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Description
The sun sank behind the mountains, painting the valley in gold and red, and the tribe fled from the oncoming shadows. It was almost time to move on from this land, but the Great Fire still burned within the caves here, and the first members of mankind huddled around the safety of its warm glow. The hunters knapped stone arrowheads, while the women skinned and cooked the day’s kills.

Malloch had his own work to do, facing a bare, flat wall in the back of the cave. It was his job to make the marks. Small bowls sat on the ground around him, and his fingers quickly dipped into one or the other before returning to the rock face. He had painted the images in his head since he was a child: antler-runners and fang-claws, fly-fasts and dig-lows. The marks called game to their lands, and gave strength to their hunters, and kept peace with the forces of nature.

Tonight, he drew different marks. There weren’t any of his usual reds and oranges, only stark black, white, and gray ash. Likewise, his lines were crisp and straight, with sharp ninety-degree angles and symmetrical composition. Two vertical lines rose up from the ground to just above his head, where they were connected by a horizontal one. Combined with the dirt floor, they formed a perfect rectangle, which he began to fill with four smaller rectangles. Everyone agreed that his antler-runners were beautiful, but they were flat, monotone. Each of these rectangles, he traced with shades of gray until they seemed to raise from the surface of the wall. The outer perimeter, he lined with a black so dark that it appeared to crack the stone itself.

His face twisted with concentration as he perfected the details, finally etching a perfectly round circle near the right-most edge of the frame, about waist-level. Such a focus gripped him that he didn’t even notice that the entire tribe was watching. Or that they had begun to gather behind him. Each of them stared at this new mark with puzzlement. Nothing about it was in line with nature: not the lack of color, nor the rigid geometry.

Attle, the head of the hunters, stood at the front of the group, with a rock in hand. Malloch licked the tip of his finger and reached in to add the last bit of detail to the circle, which almost appeared as a shiny orb, standing off of the wall.

The hunter raised the rock high over-head, and added red to the palette.