The Stalker of the Sunrise Steppes: What the Canyon Keeps
There are things in the Sunrise Steppes that do not announce themselves. The canyon has kept its secrets for longer than memory reaches, and it is not in the habit of offering them to those who are not paying the right kind of attention. Chelle had always been the right kind of attention.
She had first noticed him three visits ago. A shape at the edge of her peripheral vision. Gone when she turned. Her earth magic had read it immediately — not threat, not territorial, nothing that wanted anything from her except to know what she was. Clean curiosity. The kind that belongs to things that have nowhere else to be and no particular urgency about being there.
She had said nothing. Done nothing differently. Simply filed it away in the part of her mind that keeps track of things the Steppes are telling her, and returned to the shallows.
The second visit she caught a glimpse behind the large boulder at the bend in the river. A stillness too deliberate to be stone. Her magic was reading him clearly by then — protector energy, old and settled, the kind that does not need to announce itself because it has never needed to. Indigenous magic, deep and layered, older than anything she had encountered before. She could touch the edge of it. She could not translate it. That was rare for Chelle. She noted it the way she noted everything in the Steppes — with complete attention and no urgency — and she decided, quietly and without ceremony, that she liked her stalker. He was friend, not foe.
She had gotten used to him peeking.
The patient watching he did — still, unhurried, present in the way of something that has chosen exactly where it wants to be — had worked on her in the way that patience always works on those who recognize it. It was the same quality she had felt in the Dragonforged pieces, in the ancient compact between power and the one who knows how to meet it. Something that does not chase. Something that simply remains, certain of itself, until the world arranges itself accordingly. She was, she admitted to herself somewhere around the third visit, a little smitten. She did not examine this admission too closely. She simply noted it, the way she noted everything, and returned to the shallows.
Today was different from the moment she arrived.
Past noon, the light going amber over the canyon walls, and the boulder at the bend was just a boulder. No particular stillness. No watching. She found herself glancing toward it more than she needed to. Noticed she was doing it. Returned to the shallows. She was reaching for a piece of Imperial Jasper when she felt it shift — and looked up to find him simply out, in the open, in the full amber light of the afternoon, sitting down and watching her with the same unhurried curiosity as always, except now there was nothing between them but distance and the sound of the river.
Well, Chelle thought. That was anticlimactic.
She returned to her gathering. He watched. She worked. After a while she glanced up and he was staring at her — direct, unashamed. She looked back down. When she looked up again he had turned his gaze to the distant mountains, eyes half-closed, the look of a being entirely at peace with its place in the world. She caught herself doing the same thing sometimes. She understood that look. She had worn it herself without knowing. He turned back and found her watching him. Neither of them looked away. It was not a challenge. It was a recognition. I know you feel it too. Not said. Not needed.
It was later — the sun lower, the canyon walls going deep gold — when she found the more isolated bend in the river. Tucked behind a natural curve in the stone, the water running clear and shallow over smooth rock, the afternoon heat still sitting in the canyon air. She carried out her usual bathing routine. She shook her coat out well and rinsed her robes of a considerable amount of sand and dust. Nothing unusual and as always, she didn't want it going back to the attic with her. she spread the robes out on a hot, flat, rock. It would dry quickly there. She had thought her private spa was hidden from the lower canyons. She considered it pretty secluded actually. She had not considered that a creature who knew every stone in these Steppes would know such a beautiful place better than she did. She never stopped to think that it may be also favorite spot of others.
She had not considered it at all, actually, until she stood back up from the shallows where she had been laying in the cool eddy. Every inch of her bare, fair skinned, womanly glory. Completely in view.
He was there. At the top of the bank, entering the area from a cluster of canyon scrub. He was, now, absolutely motionless. Frozen in the way of something that has just realized it has made a significant miscalculation. His jaw, she could have sworn, was simply hanging. The expression of a being who had expected to come and cool himself quietly and had instead been ambushed by something so far beyond his calculations that his entire considerable composure had simply — stopped.
She had not known a cougar could blush.
She knew it now.
He suddenly looked up, as if something high on the canyon wall was very interesting. He tried to look left and then right. His eyes couldn't escape it. "Nope, she is definitely still there", the cat said to himself. In the end, he did the only thing that his embarrassment would fully allow. He ran. Fast. The particular speed of something that is not fleeing danger but fleeing its own complete loss of dignity, which is a different speed entirely and considerably more urgent.
Chelle stood in the shallows for a moment, water in her hair, the afternoon light on her skin, and then she smiled the particular smile of someone who has just received very useful information. The smile turned into a mildly mischievious laugh. "That was unexpected". The suspicions that she had had recently, however, were definitely proven facts now.
She knew he hadn't gone far. She knew, with the certainty of her earth magic and a more ancient feminine instinct that needed no magic at all, that he had doubled back. That he was behind a boulder somewhere up the canyon, doing his absolute best and failing. Most men couldn't help themselves. They had to get "just, one more glance" Why would this male be an exception?
She took her time retrieving her things from the bank.
A very long time, as it happened. Unhurried. The way you do things in the Steppes. She was facing the other direction, which meant her back was to the canyon. She bent completely over(retrieving her clothing), which meant anyone who was still behind a boulder up there, and was looking, had a view that she was — very generously, and with complete awareness — providing. She was giggling to herself in the quiet way of someone who is very much enjoying a private joke at someone else's expense, and then she felt it — the particular tingle of energy that meant something somewhere had become significantly more alert. The same frequency as the blushing incident. Identical, actually.
She giggled harder.
She was still smiling when she finally adjusted her redonned clothing and turned toward home. The canyon held its amber light around her, warm and ancient and entirely complicit. She gave one last glance back at the boulder she suspected most strongly.
Nothing. Of course nothing. He was very good at this "hide and peek", when he wasn't being ambushed by the most beautiful thing he had apparently ever seen... In his two hundred years of canyon life...
Never would have thought, she said to herself, following the path she always had toward home, coat pockets full of stones and a smile she had no intention of explaining to anyone, that I would be more comfortable in my birthday suit than a skinwalker.
She walked the rest of the way home in excellent spirits.
Midnight was on the rooftop when she came through the portal. He lowered his great sapphire head and went very still — that particular stillness, reading the mineral scent of canyon stone and something else, something layered and old and indigenous and two hundred years deep. His golden eye held on her for a long moment. Something moved through his ancient chest that had no name in any language currently spoken.
He knew that energy. He had known it for a very long time.
He said nothing. He went back to watching the city. His tail, however, moved once — a single slow sweep — in the way of something that is working very hard to appear unbothered and is not entirely succeeding.
Chelle set the stones on the shelf near the portal door and went to make tea.
She did not mention the skinwalker that evening. There was plenty of time for that later. There was nothing but time, in the patient way of Soraveen things, and some stories were not finished yet. They were only, gloriously, beginning.
This is a canon piece for the Sunrise Steppes arc. The skinwalker's full story is still becoming. Like the bead in the river — it will arrive when it is ready.
More from the Sunrise Steppes: The Whispers of the Deep Earth — what the stone carries before it reaches the surface. | The Weight of the Deep Earth — Tiger Eye, Lapis, and Amethyst from the afternoon shallows. | The Weaver of Mountains — another stone, another afternoon, another thing the canyon decided to say. | The Alchemist's Earth — what the deep earth makes when it has enough time. | The Becoming Places — where the river polishes what the mountain releases. | The Dawns of the Sunrise Steppes — Midnight's vigil over the stone country.
What will you find?: What the Stone Becomes — Natural Stone Bead Bracelets