Martin County, Indiana—1863
The forest was on fire.
Not with flames, but with light—pale, unnatural light that spilled between the blackened trunks of ancient sycamores and maples. The air itself hummed, the ground pulsed as though the bones of the earth were shifting beneath their feet.
They worked in silence, the five of them—three men, two women—faces streaked with dirt, blood, and something older than either. The sky above the ridgeline boiled violet and gold, an unnatural aurora that had no place in southern Indiana.
The youngest—a boy no older than twelve—watched wide-eyed as the last of the great stones was pushed into place. He clutched a carved talisman in both hands, fingers raw from hours of labor. Beside him, an elder Lenape woman traced symbols into the wet earth with a twisted branch. Her lips moved soundlessly, chanting words in a tongue so old even she no longer knew their meaning.
The others—settlers in ragged Union blues and homespun—had dropped to their knees, exhausted and pale. One of them, a bearded man with a splintered rifle slung over his back, muttered, “We shouldn't have come here.”
The elder finished her work. Slowly, deliberately, she rose and took the boy’s trembling hands in her own. She pressed the talisman—stone carved with five intersecting marks—into the soft clay at the center of the ring of stones.
The wind died.
The light flickered once. Twice. Then vanished, as if it had never been.
Only darkness remained, and the scent of damp earth and burning leaves.
The elder whispered in the boy’s ear, her voice barely more than breath:
“Some things are not meant to be remembered.”
And with that, they buried the mark.
And with it, the warning.
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