Prompt:
I reached the canyon at 07:14 local time. The sun, a pale amber orb hanging low in the haze, had just begun to warm the ochre cliffs. I stood at the edge of the plateau for what felt like hours. Below, glowing cyan water traced a path through the ancient stone, shimmering like veins of fire beneath the planet’s skin.
No signs of fauna, sentient or otherwise. Not even the shriek of wind. Only silence, dust, and beauty so profound it felt engineered for contemplation.
This place is called Nirell’s Path on our early charts, named after a philosopher who believed silence was the highest language of the universe. Fitting.
Getting here was not easy. The shuttle’s lateral thrusters choked on the thin particulate atmosphere during descent. I had to recalibrate manually and land blind through three layers of dust clouds. One of the rear panels peeled from heat friction—engineering’s going to kill me when I get back.
The air is breathable, but dry. Chemical scans show high traces of iron oxide and trace amounts of silicates common to glacial formations. The water below is rich in bioluminescent plankton—either native or long-adapted. It glows without heat, and only in response to movement. When the wind stirs across the river’s surface, it lights up like a pulse.
I descended to the lower shelf around noon. Grav is 0.83 Earth norm—enough to remind me I’m still a child of heavier worlds. The rocks are layered horizontally, perfectly stratified, like a natural archive of time itself. I chipped a fragment for analysis: quartz latticework intertwined with something organic, maybe fossilized bacteria or something stranger.
There are no structures here. No ruins. No footprints in the dust. But somehow, it still feels inhabited. Not by a civilization, but by memory. A world that knows it has been seen before and chooses to reveal itself only in part. I found a lone obsidian spire, smoothed by time, resting near the waterline. Likely natural—but its shape was too deliberate, too elegant. Like a punctuation mark from a language I don't know how to read.
A message, maybe.
We explorers come searching for answers, but sometimes all we find are questions too old to ask.
I spent the night near the edge, wrapped in a thermal blanket, staring into the canyon. I didn’t want to leave. Some places don’t need cities or monuments to prove their significance. They simply are. And they wait.
Before I left, I carved a small line into a soft patch of stone—a personal mark. Nothing that will last the millennia. Just something to say: I was here.
As the shuttle rose again into the pale morning light, I looked back at Nirell’s Path, glowing and silent, and felt a strange peace. Maybe this is what we were always meant to find—not answers, but stillness. And awe.
Artist
