Faterwall

She fanned out her arms and did a little dance as she wound her way along the narrow mountain trail, pretending, as she often had as a child, that the land fell away steeply on either side of her and her winged arms would at any moment lift her high into the air. A laugh bubbled up from her belly and she let it free. She would not allow the pain of the last few years to smother her any longer.

She lifted her chin to the sky, eyes closed, as the hot Colorado sun embraced her like one of her grandmother’s hand sewn quilts. The smell of sunbaked pine accompanied every breath, as welcome as those oven-warmed cookies with a thumb of homemade jam at their center she’d loved so much back then.

“Push your thumb right there,” the wind whispered in her ear.

“Now just a teaspoon of jam,” the trees added.

Her grandmother’s voice seemed to carry through the years to find her here, on this trail, high in the mountains where she belonged. A place she never should have left.

She drew a long breath, expanding her lungs as far as she could. The minerality of the granite bones of the mountains and of dirt baked so thoroughly it could practically be used to staunch the bleeding of an open wound were heavy on her tongue. She loved that taste.

The aroma of wildflowers wafted on the breeze, her heart pumping that essential sweetness to every cell of her body, nourishing her soul. It soothed like a balm, and she realized that, in a sense, staunching an open wound was exactly what this mountain, this hike, was doing.

She paused, hands akimbo, sweat trickling down her back and pooling between her breasts. It had been far too long since she’d lost herself in the Colorado wilderness. She’d left with some misguided fantasy, a dream of big houses and expensive dinners that had somehow wiggled its way into her mind. It was a dumb dream. Never really her own. Implanted by school, by movies, by friends. The chasm between then and now filled with a failed marriage, a dead child, and too many years squandered in the haze of empty vodka bottles and pinpricks in obscure places. Years of her life pumped out like blood from a fresh stab wound.

She took another breath, this time tasting the slight pressure of wing against air, the alert tilt of a furred ear, the flex of strong muscles under smooth skin, and she smiled at the wonder of it all. The familiarity. It fit like an old t-shirt, or the well-worn pages of her favorite book, curved where she curved and straight where she was straight.

She started back up the path, clouds of dirt puffed behind every step. Her boots scuffed on rock, deflected spines of cactus and the reaching fingers of scrub oak alike, carrying her further from the violence of her recent past and closer to the years that had come before. They were old friends, these boots. They remembered even as she had forgotten, and were now more than happy to remind her how to move… how to step… how to live.

Most people thought healing required some sort of moving forward, leaving the past far behind. But the stones knew when she’d last known the peace of a well-lived and well-loved life. For her, that meant narrow trails weaving through trees, mountains, and rivers. It meant high alpine lakes, sleeping with nothing but nylon between her and the velvet night–and solitude. These things led her back to her grandmother’s cabin, her scratchy laugh, and the memory of wholeness. Of how to be whole.

This particular trail wound twelve miles along a mountain stream to a waterfall near the top of some unnamed mountain. Plain brown US Forest Service signs punctuated her progress at regular intervals, their blocky white lettering reminding her of the remaining distance to her destination. Waterfall 10, followed sometime later with Waterfall 6.

As each sign came into view she had to resist the urge to kick them down. They were a distraction, an invasion of humanity in a place she’d come to avoid it. She’d expected something more like a game trail than a proper hiking trail. The trail hadn’t been on any modern trail map, and she hadn’t found even a whisper of it online. She’d discovered it in one of her grandmother’s old notebooks, grimoires she’d called them, always said with a wry smile, just a quick reference with the GPS coordinates, no notes, no comments on the condition of the trail or it’s difficulty.

Witchcraft jokes aside, her grandmother had kept meticulous notes over the course of her life. She documented every hike –trail or no trail. Every nook and cranny of these mountains was described somewhere in her notebooks–except this one. That oddity had immediately jumped off the page. Why was this hike different? What about it had made her grandmother decide to skip the journal entry? It was so unusual she’d immediately packed up a bag and headed off to find out.

She’d planned for a wilderness hike without a trail at all. At best she’d expected an overgrown path, mostly returned to nature, unmarked and relatively unspoiled. There had been no parking area to speak of, which she’d expected. But to her surprise and disappointment, the trail itself was well worn. A well-worn trail meant the mystery of the missing journal entry was no mystery at all. Very likely some locals kept it well maintained and had convinced her grandmother to keep it a closely guarded secret.

Her adventure had suddenly turned quite mundane, but locals kept only the coolest spots this secret, so she’d set out with anticipation. Despite the signs of civilization and use, today, at least, she could easily believe she was the only person out here. The trail wound in turn through silvery stands of Aspen, followed by darker green stands of pine, the trees untouched by the ravages of Pine Beetle now so common everywhere else. The buzz of hummingbirds and the hum of insects kept company with the steady thump of her steps. It was beautiful country. Her grandmother’s country.

She stopped and pulled out her water bottle as she left the trees and entered a broad meadow. Grass and wildflowers crowded both sides of the path and stretched off into the distance. Water seeped up through the ground creating small rivulets that leaked off toward a nearby stream, turning the otherwise dry earth to mud and filling the air with a moist lushness uncommon in the high alpine desert of Colorado.

A fire had chewed through here at some point in the distant past. Charred bones of trees jutted haphazardly through the thick cover of life that had since sprung up. It called to mind a quote she’d once read from Van Gogh, something about every act of creation starting with an act of destruction.

Fire had long been a part of the natural cycle of these mountains, killing off old growth forest, yes, but in so doing making way for a renewal that would otherwise be impossible. Flowers and grasses raised their heads to sunlight that had previously been gobbled up by the forest overhead. Young trees that had long slept in their shells suddenly were able to come to life and try in their own ways to reach the stars.

She stuffed the water bottle back into her pack and smiled at the riotous color around her. The regenerative power of nature was profoundly comforting. That so much life, such beauty, could spring from complete devastation was liberating. There could be no greater source of hope than seeing the Earth’s fecundity unhindered by doubt and unashamed of Her scars.

As she reached the end of the meadow, she discovered a number of tree stumps set up in a circle off to the left. She stepped off the trail, venturing into the tall grass as she headed toward them, curious. She could see they were logs that had been placed here, not the remaining stumps of living trees, and they were huge. Much bigger than any of the trees she’d seen along the path, which meant they were either very old or they’d been transported here from someplace else.

Shapes and symbols were carved deeply into the wood, exotic and strange, they curled in complex patterns that were like nothing she’d ever seen. She counted about twenty stumps in all, and they had clearly been here for quite some time. Vines twined up and around the stumps and lichens had taken up residence inside the carved shapes.

She wandered among them, running her fingers along the whirling patterns, wondering who had carved them and what they meant and how long it might have taken to complete them all. She thought it must have taken a lifetime for someone to carve such detail. It was a level of commitment and dedication unheard of in the era of fast information, fast food, and fast fashion and she longed to meet the artist.

Reluctantly she headed back toward the trail, musing that perhaps an entire community had been involved in the carving. She couldn’t decide which theory she preferred–a community of carvers working for common cause, or the lifetime dedication of a single carver. Both options left a stamp of warm admiration on her heart and she was glad the locals had held this so close, and happy that her grandmother had kept the secret as well. It was a gift, stumbling upon such a thing on an unmarked trail, and knowing that her grandmother must have stumbled upon it just the same made her feel closer than she had in a long time.

The trail rose into a sharp incline and her breaths came heavy and labored. The Aspens vanished and the pines thinned. The mountainside began crowding her, pushing her ever closer to the cliff as the trail narrowed. The top was close.

She inched around a tight curve, the rough stone scraping the skin of her arms as she hugged it close. On the far side she was greeted by a sign.

It was not the expected brown sign with blocky white letters, though. Instead it was another log, stood upright like those she’d seen in the meadow, but short at only a few feet high, and a girth that matched that of the trees around her. An arrow had been crudely carved into the bark, pointing to the left, and above it the word Faterwall had been carved. The trail she’d been following seemed to continue to the right, but another trail–equally worn–split off to the left.

The crudely carved signpost, and spelling error, was an oddity given the uniform US Park Service signs she’d seen up to that point, but it would hardly be the first-time hikers had taken it into their own hands to clarify a gap in signage and add an arrow toward a cool feature.

The trail off to the right continued climbing through the same ravine. It seemed likely it led to the top of the fall and was the official USFS sanctioned trail. The jog to the left was probably the result of decades of renegade hikers seeking a pool at the base of the fall for a cool dip after a long climb. The roughly carved signpost left for the slightly more adventurous who had made it up this far, by someone with a serious spelling challenge, or maybe someone who had been more than a little drunk.

The trail had so far been free of other hikers, and there was plenty of time left in the day to make it to the top of the falls.  She turned to the left and headed for the pool. She was hot, and a swim in an isolated mountain lake was just what she needed.

Ten minutes later she felt the distant rumble of falling water in her chest. As she walked the forest returned and thickened, the pines crowding in on the trail, their branches interlacing above her and the trail beneath her feet covered by a thick layer of needles and rotting cones.

Along the right side of the trail was a rock cairn, stacks of coins, sea shells, crystals, and other trinkets littering its base like offerings. She fished into her pocket for an offering of her own, offering a small token of appreciation and friendship to the faceless wanderers that had made it to this place before her and those that have yet to come this way. But as she leaned down to place her coin, she caught sight of an oddity.

Someone had tucked a strange sort of effigy against the far side of the cairn. It had the rough appearance of a doll, a couple bundles of twigs wrapped together with a scrap of cloth in such a manner to suggest a vaguely human shape. The fabric had faded with exposure and the pattern was no longer visible but she was pretty sure it had been blue.

She paused, coin pinched between two fingers and hovering just above the cairn. Leaving tokens as a sign of appreciation was a common practice amongst hikers. It was the nature lover’s equivalent of a positive review. An acknowledgment of something wonderful and beautiful and shared.

But she had never seen an effigy before. It was an odd thing to leave at a cairn like this. It seemed somehow too personal, like someone revealing too much during a gathering of strangers, leaving the other guests deeply uncomfortable and unsure of how to proceed. She lingered a moment, uncertain, before shrugging her shoulders and dropping her coin. She stood and continued on her way.

Cairns were stacked everywhere along the trail, some piled to the side or up on a nearby stone, others built up at the base of trees. A couple had been stacked right in the center of the trail. They all had offerings of some sort scattered around them, and some of them had the same sort of effigy as the first.  

These had as much variability as the tokens did. Some tied with shoelaces or straps from backpacks, some were made with large sticks, others of small twigs. Some seemed as if they had been placed with great care, perched carefully on a tree branch, while still others looked as if they’d been tossed away with little thought. Each one ignited her discomfort and curiosity. Who had left them, and why? She wondered if perhaps this was the real secret of this trail and not the carvings she’d found in the meadow far below. She wondered if she’d stumbled upon some equivalent of a burial ground, or a place of ceremony. She considered turning back but there was no indication that she was trespassing. Indeed, the Forest Service signs and the carved arrow indicated this was a public trail. Nothing indicated to her that she should leave, that she was trespassing. But the effigies were baffling.

The path darkened, the trees growing more tightly together, and goosebumps formed on her arms as the cool mist from the fall filled the air. She could feel the primordial vibration of the fall in every cell of her body. She hurried onward.

Water was a scarcity here, and most waterfalls in Colorado were small, a fan spread over a rock face or a thin veil of water falling to a pool below. This one was entirely different.

The cascade fell for over a hundred feet, crashing into the most bucolic mountain lake she had ever seen. Mist from the fall cloaked everything in a silvering haze, pine trees gathered like supplicants around the small lake, aspens offering up a shimmer of lime green and ghostly pale light as contrast. The trees were massive, bigger than anything she’d ever seen anywhere in Colorado. More the size of the renowned redwoods of California than the stumpy mountain pines normally found here. Flowers cloaked the forest floor in shades of pink, dark purple, and white. Mosses hung from the trees, dangling their fingers ever so delicately into the crystal water below while others hugged trunks and graced the rock faces. It was breathtaking.

She released a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. She lowered herself to her knees, overcome with awe. If ever a place like heaven had existed, surely it was this.

She understood, then, why her grandmother had written nothing about this place in her journals. This was a place that had to be felt in order to be seen. Nothing so crude as human language could capture the way her heart beat in sync with the thunder of the falls, the way her lungs became the trees crowding in around her, the way her soul floated just above the lake mingling with the mists.

She understood, too, the effigies so many had left behind. She knew that some part of her would stay here, living forever in this enchanted place.

 Nothing more than obscure references to this place had been written because this was not a place that could be described. It wasn’t a destination everyone who picked up a trail map could be guided to. It didn’t belong in the same world as internet searches and fast-food restaurants and jobs that forced people into a cube instead of a forest. It was a place to be discovered, stumbled upon by seekers. It was a place one had to be called to.

“If deities existed, old or new, here they would call home,” she breathed.

She climbed to her feet, shrugged her pack off her shoulders, and leaned it against the massive trunk of the nearest tree. She pulled off her boots, her pants, the rest of her clothes, and walked barefoot to the edge of the water, the bottoms of her feet tickled and cushioned by a thick carpet of moss.

The cool water was like fresh watermelon on a hot summer day. Or like honey sweetened iced tea after an afternoon working in the garden. Or like still warm almond cookies with a thumb of homemade raspberry jam fresh out of the oven. It was all of those things and none of them. It was something apart. Incomparable. Almost unbearable in its perfection.

She dove under, luxuriating in the feel of the water on her skin, of the tensing and pushing of her muscles as she swam to the center of the lake. The water felt like a salve, draining away the guilt, the self-loathing, even the grief that had hardened into a knot at the center of her chest.

She surfaced, pulling sweet air deeply into her lungs before rolling onto her back. She lost track of how long she floated there. It could have been minutes. It could have been hours.

With ears under water she could feel the fall, the vibration from the water transferring to her eardrums and from her eardrums to some primal core of her person. For the first time in her life she understood what it was to be truly and completely at peace.

A breeze washed across the surface of the lake, bringing her nipples to a point and the hair on her skin upright. She shifted forward, slowly treading water as she scanned the shoreline.

From somewhere in the distance a lone howl lifted, taken up quickly by another, then another, until she could no longer count the multitudes of voices in the sound. The skin of her arms pimpled and she could feel the thump in her chest as her heart raced.

She searched the shoreline, spinning quickly as she tried to see past the trees looming over her, trying to penetrate the shadows that seemed to have gathered there.

She had heard wolves; their voices were soulful and beautiful. This sound was neither.

The howl lowered in tone, deepening into a low groan that seemed to echo from one side of a vast forest to the other before settling into the molecules of the water of the lake. In it she heard an emptiness that rivaled the illimitable emptiness of space, a longing that filled her mind to the edges of her skull and the absolute limits of her imagination, a grief so deep the all-consuming despair at the loss of her daughter was a single grain of sand to all the sand that ever had existed or ever would exist through all of time.

She stilled, her eyes going vague and distant as her mind was gripped by a grief so deep it threatened to drown her. The refreshing coolness of the water grew clammy, the trees menaced from the shoreline, leaning toward her as if they wished to bind her and drag her beneath the surface.

She shook her head, forcing her eyes to focus and find the pack and clothes she’s so blithely kicked aside earlier.

A trick of the ravine she told herself. The narrowness, certainly it would play tricks with the wind.

 But she’d spent a lifetime in the wilds of Colorado. She’d been in hundreds of narrow ravines and valleys. There was nothing that could make a sound like that.

 She pushed the traitorous thought aside and pushed for the shore. She could worry about what it was later. It was time to leave.

She swam, but the shore grew no closer. She pushed harder against the weight of the small lake. She was fit and strong and was a good swimmer—she could swim across this lake a dozen times before feeling tired. But somehow the water had become colder, and her arms and legs were growing heavier. She was winded, her breath coming in short gasps, and her stomach churned in fear.

It is nothing. She thought again, chanting the words over and over as if they could wrap her in a circle of protection. But other thoughts seeped through the spaces between the words.

Something made that sound.

Something is holding you here, sapping your strength.

Is this what drowning feels like?

She shook her head once again, banishing the dark thoughts back to the reptilian portion of her brain that had spawned them. The water is no colder, you are not drowning. You simply let your attention wander.

Her grandmother had been here before her and she had clearly been just fine. The trails were well maintained, obviously people came and left again just fine.

She took several slow breaths, steadying her heart rate and her nerves. She focused on the shore. She could see her pack leaning just as she’d left it and she could see her clothes scattered on the shoreline. She kicked forward, eyes pinned to her pack, and felt herself moving, the shore coming a small bit closer with each thrust.

Another howl lifted into the air, much closer than the last one. A wind gusted through the clearing, whipping branches into a fury and raising small waves on the surface of the lake. The mist from the fall spun violently in the air. As the howl dropped into another desolate moan, a current wrapped itself around her and tugged.

She sucked a breath in panic, but it was carrying her across the lake, holding her safely at the surface. She could breathe, but she couldn’t direct her movement. She lunged one direction and then another, but no matter how hard she tried the current pulled her relentlessly toward the far shore. Away from her pack, away from her clothes, and away from the trail back home.

She could feel panic welling up in her chest. There was something holding her here, controlling her movement, forcing her toward something unimaginable. She thought again of her grandmother. Had this happened to her when she was here?

But in truth she had no idea if her grandmother had come to this lake or had simply continued up to the top of the fall. This trail may not even have existed then. Maybe it didn’t even exist now.

Perhaps I am dreaming. Or already dead.

But she knew it was real. All of it. The bucolic setting and the inhuman multitudes contained in that voice, and the current that held her snugged tightly in its grasp.

Nothing in her life had prepared her for something like this. Magic was not real. There were no such things as monsters. But she knew with cold certainty she was experiencing both now.

She felt the world around her shift into a new shape, a shape with magic and monsters and untold mysteries, and with this acceptance an odd sort of calm settled over her. She had wandered far in search of renewal, of a new life far from the drinking and the grief. She had found what she was looking for, as unlikely an unexpected as it might be.

She leaned back and relaxed her body completely, letting the current hold her and carry her as it wished. She had spent too many years living in fear, afraid to face up to her own mistakes, afraid to grieve her daughter, afraid to make herself right again.

Never again. She thought, and with no small amount of surprise she realized, this time, it was a statement of truth. She would face this, whatever it was, directly. No more running. No more hiding. She lifted her head and faced forward, watching the shoreline for an indication of what was to come.

As she drew close a shape detached itself from the shadow of the wood. At first glance it was appeared to be an elk. Tall and stately with the largest rack she’d ever seen. But the longer she studied the animal the more certain she became that it was a moose, a long trail of moss dangling from its mouth as it watched her approach. A cloud of mist engulfed the moose, but when it shifted clear again all that remained was a hare. Or is it a hawk?

Sand scraped her knees and the current released its grasp. She climbed to her feet and stood wide-eyed and dripping. The shape looked for a moment like a marmot, a white-tailed deer, a yellow finch, a blue jay. She stood less than ten feet away, she could see it clearly, and yet she couldn’t see it at all. She blinked. A woman stood in front of her.

Her mind spun in confusion and she stumbled in disorientation. She stretched a hand out blindly and leaned as her fingers touched the rough bark of a nearby tree.

“Forgive me,” she, it, said. “I find the human form…” She paused; head tilted to the left as if she were considering something. “… difficult.” The woman flickered and a black squirrel crouched where the woman had stood an instant before.

She had heard the words clearly enough, and every shape it had taken had been solid, clear, perfect in every detail. She had no doubt that were she to kneel and stroke the squirrel it would be as solid as any other. Her senses did not lie, but they could not be telling the truth either. Things that shifted shape did not exist, and if they did, they certainly didn’t speak. She opened her mouth to ask a question she’d not yet fully formed in her own mind, but the squirrel spoke first.

“You seek, but you are not a seeker. I smell doubt on you like a miasma, the disbelief in anything beyond yourself and others of your kind.”

The squirrel shifted to a black bear and sighed, lowering itself to the ground, reaching one paw forward to dabble in the water of the lake. “I grow tired of this era, of the empty narcissism of your kind. Mortals have long sought immortality, but it is not the gift it once was when all the earth is harnessed by the idolaters of humankind. I begin to see the particular gift of mortality.”

The bear reached out its second paw, tapping at the water with its claws like a pianist on their keys, and she found herself rendered speechless. Her head felt like a lightbulb an instant before it burns out. Too much information coming too fast. A shapeshifting creature waxing poetic about mortality and narcissists… She wavered between the world she had always known and this entirely strange new reality she found herself in. She didn’t know whether to run in fear or kneel in worship.

But she somehow felt neither was right. The creature was clearly not fond of people but it didn’t seem threatening. And while it was clearly something beyond human it didn’t seem to require devotion. It seemed like it simply wished to speak, and in that case, she had something she wished to say back.

“I found this place, didn’t I?”

She didn’t know what this creature was or what it wanted, but if there was one thing she did know, it was that she was a seeker. She’d spent her entire life searching. She didn’t know what she had sought, but that exploration had been her damnation. It was the crack that had allowed Seth into her life, the catalyst that had opened the door to her drug use and eventual abuse.

It was what had killed her daughter but refused to kill her.

There had been more challenge in her tone than she’d thought, and her belly quivered in dread at the response she might get in return. But the creature only laughed, an odd sound coming from a bear. A flicker and a mouse quivered where the bear had been. A blink and a mountain lion’s amber eyes stared back at her.

“You have no concept of what that word means. Your kind has shrunken in on itself, your souls have atrophied and withered, your concept of what is and what can be waning as your obsession with yourselves has waxed.”

The lion stood, stretching, claws cleaving the earth beneath its feet. She blinked and a coyote sat lightly before her.

“There is enough of a spark in a rare few of you to keep a few pockets such as this one, and for that I am grateful enough. We can expect nothing more until your cities have fallen and your bones have moldered.”

The creature’s words made no sense. Certainly most people were self-obsessed, she had always been, as had most people she had known. But civilization was growing, not shrinking in on itself, and she couldn’t see what any of that had to do with this place.

Her vision doubled, tripled, and then narrowed into clear focus. The creature wasn’t flickering between forms. It was all forms all at the same time. It was all there, every plant, every animal, every form of life that existed in these mountains, all there, together. It seemed to flicker between forms only because she couldn’t see something so… so all encompassing.

“Oh…” The word tumbled out of her carried on a soft exhale as a glimmer of understanding unfurled within her.

“Ah. Now you begin to see.” The voice was no longer singular, it was a multitude of voices, the combined tongue of all that lived and breathed in these mountains.

Her paralysis broke, her lungs drew a deep breath, and in it she tasted… She searched for the right word, something that could encompass all the flavors of these mountains, and came up empty. It was glorious in its complexity.

“You…” Words failed her. They were so tiny next to this being in front of her, next to all the life she, it, encompassed. “But you are not a god,” she stuttered out.

The being nodded a thousand heads. “We are not, though many have called us such over the millennia of our existence.”

The creature approached her on many thousands of legs and she quivered. For the first time in her life she understood the human tendency toward religion. It was, perhaps, the only way for the human brain to encompass what could not be contained, to comprehend the incomprehensible. Perhaps only now, in the age of particle physics and planetary science could brains as comparatively small as ours begin to grasp what stood before her–not a god in any sense of the word, but a living representation of life itself.

“You are…” she gestured all around her, at the trees, the lake, the mountains, as she struggled to find the words. “You are these mountains. The stones and trees, the dirt and the water, and all the creatures that live amongst them. They are all… you.”

The coyote nodded as it studied her. “A part of us, yes. But also separate from us. We stand apart, unique, as each of them is unique.”

“Does every place, is every place like you? Like this?”

“Not any longer,” the creature said. “Once there were many of us. More than you could count.”

The being circled her, trailing a claw, a fin, a tendril of green along her bared shoulders, across her chest, along her chin. It stopped in front of her, and she stared into the eyes of untold millions.

She stared into those other eyes, so different and yet so similar to her own, and she felt the infiniteness of evolution open before her. For the first time she truly considered what that unbroken line of life entailed, how deeply connected she was with every other form of life on this planet, how much they had shared across the eons.

“As your souls have atrophied and died, so have we. As you drain our aquifers, dam our rivers, ravage our forests, and poison our soils in service to your narcissism, we perish. As you muzzle, contain, and control, we die.

“There was a time when you were one of us. A part of us, along with all the others. You had such magic in you, so much potential. But you severed your umbilicus from all else long ago.

“This place… it is but a remnant. A shadow of what it once was.”

Her vision wavered as all the grief and despair she held walled up inside of her broke free. Tears spilled down her cheeks, dampening the ground at her feet. So much lost, so much suffering, and for what?

She fell to her knees, grief coating her skin like oil, guilt tightening her throat. The emptiness she’d always felt, the unknowable thing she sought… it was this. It had always been this. It was the nameless void at the center of every person she’d met. Some filled it with drugs, others with work, but precious few–perhaps none–dared recognize it for what it was.

Perhaps humanity couldn’t see it, couldn’t recognize it, or perhaps they couldn’t bear the consequences of the long line of choices that had severed their connection to the life around them and continued day after day, choice after choice.

“What have we done?” She cried out, her voice thick and choked.

She turned her eyes toward the enchanted lake, absorbing the unmarred beauty of it, trees that had been allowed to live beyond their adolescence, mosses and flowers allowed to grow where their seeds and spores fell, life permitted to thrive without boundary of pot or edging or property line.

She’d sensed the magic of this place when she’d first seen it, had realized why it had been in no modern trail book, map, or website, but the shallowness of that recognition was almost comical to what had been laid bare before her now.

She felt a pressure in her belly. She looked down to find a small green shoot had taken root in her belly button, pushing itself inside of her, connecting her to the tangled lives of the creature before her. She considered that perhaps she should feel fear, but she found she had no room for such a small human emotion. All she felt was a sense of returning, of coming home after a long and exhausting journey.

“You have forgotten us,” the voices murmured against her ear. “But we have never forgotten you.”

The trees sighed, their leaves dancing as if in a breeze, though the air around her remained still. The lake took on a golden hue, ripples shimmering across the surface as if the sun itself had dipped a finger in and given it a stir.

“Like all things must, we take what we need to survive, and survive we must. There are so few left.”

She could feel tendrils spreading through her, pushing beneath her skin, nudging into her stomach, her liver, her heart as it shadowed her own biology. There was no pain, only a pleasant pressure like that of a lover, a sense of fullness throbbing inside of her.

As the thought flitted through her mind she felt a nudge between her legs, and she opened fully before it, marveling that she had finally, finally, found what she’d long sought. A connection like that of mother to child, but to all things. A sense of belonging so complete no doubt could ever again find footing.

She understood, then, what was being asked of her and she accepted without hesitation.

As the being spoke, one voice began to separate itself from the multitudes. A gravelly voice that reminded her once again of warm almond cookies with a thumb of jam at their centers.

“We take you as an offering, to sustain us. But you will not be forgotten. You will live in us, and when the rein of your kind has come to an end you will help rebuild the world, fill it once again with many songs, many voices, to add life to every niche and corner of the world, as it once was.”

She felt like she was draining, her consciousness, that thing that had always been her falling slowly from the tiny body she’d spent the last thirty years inhabiting. A small part of her thought perhaps she should feel fear, that she should fight, run. But her larger self understood that part of herself lingered yet in separateness, in that tiny body. The rest of her had joined the multitudes, and in that, she understood how small and meaningless that life of aloneness had always been. How small and meaningless all human life was, every technological achievement, every paved road, every towering building, without this. Without a connection to all else.

“I give,” she said, pausing to fill her lungs once again. “I give myself freely.”

With those words something deep inside of her shifted, a door she’d never known existed opened, and inside, the tiniest sliver of green rested against the redness of her flesh.

The slow spread of the filaments of life paused, and she sensed surprise from the being. Then a single root, thinner than the finest hair, began forward again, pushing tentatively into that deep hidden spot to twine with the glimmer that rested there.

The trees around them stilled, the pond turned to glass, the waterfall silenced its endless roar, and everything seemed to lean in toward them as if wanting to see.

A shiver shook through her, small at first but growing until her entire body shook with the force of a newborn forest stretching and awakening in spring. She gasped as her body bulged with life, the twined filaments of green filling her with a passion beyond imagining. Waves of pleasure wracked her body as the multitudes of the being joined with her, the forest shaking with the force of their union.

“It has been so long since we have found another,” the voice whispered against her. “Perhaps the world is finally turning. Perhaps your kind is ready to return.”

She felt her mind slowly expanding, growing beyond the limits of her own small skull. She wondered, for a moment, if her skull might burst. But she felt no real fear of such a thing. She was being born into something entirely new, no longer limited or contained by that small body.

She felt the ghostly essence of other lives brushing against her. Shapes she’d seen but had never truly understood before. Now she saw clearly what it was to be a bird, a worm, or a mountain.

“Welcome, sisterbrother.”

She felt a deep throbbing coming from the earth, the scrabbling of almost infinite life in the earth beneath her feet, eating, reproducing, creating the soils that allowed other life to thrive. She forgot the limits of her own skin as her awareness bled into and spread through the ground below.

“You will live here, in this grotto, harboring all within you until the human cities crumble, until the bones of your lost brethren molder, and when the world once again welcomes us, you will raise these mountains anew.”

She was yanked to the side, a lurching separation that forced a final gasp from her mortal form. She cried out at the space of air between a strange new body and the vastness she had been only a moment before. But this was not the separation she had felt as a human. That connectedness with all this was still there, every sharp edge, every soft curl of feather or fur, the voices and shapes and smells of all of it.

She looked at the grotto around her with many thousands of eyes, tasted the earth, the air, the water with many thousands of mouths. She felt every shape of her new body with every possible type of skin and scale. She drew in a deep breath and could feel every creature of the mountain breathe with her.

For a moment her awareness split into an odd sort of duality, the experience of human senses overlaid with the vastness of her new awareness, and she stumbled in confusion. The creature, her sisterbrother, steadied her.

She remembered, distantly, the small body she had inhabited for a time and felt grateful that it had housed her, nourished her, and brought her to this place. She took on its form as best as she could remember it, so small it was in the vastness of all the lives of herself and considered the grandmother that had raised her, the daughter she had lost years before, and a single tear formed at the corner of her eye.

The tear fell, and where it touched the earth a tree sprouted. A Bristlecone pine stretched out new branches, lifting them into the sky where they would remain for five thousand years or more.

“Sister.” A voice spoke, reverberating the length of her new body. “Welcome.” The thousands of lives inside of her paused in greeting, in recognition of their connection with her, and she reflected the recognition of their individuality back to them and felt whole.