The Stone from Shiloh

The stone was warm when Grandfather gave it to me. Warm like it had been sitting in sunlight, except we were in his study and the curtains were drawn against the Alabama heat.

"You'll need this at that school," he said. His hands shook as he pressed it into my palm. Parkinson's had been eating at him for three years. "More than I do now."

It was river rock. Smooth and gray and ordinary-looking. But I could feel it humming against my skin. Dense with something that made my teeth ache.

"Shiloh," he said. "April 1862. I found it in the peach orchard after the second day."

I knew better than to ask what a boy from Alabama had been doing at Shiloh in the first place. Some family stories stayed buried.

The first time I used it was three weeks into my first year at Mudwick.

Professor Callahan had us practicing basic draws in the training room. Simple stuff. Borrow a little focus from the accumulated study in the walls. Push through a mental block. Nothing dramatic.

But I couldn't do it. Everyone else was pulling something from the room and I just stood there like an idiot, feeling nothing, being nothing, while Callahan's disappointment settled over me like a wet blanket.

I reached into my pocket. Touched the stone.

Courage flooded through me—older and hotter than anything I'd felt before, completely sure of itself. I drew from the training room walls like I'd been doing it my whole life. Callahan actually smiled.

After class I went back to my room and cried for an hour. I couldn't explain why.

The dreams started that night.

I was running through an orchard. Peach trees in bloom, petals falling like snow, and underneath them bodies. So many bodies. Blue coats and gray coats and some with no coats at all, just boys in their shirtsleeves who'd never go home.

A man was screaming somewhere to my left. Raw sound without words. The kind of noise that comes out when something gets taken from you that you'll never get back.

I woke up tasting copper. Blood that wasn't mine.

"Bleed-through," my roommate Clara said when I told her. She was a second-year, knew things I didn't. "You're pulling too hard from the token. Taking memories along with the saturation."

"How do I stop it?"

"Draw slower. Or find a different token." She shrugged. "Some people just run hot. You might be one of them."

I didn't want to be one of them. I wanted to be normal. Wanted to use Grandfather's gift without inheriting his nightmares.

That weekend I tried practicing without the stone. Went to the library where generations of students had studied and focused and pushed through difficult problems. Tried to draw from that instead.

Nothing. The walls were saturated with learning but I couldn't touch it. Like pressing my hand against glass and watching what I needed shimmer just out of reach.

I pulled out the stone. Courage came rushing in.

That night I dreamed I was sawing through a man's leg while he bit down on a leather strap and prayed.

Professor Odom taught Token Theory on Tuesday afternoons. Dry stuff mostly. Classifications and categories. But she'd been practicing for forty years and sometimes she'd say things that mattered.

"Tokens aren't batteries," she said one day. "They're relationships. The saturation inside them came from somewhere. From someone. When you draw from a token, you're not just taking. You're connecting."

After class I waited until everyone else had left.

"My grandfather gave me a battlefield token," I said. "Shiloh. When I use it I get memories that aren't mine."

Odom looked at me for a long moment. She had the kind of face that had seen too much to be surprised by anything.

"Whose memories?"

"I don't know. Soldiers. A surgeon maybe."

"Are they interfering with your work?"

"No. They help. The courage helps. But then at night—"

"You dream what they lived."

I nodded.

Odom sat on the edge of her desk. Outside, students were crossing the quad, laughing at something, living their ordinary magical lives.

"You have three choices," she said. "Stop using the token entirely. Your natural abilities will develop eventually, just slower. Keep using it and accept the dreams as part of the cost. Or try to give something back."

"Give something back?"

"Contributing. You know the theory. Saturation flows both ways." She paused. "When you draw courage from that stone, you're borrowing from men who died scared. Men who never got to finish being brave. If you contribute your own experiences to the token, you change the relationship. It becomes a conversation instead of a taking."

"How?"

"That's the hard part. You have to find something worth giving."

I tried three times that month.

The first time I held the stone and thought about the scariest thing I'd ever done. Telling my mother I could feel things other people couldn't. The way her face went still and strange before she called Grandfather.

The stone stayed cold. Whatever I was offering, it wasn't enough.

The second time I thought about coming to Mudwick. Leaving home. Being the only girl from my county who could do what I could do, surrounded by students whose families had been practicing for generations.

Still cold.

The third time I stopped thinking. I just held the stone and let myself feel everything. The fear of failing. The fear of succeeding and becoming something my family wouldn't recognize. The smaller fears underneath those. That I wasn't special. That I was too special. That either way I'd end up alone.

The stone warmed in my hand. Not from courage this time. From something else. Recognition maybe.

That night I dreamed of the peach orchard again. But this time the screaming man turned and looked at me. He was young. Younger than me. A private with dirt on his face and terror in his eyes.

"You came back," he said.

"I didn't mean to."

"Nobody means to." He looked down at his hands. They were covered in someone else's blood. "I keep trying to save them. Every night I try. It never works."

"I know."

"Do you?"

I sat down next to him in the grass, between two bodies that used to be people. The peach blossoms kept falling.

"I'm scared too," I said. "All the time. I'm scared I'm not good enough. Scared I'll let everyone down."

"That's a stupid thing to be scared of."

"Probably."

"This is worse." He gestured at the carnage around us. "This is so much worse than failing a test or disappointing your grandfather."

"I know."

"Then why are you telling me?"

I didn't have an answer. We sat there together for a while, the dead boy and me, while the battle sounds faded and the orchard grew quiet.

"I don't know your name," I said finally.

"Thomas. Thomas Reilly. Ninth Illinois Infantry." He almost smiled. "I was going to be a teacher. After."

"I'm Ruth."

"Ruth." He said it like he was trying to remember how names worked. "You should go back now, Ruth. Don't stay here too long. People who stay too long forget they have somewhere else to be."

I woke up with tears on my face. The stone was warm in my hand, pressed against my chest where I'd fallen asleep holding it.

Something had changed. I could feel it. The courage was still there when I drew from the token, but it wasn't just taking anymore. Thomas Reilly had been scared too. Had died scared, probably, in that bloody orchard. But he'd done what needed doing anyway.

That's what courage actually is. Not the absence of fear. The presence of fear and the choice to move forward regardless.

I used the stone in Callahan's class that week. Drew slower, like Clara suggested. Let the warmth come gradually instead of demanding it all at once.

The draw worked. The memories stayed manageable. And when I slept, Thomas sat with me in the orchard and told me about the farm in Illinois, about his sister who could sing, about the girl he'd hoped to marry if the war ever ended.

I told him about Mudwick. About the magic he'd somehow become part of. About how his courage had been helping students for sixty years without anyone knowing his name.

"That's something," he said. "That's really something."

It was. It really was.