Her chest ached, and she wasn’t sure if it was wonder or fear. Now, hearing it again, her breath stuttered. The room seemed to tilt. Maybe it was the lingering concussion, or maybe it was something older, something that lived beneath her pulse. Were the ancestors reaching for me again? Have I been deaf to them all this time?
The room blurred for a heartbeat, the voices around her fading into the hum of the sea outside. She steadied herself with a slow inhale, fingers curling in her lap.
Maybe this was how the old ones spoke now, through songs, through strangers, through moments that refused to let her look away.
She braced herself as Than’s fingers found the first chord, his voice, deep, compelling, and beautiful, and made the night shudder with the sound.
The first line rolled through the room like a slow tide.
The wind carries dust, the river carries stars,
Than began to play, the melody low and sure. The song was familiar and new all at once, Chay’s words about balance, the space between breath and belonging.
the earth holds both and calls it home.
We walk between them,
learning to breathe in rhythm.
Somewhere in the second verse, another sound joined, a deep hum that grew into rhythm. Bear’s voice, low and rough, rose in a gorgeous chant. The vibration ran through the floorboards, through her skin, through the hollowness she’d carried since the crash.
Her fingers tightened in the silk of his hair, her body tuning into him, her spirit with his, her heart beating in time to his homage. His spirit answered the song the way her grandmother’s had once answered the drum.
One heart, many hands?—
the circle doesn’t end.
When you stumble, I steady,
when I falter, you rise.
This is Wolakota.
Not peace, but belonging.
Not silence, but balance.
We walk the same road,
side by side.
The chant wove around Than’s melody until she couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. The air felt thick with it, warm, alive.
Even Fly and Shamrock had gone still. Fly’s head was bowed, eyes closed. Shamrock stared at the floor, his grin gone, the sound pulling something reverent out of him neither of them could name.
Bailee’s chest ached. The sound was the same one she’d heard in her dreams, the word Wolakota rising like breath. Maybe the ancestors hadn’t been reaching for her at all. Maybe they’d been waiting for her to stop running long enough to hear them.
The sky leans down to meet the earth,
the wind finds its home in the grass.
Between them is where we stand,
learning how to listen.
Her throat tightened. She thought of the star quilt folded away in its cedar chest, the one her grandmother had given her, believing she’d carry on the medicine line. She hadn’t looked at it in years. It lay buried in the dark, like her heart, like everything she’d turned from.
But tonight, with that single word filling the air, she could almost feel the quilt’s weight again, the stitched stars warming under her fingers, calling her home.
