A Forever Unrooting of Jade and Hickory (The Rooted Realm #1)

Prologue

My haunted feet guided me toward the old hickory again. The worn down trail etched in their memory night after night. It didn’t matter to me then why it called. Because when the hickory wanted me there, I would be—without question.

For that reason, just as my feet knew their repeated destination every night since the roots first started calling, my now seventeen-year-old heart felt certain that if the trees were to have a muse, it would be me.

Whether it was a whisper of shuffled leaves, a bewitching embrace from their outreaching limbs waiting to be climbed, or a distant memory from the smell of their earthy roots beckoning me to come closer.

I always would, even if I didn’t then know why.

Each type of tree pulled me inward through whispered promises carried in the evening breeze, filling me with completely unapologetic feelings. For all woods spoke to me, that much is true. And they spoke of a time when I had known them better.

Surely some form of subtle inside joke, knowing how easily they could lure me with their expansive limbs that reached to the sky and their deep roots that weaved toward the core of the earth.

But that beaten path told the reality, because of all the trees that called my name, it was the hickory that had the strongest pull.

In my youth, I would often find myself rooted at the base of that old hickory tree, being just off the path along the woods of our old family estate.

But there was something about that hickory that made it stand out among the rest. An urgent tug at my core reached deep within me to make my blood hum with curiosity. With a need to be near it.

Its claw-like roots stretched down the hill, like it might get up and walk right to me. I thought without a doubt that it wanted to. That as much as I was haunting its strong limbs with my presence every night, I knew the true haunting was reversed.

Within its exposed roots were gaping moss covered holes that seemed they could open up and just swallow me whole into a portal to a world unseen. Secretly, I often thought, I would welcome that idea.

It was a tree so tall and out of place. Its limbs stretched to the heavens, but seemed to then bend down like prison bars, caging in what was found below. For me, the branches offered an unseen protection, much like a warm embrace.

I was a prisoner of my own doing, but I welcomed its warden. A safe haven that urged me there at every waking moment. Some unknown calling of invisible music singing my name through the ever-changing breezes of the seasons.

Only the hickory knows your desires; it seemed to speak in my mind. I didn’t know then that these subtle urgings to the hickory were part of something deeper. Built from a legacy I had no part in creating, but that had everything to do with me.

At the base of the tree, a large root burst out and sat there like a jagged finger. A perfect sitting nook. While the other side held a root, that almost seemed to wrap around the whole of the tree. In that spot is where I would spend most of my time.

I lay there in a misshapen circle that if I looked too hard, I swear I could see a glimpse of a sparkle of a life once lived.

Because I had lived it. Or, as strange as it may sound, I could see a tall form in the distance, always watching from the depths of something sea foam hued.

Because he always had his eyes on me. At other times, I would hear a shimmer of a whisper that seemed just for me. Because it was.

What I didn’t know then was that, in those depths, I had lived many lives before—in this world and his—because hickory wasn’t just some tree with bark my heart ached to trail my fingers along.

No, there was a man beneath its roots that tethered my soul to his.

Not even a man, but something more. Something ancient.

That old hickory tree is where my story began in this life. And while it started promisingly with love and lust bursting at the seams with the one who remains tied to my destiny through the realms beneath the trees, it ends quite the opposite. And it ends that way in every life he finds me.