Chapter 1: What the Bones Remember
The pain started in Vera’s hips when she was twenty-three winters old—not the ache of hard travel, but something deeper, a grinding in the joint that spoke of time’s relentless erosion. She was considered middle-aged by her people’s reckoning. Most Neanderthals did not see forty winters. Their bodies were built for strength and endurance, not longevity. They were the engines of ice ages, burning bright and fast.
Vera sat by the fire in the communal cave her band occupied, rubbing rendered fat into her aching joints. The fire was small—just embers banked for the night—but it cast enough warmth to keep the frost from her fingers. Around her, the others slept: her brother Khar and his mate Lira, their two children curled between them like puppies. Old Matri, who had seen thirty-eight winters and was considered ancient, muttered in her sleep near the cave’s back wall.
Vera looked at her hands in the firelight. They were broad and strong, the fingers thick with muscle, the palms calloused from years of hafting stone to wood, of scraping hides, of gripping spears. Her skin was the color of the cave’s limestone—pale from generations of weak sun, adapted to the gray skies and long winters of the north. She had her mother’s brow ridge, heavy and pronounced, casting her eyes in perpetual shadow. Her nose was wide and substantial, the nostrils flared to warm the frozen air before it reached her lungs. Her hair, which she wore in a single thick braid bound with sinew, was the color of wet earth after rain—dark brown shot through with strands of auburn where the firelight caught it.
She was not beautiful by any standard she knew. The Neanderthals did not value beauty as the tall newcomers would one day value it. They valued strength, and skill, and the ability to endure. Vera had these in abundance. She could track a reindeer across frozen ground for three days without rest. She could flint-knap a blade in the dark by feel alone. She could carry a wounded hunter on her back for ten miles.
But she was also different. She dreamed too much. She asked too many questions. She stared at the stars and wondered what they were, when her people knew they were simply the eyes of ancestors watching over them. She touched the cave walls and felt something like hunger, something that wanted to leave marks, to create.
“You’re awake,” a voice said from the darkness.
Khar emerged from the shadows, returning from relieving himself outside. He was shorter than Vera by a hand’s breadth, but broader, his body built like a bison’s—massive shoulders, thick neck, short powerful legs. His brow ridge was even more pronounced than hers, giving him a permanent scowl that belied his gentle nature.
“Pain,” Vera said, holding up her hands.
Khar nodded. He understood. They all understood pain. It was the constant companion of their lives, the price of survival in a world that wanted them dead.
“The hunting party returns tomorrow,” Khar said, settling beside her. “Torag said they found signs of the reindeer herd moving east. Toward the mountains.”
“The Altai,” Vera said. She had heard of those mountains—vast limestone ranges that rose from the steppe like the spine of a sleeping god. Her grandmother had come from that direction, generations ago, when the cold had pushed her people westward.
“We could follow,” Khar said. “The hunting is poor here. The mammoths are moving north with the summer. We need meat for the winter.”
Vera looked at the fire. She thought of the mountains, of the unknown lands beyond them. She thought of her restlessness, the feeling that had been growing in her chest like a seed in spring soil—the sense that there was something more than this cave, this cycle of hunger and cold and brief satiation.
“Yes,” she said. “We should go east.”
