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  • Writer's pictureJenalyn

The Stone Steps

Updated: Jul 3, 2020


The morning air was crisp and cool as Victoria stood at the bottom of the stone steps. A light fog embraced the entire mountain, just dense enough to muddle the light of the sun and cast the forest in muted shadow. Victoria took a deep breath and counted the steps. Only fifteen steps to get to the Sacred Tree. Shouldn't be too hard, right?


She shook her head. She couldn't let what she saw make her overconfident. Her older sister had warned her that the stone steps would not be as they seemed. "Each step will be much harder than the last," Becca had told her. "The trick is to keep pressing forward no matter how hard it is."


Victoria took another deep breath, filling her nose and lungs with fresh air and the smells of soil, moss, and mist. She let it out slowly, then looked back up at the tree. "I can do this," she said under her breath. "I have to do this." Licking her lips, she looked down and took a step. She froze, anticipating some sort of resistance. But nothing came. She let out her breath, not even realizing that she had been holding it.


"Well, that was easy." She looked back up at the tree, its verdant branches stretching toward the sky and its thick roots digging deep into the earth. "Each step will be harder than the last," Victoria reminded herself. Steeling herself, she took another step. Then another. Then another.


This was much easier than she had anticipated--almost too easy. She looked up from her feet to the tree, and her heart sank. Despite taking several steps, she was still standing on the very first stone step. She hadn't moved at all.


"Of course not," she murmured. She tried again to walk up the steps, this time going up six stone steps before stopping to check her position. Again, she had made no progress. Her frustration growing, she bolted up the stairs, not stopping until she had counted fifteen steps. But once again she looked up to find herself on the bottom step.


"What am I doing wrong?" she cried. She turned around and plopped down on her current step. Her fingers gripped the edge of the broken stone as she agonized over her apparent failure. Of course, she would fail at her test. She was always failing, never living up to her parents' expectations, never meeting Becca's seemingly perfect standards.


Maybe she should just walk away. She could always tell them she never really wanted to be a shapeshifter, that she hadn't realized it until she tried climbing the stone steps.

Even as the thought crossed her mind, a lump formed in her throat, tears threatened to fall, and she knew that she could never sell the lie. Becca would see through her in a heartbeat. And the thought of the disappointment on her parents' faces made her blood run cold.


No, she had to do this. Victoria rubbed at her eyes, wincing as she accidentally got dirt from the stone in her eye. She rubbed her eye on her shoulder, then stood up to face the stone steps again.


"The trick is to keep pressing forward no matter how hard it is," Becca had said. But Victoria had pressed on and hadn't gotten anywhere. Perhaps the test of the stone steps was different for her than it was for Becca. But what could she do differently? Obviously simply climbing the stairs wouldn't get her anywhere.


Victoria looked up at the Sacred Tree. She marveled at the way it both reached toward the sky and down into the depths of the earth at the same time. If only she could occupy two worlds the way it could. If only she could be both a shapeshifter and a regular teenager. But she could occupy two worlds--both the human world and the animal world--if she could only reach the tree.


A sense of longing spread from her chest all the way to her fingertips. She reached out to the tree, filled with a strong desire to feel the tree's coarse bark beneath her palm, to smell its bark and hear the rustling of the wind through its leaves.


Without warning, she realized that she was now standing on the top step, just a few paces away from the Sacred Tree. She whipped her head around and looked down the steps at the bottom where she had been standing only moments before. How had she gotten there? Had she really made progress when she was climbing and just not realized it? Or had she suddenly been transported from the bottom to the top?





Victoria turned her attention back to the Sacred Tree and suddenly it no longer mattered. She raced over to the tree with tears in her eyes, wrapping her arms around its narrow trunk. The coarse bark scratched at her cheek and pricked her bare arms, but she didn't care. She hugged it fiercely, so overcome by emotion that her eyes spilled over and her tears ran down the trunk and spattered in the dirt. Her heart felt full, ready to burst and, in an instant, she felt it explode.


The reverberations from her bursting heart shot from her center to the ends of her limbs, and she was overcome by the desire to spread her wings and fly. Letting go of the tree, Victoria tensed her muscles and took off, soaring higher and higher until she was above the trees. The Sacred Tree had heard her unspoken wish and given her access to both the earth and the sky.

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