The sound came first.
Not a tone, not a chord, but the moment before sound becomes itself, that trembling between silence and thunder. It rose through Mara's bones, unfurling in her ribs like a long-folded map, and she realized the humming had never been inside the canyon alone. It had always been waiting in her.
The stone under her palm did not feel like stone. It moved without moving, thick and slow as winter light, a current turning on its own axis. The fissure widened—not outward, not in any way her eyes could track, but downward and upward at once, like something remembering it had more dimensions than it had admitted.
Teach me, she had said.
Very well, answered the widening.
The world thinned.
Sight left her first, not as darkness but as the absence of needing to see. The bowl of the canyon, the leaning columns, the shivering air—gone, or else moved so far to the edge of her that they became unimportant as dust. In their place: a vertical falling without distance.
Not down. Not up. Just through.
Her hand did not leave the rock. Her hand became the memory of a hand; the fissure became the idea of an opening. The humming flowered into a thousand threads, each one taut as a bowstring, each one running from the center of her chest into the unmeasured deep.
She became aware, distantly, of her own first fear: the old fear of drowning, of being pulled under and smoothed away. The years of holding herself back from currents too strong, tides too wild. The fear had always worn reasonable names—caution, prudence, patience—but now, in the midst of this impossible falling, she saw it bare.
It was small. That startled her. The thing that had ruled her was the size of her cupped hands.
You thought letting go was death, something in the not-light whispered—not a voice, but the meaning of a voice.
You thought holding was refusal.
The river of possibility rushed around her, though still nothing seemed to move. If she tried to focus on it, it scattered, like trying to stare directly at heat. When she stopped trying, when she simply…let her attention rest, shapes began to appear.
Not images, not at first. Sensations.
The weight of a newborn laid against her chest. The ache in shoulders from carrying buckets across a courtyard. The grit of sand caught between molars, chewed by someone else's jaw. The way a mountain feels as roots of stone press deeper into molten dark.
They came faster: a fox's startled leap, a seed splitting under snow, a hand raising a knife, another hand lowering it. The sorrow of a broken bowl, smooth porcelain shards remembering their whole.
She knew them. Not as histories she had read or stories she had been told, but as pulses within herself. Each carried its own particular gravity, and as they passed through her they left their imprint, small adjustments to the orbit of her being.
This is holding, the canyon said. Or perhaps the word we would be truer: the we that the column had claimed, the we that was not plural or singular but the tense of belonging.
Holding is not clenching, the meaning went on. It is not the fist; it is the riverbed. It is the shape that allows passage without surrendering its own.
Images sharpened.
A village: her village, though it was younger, roofs lower, streets narrower. The central well newly dug, stones bright with recent touch. People she had never seen and yet recognized with the intimacy of remembered dreams. Their laughter, their arguments, their tiredness in the blue hour before dawn—all of it threaded through her.
They did not see her. She was the air between their words, the space in which their gestures could unfold. She felt their fears—the late frost that might take the barley, the cough in a child's chest that would not ease—and also their quiet, washed-out joys. Bread rising. A song shared. The light on an old woman's hair.
Mara reached toward one of them without thinking—a boy sitting on the well's rim, heels knocking stone, knuckles white around a length of rope he clearly wanted to throw into the opening and climb down. He was talking to the well, lips moving fiercely.
I know you're not just water.
Her hand passed through him, and yet he shivered, glancing around as if someone had walked over his grave.
We are the memory of every reaching, the canyon told her, and she understood: the column, the crack, this vertical river—all of it was what remained when enough hands had pressed themselves against the same place and asked to be answered.
Not a god, then. Not a master. A concentration.
The boy grew older in a blink, his face thinning, his shoulders broadening. He became a man who left, a man who did not return. The well remained, accepting other ropes, other doubts.
Mara saw herself as a child, years later, walking past that same stone circle without looking, fearing its depth the way she feared her father's silences: an absence that might swallow her if she acknowledged it.
You have always been here, the canyon said gently. Even in your refusals. Especially in them.
She wanted to protest—to catalog all the ways she had turned away, all the little cowardices—but the river moved differently now, carrying something heavier. The threads of humming in her chest tightened; the pressure built, not painful, but insistent.
Everything has known how to let go, she had once told the rock.
She watched now as letting go played out across the river of visions: leaves detaching from branch, lovers parting at crossroads, glaciers calving themselves into a warming sea. The relief in some faces, the devastation in others, the stunned blankness in more.
Then the river showed her a different abiding: a parent awake through the night beside a fevered child. A stone arch standing even as the building around it crumbled. A line of women, back through time, each passing a worn wooden bowl to the next.
Holding.
Not hoarding; not dragging the past forward like a weight. Holding as a way of giving shape: to grief, to joy, to change. The river ran through these images, and she felt how the act of holding created banks so that the flood could become something other than ruin.
The pressure inside her reached a threshold.
Something in her chest cracked—not in injury, but like a shell finally failing the chick within it. Light poured through the fracture, if light were also sound and taste and the clean, iron-thick smell of first rain. She gasped, or would have if she still had lungs.
You cannot hold the world, the canyon told her.
She almost sagged with relief.
But you can hold the place where you meet it.
In that moment, it showed her that place: the narrow corridor where her fear and her courage both stood. Her refusal, her assent. The rim and the river. Her mother's hand leaving hers at the edge of the field. Her own hand, years later, leaving someone else's. All the small thresholds she had hurried past, eyes down.
She saw that she had mistaken numbness for stability, distance for safety. She had let go of almost everything before it could touch her fully, and called that wisdom. Her hands had been open, yes—but open like mouths refusing to close around taste.
Teach me, she had asked.
Now the teaching turned.
To hold, the canyon said, you must allow yourself to be marked.
The humming grew rough, like a melody encountering stone. The river slowed around her, its possibilities thickening into fewer, denser strands. Choice, she realized. This was what choice felt like when she did not skim past it.
One strand showed her turning away now: taking her hand from the fissure, walking out of the canyon, building a life bounded by familiar hungers and satisfactions. A quiet life, mostly. Some kindnesses, some hurts. The river honored it, neither condemning nor praising.
Another strand showed her staying, but only half. Standing always at the edge of the opening, visiting when the need grew too sharp, retreating when the answers grew too strange. She recognized that one; it looked like the way she had already lived.
The third strand was less clear, as if it extended beyond the river's current reach. She saw only fragments: other canyons, other openings. A city split by a fault that glowed in the night. Children being taught to listen—not just with ears, but with the spaces between their bones. Her own face, older, not softer but more exact.
This strand felt heavy. Not like a burden, but like a name finally spoken.
Choose, the canyon said.
"Isn't that what I'm doing?" she thought, though she had no mouth now either, only the thought itself.
Not yet.
She sensed then the last of her clinging: the wish for a future that would not hurt, that would not cost. The wish to hold without being held in return.
To hold is to be grasped, the canyon said. By time. By others. By consequence.
The three strands hummed. The river waited.
Mara moved.
Not toward one of the visions, but toward the crack still under the memory of her palm. Toward the place where they all converged: the point where the threads threaded through her.
"I won't ask you to spare me," she thought, and it startled her to realize she meant it.
The canyon did not answer. It did not bargain. It simply opened.
The vertical falling became, for a heartbeat or a century, stillness. Not the stillness of emptiness, but the stillness of a hand closing around another hand in the dark, both of them trembling.
Something passed between her and the river then—not knowledge, not exactly, but a pattern of feeling that she knew she would spend the rest of her life deciphering. A way of walking, a way of listening, a way of staying when everything in her wanted to flee.
When her senses returned, they did so in pieces.
First, the weight of her own body: knees against stone, spine aching from a posture held too long. Then the taste of her tongue—metal and dust and something clean. Then the sound of wind, cautious, creeping back into the canyon in thin threads.
Sight came last.
The bowl of stone was itself again, but not the same. The column still stood in the center, its not-light, not-dark surface unchanged to the eye. The fissure beneath her palm was exactly as narrow as before.
Mara was not.
Her hand was still resting against the opening. She became aware of the tenderness in that palm, as if she had been gripping something for years and had finally released it. Lines she did not remember marked her skin, faint, like the ghost of a map.
The humming inside her had quieted. Or rather, it had moved. It no longer sat like a foreign instrument in her chest, waiting to be tuned. It had sunk deep, into marrow, into the spaces between heartbeats.
She could reach for it now without reaching away from herself.
The canyon did not speak. It did not need to.
Mara took her hand from the stone.
The air caught on her skin as if meeting someone who had been gone a long time. The sky above the rim was a harsher blue than before, as though the light had lost its innocence. Or perhaps it was only that she had lost hers.
She stood slowly, legs unsteady, and felt the pull of gravity as a kind of invitation rather than a chain. Her body had weight. Her choices would, too.
Everything has also known how to hold, she thought, and understood that the sentence was not finished. It would never be finished. It was something she would have to keep saying, differently each time, with each touch, each refusal, each reluctant, necessary letting go.
She looked once more at the column, at the crack that had changed nothing and everything.
"We," she said aloud, testing the word on her tongue. It tasted of riverbed and rim, of fear and of the hand that had lain over it.
The wind, hearing itself included, rose.