Curiosity → Discovery → Awe
The world before civilization knew her footsteps.
Wenh moved through the primordial forest as dawn broke, mist threading between ancient trees like breath made visible. At sixteen, she was narrow-shouldered and watchful, with eyes too intense for comfort and hair that refused any attempt at order. Around her neck hung a pendant that caught the weak morning light and transformed it—a translucent green stone that seemed to glow from within, as if it remembered being born from fire and violence in the sky.
Moldavite. Tektite glass formed when a meteor struck the earth with such force it melted stone and flung the molten droplets skyward. Most who found such fragments saw only pretty rocks. Wenh knew better. She had been there when it fell.
She knelt now at the base of a massive oak, examining the mushrooms that grew in its shadow. Not food mushrooms—these were the dangerous kind, the ones that could kill or transform, and transformation was simply death's more interesting cousin. Her fingers traced their spiral caps, and without thinking, she sketched the same pattern in the dirt beside them. Spirals within spirals. Patterns within patterns.
The forest breathed around her—really breathed, as if the trees and earth and growing things formed a single organism drawing air into invisible lungs. She felt it in her bones, this breathing. Everything connected. Everything speaking a language older than words.
She stood, shouldering her gathering basket. The medicine pouches at her belt were made from predator leather—bear hide that still carried the scent of the creature who'd worn it first. Inside: dried mushrooms, roots, herbs that could heal or harm depending on dose and intention. The line between medicine and poison was thinner than most people wanted to believe.
Ahead through the trees, she could hear them. Voices. Many voices, speaking the different sounds of their different peoples.
The Great Rest awaited.
The gathering place emerged from the forest like something dreamed into being by the land itself. A natural amphitheater carved by wind and water over millennia, ringed by cliffs where caves opened like dark mouths in the stone. In the center stood pillars of rock—massive T-shaped monuments carved with animals Wenh's grandmother said had walked these lands before humans learned to stand upright. Lions with teeth like daggers. Mammoths that shook the earth. Bears tall as trees.
Around the pillars sprawled temporary camps, perhaps two or three hundred people from tribes scattered across distances it would take moons to walk. Different hide patterns, different tool styles, different sounds for the same basic truths. A baby's cry sounded the same in any tongue, as did laughter, fear, grief. The rest was decoration.
At the heart of it all, the sacred fire burned. Always burning, tended by the priest tribe who lived here permanently—the deposited ones, the injured and different and those who'd chosen to stay. They wore markings that identified them across the gathered peoples: we belong to this place, not to any single tribe. We are the keepers.
Wenh entered the gathering area and felt the attention shift toward her like wind changing direction. Whispers rippled through the camps—tone without words, meaning without language. She understood perfectly: Too young. Presumptuous. Who does she think she is?
Near the fire sat the elders, and among them, the priest she would have to convince: a man weathered by six decades of seasons, his face a geography of wrinkles that mapped every winter survived. He looked up as she approached, and his expression said what his mouth did not: This should be interesting.
Wenh set down her basket. Opened it so the elders could see her offering: fresh herbs that wouldn't be found again until the growing season returned, dried mushrooms carefully prepared, roots harvested at the dark of the moon when their medicine ran strongest. And beneath these, wrapped in leaves, the preparation she'd spent three days making. The tea that would change everything.
The elder priest examined her offerings with hands that had probably forgotten how to be gentle. He lifted the mushrooms, sniffed them, set them down. Touched the roots, nodded slightly. Then his eyes found hers and held.
She met his gaze. Did not look away. Did not lower her eyes as custom demanded from the young.
After a long moment, he nodded. Not warmly. But acceptance nonetheless.
In her temporary shelter, Wenh ground mushrooms with a stone mortar her grandmother had given her, adding water from a hide vessel she'd filled at the spring behind the caves. Her hands shook slightly as she worked. Not from fear—or not only from fear. From the enormity of what she was about to attempt.
A woman appeared at the shelter's entrance, one of Wenh's tribesmates who'd made the journey with her. Concern creased her face as she watched Wenh prepare the tea. She made a gesture: Are you sure?
Wenh nodded. I'm sure.
The woman embraced her, brief and fierce, then left without further protest. They'd known each other since childhood. If Wenh said she was sure, she was sure, even when sure meant walking into the dark forest alone.
Wenh sat with the finished tea, watching the surface shimmer with oils that caught the light. Three days ago, she'd had no intention of offering this to the tribe. It had been for her alone—a medicine woman's experiment, dangerous and solitary. But then the pattern had revealed itself, spiraling out across her memories like the mushroom caps she'd sketched in the dirt, and she'd understood: some truths couldn't be told. They had to be experienced.
She took a small sip. Just enough to remember what awaited on the other side. Then she sealed the vessel and stood.
The afternoon sun slanted low through the trees as she walked to the cave entrance.
The tribe gathered in a semicircle before the cave wall, and the wall itself was the whole history of this place made visible. Geometric symbols covered the stone—glyphs that had accumulated over more generations than anyone could count. Some crisp and fresh, cut into the rock within the last season. Others so faded they were more shadow than mark, whispers of patterns enacted before anyone living had been born.
The drums began. Simple rhythm, heartbeat steady. Three-hole flutes joined them, bone instruments that sang like wind through hollow reeds. The sound wasn't music exactly—it was the beginning of something, the opening of a door that led away from ordinary time.
Wenh stepped forward from the crowd.
The reactions came like weather patterns she could read in people's bodies. Some nodded, encouraging. Others shook their heads—too young, too young. The elders watched with varying degrees of skepticism. And there, in the crowd, a young man perhaps three winters younger than Wenh watched with unusual intensity. Something in his eyes said he recognized something in her, though they'd never met.
She would remember that face. Winters from now, when he stood where she stood now and told stories about goats that no one else would understand, she would grin at him with recognition and validation. But that was for the future. Now, she had her own pattern to enact.
The elder priest spoke. Wenh didn't understand his specific words—he spoke the sounds of his people, and she spoke the sounds of hers. But tone carried meaning deeper than language. He was saying: This is unusual. You are young. But the ritual is sacred. We will see what we will see.
He gestured to the wall.
Wenh approached, hand trembling as it reached toward the stone. She touched a specific set of glyphs—spirals radiating outward, points of discovery, arcs rising like breath or smoke. The moment her fingers made contact, the music shifted. The melody became hers, as if the instruments had been waiting for this particular touch to know what to play.
She closed her eyes. Traced the glyph slowly, feeling the cold stone against her fingertip, the grooves carved by whoever had first marked this pattern. How long ago? Before her grandmother's grandmother? Before anyone's memory?
The tribe watched in silence broken only by the drums and flutes.
Wenh's mind opened.
In that space between waking and dreaming where medicine plants take you, three objects appeared before her: the moldavite pendant warm against her chest, the predator's tooth in the pouch at her belt, and the sealed vessel of mushroom tea she would soon share. They spun slowly in the dark, then aligned into the pattern she'd traced on the stone. The pattern that had structured her life without her knowing it until three weeks ago, when the mushroom medicine had shown her how to see.
She began to make the sounds of her people—not words but tones that conveyed meaning through rhythm and emotion rather than semantics. A kind of singing that wasn't quite song. The tribe leaned forward, following the thread of her voice into the first story.
The Eclipse
Eight winters in, Wenh had been playing in the forest with two others: her childhood friend, a boy who climbed trees better than anyone, and her little sister who had a laugh like water over stones. The day had been ordinary until it wasn't.
The sky began to darken though the sun stood at its zenith.
Animals reacted before humans did. Birds stopped their songs mid-phrase. Deer stood frozen in the clearings, heads lifted, sensing something wrong in the fundamental order of things. The forest held its breath.
Young Wenh's friend grabbed her arm, pointing at the sun. They shouldn't look directly—everyone knew that—but how could they not? The moon was eating the light, taking bites until only a ring of fire remained.
In the unnatural twilight, her little sister started to cry. Not from fear exactly, but from the sheer wrongness of day becoming night. Wenh held her close as the shadows grew strange and directionless.
Then the meteor came.
A shriek across the sky, bright even against the eclipsed sun. It burned green and terrible, trailing fire as it fell, and when it struck the earth somewhere in the forest's depths, the impact shook the ground beneath their feet.
Curiosity warred with fear. Curiosity won.
Wenh left her crying sister with the other children and ran toward the impact site, her friend close behind. They found it in a clearing where the meteor had punched through the canopy—a crater still smoking, rocks scattered in a pattern radiating from the center like the spirals Wenh would later trace in dirt.
And there, among the shattered earth and burned vegetation: fragments of sky-stone. Most were dull grey, cooling slag. But one piece glowed with internal light, green as new leaves in spring but brighter, stranger. Glass made from stone made from violence made from the marriage of earth and sky.
Young Wenh picked it up. Still warm. The size of her thumb. It pulsed with a light that had nothing to do with the fire that made it—this was the stone's own inner radiance, as if it remembered being a star.
Her friend found a fragment too, but his was ordinary grey. They compared them in the strange eclipse light, and Wenh understood even then that she'd found something precious. Magic, though she had no word for it yet.
When they returned to the other children, the eclipse was ending. The moon releasing the sun bite by bite. Light returning to the world.
Wenh had kept the moldavite. Wore it always. And every time she touched it, she felt that day again—the terror and wonder combined, the darkness at noon, the gift that fell from heaven to earth.
Curiosity leading to discovery leading to awe.
In the cave, present-moment Wenh touched the pendant at her neck. The green stone caught the firelight, and watchers in the tribe murmured. They knew this story—some had heard it, some had seen the pendant, some had been there that day twenty miles away when the sky threw stones. The elder priest's skepticism had shifted to something closer to interest.
Wenh continued her tonal narration, hands moving in the gesture-language her people used to amplify meaning. The music shifted with her, drums and flutes following the emotional arc into the second story.
The Predator
Four winters ago, when Wenh was hovering in that space between child and woman, she'd gone tracking with a group of teenagers. They were hunting deer, moving through rocky terrain where game animals came to lick the salt deposits. Good hunting grounds. Dangerous hunting grounds.
They heard it before they saw it: growling, pained and desperate.
Through the rocks they glimpsed the source—a massive predator, bear or great cat, it was hard to tell from the distance. The animal was injured, favoring one side, its face swollen and distorted.
The other teenagers bolted. Frantic gestures: Run! Are you insane? Run!
But Wenh stayed.
Hidden behind rocks, she watched. The predator was dying—she could see it in how it moved, how it panted, how it lay down between failed attempts to hunt. Something was deeply wrong.
Curiosity held her still while fear screamed at her to follow her friends.
Over the following days, she returned. Always at a safe distance. She brought water in a hide vessel and left it where the predator could find it. Brought meat scraps from her family's kills. Each day the predator drank and ate what she left. Each day she came a little closer.
Until the day she could see what was wrong: a broken tooth, snapped off at a cruel angle, the gums infected and swollen. Festering. Killing the animal slowly.
The predator lay down, exhausted, dying. This was the moment. Either she could help or she should leave it to die in peace.
Wenh approached with herbs the elder medicine woman had taught her to use—though never for this purpose. The predator growled but didn't move. Didn't run. Maybe too weak. Maybe understanding, somehow, that she meant to help.
Her hand closed on the broken tooth fragment.
The world reduced to breathing—hers and the animal's. The warmth of its breath on her arm. The texture of the tooth under her fingers. The knowledge that one swipe of its paw would end her life.
She pulled.
The tooth fragment came free. Blood flowed hot over her hand. The predator roared and Wenh scrambled backward, certain she'd made a fatal miscalculation.
But the animal only shook its head, blood flying in droplets that caught the sunlight. It didn't chase her.
She approached again. Slowly. Packed the wound with herbs the way she'd been taught—yarrow to stop bleeding, honey to prevent infection, willow bark for pain.
The predator allowed it. Allowed her hands in its mouth, allowed the medicine, allowed the touch of something that should have been prey.
Days later, the wound had healed. The predator was strong again, could have returned to its territory. But when Wenh approached the rocks where she'd first found it, the animal was still there. Waiting. Watching.
She sat nearby. Extended her hand. Touched fur that held both softness and the potential for violence.
The teenagers who'd fled that first day watched from a distance, unable to comprehend what they were seeing. Among them, the same boy who'd shared the eclipse—her childhood friend. He shook his head in wonder and something like fear.
Wenh took a tooth that had fallen naturally, a shed claw. The predator didn't object. She kept these in her medicine pouch, next to the herbs that had saved a life that shouldn't have been saved.
Curiosity leading to discovery leading to awe.
In the cave, Wenh produced the tooth from her pouch. Held it high so the tribe could see. Gasps rippled through the gathering. They knew what this meant—what animal had worn this tooth, what it meant that she still lived to show it.
One of the teenagers from that memory stood in the crowd now, nineteen winters in, and nodded confirmation. I was there. I saw this happen. I don't understand it, but I saw it.
The elder priest leaned forward. His expression had moved beyond interest into something approaching belief.
The music shifted again, preparing for the final story.
The Medicine
Three weeks ago, Wenh had attended a cave game. Not as participant but as witness, standing in the crowd as someone else traced glyphs and told stories. She couldn't remember now who had stood in her place—the details didn't matter. What mattered was the moment during the ritual when recognition had bloomed in her chest like light.
That pattern. I know that pattern. I've lived that pattern.
After the ritual, as the tribe dispersed and the fire burned lower, Wenh had sought out the elder medicine woman who'd taught her the herbs, who'd shown her how to see the medicine in plants that others thought were simply weeds. The old woman had agreed to walk with her to the sacred grove where the most dangerous plants grew.
"The predator mushrooms," Wenh had said, using the gesture-language to make her meaning clear. "The ones that kill or transform."
The medicine woman's face had grown stern. "Both are dangerous. Both are death in different forms. You are too young for such medicine."
But she'd shown Wenh anyway. Perhaps because she recognized something in her student. Perhaps because some knowledge can't be withheld once the student is ready to learn it.
The mushrooms grew where dangerous animals denned—as if they fed on fear itself. They had caps the color of dried blood, stems that bruised blue when touched. Beautiful and deadly.
"Never whole," the medicine woman had warned. "A piece no bigger than your smallest fingernail. And even then, only when the question is worth risking the answer."
Wenh had prepared the tea in solitude three nights later. Microdosing carefully, measuring by touch and instinct the amount that would open doors without shattering the person who walked through them.
She had drunk. Had waited.
And the world had transformed.
Not hallucination—she could tell the difference, had experimented enough to know true vision from mere fantasy. This was pattern revelation. The mushroom medicine showed her what had been there all along, hidden in the architecture of her experiences.
She saw her three memories simultaneously: the eclipse, the predator, this very moment. They aligned. Overlapped. Became one story told in three different contexts.
Curiosity (the darkening sky, the injured animal, the dangerous plants) led to discovery (the moldavite, the healing, the vision) led to awe (understanding, connection, revelation).
The same pattern. The same emotional arc. The same shape to fundamentally different experiences.
And more: if she could see this pattern in her own life, she could teach others to see patterns in theirs. The glyphs on the cave wall weren't decorative—they were a language for experiences that had no words. Abstract shapes that held specific meanings. Keys to unlock recognition.
She decided then, in the aftermath of the mushroom vision with the world still vibrating abnormally: she would request the cave game. Would stand before the tribe and offer her pattern for validation.
Even knowing she was the youngest ever to attempt it. Even knowing the elders would doubt. The pattern demanded it.
Wenh finished the third story and stood in silence before the cave wall. The tribe was utterly still. Even the drums and flutes had quieted to nothing.
Three stories. Three different times, places, circumstances. Same pattern woven through them all.
The elder priest rose. Approached her slowly, studying her face with those ancient eyes that had seen more patterns enacted than she had winters in her life. He looked to the tribe.
His tone when he spoke carried the weight of ritual, of decision: What say you? Has she lived the pattern? Do you witness it?
The tribe responded. Not in words but in sound—a collective affirmation that rose and fell like breathing, like waves, like wind through the trees. Recognition. Validation.
The friend from the eclipse stood, showing his meteor fragment—grey stone, ordinary, no inner light. Then gesturing to Wenh's moldavite with something like awe and envy combined. I was there when it fell. She found the magic one.
A teenager from the predator memory stood. I was there. I saw her sit with death and survive.
The elder medicine woman rose, ancient and knowing. I taught her the herbs. I warned her about the mushrooms. She chose wisdom over safety.
One by one, the witnesses validated what she'd told. The pattern was real. The experiences were true. The arc from curiosity to discovery to awe existed outside her imagination, confirmed by those who'd been present for the journey.
The elder priest nodded. Stepped aside. Gestured to the wall.
Wenh approached with a sharp stone tool. Found a space near the glyphs she'd traced with her fingers. With careful, deliberate strokes, she carved her mark—a notch, a tally, a permanent record.
This pattern was enacted. This pattern was witnessed. This pattern is real.
The drums and flutes returned, building to a crescendo that seemed to shake the stones themselves.
But Wenh wasn't finished.
She'd prepared something beyond the ritual. Something unprecedented.
From her basket she drew the sealed vessel containing the rest of the mushroom tea. The crowd's murmur turned to confused muttering as she held it high. The elder priest's eyes narrowed. What is this?
Wenh's gesture was clear and challenging: Share with me. Experience what I experienced. Know the pattern from the inside.
This had never been done before. The ritual was ancient and sacred, but it was also conservative. Structured. You told your stories, the tribe witnessed, you marked the wall, everyone went home. No one had ever offered to share the consciousness-altering medicine itself during the sacred ceremony.
The elder priest hesitated. This was dangerous. Revolutionary. It could be sacrilege.
But the ritual was about truth. About pattern transmission. About finding ways to help others see what the pattern-seers saw.
If the medicine helped her see the pattern, might it not help others see it too?
He extended his hand.
Wenh poured a careful measure into a wooden cup. The priest drank, his face impassive. Then Wenh moved through the gathered tribe, pouring small amounts for those who chose to partake. Not everyone did—many refused, suspicious or afraid. But enough drank. Enough opened themselves to the experience.
They sat together as the medicine took hold. No one spoke. The fire crackled and the stars wheeled overhead and the cave mouth yawned dark behind them.
And in the silence, with consciousness shifted just slightly off the normal axis, something happened. Wenh could see it in their faces—the moment when understanding bloomed. The pattern wasn't just her story. It was everyone's story, manifesting in different forms. The eclipse could be any moment of wonder. The predator could be any danger faced and overcome. The medicine could be any revelation that changed everything.
They were seeing it. Actually seeing it.
The elder priest's stern face softened into something like wonder. He looked at Wenh with new eyes—not skepticism now, but recognition. She wasn't just young and presumptuous. She was a bridge between the pattern and the people who needed to learn to recognize it.
As the night deepened and the medicine wore off, the tribe began to disperse to their camps. They walked differently—more slowly, more thoughtfully, as if the ground beneath their feet had become precious or fragile. Some stopped to touch the cave wall, fingers tracing glyphs they'd seen a hundred times but understood now for the first time.
Wenh sat alone by the fire, exhausted and exhilarated. The moldavite at her neck caught the firelight, green and glowing. The predator's tooth in her pouch felt warm against her hip. The empty vessel that had held the mushroom tea sat beside her, and she wondered if she should feel guilty for what she'd done.
But she didn't. The pattern had demanded it. And the pattern was never wrong.
"That was well done."
She looked up. The young man who'd watched her with such intensity earlier now stood at the edge of the firelight. Perhaps thirteen or fourteen winters in, with the kind of eyes that saw too much and couldn't pretend otherwise.
"You saw something," Wenh said. Not a question.
He nodded. Sat without asking permission. "Goats," he said simply.
"Goats?"
"I think like them. Try to see what they see. My brother thinks I'm mad." He said it matter-of-factly, without shame or self-pity. Just truth.
Wenh felt something shift in her chest. Recognition flowing both ways. She smiled—not the polite smile of social interaction but something fiercer and more genuine. The grin that would become her signature in winters to come.
"They probably thought I was mad too," she said. "Sitting with a predator. Eating mushrooms that could kill me. Being sixteen and thinking I could teach elders about patterns."
"But you were right."
"So will you be. About the goats. Whatever you're seeing."
He looked at her with naked gratitude, and she understood in that moment what her role would be. Not just to see patterns in her own life, but to recognize when others saw them too. To validate the weird ones, the outsiders, the people who befriended what they shouldn't and saw what no one else could see.
The medicine woman's path wasn't just about herbs and healing. It was about this: sitting by the fire with someone who needed to know they weren't alone in their strangeness.
"Seven winters," she told him. "When you're ready. Come back and tell your goat stories. I'll be here. I'll understand."
He nodded and slipped away into the dark between camps.
Wenh sat by the dying fire until dawn, watching the stars wheel in their ancient patterns overhead. The moldavite pendant pulsed with its inner light—sky-gift, star-stone, reminder that wonder could fall from heaven at any moment if you were brave enough to run toward the impact site instead of away.
Curiosity, she thought. Then discovery. Then awe.
The pattern would repeat in a thousand different forms across a thousand different lives. But always the same essential shape. Always the same arc from question to answer to revelation.
She would spend the rest of her life teaching others to see it.
Starting now.