back. 

I jog to catch up, stumbling over the clutter, my ankles twisting in their own discomfort. Here, beneath the trees, fluctuating patches of shade and pale light dance and shift across bole, ground, and rock. I stop at one particular stone, the size of my fist, with spangles that gleam like burnt amber in a sunbeam.

I’d know it anywhere, now. Metathracite. Or that’s the name I’ve used. I hope it will serve as a foundation in medical cures for something like cancer one day—the tests I ran in camp indicated its enormous potential—but if it finds a worthwhile home in the tech arena, that will serve just as well for my purposes. My name and career ride on the bet that this is a heretofore unknown mineral, that I am in fact its discoverer, and that its unexpected and unique properties will ensconce my find in a position of high demand. I pick it up.

“Nice rock,” Baba says from beside me.

Startled, I leap almost a foot downhill. I stumble into a tree, one hand pulled back to lob the metathracite in defense. I whoosh a loud, long breath. “Baba, don’t do that. I could have hurt you without meaning to.”

“Could you now?” She squints at me, then nods at the rock. “That ain’t worth what you’ll pay.”

“What does that mean?” My head throbs and I squeeze the back of my neck with my free hand.

She steps away, beckons.

I follow, hefting the stone, valuing it in my mind. If it’s as unique as I suspect, metathracite might even revolutionize entire industries. My mind wanders along that pleasant dream as I traipse after Baba, our steps carrying us farther from my vehicle until I’m no longer certain I could find it again. Maybe she’s taking me to her own car? No. That makes no sense. The road lay closer than this, and the path to that destination needed no breadcrumbs up the hillside. Not after my passage.

Maybe Baba lives nearby and heard the crash?

I glance around. This wood seems best fit for animals and trees and birds. What kind of house might Baba have here, so far from the city’s civilized services? My most primitive campsites may not have running water, but they at least have satellite.

Usually.

The tightness in my shoulders and back make continued movement a chore. I should have swallowed a few aspirin before I left my car. Assuming I could find them in the wreckage. “Where are we going?” I call.

She stops a few yards ahead, in the liminal space between light and dark. I make my way to her side.

Baba points to a carpet of blue threaded between and around the gnarled roots of nearby trees as far as I can see. Sun sparkles in dewdrops on tiny velvet caps where the light breaks through the canopy. In the shade, spidery veins of turquoise glow across the mass fungal growth, peering out from within like lights behind curtained windows.

“Spritefoot,” she says. “Catena civitatis. Guter nachbar. Ffrind y coedwr. No matter its name. As essential to this wood as neurons are to your brain. Watch your step.” She leads me on a narrow path between the vivid beds.

I look behind, where our feet have passed, and catch a glimmer of light as it dissipates behind a tree. Just like the others. What is that? I stop, go back, swing around the tree into a cloud of Lilliputian rainbows, wings aflutter all at once, patches of morning sun reflecting their iridescence. The diminutive buzz of one pair multiplied by dozens, hundreds, hums loud as a swarm of hornets. I gasp, then close my mouth, hopeful I’ve not swallowed one of these creatures.

“Ostanovis’, ty uzhe poveselilsya.” Baba speaks from beside me. She waves at the insects, her tone indulgent, even amused. “Begone. We’ve work to do.”

The tiny wings scatter and Baba resumes our trek. “They’ll be back. Curious creatures.”

I hurry to catch up. “What are they?”

“Fae.”

Images of childhood fancy dance through my mind, complete with enchanted forests where time passed differently than in the human world and where winged beings made their home. “Fae? Like faeries? That kind of fae?”

She tosses me a glance past the white hair on her shoulders, the kind of look my grandmother used to keep wee me silent in the midst of company when I rambled too long. I am no longer small, and I open my mouth to say more, but think better and shut it once again. Baba is my exit plan, though I’m starting to think I would have been better off hiking to the road and hitching back to town.

“You tried that,” Baba calls back. “Didn’t work like you expected, did it?”

I stop dead, my shoulders pulled up tight toward my ears like someone poured ice water down my back. She heard my thoughts?

Ahead, she reaches up into the lower branches of a tree, murmuring words I can’t make out. Her hand comes back down slowly, slowly, and she approaches me, still speaking to something on her palm. When she’s close, I see her little friend.

Little: not the right word in this case. The spider Baba holds is larger than her hand.

If I wasn’t frozen already, this would be the catalyst. I stare at the enormous thing, its body and all eight legs covered in fine, glistening hairs that sway in a breeze I don’t feel. Peacock blue cephalothorax and green abdomen stand out in the verdant gloom of the wood, their luminous color capturing light like insects in its web. Red leg joints make every movement look deadly, and its black eyes shine out at me as if I am a juicy offering at its altar.

I back up a step, and Baba stops. “Lady of the wood,” she says. “Nothing to fear. Say hello.”

I nod, babble some inane greeting to the spider, but keep my distance.

Baba pulls the Lady closer to her face. “Sometimes, if I ask nicely, she donates drops of venom to dry infections. Her silk then seals the wound. She and her sisters eat those pests who would carry disease to me or the other mammals in the woods.”

The spider crawls up Baba’s arm. If it gets tangled in the crone’s hair, I’ll have to help her get it out and I can’t do it, I can’t—

Baba coos to the spider and takes it back to its perch, then continues in her original direction. I follow, veering off the side to pass far from the Lady’s nest while keeping Baba in sight. She treads no discernible path. If I lose her, I will never find my way out.

The silence of this place presses against my ears, my chest. I hug myself as I walk. This is all wrong. If not for my eagerness, if not for that deer, I would be in the city. Jonah and I would be having coffee, or maybe breakfast, at that cable car diner he loves so much. Has he missed me yet? Probably not. Wouldn’t be the first time I’d gone off-grid for weeks. When last I saw him, he tried to give me a job in his department, as if I could ever take root in one spot instead of seeking my fortune out here, under the sky and on the land.

Baba stops. Light falling through the canopy still shows me nothing of her eyes beneath the crown of her hair.

She tilts her head. “Look around.”

I blink. Frown. “I don’t—”

Baba gestures with her chin, left and right. “What do you see?”

Past the wooded shade, a patch of green glows in bright sunlight. Tall spikes of blue flowers bow and waggle with the weight of butterflies and bees that flit between blossoms. A hummingbird, all gleaming iridescence, zips in from the side, spearing flowers one after another.

Above us, crown-shy trees mark fractals against the morning sky, their boughs moving in unison. A small red-and-black bird climbs one bole, moving in jerks and stops, probing the bark before its face with a sharp, long bill. A rustling sound to my right pulls my attention. There, a wild sow shuffles through the undergrowth, her snout scouting the ground before her feet. Behind her, grunting, follow five small piglets, their dark fur spotted and blobbed with random white. They take no notice of us and are gone so quickly I could almost forget they were ever there.

Baba waits, still and quiet.

“Trees,” I say. “Birds. Bees. Flowers. Pigs. Bushes.” I shake my head. What does she want from me?

“There’s your problem. You see the bricks, but not the house.” She gestures. “Those flowers grow only in these forests. They are the only source of food for that hummingbird. The spritefoot and the wood lady who frightened you so are connected. Without the fungus, the spider couldn’t survive. Without the spider, the spritefoot would not grow. The sow and her offspring eat a mushroom native to these mountains. If they did not, the fungi would invade the forest floor, crowd out other native species.” She resumes our journey and speaks over her shoulder, her voice accompanied by the occasional thump of her walking stick on root or stone. “Not just trees. Not just flowers. Not just pigs. Together, they make the Forest. If you pull at even one thread of that tapestry, you damage the whole.”

I follow her footsteps, but her words make no sense.

“Your plan will kill it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We have been watching you. I know what you intend.”

Aw hell! Just my luck to be rescued by an aged greenie, living off-grid in the woods. Yes, she pulled me from my car. Yes, she appeared to be leading me to safety. But she was also trying to stop me from pursuing a dream.

To hell with that.

“My plan will create medicines,” I say, unable to keep the snark silent. “My plan may even save millions of lives.”

“And what of the billions in this forest, and in its brethren all along these mountains?” She shakes her head, but her voice is as quiet now as it has been all along. “Your actions will trigger their fall and affect lands far from this spot. Is that not too high a price to pay?”

“It’s a patch of trees. It’ll grow back.”

She snorts, shakes her head. Mutters something I don’t catch.

“What?” I say. “We’ll only dig the minerals we need, then we’ll move on. Your precious forest will be fine.”

Baba stops so suddenly I almost collide with her hunched form. She peers at me. “You care nothing for the millions. You care only for the one.”

She moves forward again. I wish I had stayed in my car. I wish I had made my way to the road. I could be in town by now, clean and fed. It occurs to me how thirsty I am.

“You need tea.” Baba starts uphill, her aged body taking the incline better than my own.

I’m not surprised that she heard my thoughts. Hear this one, I think, with an imaginary rude gesture.

Baba laughs, a raspy cackle like the sound of ragged fingernails on sandpaper.

“Where are we going?” I cough, one hand to my mouth, then stare wide-eyed at the rosette of blood on my palm. What the—internal injuries? There is pain, yes, but…

“Almost there.”

Baba’s voice and a squawk ahead of us drags me back to the moment, to my surroundings, in time to see a raven swoop toward us. I duck, throw my arms over my head, and shield my face.

“Glupaya zhenshchina.” Baba’s voice reaches me as she moves forward. “Ne obrashchay na neye vnimaniya.”

I peek between my arms. The bird—enormous against Baba’s head—sits on the crone’s shoulder and eyes me as if I am some strange new prey. It chatters and croaks in a near growl while Baba walks on ahead.

“Almost there,” I say, “where?”

Baba points her staff up the hill.

There, a rickety house perches between two trees whose spreading bases and sprawling roots look like large chicken feet that grip the forest floor beneath the dwelling. Beside and behind its exterior walls, the trees rise like guardians, their leaves whispering in a breeze far above the ground.

“That’s where you live?” I say.

Instead of answering, she ascends the steep slope with ease on footholds only she can see. I clamber after her, finding traction where I can until we stand just before the structure. Beneath, branches stretch between the trees, their massive boughs woven together so long ago their flesh has melded one into the other. At the side, Baba climbs a stair that winds around the trunk. I follow, taking in every tiny detail. Each riser bears pads of soft green moss, thin in the center where Baba treads, plush at the sides out of the reach of foot traffic. There, in the thickness, delicate stalks support pale pink cup-shaped flowers so tiny I must stoop to see their forms. Moisture beads along the surface of these tiny worlds, and I wonder if creatures live therein.

As I start up the stair, a breeze wafts some heady fragrance past. I glance around. There, upslope from Baba’s home, a swath of blue flowers hang teardrop heads that nod and bob along curved stems, their leaves swaying like long blades of dark grass. I sniff the air.

“Deòir na baintighearna.” Baba’s voice distracts me. “Officially Dominae lacrimae, though no one gave them the honor of a formal name until they were thought extinct. Once, they covered the floor of these woods and those in similar landscapes. Now…” She sighs and looks over her domain. “They grow only here.”

I step up to the next riser and fall to my knees and Baba is there, her hand on my arm. She lifts me as if I were a child, as if I did not tower over her hunched form. I peer into her face. Shadows gather where her eyes should be.

“You are weak. You need tea.” She speaks to the raven who still rides her shoulder, and the bird is off, croaking a response in flight. It ascends into the shafts of morning sun breaking through the canopy, its wings blotting out the light, and I am falling. Baba says something in a tongue I don’t recognize. Then… nothing.

The world twists around me, all its facets bathed in hues of murky green. Noises and murmurs filter through the confusion. I squeeze my eyes tight, fight the nausea that rises in my throat and threatens to eject my last meager meal. My fists close around something soft. Something crisp. The green swirling slows, and the voices grow louder, crystallize. One stands out among the rest.

Jonah.

Jonah!

I push against the lethargy and struggle awake.

“Well, hello there.” Jonah’s voice sounds beside me.

His short hair is mussed, as if he were dragged from his bed at a wee hour. But he’s smiling, dimples in stubbled cheeks, thin lips surrounding bright white teeth. Concern deepens the brown of his eyes. Instead of his usual loosened tie and button-down shirt, he wears a wrinkled polo shirt, its logo old, unrecognizable.

Above and behind him hangs the white ceiling of a hospital, and it all comes rushing back. The stag. The woods. The slope. The boulder.

Baba. The fae. The watching animals. The delirium that followed the accident.

I roll my head on the pillow and rub my face, clean now of the burning powder from the airbags. My mentor leans on the bed rail, which creaks. I know his expression without looking—bushy brows pulled together in the center, dark gaze scrutinizing me through the lenses of his spectacles, critiquing my actions as if I am still the prized student who hasn’t quite achieved academic superiority.

I lick my lips.

“You are hereby on notice,” he says, “not to ever worry me like that again.”

“How bad?” I croak. I sound like Baba’s raven friend. The one I dreamed of.

“Well,” he pauses, “you will mend. Your car, however, is toast.”

“Yeah.” In a blink, the woods are rolling around me again. The metallic crunch of car versus boulder echoes in my head.

“Do I need to ask what you were doing up there?” The resignation in Jonah’s voice matches that in his expression.

“No. But—”

“Cait.” He shakes his head. “At least don’t go on these goose chases alone. You could have died.”

“A partner wouldn’t have stopped that buck from jumping in front of my car,” I say. “And then I would have been responsible for someone else being hurt.”

“Let me guess.” Jonah peers at me. “You were on your phone.”

“Trying to call you.” I look into his eyes. “I found it, Jonah.”

He pushes upright, runs fingers through his hair. He shoves his hands into his pockets and mutters something under his breath.

“I didn’t catch that.” No doubt, it wasn’t complimentary.

“We’ve had this conversation before,” Jonah says. “Though admittedly this is the first time we’ve had it in the ER. Don’t make me play it out solo in the morgue, Cait.”

Of course, he’s right. But he’s also wrong. “It’s different this time. I really found it.”

His stare holds mine, peering into me, searching for the truth in my demeanor, my words, my resolve. Well, maybe not that latter. I’ve always been resolved, even when chasing false leads. I like to think of it as my superpower.

“What makes this time different?” he asks, his voice tired.

“I found a mineral layer I’ve not seen before. Anywhere.” I don’t tell him I’d stumbled across it by accident when I fell into a shallow ravine and got stuck there for two days while the swelling in my ankle cleared enough to climb back out. “Took a lot of samples back to my campsite, ran chem baths, extractions, the works. At least as much as I could do in a rough lab.” I grin. “The powdered stone showed amazing properties. I believe it’s catalytic. Everything I added it to changed in unexpected ways.”

Jonah frowns. “Explain ‘unexpected.’”

“I’d rather show you.” I stop. “Wait, did they get my things from my car? All my samples were in my field case.”

“I don’t know. They managed to retrieve a few items, I think, but there wasn’t much left. Getting you out was dicey enough. They can’t get your car out yet. They need special equipment to reach it.”

Damn. My belongings must be flung out along the gouged terrain. In that mess, they may never find my field kit. I’d need another. “Oh well. We can go back for more. It looks plentiful in the gorge walls above the tree line in those mountains, and hints of more farther along the range. Now that I’ve found the markers, we can track it.”

Jonah shakes his head. “Cait, I don’t think I can convince the university to back you again. You’ve had too many false leads.”

I stare at him. This man has supported my endeavors without fail ever since pre-doctoral studies, when I took one of his undergrad classes. Okay, yes, I’ve followed a few trails that petered out, but this—

Metathracite is real. I knew it even before I found proof, and now the rest of the world will see, too. He has to believe me. I won’t accept anything less.

The machine beside me begins to beep with a will. Jonah glances at it, then at me, a frown on his face. I breathe deep, slow. The machine still beeps.

He pats my shoulder. “Calm down, Cait.”

“I’m perfectly calm,” I say. “But you need to listen to me. This isn’t like the other—”

Another machine joins the first, and the door sweeps open to admit two nurses and a doctor. Jonah backs away from the bed.

“Step outside, sir,” says the doc.

Jonah moves toward the door.

“No!” I shout. “Jonah, wait!”

“All right, Ms. Banks.” The doctor injects something into my IV line and smiles at me. “Let’s calm things down, shall we? You need your rest.”

I peer past the doc at Jonah, outside the closing door. “No! Jonah—”

The door clicks shut, blocking him from my view. Hospital sounds blur, fuzzing into the texture of my consciousness like moss on a tree root until I can’t tell reality from fantasy.

The doctor speaks to one of the nurses, her voice drawn out and inhuman. “She gets no visitors until…”

Lights dim, greying into twilight like the forest around Baba’s house. My body grows heavy, pushed down into the mattress as though it were weighted with stones.

I try to speak, to tell the doc that I need to tell Jonah… something… I can’t…

A pungent aroma awakens me. The lumpy bed beneath me and the dark, smoke-stained roof timbers above are not those of a hospital. I try to sit up. When that fails, I try to move my head. Nothing works like it should.

“Hello?” I call.

“Good. I wasn’t sure you were coming back.” Baba’s voice comes from my left, followed by a rasping sound.

“Baba?” Stupid. Who else would it be? Except… I was in the hospital. Jonah was there, and—

Baba appears above me, her figure silhouetted by the light behind her.

“Why am I back here?” I try again to sit up. “And why can’t I move?”

“You never left. I gave you a tincture to stop you hurting yourself.” She tilts her head. “Why this stone?”

I blink. “What?”

“The world is full of rocks and pebbles. Why must you destroy these forests to take ours?”

That again. “This mineral is special. It could help to make groundbreaking medicines. Maybe even cure cancer. But I haven’t found it anywhere outside these mountains.”

“Ah. So, you’ve searched the world over then?”

“Well, no. But I’ve done the research, read papers by geologists in every country. None have reported this mineral.”

She stares at me, or at least I think she does. It’s disconcerting to not see her eyes.

“Your work will kill this wood and others like it, wherever you crumble the mountainside.”

“It’s a few patches of trees, Baba. They’ll grow back.” If I could, I would shrug. “It isn’t like I’m hurting the entire planetary ecosystem or anything.”

She moves out of view. Something clatters, metal on metal. Then she returns and lifts my left foot to slide a thin tray beneath it, one with a trough at its edges. I feel nothing, but the image of my foot on a tray disturbs what remains of my calm.

“What are you doing?”

Baba disappears, then returns with a small bowl, the source of that smell that awoke me. She dips a cloth into the bowl, then swabs a sticky brown substance around my ankle and across the top of my foot.

“What are you doing?” My voice carries a shrill tone. The foreboding that began with a thin tray swells to outright concern.

Again, she moves out of sight. Another clattering sound and she’s back, balancing another tray on a stand beside my foot, close enough to see what it holds.

Knives. Scalpels. Saw. What the actual—

“Baba! What are you doing?”

She turns to me and finally, I see her eyes. I wish I hadn’t. Around the lids, her brown flesh is carved into wrinkles that stretch out to her hairline and down onto her cheeks. In the gap between the lids, deep green irises pierce my soul, their color so dark they appear almost black. No white field surrounds them. If I fall into that gaze, I’ll never crawl out again.

I manage to squeak.

“I’m going to take off your foot,” she explains, her voice calm, soft, as it has been all along.

“What?”

She holds up her instruments as if to examine their edges.

“Why?” I ask, my voice still small. “Is it damaged?”

“No.” She wipes the scalpel with the same cloth from her bowl. “But I can use the marrow from your bones in my tea.” She looks up. “Good for my aches.”

“What?” I shriek. “No, you can’t do that!” I struggle. Or, rather, I try.

Baba faces me. “Where’s the harm? It’s not like I’m hurting the rest of your body, right?” She goes back to cleaning and disinfecting her implements. “You can survive with one foot.”

I babble for a moment, scrambling to find words that will stop this horror from taking place. “Okay! Okay, Baba. You’ve given me a lot to think about. Can you wait and let me consider what you’ve said?”

Baba stops, staring at me like I’m a bug beneath a microscope. “I need that marrow.”

“I know,” I say, too fast. “Just let me think this over. Will you do that?” If I can delay her long enough for this… this tea or whatever to wear off, I can get out of here. I’ll find my way back to the road, somehow. And I’ll do it on two healthy, attached feet.

My insides squirm, as does my brain inside its bony shell, like she’s in there rooting around, searching for the lie I know I’m telling. Oh, she’s going to know. She’ll know, and then she’ll suck my marrow, and—

She looks away. “Don’t think too long.” She drops the tools on their tray and shuffles out of view. Seconds later, a thump and a creak tells me she’s grabbed her walking stick and left the house. Her raven friend croaks to her as she goes.

When I can no longer hear either of them, I try again to move. I strain as hard as I ever have for anything. Nothing happens. I stop, panting. A trickle of sweat rolls off my face. I can’t even wipe it away or scratch the itch it left behind. What the hell did she give me?

Breathe, Cait. Stay calm. Be patient. It won’t last forever.

I pass the time by going over my site tests, checking my process for mistakes, anything that might trip me up when I finally get to Jonah. The realJonah, not some hallucination conjured by mushroom tea or whatever Baba gave me.

It seemed so real, though. His hand on my shoulder, the expressions on his face, the fear that he would leave me there. That he wouldn’t push the University to back yet another Caitlin Banks shenanigan.

A grunt escapes my throat. At least there is some consolation in the fact that it was an illusion, that no one at uni waited to say, “There she goes, chasing rainbows.”

Again, I try to move. Baba’s tea still holds me fast. Geological tables, mineral properties, and hardness scales run through my head. I recite their numbers and figures to myself one after another before attempting to turn my head, shift my arm, lift a finger. When it fails, I start over. And over.

And over…

My finger twitches, scrapes against something soft and crisp with a rasping sigh. I roll my head on the pillow and lick my lips. Thirsty.

A rustling off to my right jolts me. My head whips back to confront the sound. Baba?

But no. White acoustic tiles appear where smokey rafters hung before. A disembodied voice sounds on a P.A. system in the hall.

And Jonah’s face appears above the bed.

Wait, what—

This can’t be real. But if I can move, I can flee. I struggle to sit up.

Jonah presses me back onto the bed. “Calm down, Cait, or they’ll sedate you again. I had to threaten to bring the University in on this matter to get back in here.” He raises an eyebrow. “Don’t make me look bad.”

I peer into his face, waiting for it to switch to Baba’s. When it doesn’t, and he smiles, I frown. “Jonah?”

“Last I checked.” Reflected light gleams in his gaze, bright spots in the shadows like those in Baba’s face. Back there. In the cottage in the woods.

Where I probably still am.

I close my eyes. “Tell me something only Jonah would know.”

Silence greets my demand, and I look up into his frowning face. The awkward pause draws out while I rote-quote mineral properties in my mind. The machines remain quiet.

Jonah blinks. Shakes his head. “You got drunk after your dissertation defense.”

“Who doesn’t?” I peer at him. “Anyone could guess that.”

“You showed up at my house naked at four in the morning.”

Oh. Okay, he’s probably Jonah. Except even if I am imagining it, I know that event. Well, I sort of remember it.

He leans on the bed rail, his face coming closer as he props on his elbows. “This is about more than finding rocks. More than a car accident. Wanna fill me in?”

I open my mouth, and he holds up a finger.

“If,” he continues, “you can do it calmly.”

I take a slow breath. Press my lips together. Stay calm. Right. Okay. I can do that.

“You won’t believe me.”

He cocks his head, shrugs a little. “Try me.”

My body feels solid, the bed beneath me soft, the smells in the cubby where they’ve stashed me the same as any hospital anywhere. Maybe this is real. I welcome the noise in the corridor in place of forest sounds and raven squawks and, after a pause, I tell him everything—the accident, the lights that looked like people, the animals, the raven, Baba, Baba’s house—except the foot part. I leave that out. Too creepy to think about.

When I stop, he is nodding, a minute movement of his head, as if he is trying to convince himself that this conversation is not the result of a blow to my head.

“Okay. Give me some time to absorb that,” he says. “What about your find? Tell me everything you can. Give me coordinates and describe this clue you found about how to spot the mineral. I want to send a team to confirm your finding while you’re incapacitated. Maybe, by the time you’re back on your feet—” He stops, hesitates, stands upright. One hand goes to his hair, his usual nervous shuffle. “I mean, once you’re all healed, you can join the mining team. If you want to.”

I frown. “Of course, I want to.”

“Details.” He smiles, both hands in his pockets now.

I describe the slender, dark amber- and honey-colored layers between the otherwise blue-grey shale, how to look for the milky scars where the stone had been broken or chipped, and the natural flaw that sent light back in multiple shades of brown. How, unlike most stones of similar color and texture, it breaks off in small, pebble-sized chunks when I chip it away from the surrounding bedrock.

Jonah stops me, pulls out his phone to record, then has me repeat everything I just said.

“Good.” He glances from his phone to my face. “And what was the clue you mentioned? The one that will help you find it again?”

I remember spotting it the first time. Down in that ravine, a quick downpour puddling around my seated body, rising almost to my chest before the rain stopped and it drained away. A chance sunbeam gleaming off the surface of the puddle to shine on the wall of the ravine. That’s what I thought it was, at first. A shine from reflected sunlight.

“The shale layers go from grey to that ruddy brown on both sides of a vein, but as it gets close to the metathracite, it pales to almost pink, as if the color has leached out of it into the mineral between its layers. It’s not a big swath, mind. But that’s a pretty big contrast. It should be easy to see even at a distance.”

“Where, exactly, was your campsite?”

“Coordinates are on my phone. If you can find it. Search the area between where I left the road and where the car landed.” I flash back on that night, the rolling of boulders and trees outside my windshield. I blink the images away. “The university should be able to find it using the geotracker. Look, whoever you send…”

I trail off, stopping myself before I say more about the strangeness of the place. My left foot itches, and I move the right one to scratch it.

It meets only blankets and otherwise empty space. My leg twitches, trying to bring my feet together so I can scratch the itch. I look down at the other end of the bed. There is one hump in the blanket.

One. Not two.

I raise my eyes to Jonah’s and find a grimace on his face.

“It was too mangled, Cait. They couldn’t save it,” he says, reaching toward me.

“No,” I say, my voice sharp, shrill. “Baba did this.” The walls behind him waver, the ceiling shifts from white to sooty to white again. Baba’s soft whisper hovers at the edge of my awareness, teasing, torturing.

Jonah sucks air through his teeth.

“Look,” he says, “you’re safe. You’re in the hospital. Whatever you think you saw wasn’t real. It’s the drugs, Cait.”

“Listen to me, Jonah,” I hiss, pushing all my fear into my words. They tremble with its weight. “There were samples in my car. Look for those and look for my site. It’s important. But whatever you do, don’t let anyone go there alone. They should work in packs, keep watch on one another—”

A machine beside me begins to beep.

“—make them keep watch. Those woods are strange. I told you.”

Jonah squeezes my shoulder. “Cait, calm down. You’re safe here.”

“No.” I shake my head so hard it hurts. Another machine’s alarm joins the first. The wall behind my mentor flickers between Baba’s house and the hospital white. For a moment, Baba’s disinfectant permeates the air. I grab his arm with both hands. “Don’t let them sedate me, Jonah. Don’t let them send me back there!”

He looks alarmed now. He pulls at my fingers, clasped tight around his arm. “Cait, stop this.”

“Jonah, please.”

A third machine joins the chorus, and the duty doctor comes close. His lips move, but the raven’s cries drown his words. The doctor pushes a medicine into my IV and—

The noise stops, replaced by a ringing in my ears and a soughing in the trees behind me. I stand near the edge of a cliff, balanced on one bare foot and what remains of my lower left leg. The stiff breeze of an approaching storm lifts my short hair. Across the gorge, a blob of color wraps around a huge boulder at the opposing cliff’s edge.

My SUV.

Such an odd perspective, this distant view of the boulder that stopped my descent. From here, I see the cracks in the boulder’s foundation. Their fingers reach out into the surrounding cliffside, softening the boulder’s hold on the precipice so that it leans out over empty air. A strong wind could take it down now.

I hobble-turn to face my surroundings. To either side, rough ground edges the precipice, scattered with boulders jutting from or settling into the ground beneath them. I stand at the edge of a twilight forest. Trees crowd this slope all the way up to the ravine where I found the metathracite.

This is Baba’s doing.

I close my eyes. Is she here? Watching? I listen.

The wind.

Birds, far distant, as if they want no part of me.

Traffic. Or, more specifically, trucks. Big ones. As in heavy equipment.

Jonah?

My head goes up, looking for my dig site, but all I see are trees. I take a step back toward the clearing behind me—

Except I can’t. My foot, or rather my stump, won’t move. I look down.

My leg is merging with the ground beneath it. My flesh stretches out and down past rock and stone and bone, rooting itself in the earth. I pull, twist my body, push against the ground with my remaining foot until my toes stretch longer, thickening as they go. They dig past the tendrils of my other leg, reaching toward the marrow of the mountain, anchoring me to this spot.

A tingle spreads from my ankle and lower leg up onto my shins and calves, and I shout. My breath comes faster, noisier. Before me, animals peer around boles, creep out into the open. Two bobcats stand near a lynx. A wolverine hunkers at the base of some nearby scrub. An owl flaps in to land on a branch.

The itch spreads up my legs and I look down. Skin and clothing have thickened into scaly brown. As I watch, my legs merge. I breathe hard and fast, lungs keeping time with my racing heart.

What did Baba give me?

What did the doctors give me?

A grizzly joins the animal audience, rises to its full height, and looks down on me as if I am a morsel too small to consider. An elk, majestic in its size and beauty, ambles into the scene, followed by a small pack of coyotes and a fox pair.

The thickening itch is in my torso now. I twist my shoulders, flailing against this change.

The fae arrive, standing in full view among the animals, all of them moving closer as the wind rises, keening up the cliff face to lift my hair, which thickens and stiffens and won’t fall back into place. I raise my hands to touch it, and my arms freeze, extended toward my head. Twigs, then leaves sprout from my fingers, my forearms, my elbows. My skin thickens into the brown scale of my legs. The bark spreads up my chest, my neck. Even as my hair stretches out into branches thick with foliage, the bark covers my face.

I can’t breathe! My lungs—do I still have lungs?—suck at nothing, like someone has stretched plastic over my face.

But I still hear and feel.

Murmurs, whispers, the electrical sensation against my skin regardless of its new form. The presence of the fae. Close. Touching me. Murmuring some magic. Did they do this?

Over all, the growl of heavy equipment digging into the cliff above the wood. Jonah’s crew, come for my metathracite.

But if I was never in the hospital, if that wasn’t real, how did he know? My thoughts tumble over one another like ants trying to escape a flood and realization slams into me. I am now part of these woods. Will it survive the dig?

Baba’s voice carries on the wind.

“Now we will see,” she whispers, “if the bones of one foot will take the whole body with them when they go. Taste the fruit of your labor. You will feel it all.”

White hot fear races through my veins like sticky sap. I inhale, draw air through my skin, my leaves, and scream. The sound that emerges is the thundering wind of a hundred wings as a whole flock of ravens take flight from my branches. Then they are gone, and the canyon echoes with the grinding of metal on stone as the diggers begin their work.

It was a tradition with us. We would gather on the terrace in front of our offices every Midsummer Eve as the sun slowly went down into the sea and tell stories. Not the usual anecdotes about what happened to this or that mutual acquaintance but stories, in the truest sense of the word. Snippets of legends we had heard so long ago, we could hardly remember them properly, myths we adjusted for the occasion, dreams we thought would fit the eerie atmosphere, when the sun seemed to refuse to set and the world felt as if it had ground to a halt. 

We became different people during those evenings. Usually, we were typical nine-to-five office workers, not revealing much about our personal lives except for conventional, socially acceptable snippets: significant others, children, vacation spots. We steered clear of deeper topics: fear and dreams hiding in the forgotten corners of our minds, how we saw the world, the songs we heard in the night. We could not mention those under the neon glow of office lights.

Yet for one night a year, we became something else—or maybe it was the only time we thought it would be safe to be entirely ourselves. The real us, who still remembered ancestral fears, who saw beyond the trappings of our modern existence into a darker, lonelier world, where forests and seas and stars were sacred and more than just objects in the background of our busy lives.

We took turns telling our stories. There was no particular order. Midsummer Eve did not ask for hierarchies. Or maybe there was a hierarchy but it was hidden from us. We could not understand it.

Then came the night Kaya told her story for the first time and we never got together again to share our tales on Midsummer Eve.

2

Kaya had always been an unknown element for us. She did not take part in usual office banter, the classic back-and-forth with which we occupied most of our breaks. She did her job and went home. We didn’t even know where she lived—well, someone in Human Resources probably did, her records had to be stored somewhere—but none of us had felt inclined to investigate further. Kaya was a good worker but otherwise invisible and we all had the feeling that that was what she wanted.

Until that year, Kaya had never taken part in our Midsummer ritual. One year, she made her excuses and said something had come up. Another time, she got a phone call in the middle of our outing and had to leave. All innocuous incidents. Not enough for us to suspect that she was avoiding the moment she would be asked to tell a story as the sun went down.

In truth, I don’t know why Kaya was there that evening or why she answered our challenge so readily. Perhaps she wanted to show us what real stories could do, how they could overturn reality and ruin the veil of safety between our imaginations and us. Maybe she knew too much and was tired of bearing the burden alone. Or maybe she had not meant to do it. Maybe she had no idea her story would have such an impact on us.

“It’s your turn, Kaya.”

Kaya looked at each of us in turn and for a moment we were afraid that she would refuse. But then her face changed and I could swear she was no longer only herself, as if there was someone else inhabiting her body, someone in a reckless, mischievous mood, willing to unleash chaos just for the sake of it.

“Look over there,” Kaya said, pointing up ahead. “What can you see there?”

As one, we followed Kaya’s finger.

“Water,” I said. “The sea.”

“I think I see a boat,” someone else announced.

Others nodded sagely. I didn’t because I couldn’t see any boat and I suspected everyone else was just playing along.

“The sun,” the new guy in marketing said. “You’re talking about the sun, aren’t you?”

“No, she’s talking about the gulls. Look at them, circling the horizon.”

“I think she’s talking about one gull in particular. It’s the closest one, right? The one with the black head?”

 By now we were all pitching in, enjoying the game for its own sake, forgetting its main objective. Kaya was watching us with a faint smile as if we were children and she was an adult indulging us. Eventually, she shook her head.

“No—I meant none of those things. I was wondering if you could see the shadow on the water.”

We were silent. None of us wanted to say it but we all knew there was no shadow on the water.

“It’s alright,” Kaya said. “I know you can’t see it, yet. You will, once I finish my story.”

That should have been our warning. Our sign that we shouldn’t do this. That we should ask Kaya to stop. At that point, though, we didn’t care about warnings. We wanted to see the shadow on the water.

3

“My grandmother told me this story,” Kaya began. “She knew it from her own grandmother who had heard it from a fortune-teller, traveling with a circus. The fortune-teller had sworn it was true.”

We all nodded. Our stories often began like this. I am certain none of us thought there was any truth in such an introduction. Still, we allowed ourselves to believe it, if only for one night. In those brief hours, all stories had the possibility to be real. Even the most outrageous ones. Especially the most outrageous ones.

“The fortune-teller came from some exotic southern land,” Kaya went on. “She did not like our country. It was too cold, too dark. There were creatures she did not know whispering at every crossroad. And there was a shadow on the sea.”

She had not seen the shadow when she had first arrived. Then, one day, she overheard the sword-swallower mentioning a shadow. And then on, the shadow was always there on the sea, calling out to her but repelling her at the same time. She was surprised she had not noticed it from the beginning.

“What is that?” she asked one evening when she was sure she could not take it anymore.

 What bothered her the most was that no one seemed to ever talk about the shadow on the sea. It was as if the thing was normal for them. As if every sea should have its shadow.

“That,” Bert, the sword-swallower, said. “That is the shadow of the lighthouse, of course. What else would it be?”

 The fortune-teller frowned.

“I don’t see any lighthouse. How can it cast a shadow if it’s not there?”

Bert looked at her as if she was a child who had not learned the true ways of the world yet. It annoyed the fortune-teller to no end. She was at least ten years Bert’s senior.

“It’s the lighthouse of souls, Hilda. Of course you can’t see it.”

The fortune-teller’s name was actually Hadil, not Hilda but Bert had never been good at remembering names he had not heard around him since birth.

“A lighthouse of souls. What does that mean? Whose souls?”

Bert shrugged.

“Mine. Theirs,” he added, jerking his head towards the rest of the troupe who were swaying drunkenly several paces away, completely oblivious to the conversation. “Now that you’ve noticed the shadow—yours.”

Hadil trembled. The words were like ice to her.

“Why mine?”

“You wouldn’t have seen the shadow otherwise. It only appears to those whose souls are already trapped inside.”

4

That night, Hadil dreamed about the lighthouse for the first time.

She first saw it as a column of smoke, swaying against the red horizon. Hadil was flying above it and as she got closer, the smoky column gained substance and turned into a tower of stone with a point of light at the top. Only the light was not yellow, as it should have been. It was green.

Hadil found herself descending quickly towards the lighthouse against her will. One moment she was seeing it from above, the next she was inside, standing at the foot of the spiral staircase that led up to the tower.

Hadil hesitated briefly. She did not know if she should go up or try to find a way out. Logic and the inclination for self-preservation whispered to her that she should remain on the ground floor and try to escape. But when she tried to follow that sound advice, Hadil found that her feet would not move. She could not go anywhere but up. Something was compelling her to climb the stairs.

Hadil had seen many things in her lifetime. She came from a long line of fortune tellers, witches and priests. Her kind could speak to gods and spirits of the earth often appeared in their dreams. Hadil herself had witnessed sacrifices to dark forest gods, ritual dances and initiation rites that took one to the blackest places. Wraiths had chased her and once she had even battled an ancient basilisk. She was not afraid of the unnatural. Ghosts and spooks were familiar to her.

 Despite her knowledge, Hadil was sure she had never felt such strangeness and such malice as she did now, climbing the stairs to the lighthouse tower. The lighthouse of souls, Bert had called it, and Hadil could tell it was true. She could feel them—millions of imprisoned souls shadowing her, surrounding her, speaking of millennia of despair, begging to be set free.

Hadil’s heart was breaking. She could not stand to watch so many souls suffering. It did not matter that their owners were long dead or that they were alive and did not know what was happening to their souls inside the lighthouse. All that mattered was the suffering—Hadil had never been able to witness suffering without trying to help.

“Help how?” a voice that sounded like Bert’s hissed in her ear. “You’re trapped here like the rest of us. What could you possibly do to help?”

When Hadil woke up, she was back in her bed in the trailer she shared with the two ballerinas. They were both fast asleep but they now looked lifeless to Hadil. As if their souls no longer belonged to them.

5

Days passed, deceptively uneventful. Bert did not act as if he was aware that Hadil had encountered his soul in the lighthouse. But the more Hadil looked around, the more she realized everyone she knew had their souls imprisoned there. The lighthouse had claimed the entire town.

“This won’t do,” Hadil decided. “They have to be set free.”

It wasn’t just altruism. She could feel her own soul becoming tangled inside the lighthouse. She dreamed about it every night now. She had to find a way to break the spell before her own soul was completely claimed. Otherwise, there would be no escape.

Hadil searched the lighthouse from top to bottom. She discovered that the green light at the top of the tower came from the captured souls. But why was there a light there in the first place? What was it supposed to guide?

Apart from the souls, there seemed to be no one else at the lighthouse. Still, every night, Hadil was sure she could sense an absence. Something was about to arrive or had just left. Hadil never managed to encounter whatever it was but she suspected that creature was responsible for the missing souls. Maybe, if she dealt with the creature, she would be able to free the souls. She could make it give them up. Or, as a last resort, she could kill it, and that would release its hold on the souls.

Hadil knew things the people in those parts did not know. She knew spells that would keep her asleep for days without killing her. She could remain inside the lighthouse when the soul keeper came. She would be able to confront it.

“You are mad,” Bert told her. “Madder than I thought you can be and that’s saying something.”

“But you will help me,” Hadil insisted. “Bert, you would be helping yourself, too.”

 She had come to Bert that morning and presented her plan: she was going to place herself in a three-day trance. Bert was to remain by her side and make sure nothing happened to her body in the real world. If she showed signs of distress, he was to try and wake her up.

“I’m surprised you’re asking me to do this,” Bert went on. “I was sure you didn’t like me.”

That much was true. Hadil, however, had learned a long time ago that not liking someone did not necessarily have to mean not trusting them. She trusted Bert more than she had trusted anyone else in her life.

“You will help me,” she repeated, and it was not phrased as a question—they both knew that that’s what Bert would do.

Bert lifted his hand and touched Hadil’s shoulder briefly.

“I wish I was coming with you.”

 Hadil wondered if Bert also dreamed of the lighthouse.

“We both have a part in this. Yours is here. Mine is in the lighthouse.”

“Do you know what to do?” Bert asked.

Hadil nodded curtly.

“Find the person who is holding the souls and convince them to free us—one way or another.”

6

Hadil prepared a potion and whispered secret words over it. She lay down and repeated a few other words that her grandmother had taught her long ago when they were hiding from a sand-spirit. She was aware of Bert watching her uneasily but she did not say anything. Bert was never going to understand her ways but he would still obey her instructions.

She found the lighthouse instantly. She was once more on the spiral staircase. Her soul was struggling like a captive moth against one of the windows, as if suspecting there was the possibility it could be freed. Bert’s soul was next to hers.

“Don’t worry,” Hadil told them. “After tonight we will all be free.”

She climbed the stairs. Sensing her determination, several souls followed her. They formed a protective barrier between Hadil and the lighthouse. Hadil smiled, wondering if she knew any of them. The only souls she could recognize were Bert’s and her own.

The room at the top of the tower was the same as ever. The green lamp threw trembling shadows on the floor as hundreds of corrupted souls swayed around the lamp. Only the most damaged souls powered the light. Hadil doubted she could save those. But she could put an end to the indignity they were forced to suffer. That would have to be enough.

Hadil did not know how long she waited for the dreadful presence to enter the tower. It felt too long. Her potion would only last three days. Then, she would wake up, whether she encountered the enemy or not. She was beginning to think she had gone about this all wrong. The keeper of souls would only come when her dream self was not there. He would wait for her to wake up and all this would have been for nothing.

After a while, when she was ready to give up hope, Hadil heard heavy footsteps on the spiral staircase. She tensed. Souls were light. You could not hear them as they moved. This could not be another dreamer, either. Not many would have managed to get up the stairs before they woke up. This was it, then. Their captor was finally on his way.

 In those moments, as she listened to the lumbering footsteps, Hadil wondered what she would see. She imagined green slimy creatures dragged out from the sea, or misbegotten monsters, half-human, half-beast, with claws and fangs and yellow eyes. She thought of a gigantic spider scuttling towards the green light to feed on the souls.

What entered the room was a dwarf, much shorter than Hadil. Its shadow was gigantic in the light of the candle he was holding but the creature itself was small and wizened. He looked as if he was barely holding himself together. Hadil suspected he would have crumbled into a million pieces, had it not been for the souls keeping him alive.

The dwarf’s skin was white to the point of being translucent; his sunken eyes were green and empty. He himself didn’t have a soul, Hadil realized. Whether he kept it imprisoned in the lighthouse with the others or he had lost it some other way, it was hard to tell. Nor did it matter. He was the enemy, and Hadil could not have sympathy for the enemy.

 The dwarf did not notice Hadil at first. He shuffled to the window and looked outside. The sea was restless. The dwarf rubbed his hands together, grinning.

“Yes,” he whispered. “Good. More souls for me. Storms always bring more souls. Good.”

Hadil stepped forward.

“Why do you need the souls?”

The dwarf froze, although his shadow still shivered and swayed. Some of the souls disentangled themselves from him and fluttered towards Hadil. Others remained bound to him, unable to break free. Slowly, the creature turned around and Hadil sensed that if she looked too long at him, she would be trapped inside the lighthouse forever.

“You should not be here,” the dwarf hissed. “Everyone wakes when I come.”

He was jabbing his finger at her while he spoke, although he was not touching her yet. Hadil stood her ground.

“Well, I am still here. And that means only one thing. I want you to free the souls.”

The dwarf tilted his head.

“Which souls?” he asked mockingly.

Hadil took a step forward.

“All souls. Every single one.”

She reached out and her hand fastened around the dwarf’s arm. The touch made her shudder. The skin did not feel like that of a living being but like some strange thing at the bottom of a muddy lake, slippery and sinuous. The strong stench of seaweed made her choke.

 “You will give us what I ask for,” she said, speaking clearly, her voice steady. “Every soul you have taken, you will set them free.”

The dwarf creature stood still for a long time as if Hadil’s words had turned him to stone. He had not encountered defiance in his prey before.

“What can you do to me, desert daughter?” he challenged. “I am from a world different from yours. My laws are different laws.”

Hadil shook her head.

“No law can accept the stealing of souls. My soul does not belong to you. None of these souls do. And I am here to get them back.”

The dwarf’s laughter sounded like the crack of dry branches consumed by fire. Hadil shivered but did not release him.

“Even if you free the souls and dispose of me, there are more of us in the world. At the right time, another will take my place. The lighthouse can never be destroyed. It will always be there, and it will always pull souls to it.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Hadil said. “Because my soul will be free and so will everyone else’s that is here now. As for what comes after, those people in the future will have to attend to it themselves.

She abruptly let go of her opponent, flinging him backwards. The dwarf staggered but remained on his feet.

And suddenly, he was not a dwarf anymore but a tall, slender creature, so dark it could have come from the caverns beneath the earth where no sun had ever reached. This was something older than Hadil and her desert, than sea or land, or life as Hadil knew it.

Hadil sprang at the creature but it knocked her down. She got back on her feet. Her next blow caused her enemy to stagger, moving closer to the window.

The fight between Hadil and the soul-stealing dwarf was a summer hailstorm and a winter blizzard. It was the sea engulfing the shore and the forest fire swallowing ancient trees, the sky tumbling over the unsuspecting world. The dwarf was skilled and had the strength of a dozen men. But Hadil had her will and her stubbornness, and she was not going to give in to some thieving upstart.

The battle lasted two days and two nights—Bert would tell Hadil this later, when she woke up. She had no idea of the passage of time while she was fighting. All she knew was that moment when her life hung in the balance and the fate of so many souls depended on her victory.

On the third night, Hadil’s strength was fading. She had fallen and the dwarf was now standing above her in the shape of an eagle beating its gray wings and striking at Hadil with its beak. Hadil tried her best to keep him from plucking out her eyes. She pulled out her small knife and struck at the beast.

She could not injure him but she did force him to turn again into a dwarf. Hadil watched as he staggered backwards and noticed how close he was to the open window.

Hadil gathered her failing strength and got up. She was shaking and her limbs were barely obeying her anymore. The time had come to put an end to this. She launched herself at the dwarf who slipped and fell out of the window.

Hadil fell against the edge, panting. The desperate cry of her enemy echoed in her ears.

“I killed him,” Hadil thought and the notion struck at her heart.

The creature had stolen her soul and the souls of so many others. It had to be stopped. He certainly would not have hesitated to kill Hadil. Still, none of these arguments could make Hadil feel any better.

As she knelt there with her entire world overturning, she suddenly felt a warm touch on her face. It was her own soul, come to comfort her. Hadil smiled.

“Hello. It has been a while, hasn’t it?”

She became aware of the other souls, some coming to greet her, others fading back to their owners. She watched as they flew, leaving a golden trail behind. There would be many shooting stars above the sea that night.

7

Hadil opened her eyes to find herself back in her trailer. Bert was leaning over her. He was crying.

“Hadil,” he whispered when he saw she was awake.

It was the first time that he had bothered to say her real name and the syllables sounded sweet and bright on his lips. Hadil frowned, noticing the glint behind his eyes.

“You’re different.”

“You gave me back my soul,” Bert reminded her.

She watched the new softness in his features and decided she could like him with a soul.

“You did it,” Bert went on. “You fought the darkness and won.”

Hadil shuddered, remembering the wretched creature and what had happened to it.

“Is the lighthouse still there?”

Bert shook his head.

“I can see no shadow on the sea now. No one can.”

“It’s only temporary, though,” Hadil said, thinking about what the dwarf had told her.

The shadow and the lighthouse would be back again. Bert did not seem too bothered by that, though. He embraced Hadil and she could feel that he was hugging her with his newly-returned soul. The soul that Hadil had given back to him. Maybe that was enough. Maybe the future did not have to be her responsibility after all.

8

Kaya finished her story. At first, we congratulated her. It was a good story: light versus darkness and good winning, at least for a while. What was not to like? Then, we remembered that “for a while” part and realized that Kaya had claimed she had been told it was a true story. That night, we all saw the shadow on the water.

I do not know which one of us dreamt of the lighthouse first or was the first to discover their soul was now imprisoned there. We did not talk about such things at the office. They belonged to our Midsummer festivities and we never held one of those since that night.

 Kaya left soon after. She did not hand over her notice or turn in her office equipment. She simply vanished. One evening, she went home and did not come in the next morning.

We wondered, of course. Did she go to confront the stealer of souls from the lighthouse as Hadil had? Or, since she had been the one to point the shadow of the lighthouse, was she its keeper? Was she the one who now held our souls?