Geosapiology: a brief history of geogenesis, the Stones, and the Theory of Appeasement — Part Seven
By K.A. Wiggins
The markers placed at the boundaries of the Stones to track their growth went unmoved for a day. Then two. Then a week. A month. The celebrations went from a grim duty to a joyful revel.
But though the Stones had ceased chewing through the world around them, feeding instead on the intangible tribute offered up by the people, they did not shrink. And if the celebrations ceased for more than a season, the Stones would begin once more to grow.
People began to grumble. Revels turned again into begrudging rituals. But even rote ritual executed without grace served a purpose.
Stories and songs and dances and all manner of performances commemorating key moments in the Stones’ history were developed from archival records—films and articles and first-hand accounts. The world as it had been was remembered along the way—awe-inspiring and ugly facets of the past brought out of dusty corners and held up to the light. Wonders cooed over. Atrocities bemoaned. Cat videos preserved for future generations. And humanity collectively woke up to something they all knew, that they had always known as a fact of life, but had never really considered.
The Stones were stained in blood.
They were born in conflict and had risen up against aggressors—human aggressors—in defense of the oppressed. And they were still rising, with every hand raised in anger, with every drop of blood spilled, with every life taken in hate or greed or selfishness.
The world did not change that year. Or the next.
But for every day that there was peace within a Stone’s reach, another inch was measured between the boundary markers and its outermost edge. After a month, the first seedlings sprouted in the fertile soil that piled softly across those scant few feet of reclaimed earth. After a year, tentative gardens were taking root. After ten, there were orchards.
Every place and every people was different, working their own way toward healing in their own time. There were whole months and years and decades where some Stones yet grew, or stopped and started in halting unease. In some places, a generation grew old and was taken into the Stone before their people’s healing could progress.
As it had taken centuries for the Stones to grow, so it took centuries and centuries more for humanity to learn how to reverse the process.
Had they learned it less thoroughly, they might have said it took them that long to starve the Stones of the blood that had birthed and sustained them. Instead, they spoke of the Stones with respect, and gratitude—and caution. And, near the end, perhaps there was even sadness for the passing away of those great and terrible silent teachers of a lesson learned all too unwillingly.
But a handful of Stones remain, towering at the edges of wilderness and human dwelling places, as they always have done. Solitary landmarks to navigate by, stories to tell, and reminders of what has been and will one day come again.
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
Love the prose and thought provoking theme.