“No,” I whispered.
The presence within me, the voice that spoke to me, the . . . the weirdness that set me so much apart from the other girls, hissed, frustrated. And growled, stirring as if alive. With long practice, I shoved the voice down and moved on, away from the fresh meat. Deeper into the trees, the light dimming into colorless false dusk. Holding on to trees to keep my balance, catching myself when gravity took over and the earth fell away.
Artificial evening took over from the afternoon as the sides of a tight crevice closed in, and the rain became drenching, wetting through to my skin, down into my waterproof boots and the collar of my denim jacket. Shadows dappled and moved as if alive. Rain coursed down the mountain.
Nothing looked the same. Everything looked the same. I have been here. I have been here. Home . . .
The trees, which had once been huge and old—older than the ravens and the owls, old as the sky and the earth itself—had been raped by the white man, cut and butchered and carted away on trains, leaving bare earth and eroded soil. Now they had been replaced by saplings. I remembered both—the old, massive trees and the barren earth. I remembered the time of hunger. I remembered young trees, when the world tried to regrow . . . the world before and the world after. And a world of fire, when flames consumed everything and the few remaining animals raced in panic. For a moment I saw fire, red and scorching, the mountainside black with suffocating smoke. And the flood that followed, wiping out what little was left.
I had studied the history of the place. I was remembeso was rering the early nineteen hundreds, when white men stripped the entire Appalachian Mountains bare of trees. Matching my memories, there had been a fire . . . here. A time long before I was born. Surely it had been long before I was born. Yet I remembered.
I leaped over a rill of water and vaulted over a fallen tree, my palm abrading on the wet, rough bark. Now the trees were somewhere in between in size, no longer saplings, but not yet old, not yet wise. Less than a hundred years in age. So much smaller than my earliest memories. And still I plunged down, into the ravine with the water and the rain. Searching.
Something white caught my eye. I stopped. Frozen. Still. Where had I seen it? What?
Rain rolled down my face to hang on my nose and jaws, to drip from the end of my braid. I was at the bottom. Too far right. I moved left, slightly uphill, my feet squishing with the wet that rolled down my ankles into my boots.
I saw the glimmer of white quartz beneath a matting of soil and decades of leaves. I raced to it, knelt, and brushed away the detritus that hid it. And saw the faint line of gold trailing through the quartz. I touched my necklace. The same gold. The same exact gold: from this place, from this rock.
I sobbed hard, a concussive explosion of trapped agony. It was real. All this time. The memories, the dreams. All real.
Unbalanced, I slid downhill, my feet unsteady on the steeply pitched hillside. Caught myself on trailing branches and an oak trunk. Trying to think. How had white man not seen dalonige’i? The yellow rock. The gold he lusted after. How had it remained hidden?
Slightly above me, the ground around the boulder gave way, carrying with it pebbles and dirt and a few fist-sized rocks. Erosion had hidden the boulder. Floods had uncovered it, hidden it, and uncovered it again. And though the trees had been raped from the earth by the white man, though they had trampled all over the chasm, they had missed it. The boulder was still here.
My feet, precariously perched in the mud, slid out from me, and I sat down hard, landing with a splat in a runnel of water. A roar of white water sounded nearby, running off Horseshoe Rock above, the runoff grown to a river in the rain. Leaves bowed down, and droplets still drummed, and creeks appeared that had been empty only moments ago. Long minutes passed. I leaned a shoulder against the white quartz stone. Lifted a hand to rest against it, my fingers splayed on the cool stone. It’s real. . . .
Rain raced over me, dribbled through my fingers on the quartz. I’d found it. I had found the place of my dream. The only thing I had of my past. The one thing that the voice that possessed me and I agreed upon. This rock.
What had happened here? How long ago?