Excerpt
Once upon a time...

The Harbor Witch gasped in her sleep. The dream she was having was a uniquely strange dream in which, although deep in sleep, her conscious mind was completely aware of the dream, and she had no choice but to watch its sequences unfold before her mind's eye as if she were watching a singularly personal tableau.
She awoke with a start, her eyes darting about the shadowy interior of her stone-and-mortar cottage. The revelation she had seen in her vivid dream shocking her, causing her heart to pound and perspiration to glisten on her forehead and upper lip. The lucid dream had been nothing less than an epiphany; a psychic foretelling of her future; of her destiny!

Scrambling quickly from her humble bed--naught but a large flour sack stuffed with dried herbs and flowers--she withdrew an age-worn, suede pouch from beneath her pillow. The pouch held twelve smoothly polished stones; some of them appearing to be common river stones with iridescent shades of blue and green running through them, others were semi-precious jewels; a small emerald, two pieces of polished jade, an amethyst and a small, round topaz. She had purloined these special stones from her grandmother; stones so ancient, even she did not know their true age. To the casual eye, they looked to be merely a handful of brightly-colored stones, but, to her, these stones were unique and extremely powerful; these stones were Mumble Stones; these stones spoke to her.

Hurrying over to what served her as a table--an old, weather-beaten hatch cover, resting on two wooden crates--she eagerly opened the drawstring on the pouch and, upending it, let the stones fall into the palm of her right hand. Whispering the special words that would awaken the stones, she covered them with her left hand and then pressed her hands firmly together, warming them. When she felt the stones began to pulse gently against her palms, she turned her hands and then spread them, allowing the stones to tumble onto the table.

She stared down at the stones, whispering to them, listening to what they whispered back to her, her eyes widening with excitement. Yes, the message was there--the stones promised her youth, beauty, wealth--they promised it all! She was unable to contain her elation--there was no doubt; the stones did not lie; the stones bore out her dream---in every detail! This would, indeed, be her future! This was ordained to be her destiny!

All that needed to be done now---, she thought with grim resolve as she turned from the table and hastened to an old trunk resting in a corner of the cluttered room; the trunk that held her special magic. ---was to make it happen!

Thus begins a chain of events that you would never expect or believe!