Archive of Stone - Part 2

Whispers of the Water Bears

Archive of Stone is a short story written for The Future of Nature, a community Earth Day writing project exploring the human–nature relationship*.

In Part 1, the story begins with the forming of the Earth, and the gradual encoding of the memory of all life and balance into the rocks. A bridge grows between the memory and life, woven through the beings who lived on and within the rocks: lichen, moss, and tardigrades. But humans, with their gift for invention, break the balance.

You can read Part 1 here: Archive of Stone Part 1 - Waking of the Water Bears

The Cave

Stone chips bit at the soles of my feet as I scrambled down the trail, slipping on wet shale and bare rock slick with rain. Skidding sideways, arms outstretched for balance, breath loud in my ears and my heart pounding to the unfamiliar rhythm, my hand found the cliff wall. The sea below had vanished in a blur of slate-grey mist, the edges of reality dissolving in the sudden downpour. My world narrowed to the feel of the stone under my hand and beneath my feet.

My skittering pulse lurched as my open palm skimmed the curve of something coiled and ancient, imprinted in the rock beneath my hand. The haptics in my chest resonated with a subterranean cadence — a heartbeat slowed by millennia, translating through the stone into my body.

I ran on, no longer slipping blindly, but pulled forward by the irresistible beat, until the path turned another corner and the wind shoved me stumbling into a wall of rock. I caught myself, breath ragged, and looked up. Half-concealed by ivy and shadow, there was an opening. A narrow cleft in the cliffside, a few feet above the trail.

I scrambled up, my fingers slipping on the wet stone. Gripping the ledge, I wriggled through, sliding over the slick stone and tumbling into darkness. The storm howled behind me, but within, there was deep silence. Breath held still in lungs of stone and something waiting in the interstice.

The air was suffused with an earthy mineral tang. I sat up where I had tumbled and looked around me. The walls, slick with condensation, glistened in the half-light, veiled in drapes of moss and film-thin algae. Lichen bloomed in pale rosettes across the limestone, luminous in the stormlit dark. The floor was uneven, layered in shale and soft, root-threaded sediment. wisps of maidenhair clung to cracks in the rock, and tufts of fern curled from damp crevices near the entrance, fronds trembling, seeming to quiver in time with the sensation still alive beneath my ribs.

The dark stretched above me, layered in centuries-deep silence. I stood slowly and looked up into the blackness. It felt like standing beneath the open throat of time. Swaying with a sudden sense of vertigo, as if I might fall upwards and be swallowed by that vast stillness, I reached for the cave wall to steady myself.

The stone was cool against my palm, and beneath the surface, I felt a low insistent cadence pulsing with the same frequency vibrating inside me. My fingers drifted across a newly familiar shape: the ancient spiral pattern of life folded back into stone that I had felt along the trail. Fossil imprints pressed into the rock like the fingerprint of time, stretching as far as I could reach. The rhythm inside me settled, steady and resonant, like a tuning fork struck once, still singing in my bones.

I turned, drawn back toward the cleft I had scrambled through, where storm light touched the rocks. The ferns arched in the dampness, their fronds beaded with droplets of rain. I knelt, pressing my hand into the delicate filigree of moss cushioning the cave entrance and spread my fingers through the threadlike filaments. As I curled them into the soft green tussocks, I felt again the presence that had stirred awake in my cells, the strange harmonics inside me resonating through the moss, answered by the stone.

The tardigrades were there. I could feel them. Not just in the moss and lichen, but inside me too. Water bears curled deep in my cells stirring awake. I could feel their soft rhythmic whispers pulsing through my blood.

With a thrill of surprise, I felt the vegetation shift beneath my hand, squirming, stretching, slowly at first then faster. Tendrils climbing over my fingers, reaching around my wrist and exploring my arm in an accelerating timelapse of hastened growth. The lichen burst across the cave walls in constellations of spirals and arcs, blossoming outward as if decades were unfolding in seconds. Somewhere above, the dark yawned open and my mind fell upward into it, past and future unspooling at once.

A bright flash of lightning ruptured the sky outside the cave and time broke open in crashing thunder. A force rose from the stone like a riptide, pulled through the moss and slamming into my chest. I tried to inhale but there was no air. Time was a relentless tide, pulling me under, filling me with vibrations, dense and harmonic, forcing their way into my lungs, my throat, my ears. A tide of memory, roaring into every cell. I was drowning in it, eyes wide, mouth open, the past filling every space inside me.

I surged upwards through the flood of memory toward a distant surface shimmering with light far above. My mind kicked toward it in panic, lungs burning, the resonance thrumming through every cell. The presence of the water bears within my body seemed to swell, reaching through me to settle my racing heart, and the moss curling around my arm was like a steadying hand on the shoulder of my rising fear.

I surrendered.

The current of time lifted me, no longer wild and turbulent, and my mind broke the surface into the cool hush of the past.

I could still feel the gentle touch of the moss on my arm, and the stone beneath my knees. But at the same time, I stood high up on the cliff path among tussocks of purple thrift, the wind lifting my hair in soft, drifting clouds, as it played across the headland.

Inland, I could see the river wandering toward the sea, widening into the slow, tidal shallows of the estuary. Its waters spread across silted banks and winding channels, feeding into reed-fringed marshes alive with movement.

In the quieter reaches, fish flickered through long, green ribbons of eelgrass. Reed buntings and sedge warblers flitted through the reeds, their songs a scatter of buzzes, chirrups and whistles, sharp and insistent in the morning air. Midges spun above the water in shifting veils.

An otter surfaced nearby, twisting and rolling before melting back into the deeper channels. Further out, the estuary opened into broad mudflats, where curlews and oystercatchers dipped and called, feeding with the tide. Along the margins, sea aster bloomed pale against the darkening silt. A gull’s cry rose above the reedbed chatter, carried away on the wind.

I could feel the long, deep breath of low tide turning and flowing back into the land, distributing silt, laying down salt, feeding root and wing and scale. All of it connected, moving through me as if it were my own breath. The balance of life moved in harmonic resonance, clear and steady, through water, soil, reed, and bone. The same pattern that had drawn me out into the night. Every cell in my body responded, arranging itself like sand on a drumskin, shifting to match an inaudible song.

I watched as time spooled forward, the landscape flickering through night and day, seasons flowing into years, decades, centuries. The tides ebbed and flowed, storms reshaping the shoreline. Dunes shifted. Rockpools emptied and filled. Reeds thickened and thinned with the turning light. Eels followed ancient paths upstream. Water carved new routes, then surrendered them. And I felt it all. Life moving in cycles, layered and overlapping, in rhythm with the pulsing of blood in my veins.

But then, I felt the pattern begin to shift. A slight, off-kilter arrhythmia seeped into the steady flow, something dissonant at the edge of perception. The ground firmed under footfall. Paths wore into the grass. Ditches were cut to guide the water. Marshland gave way to pasture, and the reed beds thinned, then vanished. Channels straightened as asphalt scarred the ground, and the soft contours of the estuary were replaced by hard angles, sharp edges, and cold steel. Buildings rose. Iron teeth bit into the earth. I watched as unyielding concrete stretched out across the estuary, constricting the tide.

The cadence inside me stuttered, distorted and jarring, as the balance tipped. Teeming abundance fractured into scattered fragments of life clinging where they could. The calls that once marked the turning of tide and season fell silent. The breath of the estuary caught in its throat. Life choked on tangles of discarded fishing nets, oil-slicked water, and plastic clogging the shoreline. I could feel the hard lines of the harbour and sea wall constricting my ribs like a brace, the sting of pollutants burning against my skin, and the serrated edge of human disregard cutting into me.

The jagged rhythm tore the connection loose and I slammed back into the present, recoiling in pain at the violation of all that once moved in time with water, wind and stone. My chest ached like I’d swallowed the tide. The marshes, the eelgrass beds, the intertidal rhythms traced by curlew and oystercatcher, the spawning routes of silver-skinned fish, they were a part of me. My blood pulsed with their cadences. My bones held their shape. The loss was in my skin, my lungs, my belly. I pressed my forehead to the stone and tears fell, hot and fierce, soaking into the moss. Grief rose in waves, sharp and bitter, flooding every hollow place inside me.

I don’t know how long I stayed there, aching with a loss that felt as if it would never ease. But almost imperceptibly, moment by moment the pain and the pressure began to lift. My tears slowed, then stopped, drying salty on my cheeks. The ancient patience of stone gathered, waiting. The lichen, the moss, the strange patterns in the stone seemed to pull closer, enfolding me in calm as my pulse steadied and my sobs subsided.

Slowly, I reached toward the stone and pressed my hand back into the moss.

Its tendrils curled softly around my fingers again, then my wrist, connecting me back to the stone. The jagged dissonance was still there, catching at the edges of my mind, but beneath, I could sense a deep harmonic resonance, stretching back to the beginning of time. I felt myself drawn inward again, but this time, as if I were wading out into a wide ocean of knowledge, guided by the moss and the whispers of the water bears.

The moss held the connection as the memory deepened. I was drawn further in, closer to the hard geometry of the harbour walls and sea defences. I could feel the weight of what had been built where water once moved freely. But there was something else now: A low-frequency fine-grained shiver rearranging into increasingly complex, symmetrical forms, etching patterns into my consciousness like a transmission of knowledge. The concrete could be undone, the sea wall could fail. Harmonics carried through stone and water, deep enough to reach the bonds that held the structure together. A resonance that could loosen it from the inside.

I felt how it would begin. What had to be done. Once set in motion, it would move on its own. The harbour would break apart. The resonance would travel up the river, slowly but irrevocably disrupting the hard lines that constricted it. The tides would push back against the interference and balance would gradually restore the land. I was the catalyst.

And in its wake there would be hardship. Flooding. Displacement. Anger. The cost would be high. But no one would know it was me.

The moss gently disengaged from my hand as the knowledge settled into my body. The water bears’ whispers remained, a gentle, comforting presence inside me, as I climbed out of the cave and clambered back down to the cliff path. The storm had blown itself out. A light warm breeze laced with the tang of salt caressed my skin and ruffled my drying vest and shorts as I walked.

The moon was low and the horizon edged with the faint light of dawn as I slipped back into the house and quietly to my room. The sea breeze rippled the curtains. As I climbed into bed, the soft remnants of moonlight caught my skin where faint, translucent patterns shimmered, like natural geometry echoing the pulse of the water bears in my blood.

The curtain stilled and the pattern was gone. But as I ran my hand up my arm where the moss had caressed it, I could feel them under my skin, the rhythms of balance that I would begin to restore. Tomorrow.

I sank into sleep, lulled by the rhythms pulsing in my blood and the whispering of the water bears in my cells.

This is the end of Part Two of Archive of Stone: Whispers of the Water Bears. Part Three: War of the Water Bears, will follow soon.

*“The Future of Nature” is an Earth Day community writing project for fiction writers to explore the human-nature relationship in a short story or poem. It was organized by

Claudia Befu

and

Julie Gabrielli

, and supported with brilliant advice from scientists

Jonathan Tonkin

and

rebecca hooper

. You can find all the stories as a special Top In Fiction Disruption edition, with thanks to publisher

Erica Drayton

.