A brown-black puddle had formed beneath the large stone. The stone watcher looked on in terrified awe. It was the souls of people long dead, people who had once wandered this cold tundra, and who now slowly were returning to the present reality. The souls of the stone watchers that went before him.
Small things became visible in the oily fluid. Arrow heads of flint, bones with unreadable markings, hair, fingernails. The first apparition began to crawl out of the ooze. It looked like like a baby covered in tar. The next one looked like a famished dog, the shining black, slime reflecting the cold afternoon sun. One by one the old stone watchers rose from the soil beneath the stone. Their bodies grew with a hideous speed. Unnatural. Unclean. Dangerous.
The stone Watcher saw how their bodies slowly, and painfully were getting into shapes that must have resembled them, or rather them and their totem animal at the same time. One of them looked like a snow lion with human legs, one a lake bear with a human face. There was a pregnant, feathered woman, a man with wings instead of arms. Eleven of them stood in front of the stone watcher now. Glistening black. He wet himself in terror.
Then the feathered woman asked him, “why have you called us here, stone watcher? Are the tribes in danger? is fire falling from the sky as it happened in my youth, are the tribes starving? are the herds sick?”
“Eeee,” the stone watcher said. “I… I just wanted to see if the ritual really worked.”
