Sixty-Thousand Years of Solitude

The canyon had devoured the trail completely.

Bobbie Jean’s fingers scraped against bare sandstone where the metal markers should have been bolted. Gone. Not just the markers—even the drill holes in the sandstone were smooth, as if no hand of iron had ever touched it.

Her chest constricted. Not from the altitude, but from something colder creeping up her spine.

This was impossible. She’d hiked this loop a dozen times since the divorce. She knew every switchback, every cairn. Trails didn’t just disappear.

At fifty-two, her body was already staging a revolt; knees grinding with each step, lungs burning in the thin air, sweat pooling in the hollow of her throat.

She’d taken up hiking to fill the silence her marriage and daughter Bailey left behind, to exhaust herself enough to sleep without hearing the echo of her own breathing in the empty house. But this—this felt like punishment.

The sun plunged toward the horizon with unnatural speed, painting the sky the color of old blood. Her water had run out hours ago. When the sound of running water finally reached her, she stumbled toward it like a woman possessed.

She crashed through the willows, already tasting salvation on her cracked lips—

And froze.

Firelight flickered across the river. Human shapes moved around the flames.

Thank God. Other hikers. A search party, maybe. She opened her mouth to call out, then stopped as her eyes adjusted to the dancing light.

The figures were wrong.

Too broad. Too heavy. Moving with a rolling gait that made her primitive brain scream warnings. When one turned toward the fire, silhouetted against the flames, her breath died in her throat.

The skull was massive. The brow ridge jutted like a shelf over deep-set eyes. The nose was wide, flaring. The jaw thrust forward in a way that belonged in museums, behind glass, labeled with neat little placards about evolutionary dead ends.

No.

Her mind recoiled. Heat stroke. Dehydration. Had to be.

The rational explanations tumbled over each other, desperate. Historical reenactors. Method actors preparing for some caveman movie. Exceptionally ugly backpackers with serious dental problems.

But the details kept accumulating like evidence in a trial she didn’t want to win.

The shelters weren’t crude lean-tos but sophisticated structures of bone and hide, smoke rising through complex ventilation systems. Spear points glinted around the fire—not primitive clubs but elegant, deadly tools that spoke of minds capable of engineering, of art.

Of music.

The melody wound through the air like smoke, passed from throat to throat in harmonies that made her chest ache. She’d read that they couldn’t speak properly, that their vocal cords were too crude for language.

But this wasn’t grunting or growling. This was song, complex and haunting and impossibly beautiful—a music that knew no loneliness, where every voice wove into something larger than itself. Exactly what she’d been starved of.

This isn’t real. This can’t be real.

But the smoke coated her tongue with the taste of charred bone and sizzling fat, stinging her eyes with tears that tasted of salt and terror. The river gurgled over stones at her feet.

Across the water, a child with matted red hair and gentle eyes laughed at something its mother whispered, and the sound was a ghost of Bailey at five years old.

Bobbie Jean’s legs gave out. She collapsed into the reeds, shaking, as her rational mind and her delusional reality went to war. Every scientific principle she’d ever learned screamed that this was fantasy, hallucination, the dying dream of a lost hiker’s brain.

But her heart—her treacherous, lonely heart—whispered something far more terrifying:

What if it’s not?

Above, the constellations were wrong. Not just unfamiliar, but fundamentally altered. The stars of Orion’s belt were there, but their spacing was different, as if a great cosmic hand had shifted them slightly. The handle of the Big Dipper was no longer a graceful curve, but a series of staggered, almost broken, lines.

She searched for the North Star, a point she had navigated by her entire life, but found only a dark, empty patch of sky where Polaris should have been. This was not just a different place; it was a different time.

The encampment across the river might as well have been the only light left in existence.

The fire’s glow carved a fragile sphere from the absolute dark—a defiant blaze raging against the void that had swallowed the world whole.

Beyond that circle, nothing. The river vanished into black water a few feet from shore, its voice the only proof it hadn’t simply ceased to exist. Above, stars hung so close and sharp they seemed ready to fall like knives into her upturned face.

Bobbie Jean’s stomach twisted into itself, hunger clawing through the panic with animal desperation. The smell of roasted marrow drifted across the water—rich, fatty, real—but underneath lurked something wilder. The musk of unwashed bodies, the metallic tang of fresh blood, the green rot of river weeds decomposing at her knees.

Her body betrayed her completely. Every instinct screamed contradictions.

Go to them—but her body wouldn’t bend toward the water.

Run—but her knees had grown roots into the mud.

Call out—but her throat sealed shut. She was trapped between two equally desperate commands, her nervous system at war with itself.

Then the forest exploded.

The ground beneath her vibrated with each thundering step. She could smell it now—rank fur and predator breath, the ammonia stench of territorial marking.

Her primitive brain screamed move even as her muscles locked in terror. Her lungs seized. The sound was close, so close, bearing down on her hiding place with the inevitability of an avalanche.

She folded into herself, hands clamped over her mouth to trap the scream building in her throat. Whatever stalked these primordial woods would find her in seconds. Tear her apart. Drag her into that hungry darkness—

The crashing veered away, swallowed by the night as suddenly as it had come.

Bobbie Jean lay gasping in the reeds, tears cutting tracks through the dirt on her face. When she finally lifted her head, the fire still burned. The ancestors still lived.

Watch, something whispered in her mind. Just watch.

The circle pulsed with rhythms older than civilization. Voices threaded together in harmonies that reached inside her chest and squeezed.

A bone flute sang thin and sweet above the deeper thrumming of hide drums—vibrations that traveled through the mud, up through her pressed palms, into her chest cavity until her heart tried to match their hypnotic rhythm.

Hands painted stories in the air—gestures so vivid she could almost taste their meaning. Children darted between the adults like sparks, shrieking with pure joy until gentle hands gathered them close, feeding them morsels of food passed mouth to mouth.

The darkness beyond pressed closer. Bobbie Jean could feel it watching, waiting. Patient as death.

Just inside the fire’s reach—warmth. Safety. Connection. But when the wind shifted, it brought the night’s true scent of the metallic promise of snow, the yawning emptiness of spaces too vast for human comprehension, the particular silence that meant apex predators were watching from the dark

The rhythm shifted as children were coaxed toward the shelters, led into lamplit openings beneath roofs of mammoth bone and carefully stitched hide.

The adult circle tightened. A hollowed gourd passed from hand to hand, and laughter grew thick and wine-warm. Music quickened—drums racing hearts, flutes chasing breath, voices rising like prayer.

They leaned into each other without shame or hesitation. Shoulders touched. Fingers intertwined. An elderly woman was lifted by younger hands, carried to her bed with such tenderness that Bobbie Jean’s chest cracked open with longing.

Around the fire, couples drew closer—foreheads pressing, breath mixing, bodies swaying as one shadow in the flickering light.

When had anyone last touched her with such care? When had she last felt part of something larger than her own hollow breathing?

Bobbie Jean’s hunger became a living thing, gnawing through muscle and bone. Her lips cracked when she tried to wet them. Her body shook with cold and exhaustion and a loneliness so complete it had its own gravity.

Across the rushing expanse of river, the fire burned on—a lighthouse in an ocean of night that had no place for her kind.

But God, how she wanted to swim toward that light.

The fire was dying. She could see it—the flames settling lower, the circle beginning to break apart. Whatever window existed for contact was closing.

In ten minutes, maybe five, they’d bank the coals and disappear into their shelters. She’d be alone again with the hungry dark and her impossible choice: die slowly in the reeds, or risk everything on a single step toward the firelight. Panic coursed wildly through her veins.

The fire roared back to life as an elder stoked it, and she watched the group stumble drunkenly into their shelters. Only one figure remained as a sentinel against the vast, hungry dark.

He was young, built like violence distilled into human form. Muscles rolled beneath skin weathered by seasons no modern man could survive, carved not by gyms but by the daily business of staying alive.

His blade moved against bone with surgical precision, each stroke a meditation born of ten thousand identical nights. When branches snapped in the distance, his hand twitched toward the spear—but nothing emerged from the black.

Then the canyon screamed.

A yowl shattered the quiet. Some great cat announcing its presence to the night. Another cry answered, piercing and alien, the death-song of something Bobbie Jean had no name for.

Birds exploded skyward in panicked clouds, their wings beating thunder against the darkness before the forest swallowed even their cries.

Silence.

Complete. Suffocating. As if the world had stopped breathing.

Minutes crawled past like wounded things. Then—slowly, tentatively—the night began to exhale. Insects resumed their electric chorus, so loud her ears throbbed. Nocturnal birds called in ghostly harmonies. A lone howl drifted from the canyon’s throat, answered by voices she prayed belonged to nothing with teeth.

Cold seeped into her bones like liquid mercury. Her body contracted against the mud, seeking warmth that didn’t exist. Hunger, thirst, and exhaustion wove together into a single rope of agony, squeezing her chest until each breath came shallow and sharp. Her throat had sealed shut—no saliva left to swallow.

Snap.

A twig broke somewhere close. Too close.

Every muscle in her body screamed move, hide, run. But she’d long become stone, prey frozen in the killing moment.

Across the safety of fire, the guard rose from the overturned tree in one fluid motion, uncoiling like smoke given form.

His gaze swept the darkness. Not toward her, but past her, scanning the treeline with practiced alertness.

Yet in her oxygen-starved, terror-drunk state, it felt like those wide eyes were boring straight through her ribs. Her mind, desperate for connection in this foreign place, conjured meaning from shadows.

He sees me. He knows.

But he was only doing what guards had done for millennia—watching for real threats in a world full of them.

In the space between one heartbeat and the next, she felt seen—not by him, but by the night itself, by history, by the weight of sixty thousand years pressing down on her hiding place.

Her panicked brain transformed his casual vigilance into cosmic recognition, his routine sweep of the forest into acknowledgment of her unprecedented presence.

Her heartbeat thundered so loud she was certain the entire canyon could hear it. The forest leaned closer, listening. Between them, the rising embers pulsed like dying stars, the only light left in a darkness vast enough to devour civilizations.

Another crack from the brush behind her. A yelp. Rustling. Then that terrible, endless quiet that meant death had visited someone else tonight.

She shivered. Tears continued carving clean tracks through the grime on her cheeks. Her stomach clenched with hollow pain. Her mouth worked soundlessly. Her body begged to move, to run, to do something—

But she could not.

He did not move either. He simply watched, patient as stone, as time itself.

And then—

Snap.

The world fractured. Sound collapsed. Her vision tunneled to a pinpoint of dying firelight before expanding into a darkness absolute enough to swallow reality itself.

Her body crumpled in the reeds, a forgotten relic left on an altar of mud and time, waiting for an ancestor who might, against all odds, recognize her as one of their own.