His life was lived in shades of green and shards of black, accompanied always by a fresh, quiet aroma that he has never been able to place, and will never be able to erase from his memory. It was the wind in the fields after a long, hard day of work. It was the breeze over the river that lay just beyond his home in backwoods Tennessee. It was the dew in the moonlight that clung to each needle of each primordial pine, and it was the rain that found its way into the caves in slivered streams to wash away the blood in the darkness.

Emmett was the strongest of six siblings, nearly all of them from different mothers, as life in the country was never easy for women of childbearing age. He had never known his mother, nor had he truly known any human that had been worthy of the title. His life had always been gloriously free—in his father's opinion—of any unnecessary feminine influence. There was no room for weakness or sympathy in his arduous routine.

The workload never ceased for the five young brothers. From the time they were old enough to walk, they had been employed in the grueling, mundane tasks of farming life. When their work had been completed in the fields, there was a forest full of trees to level that stretched to Pennsylvania. There were animals to be tended to and others to be hunted—and of course there was the constant competition for their father's favor. It burned in all of them and drove them apart. In this, Emmett came out, more often then not, the winner. He lived for any challenge offered him. He had been raised to strive for the best…to reach for something more at all times.

But there was one thing more that he lived for…his sixth sibling, and his only sister. She was born ten years after him, and exactly eight minutes before the death of her mother. She instantly became the last feminine presence in the McCarthy home, and the thorn in their father's existence. She was a burden from birth to the younger brothers charged with her care, and not worth a second glance to the older ones. To Emmett, she was his only weakness and the only true happiness in his monotonous world from the first time he saw her peaceful face.

When she was old enough to keep up with him, she would follow him relentlessly through the fields and over the mountains, into the most dangerous terrain without a doubt in the world, and he would lift her over root and rock, until she grew tall enough to leap over them without help. She would assist him when she could, and when the task at hand proved too difficult, she would sit beside him as he worked and paint his world with her beautifully vivid tales.

She was a born storyteller. None of the siblings had been allowed any formal schooling. Their father considered such things as books and numbers a waste of time, and he deplored anything that required imagination. Her talent was considered worthless, and so her tales were spun well out of his earshot.

They were folkloric and mythical, centered around a carefree hero that she had affectionately christened Jonas. The tales would weave and twist into one another and he would find himself suddenly lost in his sister's well-constructed fiction, wishing for the legendary strength and freedom that she had bestowed upon her character. The pieces that he enjoyed the most were the traits that he had always associated with her. They bled into the story through her character--a contagious joy or an inexplicable goodness--things inside her that illuminated his days and made them distinguishable.

Emmett pushed himself to the limit every minute to please his father. He grew taller and stronger each exhausting day to bear the strain. He found himself often unable to find his own smile and unable to even remember what it felt like to laugh. In those times, Emmett would think silently of the friendly giant that his sister had created, and wish for his fairy-tale life.

It was his sister's deep, peaceful breathing that he woke to every morning. It was only her inexplicable laughter that could cheer him during the day. It was her whispered stories that he fell asleep to each night, and it was her sobbing screams that announced the death of their father one solemn, misty morning just before the frosts came. She had awoken unusually early—with the sun, which was rare for her. She found her father cold and dead in his bed. He had died in the night. Of what, no one would know. He was an old man, and they passed quickly in those times.

It all fell apart after that.

Emmett's father had been cruel at times...a slave driver to five sons, an uneducated tyrant to his only daughter, and utterly Machiavellian to the neighbors whose lands he bought out from under them without the slightest remorse, but he had always kept order among his sons. With order came production. With production came money. With money came land. With land came power, and power was all that mattered. The philosophy seemed so simple.

In the end, all of the power in the world could not stop his lands from being torn apart by the greed of five brothers. Emmett had always been the fiercest fighter, and the most favored among the sons, and so he maintained the greatest portion. His brothers seethed in secrecy from their tiny plots on the outskirts of what once had been their father's empire.

And suddenly Emmett was faced with a freedom that he had never believed imaginable. For as long as he had remembered, his days had been filled with endless, exhausting labor, and his nights with a dreamless delirium. It had been an unbreakable routine and an eternal struggle to be stronger…richer…greater, than everyone else around him, created by a man who could no longer make demands. He was seventeen years old and without orders for the first time in his life. Freedom was unfathomable.

He found himself spending more and more time away from his farm. It only reminded him of a responsibility that he had never wanted. He immersed himself in the nightlife of the mining towns that had sprung up all around, discovering the pleasures of alcohol and nightly combat. He enjoyed betting on his own strength, and he rarely lost.

Emmett's sister had fallen under his charge. She stayed at home when he wandered off for days and she worried more than any seven year old every should when he came home bloodied and bruised, and often too drunk to do more than stumble to his bed. He had lost interest in her tales of nobility and felicity, and he had all but forgotten Jonas, and even his creator in his quest to find his own piece of power. He seemed to believe that power could be achieved with a fist much quicker than with a plow.

By the time he came to his senses, it was nearly too late. He awoke one morning nearly two years later in the street of a town that he did not remember traveling to with his body bruised, his money gone, and his head screaming from the alcohol that had caused him to lose his first fight the night before. His muscles ached, but his mind was suddenly quite clear. He could not go on like this.

Emmett was only weeks away from losing his lands to the brothers that he had fought off in the beginning. They had been observing with growing anticipation as their strongest brother slowly squandered his father's inheritance, and now they were writhing in pleasure in their homes on the borders, waiting in the wings with their father's money to buy back his land as soon as it went on the auction block. Their father would have been proud.

Suddenly awakened to his harsh reality, and unwilling to allow his young sister to be forced to live as a slave again in the household of one of her other brothers, Emmett threw himself into rectifying his mistakes and saving what his reckless abandonment had put in jeopardy. He threw himself back into his work with a feverish determination. He spent his days salvaging what he could of the fields, and his nights in the forests, cutting timber and hunting. His sister followed him faithfully, overjoyed that he had finally come back to her. She sold the firewood and hides during the day as he worked failing fields, and she accompanied him each night further and further into the forests to find the next day's product.

It was a lost cause, and he knew it almost from the beginning. Nothing short of a miracle would save their lands from foreclosure, but Emmett persisted, fighting the exhaustion and the hopelessness by losing himself in his sister's stories once again. She had new plots now, and new characters from two years of near solitude, but her hero never changed. Jonas was always there to save the day…always there to take away the bleakness of his own days. Emmett pushed through, imagining himself as Jonas—saving his lands and finding his freedom in his family and not in a fight or a bottle. It all seemed so obvious in hindsight, with his body aching, his mind reeling, and his sister's forgiveness tinting her tales. It all seemed written in stone now. He should have become the carefree character that she loved so much. He should have been her hero. This illusion played over in his head night after night as they plunged deeper into the forests, out of their own land, and into their neighbors'.

It was this illusion that was playing in his mind when he stumbled upon the tiny black opening in the wall of stone that they had been following. They had been walking for some time, Emmett with a bundle of firewood burdening his stride and his sister with a string of small animals from the traps placed secretly on his brother's land.

He approached the entrance cautiously, letting the firewood fall behind him. Already, he noted the gamey scent that emanated from within and indicated the presence of a predator. He held his rifle at the ready, motioning for his sister to stay far back. She obeyed with unease. Slowly, very cautiously, Emmett entered into the crack. Only a fraction of sunlight shone into the small opening, but what he could make out directly in front of him caused his legs to give out. He fell to his knees. A cursed escaped his lips, loud enough to send his sister running for him.

The air was thick with the scent of some wild animal, but there was nothing to indicate that the animal still claimed the cave as its den. Still, he kept his rifle near as he crawled to the back of the cave, unable to regain his footing. It was speckled with the most beautiful color that he had seen in his twenty years of life—a radiant, reflective gold. Unable to believe it, he pulled out his hatchet and pushed it into an exposed vein of the strange metal. It gave in slightly to the blade. Emmett's heart leapt. He heard his sister's breath stop behind him. Gold. They'd found gold on his brother's land.

There was a muffled thump as his sister fainted.