Geosapiology: a brief history of geogenesis, the Stones, and the Theory of Appeasement — Part One
By K.A. Wiggins
Happy New Story Sunday, Daily Tomorrow readers! This week, I'm happy to talc about the smartest geology-based fiction you'll ever take for granite, by the amazing Canadian author and educator K.A. Wiggins (@kaiewrites.bsky.social). This schist is off the cherts. Gneiss.— The Editor
Geosapiology: a brief history of geogenesis, the Stones, and the Theory of Appeasement
By K.A. Wiggins
The first stone went unnoticed, and why shouldn’t it have, lying stained and broken, so still among so many others? It did not shiver or rock or leap into the air to summon attention to its slow, steady shift. It simply was—and then it was larger.
In later years there would be whole fields of research and endowments and institutes devoted to the phenomenon, attempting to calculate rates and forms and desperate reversal schemes according to mineral composition and geographic origin. Scientists would write long, unreadable papers that said what any child could see plainly: granite tetrissed, limestone sifted, crystals unfolded, in glittering bursts.
The first stone was a chalky, porous sandstone, and so it all but puffed, transmuting—though it would take many years and decades and, indeed centuries, for geosapiologists to begin to understand the mechanism, and physicists utterly failed to account for the excess matter evident in spontaneous generation—mineral and biological materials in its vicinity into more of itself, in a process that started out microscopic and ballooned, or perhaps more fittingly, snowballed.
The first stone’s stains were soon covered over as it grew, its crumbling edges smoothed in the process until it perched on the landscape, replete.
Unlike a snowball, it did not roll. If any of the living had remained near enough to see it, they would have run in terror—or dropped to their knees in prayer. Neither act would have saved them from what was to come.
The first stone—or Stone, rather—was only the first, after all. All around it sat ash-and-dun-coloured lumps swelling softly under the harsh sun and caustic smoke, like a deserted schoolyard of half-finished snowmen after the bell rings. Some of these Stones had not started as stone at all, but as the pebbly sediment of blood-spattered concrete and gravelly road fill. Still, they grew. Less softly, but no less quickly.
There had been little enough alive in the blasted wasteland that had once been a vibrant, if impoverished, city block to begin with, and less left as the Stones grew. The uprooted grasses and fallen bodies and loose earth and twisted debris sifted into a fine dust, and the calcium and magnesium and phosphorus and more besides was unconsciously but equitably apportioned between the growing Stones.
They shed their accreted formlessness then, each in their own way, according to their own nature; the fine powdery sandStones forming softly rounded arches between themselves; the concrete-freed limeStones echoing the ridged and spined flourishes of their extreme youth in filigreed webs.
The Stones had risen, but they were not yet aware.
K.A. Wiggins (Kaie) is an award-winning Canadian speculative fiction author who can't stop inserting monsters (and magic) into local landscapes.
Best known for her gothic-dystopian YA+ Dark Fantasy series Threads of Dreams, in which a macabre (neurospicy) misfit storms monster-infested, post-eco-apocalypse Vancouver, her quietly subversive works have also appeared in Year's Best Canadian Fantasy & Science Fiction, Brave New Weird: Best New Weird Horror, Lightspeed Magazine, Strange Horizons, The NoSleep Podcast, Fantasy Magazine, and Pulphouse Fiction Magazine, among others.
Kaie spends her days with books on the traditional unceded territory of the K’omoks and Pentlatch peoples, writing, working as a school library tech, teaching as a Creative Writing for Children Society educator, and leading the Children's Writers & Illustrators of British Columbia Society. Find her at kawiggins.com.
Copyright © 2025 K.A. Wiggins