THE PORTAL CHAPTER ONE
Rumors in the Desert
The desert was quiet. Maya Torres paused halfway up the sandstone slope, camera strap digging into her neck, as she listened. The wind had dropped away so completely she could hear the faint tick of grit settling against her boots. Above, the sky stretched pale and cloudless, the kind of flat blue that looked painted on. A pair of ravens circled in lazy loops over the ridge, their calls carrying sharp across the canyon.
She snapped a photo of the horizon, burnt red cliffs fading into dusty sage green but it wasn’t the landscape she had come for. This was her second week in Bridge Canyon, and she’d already filled memory cards with vistas and rock art. What she wanted now was a story.
The story was why she was here, in this forgotten corner of northern Arizona where the maps turned vague and the locals turned vague with them. Every time she asked about the petroglyphs carved into the canyon walls, or about the hikers who’d gone missing over the years, someone would shrug and say the land was dangerous. But in diners and on gas station porches, she’d catch half-heard phrases, “the place where the Earth breathes”, “the canyon that vanishes people.”
Yesterday, she’d finally asked one of the elders directly. “You don’t want to go there,” Thomas Naakishchiin had told her, his voice like dry stone. “It’s not evil. It’s not good either. It just is. And it doesn’t give back what it takes.”
She waited for him to elaborate, but he only looked past her, toward a line of cliffs glowing in the late sun. “Our young ones used to walk there,” he said. “On vision quests. Some returned with great wisdom. Some… did not return at all.”
Now, climbing toward those same cliffs, Maya could almost believe the air had changed. The heat pressed differently here, heavier, more alive. She caught the smell of sage on the wind, and beneath it, something sharper, metallic, like a coin held too long in the mouth.
Her camera beeped, ready for the next shot. She raised it toward the ridge, framed the uneven horizon.
Through the viewfinder, a shimmer wavered just above the rocks. Not heat haze as it was too early for that and too cold. This was tighter, like glass bending in slow motion. When she lowered the camera. The shimmer was gone. Somewhere far off, a sound like distant chimes drifted through the stillness. Maya stood a long moment, breath caught in her throat, before she forced herself to keep climbing.
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