All night long, Windwalker followed the thrumming lines of power that
ran beneath the earth. They were like the Chaco Canyon Roads. Her
people had built them so long ago, even before she was a child in her
first ten summers, that no one could say why the roads had been carved
into the hard scrabble of the earth. The Anasazi traveled only on foot.
And she had long forgotten the stories she’d heard at Grandmother’s
knee. Now, she simply followed it, the pulse in the earth that was
leading her somewhere, though she didn’t know she was being led too.

She was forty miles outside of a city of angels before the air didn’t
taste of grit and chemicals and her eyes stopped burning. Windwalker
was not fond of this new era that draped the world in its soot covered
wonder. The world had indeed moved on during her Long Sleep, but the
directions in which it had moved were unsettling and largely
unpleasant.

At the distant horizon, she could see the mountain jutting out of the
ground reminding her of Black Mesa, a place where her people never
went, even before they vanished into the mists of this world and those
that no one spoke of. It was there she was being called, for what
purpose she could not tell.

Halfway there, something shifted under the
ground, some change, some ripple in the currents of melted stone that
flowed around the heart of the earth. She could feel it deep within
her. Something was coming, or had come and gone, she could not be sure
which.

She set her eyes forward, let her feet feel the humming in the earth,
and walked, the dust pluming around her deerskin boots. She might not
walk the whole distance but here, in the canyon, where the ghosts of
someone’s ancestors still danced and sang, she walked among them.

She eased her six-foot frame up the side of the mountain, hands and
feet readily finding the chinks and toeholds in the rock, until she
reached a sizable outcropping and pulled herself onto the deep ledge.
She sighed pleasurably, leaned back, and pulled out the pouch of herbal
tobacco she’d bought from a street vendor. It was quite different from
what she’d brought with her from Chaco Canyon, in color, texture and
smell. And in effect, wellremarkable, she thought, smiled to herself
and dozed. She dreamed.

Halfway around the world, deep beneath the ocean, the thick bones of
the world groaned and shifted. Resting on molten rock, the thick slabs
bumped, jostled, ground one against the other, sliding above the
currents, so slightly, so slowly that the world hardly took notice.
Along a deep fissure, one slab fitted to another by nothing more than a
small wedged outcropping in a corresponding niche. A small crack
appeared in the wedge, pressure built, until it broke, a small piece,
no bigger than a child’s hand, but it was enough to allow the fitting
to break, one slab slipping ever so slowly beneath the other, thrusting
it up inch by inch, but all too quickly. The earth shuddered, and the
world felt it. As the ocean floor rose, it pushed volumes of water
upward, waves building to the surface. A small ripple, spreading,
gathering momentum; in hours, it would engulf the lands around it,
sweeping away everyone and everything in its path.