The Leaf

Chapter 9
So Nifty waited. One afternoon, restless from staring at screens and drawings, Nifty left the cabin for a long walk.
He followed familiar paths through the woods without thinking much about where he was going. The forest had become ordinary to him.
Not home. But familiar.
That was why the leaf stopped him. It lay alone beside the trail.
Nifty walked past it. Then stopped.
Slowly, he turned around. The leaf was broad and dark, with thin violet veins running from its stem to the edges.
Nifty stared. He knew that leaf.
He had seen thousands of them. Just not here.
He picked it up. The texture was right.
The shape was right. Even the faint smell that clung to it was right.
"No." Nifty looked around. Nothing else seemed unusual.
He told himself there had to be plants in the human world that looked similar. There were millions of things here he had never seen.
It was a leaf. That was all.
Nifty carried it with him anyway. He found the stone less than half a mile later.
This time there was no walking past it. Nifty saw the purple line immediately.
The stone was small enough to fit in his palm, dark gray with a thin mineral vein cutting through it like frozen lightning. Nifty knelt.
His stomach tightened. There were stones like this near home.
Not stones that looked similar. These stones.
He picked it up and turned it over. The underside carried the same tiny silver flecks he remembered seeing as a child.
Nifty for a moment just simply stood there.
The leaf could have been coincidence. The stone was harder to explain.
Then suddenly a sound moved through the trees behind him. Nifty spun around.
Nothing was there, then Another sound came from farther away.
He did not wait around for a third.
Nifty , turned and ran. Branches struck his arms as he pushed through the woods.
He did not slow until the cabin appeared between the trees.