The Cherokee called the Great Smoky Mountains Shaconage (shah-CON-ah-gay), "place of the blue smoke," and named the mountain haze Ahyv (ah-YUV), their word for mist.

Our folk myth takes place three hundred million years ago, when the cloud-topped peaks lay beneath the Iapetus Ocean, a prehistoric sea that preceded the Atlantic. The Appalachian Mountains had formed when the African and North American tectonic plates collided, thrusting the primordial seafloor upward.

This fated tale about the last mermaid of her lineage and a star-guided sailor begins as the ancient waters receded, and the veil between worlds was thin.