
Meet Ermione
Copyright 2018
Anticipated Publication in 2025
Ermione moves like a whisper through the underbrush, her sharp mind always strategic, always prepared. She knows the language of fear and mistrust—the way silence signals a hidden predator, the way a slight hesitation can mean certain death. But when she encounters the Big Feet humans, everything she understands shifts. These towering predators, she had been taught, are certain, dominant, powerful. Yet the one she calls the Two-Feet Deer carries the thick scent of fear—the kind she smells in prey just before the kill. Hidden among the ground litter and shrubs, Ermione watches as the Two-Feet Deer collapses under an invisible weight, trembling, and weak. This is not the fear she knows. This is something else.
Through Ermione’s eyes, fear is revealed for what it truly is: a tool—to sharpen, to guide, to protect. But in humans, it mutates, manifesting as control, anxiety, the illusion of safety. The Two-Feet Deer (Mariah’s mother) suffocates her daughter with overprotection, mistaking control for care. Mariah, caught between living with chronic illness and the fear of losing the battle for her independence, fights against her mother’s grip, widening the chasm between them. But when an unexpected close encounter forces the mother, daughter, and wild ermine into a day of uneasy proximity, it is Ermione’s primal understanding of fear—how it teaches movement, not paralysis, and how survival sometimes demands trust—that ultimately offers the Big Feet a new way forward.