Chapter 1

The sun rose as a hard, yellow coin over the basin, burning off the morning dew until it lifted in thin, steaming veils from the plain. Dark green foliage spread in every direction—lush, wet, and unfamiliar to the people who had come from the cold. In the distance, great pachyderms trumpeted from a wide tributary, splashing and churning the shallows. Bird calls stitched the air, and now and then a deeper roar rolled across the grasslands, a reminder that teeth and hunger lived in the same world.

A few dozen tribesmen clustered around a huge rock that did not belong. It jutted from the flat acreage like a broken tooth, a single immense boulder where no boulder should have been. The men circled it warily. They touched its surface and pulled their hands back as if it could bite.

They still wore remnants of thick northern furs—patchwork strips tied with sinew and braided grass—though the heat here made the hides feel like punishment. They had been pushed south, step by step, across gradually warmer climes by advancing snow and ice. What the cold did not take, rivals did: fierce, familiar enemies with clubs and stone blades, pressing them onward until, harried no more and too reduced to threaten, they were left at last to the Nile basin.

Here they would set a camp, count their dead and missing, and begin the long, painstaking work of thanking old gods and asking permission to live under any new ones.

They knew nothing of this place. The greens were darker, the air heavier, the sun more merciless. The women and children stayed closer to the boulder’s shade, huddled and quiet, while the men grumbled and argued. They stared at the plain as if it might rise up and swallow them.

Old resentments traveled with them as surely as hunger. In the long run south, many decisions had been made in panic—who to carry, who to leave, who to fight, who to appease. Old leaders had died. New leaders had surged up in their place. Every mile had shifted the balance of power, and nothing that had been left unresolved could remain buried forever.

Now, with the flight seemingly over, those old disputes returned, sharpened by exhaustion and the strange boulder that watched their squabbling without moving.

The women watched the men’s circle with a stillness that was not calm. For some, whatever happened in the next hour would mean the difference between being claimed by a vicious abuser or being left to a gentler hand. They did not mind sharing if it meant shelter from more pain. They had survived by learning what bargains to make.

Voices rose. Hands gestured. A brief shouting match broke through the murmuring like a snapped branch.

Then came the sickening sound of bone meeting stone.

The largest of the tribesmen—Og, a real fighter, broad as a bull and scarred with old victories—had lifted his makeshift cudgel and brought it down on the eldest man in their group. The elder crumpled without ceremony. His body twitched once, twice. Blood and gray matter seeped from beneath his crushed skullcap and stained the grass black.

For a moment, no one moved.

The elder had carried power that did not come from size. He had been wise in the tribe’s small way, resourceful, and stubbornly clever. He had led them out of the jaws of death more times than anyone could count. To strike him had been unthinkable. To kill him was a tearing of the world’s fabric—proof that nothing was sacred when fear and ambition took hold.

The journey had already stripped them of strength. Almost all of the best hunters were dead or crippled. Among those who remained, there was only one who might inherit leadership without ruling by terror.

Ul.

Ul was not the strongest, and he did not pretend to be. He was quick, and he listened. For months he had stayed close to the elder—close enough to be resented, close enough to learn. He had watched the old man shape ideas with his hands and mouth, marveling at the way a sound could summon meaning. Together they had begun to make new words and refine their crude communication, pushing it forward in tiny increments.

That alone made Ul dangerous.

Others whispered that he should have been in harm’s way like the rest of the men whenever conflict came. Instead, he ran errands, carried children, and helped the women when he could. Some called it cowardice. Some called it cunning. Og called it a threat.

Og turned, his mouth spreading into a malicious grin, and hefted his cudgel again. The men closest to him stepped back without thinking. When Og’s gaze locked onto Ul, it held the same blunt certainty as the weapon in his hand.

Ul backed away. He opened his mouth to shout—warning, protest, anything—but the sound that came out was swallowed by the circle tightening around Og.

Ul turned and ran.

Og came after him, bellowing, swinging wildly. The boulder loomed between them, and Ul used it, darting left, then right, keeping stone between his skull and Og’s club. He could outdistance Og in open ground, but the thought that followed was colder than the morning dew: eventually he would have to return. Alone he would not survive. If he fled, the tribe would yield to Og out of fear, and the women and children would pay the cost.

Ul ran harder anyway, lungs burning, Og’s voice falling behind him into a distant roar.

As Ul rounded the boulder again, a flicker of movement on the plain caught his eye—low shapes, swift and coordinated, cutting through the tall grass from the river’s edge. Predators. Not one, but several, angling toward the cluster of people as if the tribe were a carcass already decided upon.

Ul skidded to a stop and threw his arms wide, yelling and gesturing toward the oncoming danger. Two women shrieked and clutched their children tighter. A boy began to wail. Ul grabbed at the air, trying to make his hands say what his words could not.

Behind him, Og burst from the brush, face red with rage, cudgel raised.

Ul’s choice collapsed to a single heartbeat.

He snatched up a thick piece of fallen firewood, turned, and charged.

Og had only time to blink.

The firewood smashed into Og’s face with a crack that carried. Bone gave way. Og dropped to his knees, hands flying to his jaw as blood poured between his fingers. His eyes widened—not with pain alone, but with shock. The tribe had feared him for so long that even he had come to believe he could not be challenged.

Ul did not wait for Og to recover.

He scooped up one of the smallest children, hoisting the boy onto his hip, and began driving the tribe toward the forest with sharp gestures and clipped commands. Women grabbed infants. Men snatched up what few tools they had. Feet pounded the earth.

The predators arrived like a storm.

Under the leafy canopy, the air cooled, but the sounds behind them did not. Distant screams rose and were cut short. The crunch of bones carried through the trees in wet bursts. Someone sobbed as they ran. Ul pushed them onward until the noises dimmed and the forest swallowed the last echo.

When Ul finally stopped, he lifted his hand and the others obeyed without argument. They formed a tight cluster among the trunks, panting, eyes wide, smelling sap and fear.

They looked at Ul with something new: respect, and the desperate hope that respect required.

He was the leader now.

Ul felt the weight of it settle on his shoulders like a hide soaked in rain. Leadership was not a prize. It was constant vigilance—shepherding, watching, deciding, and being available at all hours for practically anything. He met the women’s eyes and saw both hope and sorrow there. Even something as simple as choosing mates would now be tangled in politics and survival. Already, some sought his gaze as if it could promise safety.

Hours passed before Ul judged it safe to return.

He led them back out onto the plain and toward the boulder. The grass around it was torn and flattened. There was nothing left of Og or the elder except a dark smear and a trail that disappeared into tall reeds. The men, including Ul, circled the boulder once more, scouting the perimeter, listening for movement.

Then they sat at its base and began the crude work of ceremony.

They buried their dead quickly, with every ritual they still remembered. Closure mattered. Ritual kept their world from cracking open. It told them there was order, even when there was not.

Afterward they ate roots and leaves pulled from the damp soil and drank from cupped hands at the tributary. The tribe’s short memory—its ingrained ability to move from one calamity to the next—was not a moral flaw. It was how they stayed alive.

Ul sat apart and watched the boulder.

It was too smooth in places, too uniform. Not like river stone. Not like the scattered rocks that sometimes lay half-buried in the earth. This boulder felt placed.

When the others began to chatter and settle, Ul stood and approached it. He found a fist-sized rock, lifted it, and smashed it against the boulder’s flank. The smaller rock fractured, splitting into jagged pieces. He chose a fragment with a sharp edge and, as the elder had shown him, rubbed it against the boulder in steady strokes to sharpen it further.

A tool.

Several men drifted closer, curiosity overcoming fatigue. Ul worked until the edge was keen. Then he set the point against the boulder and began to hack.

Stone scraped stone. Dust fell in pale flakes. Progress was slow, but it was progress.

Ul glanced at the watching faces and tried to explain. He crouched, raised his hands like claws, and roared—an echo of the predators that had taken their people. He slapped his own cheek, then pressed his palm to the boulder. He traced a line with his finger, then pointed to the tribe.

Memory. Warning. A mark to tell gods and beasts alike: We were here.

The men grunted. One mimicked his gestures. Another picked up a rock and struck. Soon they were all working—awkwardly at first, then with purpose—chipping and scraping at the boulder as daylight drained away. The sound of stone on stone became their new heartbeat.

* * *

Night settled over the basin. Stars emerged as they had for millions of years, indifferent and bright.

To a trained eye, however, the night air shimmered about three hundred feet above the boulder, as if heat rose where no heat should have been. An acorn-shaped object hung silently in the dark. It had been there through the day without moving, unnoticed by the tribe below.

Inside the craft, gravity behaved like a suggestion.

The occupants watched the events on a liquid pool fixed to the interior wall—an image surface that clung to the ship’s curvature as if it were alive. Two creatures stared with large, black eyes at the shifting scene. Their faces were smooth, their limbs thin, their movements precise.

When Ul had lifted his hands and tried to turn panic into meaning—when he had chosen mark-making over mere survival—the creatures’ heads tilted in unison.

One moved to a console etched with glyphs and symbols. It touched the surface, and the liquid pool’s image collapsed into the geometry of a terminal. Lines of characters streamed across it, flowing too quickly for any human eye.

The creatures waited.

A new message appeared.

The first creature bowed its head, still for a long moment, then turned and gave a short, deliberate nod to its companion.

Below, the tribe slept in exhausted heaps near the boulder’s shadow, the day’s violence folded into their dreams.

A beam of light stabbed down from the darkness and hovered over Ul.

His body lifted from the ground, rising from prone to upright without waking. He floated, limp and silent, drawn upward toward the unseen craft. No hand touched him. No rope held him. Only the light.

Years later, Ul could still recall the incident—but nothing beyond the light. The memory was a hole edged in brightness.

In time, other tribesmen and women would tell similar stories. They would assume these were gods demanding sacrifice and respect. Rituals would intensify and grow complex, repeated until repetition itself became truth. And as those rituals were contemplated—over generations, around fires, beneath indifferent stars—new building blocks of thought would ripple through humanity.