therefore questions, and with questions came the need for answers. And thus were spirits, taboos, right and wrong, ghosts, and magic born. Thus did the blue stone, sparkling fragment of an ancient meteor, having traveled with the humans, revered and cherished, become no longer powerful in itself but powerful because of the spirit that inhabited it.
When Tall One’s descendants reached the Nile, they split up, some to stay, others to push on, and the blue stone was carried northward to where glaciers coated the world in blinding white ice. Tall One’s people encountered others who were already there—another race of humans who had sprung from separate ancestors and who were therefore slightly different, heavier, stockier, and hairier. Clashes over territory were inevitable and the magic water-stone fell into the hands of the foreign clan, who worshipped wolves. A medicine woman of this Wolf Clan looked deep into the crystal’s heart and recognized its magic, and so she had it set into the belly of a stone figurine.
Thus did the water-stone become a symbol of pregnancy and female power.
Book Two
THE NEAR EAST
35,000 Years Ago
They had never seen fog before.
The frightened women, so far from their home and hopelessly lost, thought the white mist was a malevolent spirit creeping into the woodland on ghostly feet, cutting the fugitive humans off from the rest of the world, keeping them imprisoned in a silent, featureless realm. By afternoon the mist would dissipate enough to give the women a brief glimpse of their surroundings and then, when the stars came out, would sneak back and isolate the women once more.
But the mist wasn’t the only menace in this strange new landscape where Laliari’s tribe had wandered for weeks. Ghosts were everywhere—hidden, nameless, terrifying. Therefore the wanderers stayed close together as they moved through this hostile world, shivering in the swirling mist because they wore only grass skirts—adequate clothing for the warm river valley that had been their home but insufficient in this strange new land into which they had been forced to flee.
“Are we dead?” Keeka whispered as she held her sleeping baby against her breast. “Did we perish with the men in the angry sea and now we are ghosts? Is this what it is like to be dead?” She was referring to their blindness in the thick fog, the eerie way their voices carried, the dull sounds their bare feet made on the ground. It was as if they were moving through a realm not of the living. Keeka thought they must at least look like ghosts—certainly her companions did as they moved cautiously through the thick white mist, bare-breasted women with hair down to their waists, their bodies heavily ornamented with shell, bone, and ivory, bundles of animal hides strapped across their shoulders, their hands clutching stone-tipped spears. But they hadn’t the faces of ghosts, Keeka thought. Their eyes, stretched wide with fear and confusion, were definitely human. “ Are we dead?” she repeated in a whisper.
But Keeka received no response from her cousin Laliari who was too filled with grief to speak. Because worse than the menacing fog and the cold and the unseen ghosts was the loss of their men.
Doron’s dark head disappearing beneath the violent water.
She tried to picture her beloved Doron as he had been before the tragedy—young, beardless, of slender build—a brave hunter who preferred to sit peacefully and carve ivory by the nightly campfire. Doron liked to laugh and tell stories, and he had a rare tolerance for children. Unlike the other men of the clan who had no patience with youngsters, Doron didn’t mind them crawling into his lap and in fact enjoyed it and could be seen laughing (although he did turn red with embarrassment when caught). But mostly Laliari remembered Doron’s embrace at night, how he would fall asleep afterward with his arms around her as he breathed softly into her neck.
Laliari choked back a sob.
Sarah J. Maas
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A.O. Peart
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Jake Logan
Shelley Bradley
Susan Aldous, Nicola Pierce