At first there was only the sound of her own footsteps, the slow grind of boot against grit. The canyon received the noise and diminished it, folding it into its own layered silence until she could almost believe she was walking without weight at all, slipping along a seam between times.
The humming in her chest did not settle, but it changed. It spread. No longer a point, it was a thin field laid through her bones, a low, sustained note that had nothing to do with her voice and everything to do with the fact of her being here, now, in this cut of earth.
Listen, the river had said.
She had thought that meant listening to it. To the shiver of current, the pulse of flow. But as she moved deeper, the canyon gently correcting the angle of her path, she realized she was hearing other things, too.
There was the rock itself, a slow, almost inaudible ticking—as if grains of sand far within it were shifting fractionally, reconsidering their loyalties. There was the sky, white and bright above the split of stone, its blue thinned by height until it became more idea than color.
And under all of that, the almost-familiar resonance of something she kept wanting to call her name, though it never quite formed the syllables.
She walked.
The path narrowed, then opened. The canyon walls leaned together in places, close enough that she could skim her fingers along both sides at once, left hand trailing ancient sediment, right hand brushing newer fractures, fresh breaks. Flecks of mica caught the light like trapped stars; lichen made soft, pale maps where no one had walked for a very long time.
Her humming met the space and shifted in answer, the way a note changes when sung into a hollow bowl. Sometimes it rose, thin as wire. Sometimes it sank, a throb at the base of her skull. She found herself adjusting to it unconsciously: slowing when it slowed, pausing when it stumbled, breathing deeper when it widened and steadied.
It was not guidance, exactly. More like call and response. More like learning to speak a language that had no words, only pressure and pattern.
The wind came back, worrying at the canyon like a tongue at a missing tooth. It brought with it that same layered scent—pine, dust, distant smoke—but stronger now, as if the outside world were leaning close, watching.
"Is this still listening?" she asked, not entirely sure whom she addressed.
The canyon made no comment. But there was a faint change ahead: a thinning of shadow, a hint of green where there had been only stone.
Mara's steps quickened. For a moment she let herself imagine an ordinary explanation. A stand of scrub trees, perhaps, clawing their roots into some improbable pocket of soil. A trickle of water seeping from the rock. Signs of simple life that did not require her to be anything but a woman who had wandered too far and would, eventually, wander back.
The turn ahead was sharper than the rest. As she approached it, the humming slid higher, tightening until it pricked behind her eyes. She put her hand against the wall again, more to steady herself than to speak. The rock was cooler here, the sense of remembered softness nearer to the surface, as though the stone had been recently asked a difficult question and had not yet decided how to answer.
"Everything has known how to let go," she had said.
The wall under her palm pulsed once, a slow, almost grudging acknowledgment.
She exhaled and stepped around the bend.
The canyon ended in a bowl of light.
Not open sky—she was not free of the walls yet—but the space widened and rose, a sudden amphitheater cut into the stone. A ledge circled its upper rim like a narrow balcony, and from that ledge, descending all the way to the bowl's floor, poured something that looked, at first, like water.
Not water. It did not fall. It grew.
A column of not-light, not-dark—something dense and shifting, textured like smoke but holding a shape. It rose from a point on the ground where the stone had cracked in a starburst pattern, each fracture filled with a sheen that reminded her of oil on a river's surface: colorless and yet full of color both.
The humming in her chest surged in recognition so fierce she staggered.
"Stop," she whispered, to herself, to it, she didn't know. But the word had no authority here. The vibration rushed outward from her ribs, answering that column as if someone had struck a tuning fork in the center of her.
The column shivered.
Its surface rippled, not outward but inward, folding and unfolding in ways that made her eyes ache. Threads of it reached toward the walls, toward the heights, testing invisible limits and recoiling, as if there were boundaries even to whatever this was.
Mara stood at the edge of the bowl, breath thin.
"This is the opening," she said, though she had never seen it before, though no one had told her what it would look like. She knew it in the same way she knew that the humming was hers: not by proof, but by the sudden absence of doubt.
The air here was different. Denser, and yet it scented like the wind had—pine and smoke and that sweet, sharp nettle tang—but distilled, as if someone had boiled the world down and caught the steam.
She took a step forward. The bowl's slope was smooth rock, worn by something other than water, polished by generations of absence. Her boots found no purchase; she half-slid, half-walked down, the humming rotating inside her like a slow, turning wheel.
At the base, the column's presence was almost physical. It pressed against her skin without touching it, pushing at her thoughts, not unkindly but relentlessly, like someone searching for a door.
The crack in the rock from which it rose was no wider than her palm. Yet what came out of it was vast. She had the sudden, dizzy impression that if she put her hand over that fissure, she would feel not stone beneath, but distance—miles of it, years of it, stacked and spinning.
Her knees wanted to fold. She stayed standing.
"You asked me to listen," she said. "I am listening."
The column's surface stuttered. A thin filament peeled away from it, drifting toward her like a strand of spider silk. She fought the instinct to flinch. It paused a hand's breadth from her sternum, quivering.
The humming in her chest rose to meet it.
In the moment before they touched, she thought of the river's voice saying then listen as if the listening were only the first half of a sentence. As if the second half would require something she had not yet named.
The filament pressed into her.
There was no pain. There was pressure, a deep, searing pressure, as if something had reached through her ribs and pressed its thumbprint into the center of her being. The humming shattered, then reassembled around it, altered, no longer a single note but a chord with an unfamiliar third.
Images—no, not images, but arrangements of feeling—flashed through her. Standing at the canyon's mouth as a child, forbidden. The first time she had heard the river and not dismissed it as her own thoughts. The look on her mother's face when she had said, "It's not just water."
Overlaying all of that: the slow, collapsing weight of stone when it had given way to make this canyon; the cool astonishment of mud realizing it had become rock; the brief, wild freedom of water taking advantage of a weakness and plunging through.
Soft, the stone remembered being. Softer still, the river remembered not being bound.
You are late, something said—not in words, but in a sudden, dry twist of regret that tasted like dust. You are early, it added, in the same breath. You are exactly when you are.
Her eyes stung. "What are you?"
The column pulsed, expanding and contracting like a lung.
We are the part that did not agree, it said, and she understood it meant: the part of the world that had refused to harden, to settle into one shape. The part that had kept its options open. The wild uncommitted.
You called us, it added, almost curious.
Mara shook her head. "I didn't know how."
You remembered softer, it replied. That is how.
The filament inside her thickened, rooting itself deeper. The humming braided around it until she could not tell where she ended and it began.
A thought spiraled up from somewhere low and animal: If this is an opening, it is not only for the world.
If she stepped closer, if she consented, there would be no going back to the version of herself who had merely stood at the rim and watched water glitter in the light.
The canyon waited. The column waited. The wind, for once, held its breath.
Mara took in the bowl of stone, the impossible crack, the standing not-light, not-dark that called itself we and remembered refusing.
Everything has known how to let go, she had told the rock.
The thought rose now, unbidden, altered: Everything has also known how to hold.
She placed her hand, very gently, over the fissure in the stone.
For an instant, the world narrowed to the span of her palm. Beneath it, no solidity—only a vertical river of possibility, cold and clean and bottomless.
"Then," she said, the word catching and then clearing, "teach me."
The opening answered—not with words, but with a widening.
The humming inside her rose, not as a separate organ now but as the new shape of her own heart.