The Chosen One

The Yew Tree, The Owl Girl, The Swanmaid, and the Faun

Star brought the fourwheeler to a halt and shut off the engine.

She stared at the forbidding forest before her. Blood pounded in her eardrums, beating a rhythm of fear through her veins. I won't be afraid, she thought. The answer to my past lies in that wood. I'm going in and I'm going to find out who I am.

And to think only a few days before life had seemed almost normal. Almost. It's hard to feel normal when you're the only weird one in your graduating class.

Star couldn't remember a day when she hadn't felt weird, alone, an outcast. Even as a toddler she remembered looking in the mirror, at her dusky Indian features--the coal-black hair and tan skin, and seeing how brightly her grey eyes stood out. But not nearly so much as the silvery, almost white mark on her forehead did. And she would turn and look at her mother, a blond, fair-skinned woman and wonder why they looked so very different. That was the day her mother had explained what being adopted meant.

"But you are our daughter," she said. "You are Native American, I am French and English and who knows what. But we're both American, and we're both family. Blood doesn't make a family. Love and sacrifice make a family. That is why you are just as much my daughter as if I had birthed you. Because I love you so much."

She had never felt unloved. Just different. Unique. But when she started school she had learned that being different isn't always a good thing. Sometimes, she'd learned, others will be scared of you and avoid you, just because they don't understand you.

It had been the same wherever she went--in church, which her family attended regularly, in town at the store, or the bank or wherever.

It was only in the woods, alone that she ever felt comfortable.

But she'd never come here, to the dark woods in the far corners of her parents large farm in the Ozarks hills. Papa forbid her to go anywhere near it, and Mama had told her there were strange Indian legends about the place. Ghosts walked there, people disappeared. Nonsense, Papa called it, but said there were caves and sinkholes back in that wilderness and he didn't want her wondering in them and getting lost or hurt.

So she had listened--more because the ghost stories frightened her. Maybe that was what had given her the terrible nightmares and dreams that had reaccurred in her sleep for as long as she could remember.

There was always a voice in the dreams. A calm, reassuring voice. A mellow, male baritone, she described it in her journal. A nice voice. But it was always crying out for help. Come find me. Come find me. I need you...

And then the flashes would start. Bits and pieces of scenes that made no sense but that always haunted her nights. A blazing white unicorn fighting a flaming red dragon. An Indian girl running through the forbidden forest and then falling into a hole in the earth, swirling down, down into a dark abyss. And there was always something about a woman warrior with fiery auburn hair standing on the prow of a ship and pointing through a sea mist at a sliver of land on the far sunset horizon. And there was usually a battle scene--Elvish armies whirling bolts of lightning and fire around, mists and light flashing out trees, people turning into various animal shapes, and always, a man holding up a mirror in the midst of the battle. Star was eaten with curiousity over that mirror. It showed up in every dream, but she never saw why the man was using it. It drove her crazy.

She was trying to write a story about her dream, but she still couldn't make sense out of it. She was in fact, seriously stuck with a bad case of writers block. Maybe because she had been so stressed out over graduation and arguing with her mother over why she didn't want to go to college. "I want to be a writer and a writer doesn't need college to sell books," she'd say. And then mother would say writers took years to earn a living and she'd be better off getting a teaching degree to support herself until such time as the writing took off and...