Where the Wind Cries Red

The Rim was patient. It listened to the wind, which always carried secrets – the whispers of the lost, the cries of the hunted. It held the echoes of every bullet fired, every tear shed, every prayer offered. It remembered the sound of children laughing, now replaced by the frantic shouts of searchers.

Below, the humans scrambled, like beetles disturbed in the dirt. They called names, but the names were already etched into the stone, awaiting permanent silence, or perhaps, a permanent remembrance. The Dził was heavy, its ancient rock absorbing the sorrow of the ‘Ííné, who had been burying their dead in its shadow for time untold. It felt the weight of their despair, the futility of their efforts, as if each step they took ground another layer of hope into the dust.

The great ponderosas groaned, their needles filtering the light into unsettling shadows. The earth smelled wrong. The balance, the hózhó the ancestors had maintained, was fractured.

K’adígo nahashchį́’— Now I listen.

High above, in the painted caves and the steepest, guarded canyons, where the air was thin and sacred, the Ga’an—the Mountain Spirits— danced with restless, silent fury. They were the protectors, the dancers who ensured the balance, the very heartbeat of the mountain. They were ancient entities, woven into the fabric of the mountains, their presence felt in the rustling needles of the pines, the sudden chill in the air, the way shadows stretched and distorted in the fading light. They manifested as dazzling figures of lightning and rainbow, but now their energy was clouded, disturbed. The evil was cloaked, sneaky, moving on two legs, reeking of a sickness, a decay, only permeated from within the hollows of soulless men.

The Ga’an could not directly interfere with the choices of men, but they could send warnings—the snap of a dead branch where no wind blew, the sudden, overwhelming urge to look left instead of right, the irrational fear that stopped a searcher from entering a specific cave, the cry of a lone coyote that sounded too much like a human sob.

A reckoning is coming, they communicated not through words, but through the shifting pressure, the sudden, unnatural drops in temperature that had nothing to do with the setting sun, the Níłch’i—the spiritual wind—that whipped through the valleys.

Nitsaaíh, nahazt’i’. — Be watchful, it’s coming.

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